TOW #6: The Fourth State of Matter

“The Fourth State of Matter”, written by Jo Ann Beard, is a narrative about the author’s life. Beard gives a detailed account of her everyday habits at home and at her job, as well as descriptions of her interactions with friends a co-workers. She creates a snapshot of her life and how, one day, all she knew was shattered. An editor of a physics journal at the University of Iowa, Beard left her office hours before some of her co-workers were shot by a disgruntled graduate student, Gang Lu. “The Fourth State of Matter” was published in The New York Times a short time later, winning the Whiting award for its excellence. The essay is Beard’s way of contemplating her loss of her co-workers, especially her good friend, Christoph Goertz. It resonates with anyone dealing or how has experienced the loss of a loved one, appealing to mature audiences who have an understanding and connection to life and death. Beard expresses her unimaginable emotions through the use of symbolism. Her collie, which she never names in her essay, symbolizes her inability to let go because her love is so great. The collie is very old and can barely walk anymore, so her owner must carry her outside to use the bathroom at night. After Beard had already taken the dog out once, she “climbed back under my covers already but her leg’s stuck underneath her, we can’t get comfortable. I fix the leg, she rolls over and sleeps. Two hours later I wake up and she’s gazing at me in the darkness. The face of love. She wants to go out again. I give her a boost, balance her on her legs” (Beard 1). Although the author knows in hear head that she should let the dog be put to sleep, she cannot bring herself to euthanize her beloved pet. In the same way, it is excruciating for her to let her killed friends go. Beard’s essay beautifully captures her experience of loss, and speaks volumes to her message that life makes everyone let things they love go. 

TOW #5: "The Force That Drives the Flower"

In her analysis of life and death titled “The Force That Drives the Flower”, Annie Dillard adds a unique perspective to a very ancient and abstract question. She views life from the eyes of different species, and then ties back the similarities and differences to human life. Her piece includes many fascinating facts about how organisms live only to reproduce, explaining the nature of life and death through real world examples. As a Pulitzer Prize winner and English professor at Wesleyan University, Dillard is a very gifted writer and researcher. This piece would fascinate anyone interested in science, in addition to readers with philosophical minds. Dillard very effectively uses symbolism to express her ideas, and this helps the audience connect deeply to what she is saying. When explaining the life as the individual verses the group, Dillard says, “Instead of one goldfish swimming in its intricate bowl, I see tons and tons of goldfish laying and eating billions and billions of eggs. The point of all the eggs is of course to make goldfish one by one—nature loves the idea of the individual, if not the individual himself—and the point of a goldfish is pizazz. This is familiar ground. I merely failed to acknowledge that it is death that is spinning the globe” (Dillard 3). The idea of many goldfish in a bowl helps to personify a topic that is very hard to grasp, while at the same time offering an incredibly unique view. She also alludes to other scientists and great thinkers from different time periods. Dillard concludes her essay by writing, “The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age." This is what we know. The rest is gravy” (Dillard 3). By including the words of others in her essay, Dillard explains her ideas in many different ways to allow understanding. This well put together piece enabled Dillard to achieve her purpose of analyzing the complexity of life.

TOW #4: IRB "Blink" (part one)

A book orchestrated to examine and explain the nuances of human thought, Blink, by Malcom Gladwell, is a very intriguing read. By blending elements of statistics, experiments, narratives, and studies, Blink provides a wide range of facts in order to help the audience understand why the mind processes information certain ways. Malcom Gladwell is a very well-known author who has written four other best-selling books and worked as a journalist for many years. Written for anyone who is interested in how their mind works, Gladwell’s book is very intellectually satisfying. The research happening in neurological and behavior sciences has advanced greatly throughout the past couple decades, leading to many fascinating breakthroughs that defy previously conceived ideas on the workings of the brain. By using anecdotes describing various examples, Gladwell is able to help his audience understand the purpose and points of his book. In his introduction, Gladwell begins his book with a story of how a museum discovered a statue they bought was a fraud after all of their scientific tests told them otherwise. He explains, “When Frederico Zeri and Evelyn Harrison and Thomas Hoving and Georgios Dontas – and all the others – looked at the kouros and felt an “intuitive repulsion,” they were absolutely right. In the first two seconds of looking – in a single glance – they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months. Blink is about a book about those first two seconds” (Gladwell 8). By using dialogue from experts and citing specific examples, Gladwell not only makes his book more interesting but also greatly increases the story’s logos. Gladwell also uses varying sentence structure, utilizing syntax to his advantage to emphasis his important points. In the above quote, the last sentence stands out because it is very short in relation to the sentences preceding it. This allows it to become a bold statement; a very clear and clever way of defining the thesis. Gladwell provides his audience with compelling evidence and conclusions in a way that is logical as well as cohesive. 

