The End

Work On Sunday

I said Milkman makes part of the Seven Days....sorry...meant Guitar

They Would All Do It

Worse Than Freud

Just Another Quirky School Thing

After much discussion, the Fashion Show did occur, and there was Mrs. Kauhn with her increasingly alternative attire, and there was Mr. Viscardi with his flamboyant alligator shoes. 

The first rows are always the best to watch. A mixture between involved parents and lustful college freshmen, they give for the most amusing interactions. There is a kind of priceless look that a father gets when overhearing a conversation detailing her daughter’s gluteal muscles. He becomes offended at these commentaries, but he cannot speak up against them, because although they would be out of order in any context, not in this one. If his daughter is purposefully displaying her butt cheeks in front of an audience, who is he to prevent them from watching and commenting. That’s what they came for. That’s what she came for.

I googled it. Most of the best private schools have fashion shows. It seems so absurd, so surreal. Everything associated with fashion shows; sexual objectification (mainly) of teenage girls, unhealthy eating habits, aggrandizement of physical beauty, all seem to be things that go directly against the beliefs of modern north American educators. 

My opinion is that the American educational system has become a bit exaggerated on the conservative side of this type of issue (my parents had to come to my elementary school in Cambridge Mass. when I told a girl she was fat). But things seem to take a strange turn in Fashion Shows, because although most teachers loathe it, the event perdures.  

 

Under Sergio Fajardo, Antioquia banned Fashion Shows in public schools. In an interview done by El Tiempo¹ , Mr. Fajardo basically expressed my own point of view: Fashion Shows are awesome, but it is unreasonable to host them in a learning environment. And if we do host a fashion show, I don’t think it’s half as bad as some extremists make it sound, but what I really don’t get is why the administration permits it. 

*http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/medellin/ARTICULO-WEB-NEW_NOTA_INTERIOR-12113743.html

So Disturbing

Toni Morrison makes a point out of being very blunt in showing the cruel realities lived by characters in a Song of Solomon.  At first I thought her motifs where exclusively African American, and it made sense, well, because both she and the characters are African American. Then I realized her appreciations are more universal, and although it is undeniable that most of her dissertations apply to this specific minority, the truly deep ones are much more general.  

 

One of them is about incest and strange sexual behaviors. It seems to me that Morrison is very Freudian, believing that eerie sexual tendencies are to some point present, weather in a latent or manifest form, in a good chunk of the population. 

Incest or hints of incest or incestuous thoughts are everywhere. Milkman was in love with one of his cousins.  One of Macon’s daughters always defended his actions and was very close to him, something Freud would have called the Electra complex. Milkman was breastfed by his mother until an old age, something that may or may not be morally wrong, depending on the context. In this one, things were certainly dubious, as proven by their reaction when caught: “Ruth Jumped up as quickly as she could and covered her breast, dropping her son on the floor and confirming for him what he had begun to suspect – that these afternoons were strange and wrong” (p.15).

Certainly, the most likely case of real incest is that between Ruth and his father. 

This first evidence that the reader has of this is given in Chapter 1, which refers to Dr. Fosters’ thoughts toward his daughter: “Fond as he was of his only child, useful as she was in his house since his wife died, lately he had begun to chafe under her devotion. Her steady beam of love was unsettling, and she had never dropped that expression of affection that had been so lovable in her childhood. The good-night kiss was itself a masterpiece of slow-wittedness on her part and discomfort on his” (p.23). Yeah. And that’s not half as creepy as when Macon finds her wife naked and suckling on the fingers of her dead father. 

Having to type "incest" into the google image search-bar in order to endow my blog with a picture,  definetely got me on the dark side of the internet.

This is just a specific trauma that seems to be imbedded in the Dead family, but there are others. Maybe in a future blog I will look at each of the members of this awkward family in the way a psychodynamic psychologist like Freud would have.

Much Ado About Nothing

Philip B. Corbett, the style manual editor for the New York Times,  blogged about some of what he calls the “grammatical lapses” of the recent NYT publications.

The author spent special care analyzing the dangling modifiers, phrases in which the subject of the modifier is not present immediately afterwards, leaving the modifier dangling.

One of the examples provided by Mr. Corbett:

 “While browsing through real estate agencies in New York City, a little déjà vu can be unavoidable”

Being a hardcore descriptivist, I see nothing wrong with dangling modifiers as long as the unintended meaning created by the modifier does not realistically contend with the author’s intended meaning. 

Lets’ use another of the examples given in the Times blog:

“Married to Nicole Rowe, they have three children, all conceived and born during his sentence.”

The author means to say that some man is married to Nicole Rowe. The dangling modifier makes the sentence mean that a certain “they” are married to Rowe. 

Here the unintended does not compete with the intended because it is reasonable enough to suppose that readers will have the ability to discern the correct from the incorrect. That’s the beauty of the human brain, we don’t process data like computers.