04/28/16

“The Song of Love” by Giorgio de Chirico

image

“The Song of Love” is an oil painting by Giorgio de Chirico in 1914. An interesting and metaphysical painting. It is one of the most famous works by Giorgio and an early example of the surrealists with the idea of simultaneity. The painting described both the past and the present through incongruous and unrelated objects from the ancient and present times. And these objects appears in the urban. The green ball, the head of classical Greek statue and the red rubber glove. The Greek plaster head is representative of the ancient time. Conversely, the rubber glove next to it seems belongs to the modern society. The plaster head is higher than the rubber glove seems like Giorgio wanted to show his respect to the ancient artworks. With these objects and some researchers, I know that Giorgio was an Italian Greek-born artist. That’s the reason why he put the ancient Greek statue in his works, and the color of three main objects are green, white and red. It is the color of Italian flag. I think Giorgio wanted to publicize his nationalism. Also, on the right side of the painting by a building with arcades, the sharp arches of which seems is the classical architecture. On the left side of the painting, the steam locomotive behind a red brick wall emanating exhaust gas from its chimney and it is the symbolism of the modernity. However, Giorgio created the conflict of past object and present object appears in the same place to emphasize his style of surrealists

04/10/16

Map the connection in Mrs. Dalloway

Photo of the Map

Well, I tried to insert the big image of my works, but the picture looks so unclear. Thus, I insert the link of my file here.

 

The character map makes us easy to understand the relationship between each character. And then we can easy to understand the story. There were some plots related these two story line. For example, in the early story of the novel, a car was backfired when Clarissa is in the flower shop and a lot of people were attracted by a loud voice. Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran of World War I who  also hears the car backfire. He suffered from shell shock, mental illness brought the horrors of war and he believed that he has responsible for the cause of the traffic car. This is the first plot, Woolf  brought the two story lines at the same time. As we see the life of Septimus changed after the war, we can fell  that the war had influenced people’s life.  However, there is no direct connection between Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus, but both Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus had similar traits that frequently  reminisced the past experiences.

04/1/16

The way to Baruch

Yao would walk to the R train station as normal. On the way, he went to Dunkin’ Donuts to buy his morning coffee. But the line was too long so that he left the store and directly walked to the R train station. Usually he need to have a coffee on the way to school. But what a crazy line had he waited? Yao took out his earphone and turned on his music when he walked into the subway station. The R train was on time and then he transferred to N train at the 36th ST station. After that he waited about 30 minutes because the N train was delayed. He disliked waiting for the train too long because he would late for his class. More and more people walked into the station. And then the train approached to platform. Undoubtedly, the N train quite crew, but Yao still squeezed into the carriage. Yao arrived at 23rd ST station and walked out subway station. He felt the breath of spring. What a beautiful day! That was a sunny day with a blue deep sky. The birds were caroling and the flowers were blooming. There were some leisurely tourists who tried to take the best angle of the Flatiron building. On the Madison square park, people have enjoyed the sunshine and their lunch. What a lazy day! But Yao realized he had to move on quickly. With quickly moving when he crossed the park, he greeted to his friend who was seated on the chair. YingYan knew that he late for the class. Therefore, she did not ask him to stay. She wanted to ask some questions about their Accounting’s midterm. During the midday, the Newman campus still shows an atmosphere with crowded and loud. Yao ran through the crowd to the classroom. Fortunately, he reached to class on time.

03/11/16

Discussed the connection between conflict and individuality

There is sufficient evidence to show that parents play a very important role as children grow up. In Sigmund Freud’s “Family Romances,” he discussed the connection between conflict and individuality. On the one hand, parents can lead their children to be successful as most people did. On the other hand, parents can destroy their children as a neurotic. Children always consider their parents are best and supreme in the world so that children want to be like their parents. And yet children began to compare his parents with other parents and children after he undergone competition in the society. Children complained the life and came out some questions such as why other family’s life is gorgeous? Why their parents cannot satisfy them like what other’s parent do? Obviously, the comparison would stick in children’s minds and generate conflicts. Therefore, the conflict would affect children’s individuality. We can see it has two sides. In the positive side, positive comparison played the role of motivation, which children would use the motivation and would get stronger. Conversely, to the negative side, Sigmund wrote that, “the later stage in the development of the neurotic’s estrangement from his parents, begun in this manner, might be described as ‘the neurotic’s family romance’” (237). The negative comparison made children refuse to close to his parents, children would lose self-confidence and became an introverted child with the inferiority complex. Children would frequently phantasy erotic and ambitious image in his mind to gain satisfactions. No matter what, I believe the most important growing environment is from parents. Either positive or negative, the conflict which affected children’s individuality and it mostly dependents on parents.