TOW #3: "Tuesday, And After"

                Featured in The New Yorker just two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, “Tuesday, and After” was written by The New Yorker staff, including contributions from John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Denis Johnson, Roger Angell, Aharon Appelfeld, Rebecca Mead, Susan Sontag, Amitav Ghosh, and Donald Antrim. In the piece, the various author’s shared their own experience of the attack, and their observations on how the country should move on from that terrible day. At the time, all of America was teeming with questions and looking to someone for an answer. People were afraid and they didn’t know what permanent effects 9/11 would have on their lives and their country’s future. In an attempt to answer these questions and pose a few of their own, the author’s recount the event with intensely vivid imagery.  One contributor, John Updike, recounts the event by saying, “It seemed, at that first glance, more curious than horrendous: smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, and strange inky rivulets ran down the giant structure’s vertically corrugated surface […] As we watched the second tower burst into ballooning flame […] persisted the notion that, as on television, this was not quite real; it could be fixed; the technocracy the towers symbolized would find a way to put out the fire and reverse the damage” (Updike). By including such powerful metaphors and painstaking description, the authors are able to bring to life exactly what happened, and, in doing so, are able to sway the reader using ethos and pathos to listen to their opinion. Another author, Johnathan Franzen, used juxtaposition in his writing to give America some perspective on the terrorists who led the attack. He states, “Perhaps some of these glad artists were hiding in ruined Afghanistan, where the average life expectancy is barely forty. In that world you can’t walk through a bazaar without seeing men and children who are missing limbs” (Franzen). His inclusion of two different worlds in his explanation of what happened help to make sense of the event. As a piece intended both to comfort the American people as well as prompt them to think towards the future, “Tuesday, and After” was a very well written piece that the nation needed to read. 

TOW #2: Visual Text - Syrian Refugees

"African asylum seekers packed into a boat" by Massimo Sestini, The Guardian. 25 June 2014. Web.

In a stunning picture capturing a birds-eye view of a boat filled with Syrian refugees, photographer Massimo Sestini is able to convey more than words ever could. Fleeing from a nation in chaos, many thousands of Syrian refugees are desperately piling in boats and setting out across the ocean to seek asylum in Europe. Sestini, an award winning photographer whose pictures have been featured in many Italian magazines, held onto the outside of a helicopter to take the photograph. She did so in order to send a message; escaping Syrians are in desperate need of help. During a time where some countries will not allow refugees past their borders, this picture is intended to sway them into giving aid. Those capable of provided assistance, such as other European countries, the European Union as a whole, and/or the United Nations, should be assisting these people. The image serves to both inform the general public, as well as to prompt them to allow refugees into their countries and do all they can to assist them. Sestini uses a fascinating metaphor to drive her point home, capturing a boat as lost and hopeless at sea as all the Syrian refugees are lost in the world. They have no home to go back to, and can only helplessly drift with what family they have left. Many in the picture are looking up and even holding their hands up to the sky as if asking it for help, allowing these details to communicate the clear message that the world has the obligation to step in and help them. The boat is filled to the brim, illustrating how big the problem is and showing just how many people have been effected by the disasters in Syria. All alone in the ocean with no sign of supplies, the picture’s details leads to a very strong sway of pathos and also includes some logos proving how bad the issue is. Sestini was very successful in showing the world the struggles that Syrian refugees are facing and that they deserve help to get through these tough times. 

TOW #1: "What Are Master-pieces"

Through her trademark unusual style Gertrude Stein, in her unconventional essay What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them, attempts to explain her own thoughts on what constitutes a masterpiece. A well-known figure in American literature and often called a pioneer of modernist literature, Stein presents a throughout analysis of how great works are made. Stein addresses ideas to an intellectual and philosophically curious audience, perhaps to those who strive to create masterpieces of their own or readers inspired by great pieces. During the time the essay was published in 1935, America was still slumped in the Great Depression, causing many, like Stein, to lose hope that more masterpieces would be able to be produced. Stein uses her controversial writing style to add intrigue to her agreement, giving her ideas a unique flow. Her use of colloquial language and astonishing lack of use of normal grammar gives the essay a feel quite similar to a babbling brook. In abandoning the rules for typical prose and purposely leaving a certain amount of ambiguity in her writing, Stein is able to lead the reader to the conclusion, “And so there we are and there is so much more to say but anyway I do not say that there is no doubt that masterpieces are masterpieces in that way and there are very few of them” (Stein 138). In addition to laughing in the face of generic conventions, Stein illustrates her point by including unusual metaphors. She explains our perceived identity of ourselves by saying, “I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognizing that he knows, that is what destroys creation” (Stein 132). The use of figurative language and run on sentences keeps the audience on their toes and gives a deeply passionate tone to the text. Stein uses her essay as a way to explain to the world what a masterpiece is, what it is not, and why it is so rare. By repeating ideas of identity, memory, time, and human nature, Stein defends her thesis that a masterpiece includes none of these qualities and that is why there are so few. 

IRB Intro Post #1

Blink, by best selling author Malcom Gladwell, is a book explaining how humans make subconscious snap decisions. Supporting his ground breaking ideas with facts on the function of the brain, Gladwell explores "the power of thinking without thinking". He strives to answer where our 'gut feelings' come from, and how our first instincts are often so accurate. A mixture of fascinating facts and interesting examples, Blink presents many revolutionary ideas.