Heterotopias

After slogging through Michel Foucalt's Discourse on Heterotopias, my opinion on the article was very clear, and had been so since the first paragraph. I did not find that Foucalt effectively communicated his ideas to a wide audience. He gets extremely wordy, not just in various places, but everywhere throughout the entirety of the essay. The writing is also redundant in it's wordy-ness. Such words as 'fantasmatic' don't seem necessary, it almost sounds like the author is embellishing ordinary words to make himself sound more intelligent. It is extremely dense writing at that. I found it took several reads of the same sentence to decode what Foucalt was trying to tell me through all the vestigial words.

He does present some interesting concepts, if you connect all the scattered dots. But even then he complicates the whole matter to a very unnecessary degree, and this really fogs up the window through which we are trying to get a good view of his ideas. Here is a prime example:

" First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces."

My critique of this passage is as follows. First, there is no need for him to dictate the "space" of society or the "space" of anything. He can just simply say "society". It would be like me saying, "I'm going to eat the form of a banana right now". There is absolutely no need to express oneself in such a way. Again he does the same thing in sentence two. "Utopias are sites with no real place." Why can't he just say "Utopia's are by all standards, fundamentally impossible constructs." It still sounds smart, but avoids the vagaries of "no real place". No real place in what? Can't they just be said to be "not real" and leave it at that? This trend continues through this paragraph and through the rest of the discourse. Foucalt phrases concepts with unnecessary complications and mechanisms that skew the meaning of what he is trying to say. Like I said before, the entire passage in question could be summarized, "Utopias are fundamentally impossible, and here is why."

I do not double Foucalts intelligence of his understanding of the principles he trys to delineate, but his explanation is so unnecessarily complicated that said principles are lost and or unintentionally skewed.

Warbreaker - Prologue Response

I read the Prologue to this story by Brandon Sanderson, and I would have to say that he has done his job by enticing me altogether. The main character, or at least the main focus of the prologue, is a character called Vasher. Apart from having a very cool and fun name, Vasher is introduced as having a unique ability called Awakening. Right off the bat Sanderson establishes a world with some very unique concepts that will set the ground for the plot of the rest of the story.

From what we are given in the prologue, there is a phenomenon in universe of this story called BioChromatic Breath. I suppose this would be a substance analogous to what we refer to as 'soul'. BioChromatic Breath is visible outside of the body, and it can be transferred from person to person but only by verbal command. Not only that, but it can also be transferred into inanimate materia in a process referred to as 'Awakening' it requires a certain number of breaths as determined by the size and complexity of the material in order to animate it. In the prologue Vasher animates a small straw figure to steal the keys to the jail cell door.

Sanderson continues to flesh out the rules to this BioChromatic Breath very early on. Though it is important that he give us a little info about how it works, I would have liked for him to keep it a bit more mysterious, especially because it is only the prologue. When he mentioned "The First Heightening" I was extremely intrigued, and I wanted to know how many heightenings there were. I hoped that it would be revealed much later on in the story, at some important moment. However, not two pages later he goes on to talk about a fifth and finally a ninth heightening, which only one person Vasher knows has gotten to. For a spiritual person such as myself, this concept of heightening is very significant, as it ties very deeply to attaining higher levels of spiritual awareness. The way in which Sanderson describes how Vasher feels when he takes in Vahr's breaths is actually much akin to a psychedelic experience, but much more controlled. At the same time it really is heightened awareness in all respects, and this concept alone has sold me on the story. I can't wait to read the rest of it!

Response to Lev Grossman's "The Magicians"

When I initially read the brief synopsis for "The Magicians" I was excited, and entirely ready for a 'mature Harry Potter' tale of a magical world within our real world. From page one, it becomes entirely clear that this is a story on an entirely different wavelength than Harry Potter. The Potter series is a coming of age tale, a boy who becomes a hero and conquers his antithesis. It is about all of the positive and negative experiences that one encounters on the path of maturation within the context of the "wizarding world". Harry is a bright hero that we can easily sympathize with and admire. But in "The Magicians" the main hero, Quentin Coldwater, is wholly different than Harry Potter, and not exactly in a positive way. Quentin is the classic, estranged, lonely genius of his high school. He has made all the right moves in terms of getting his life in order, but he still feels out of place. There is a part of him that is fixated on a series of fantasy books he read as a child, and he holds within his deepest desires that the imaginary world Fillory of these novels could in fact be real.