03/6/16

Discourse on the Logic of Language and“Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass

Both M. NourbeSe Philips’ poem of “Discourse on the Logic of Language” and “Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass” impact me on deeply thinking of the importance of learning knowledges and language in the life. In 19th century, the slaves must not get education, since the slaveholders just wanted them to work with tireless and obedient to earn more profit for themselves. The poem points out the influence of language when Philips read the Edict 1, “Every owner of slaves shall wherever possible shall ensure that the slaves belong to as many ethno-linguistic groups as possible. If they cannot speak to each other, they cannot then ferment rebellion and revolution”. This is the reason why slaveholders forced slaves to learn “father language”, which the simple English made slaves unable to communicate with each other, destroyed their ability to defiance. Also the poem came with two special ways of writing such as repeating the word as “lang” as language and putting questions into poem, leaded me to have more understanding of that feelings. “Learning would spoil the best nig** in the world” (20) from Douglass’s autobiography. This is how Auld spoke to his wife and Douglass when his kind wife tried to teaching Douglass. Whereupon, he realized that learning language can change his life and even change all slave’s history. This is the reason why our eminent Douglass would be an important anti-slavery hero in the history, as he had seen and learned a lot during his slavish live. Therefore, he knew he can use language to publicize the abolition of slavery. For slaveholders, the happiness was built on suffering of slaves. Thus slaveholders would about slaves would loss control when slaves had language and knowledges. After reading these two articles, I can image the horrible life Douglass had and the pathetic history of slaves. I can also see how inhuman slaveholder punish their slaves.

02/20/16

Frankenstein respone

Both clips were described the same feeling to me, which I can see how excited Frankenstein was when he was experimented to pull a dead monster back to the world. But in the novel, he was fearful and nervous. This experiment was his dream, he spent almost 2 years on his dream to verify he could do that and he was not crazy. In fact, the beauty of the dream vanished. He could not accept his art as a monster and he just wanted to run away, then he understood he was wrong. The thing he had done was so contra-natural. I don’t see this picture on these two clips, especially the James Whale’s clip, in his clip, I saw an enthusiastic scientist and how he satisfied with his experiment when monster was alive. Also he had three sane spectators and one assistant. This additional scene made me feel that Frankenstein was more like a crazy scientist, everything he had done is just to highlight his success. It’s totally different from Mary Shelly’s novel. In the novel, the experiment was only doing by Frankenstein from the beginning to end, and he kept it as the secret. By contrast, I prefer to Kenneth Branagh’s clip than James’s clip. The scene was closer to novel,” I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and convulsive motion agitated its limbs” (35). It’s exactly what I see in Kenneth’s clip. Frankenstein was screaming when the monster opened his eyes. However, both clips had their own style to describe how Frankenstein feels after he succeed bring a monster back to life.

02/12/16

Response to Descartes “Discourse on the Method”


Descartes was a great thinker, philosopher. To be honest, I have no idea about his philosophical idea until I read this article, I must admit to feeling ashamed. “I am thinking, therefore I exist” (15) which is the main idea through his whole article. Descartes tried to find a thing can above of the individual senses, universal point of view, even in science, mathematics theory of the “absolute truth”. And he found that in all these human cognitions can be reasonable to doubt. My personal understanding about “doubting” is the way of thinking, when I doubt whether I was, I had been thought. Therefore, I absolutely cannot doubt myself if I am thinking. Thinker is a subject, so the main body of thought of “I” must be exist. “Where did I get my ability to think of something more perfect than I am?”(15). Descartes’s answer is “[so] the only possibility left was that the idea had been put into me by •something that truly was more perfect than I was •something indeed having every perfection of which I could have any idea, that is—to explain myself in one word—by •God To this I added that since I knew of some perfections that I didn’t myself have, I wasn’t the only being that existed” (16). Through that quote, Descartes’s idea of perfection is coming from God. For me, it’s hard to agree and understand his belief. I was grown up in Buddhism culture, but right now I am an atheistic man since I began touching science knowledge in school. In my opinion, we can use Descartes’s doubt theory to doubt and assume that God exists. In fact, the result of our assumptions are we don’t have any proofs to prove that god exists. Since we are human being, we absolutely cannot be a perfect man, the God, who is the perfect being in Descartes’s mind. Whereupon we can say that the perfection does not exist, just like I am doubt the God does not exist.

02/5/16

First assignment—WHy Baruch?

According to poem, “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman, he said: “The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them, and proceed to my next fold of future” (51). In my opinion, this quotation means that we always need to look forward our future. No matter how terrible life was or how mediocre life we are having right now, the life is life. We cannot forget our past but we do continue to learn our lessons and do better than before as we can for our better future. Relating to my personal experience, I am a new transfer student in Baruch College. I was not a diligent student at the past college; I was just doing ordinary. Sometimes I was asking to myself, do I need to continue my education after I finished my 2-year’s college? The answer is yes because Baruch College has more challenges, especially for accounting major which I intend to study it when I was in my previous college. Certainly, I am interested in accounting. Therefore I want to get the good grade and pass some tests in order to be a CPA. Most importantly, to find a good job which I think Baruch will help me to achieve my goal. That’s why I am here. Now I am here, a new place is always full of strangeness and challenges. I remember the first time I stood at the school’s library, I was shock for that moment because people were busy on their works as I have ever heard of about the library could be that crowded. In a word, I feel that the studying rhythm would be fast which also push me to walk faster, learn faster and study harder so that I can catch up other people’s steps and stand ahead of them.

 

By:YAO LIN