And so the basic premise is established of a main character who dreams of escaping to a fantasy world. As the novel progresses, Quentin takes an unexpected turn away from Princeton towards "Breakbills", a so-called magic academy. There he discovers that the magic of his yearning is indeed real, but it is not in the form and brightness that he imagined. Quentin's classmates are mostly cynical, disengaged from the real world and take their magical gifts for granted. For me, this development was an immediate disappointment in the events of a novel. The whole reason Harry Potter 'works' is because there is a contrast between the gloominess of Harry's life with the Dursley's in the real world and the extreme brightness and adventure of Hogwarts. Not to mention J.K. Rowling picked FAR superior names for her fictional elements. On this note I'd like to take a detour: One thing many writers and readers underestimate is the vast importance of the names they bestow upon their creations. Appropriate and exciting names can do so very much for the entertainment value of a novel. Lets take for example, the names of the schools in each of the novels we are discussing. Hogwarts. Breakbills. Both are actually quite similar, two syllable words. Both call imagery to mind that is unpleasant, unlikely. However, "Breakbills" calls to mind to many different unpleasant things that we get stuck up upon the differing, conflicting imagery within it. We imagine birds crashing their beaks into stone surfaces, breaks screeching on a car, a bill getting torn in half, etcetera etcetera. There are too many different things conjured up by this name, and the experience of reading it more frequently than not is unpleasant. So then why does Hogwarts work? The simplicity of it, and the specificity of it. None of us can agree that hog-warts themselves are of a pleasant, inviting nature. However, we overlook that matter because of the beautiful contrast between hog-warts and a grand magical castle. Rowling picked a word for something small and unpleasant to describe something grand, magical and inviting. Again, contrast works, which Lev Grossman does not employ to make his novel "pop" for lack of a more appropriate word. Just as contrast makes artwork "pop out" so does it imbue the same effects upon works of literature. "Hogwarts" works additionally on a visual level in terms of the letter forms that we see. Some people will say this is of no importance and that I am over-analyzing. But everything is important, every square inch of a painting and every letter in a word is important to how an audience experiences it. The first letter, H, is grand, and out of the 26 roman characters in our alphabet, it is the letter most akin to two adjacent turrets on...yes...a castle. Fitting right? The appeal of the word continues in that there is good, fun, variation in the letterforms themselves, and unlikely variation at that. It's a fun word, and the 'fun-ness' of it lightens the gravity of the events in the story.

Returning to the point of our departure, Breakbills fails to be a fun word to read over and over, whereas Hogwarts is light, exciting, fun, and inventive all at once.

Vampires

Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire proved to be, in its entirety, a quite entertaining novel. The contrast between Louis and Lestat mirrored the larger contrast between vampires and humans. This larger contrast has many facets to it, each with different rules and traits. On one hand we can observe the strengths and weakensses of a vampire in regards to those of a human. Vampires, thought they do have immortality, are burdoned by an inability to experience the sun, the great provider of life itself. Vampires are forced to an eternal existance within darkness, which from a human perspective, we would assume to be rather dismal. They are only able to survive within this existance through parasitism upon the non-vampires; which is all-inclusive to humans and animals alike. So essentially vampires sacrifice the brightness and joy of life for immortality. In the end of Interview with a Vampire, the boy has learned nothing, and still yearns for Louis to turn him into a vampire so he can live forever. The boy had acquired no wisdom from Louis' story.

To discuss Vampires in the mainstream: we have seen a dramatic transformation and recontextualization of the vampire within modern media. Decades ago we were exposed to Nosferatu, who introduced us to all the quintessential traits of a classic vampire. At that point the lore of the vampire was fairly limited, and it had yet to develop into a phenomenon. As we observed previously with the zombie, vampires seemed to harmonize with a deep archetypical chord within people, and they have since flocked by the millions to consume vampire fiction. Once again we are approached with the question: what is it about vampires that people love?

In many cases it is the element of the forbidden love which draws people to vampires. To be more specific, a vampire would fear loving a human being because they fear themselves getting out of control and harming the human they are in a partnership. This scenario comes to light in the recent Twilight saga. But perhaps this is why Twilight works so well with young readers: it emphasizes the fear of love or attraction in the context of supernatural causes A vampire can also, in many cases symbolize an out of control sexual impulse; the desire to feast upon flesh. Why else do most vampire pictures include a woman as the prey rather than a male? Or in the case that the prey is a male, the predator is often a woman. Innately, the audience wants to observe a heterosexual interaction between a vampire and human. Of all fantastic human monsters, it can be said that the vampire is without a doubt the most sexual, on multiple levels. At the very least, it has been the most exploited as a vehicle for sexual emphasis and exploration.