Author: mlatstet

A) http://www.flickr.com/photos/borghetti/123076979/

“It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume if you want something badly enough, it is your god given right to have it.” (John Krakauer, Into the Wild, 155)

The photo I have chosen is of a man in a prison who seems lost at the bottom of an endless cell. I chose this because I felt it describes exactly what Krakauer was trying to say to the reader. He says that he climbed the mountain in hopes of it changing his life and in the end he truly gained nothing from the experience. In the same sense Chris McCandless is also gaining nothing on all the random adventures he sends himself on, instead he just continually gets more and more lost. For the sake of my argument lets assume that the man in the photo robbed a bank because he felt he deserved the money, but in the end he got nothing except an undefined amount of time spent in prison. In other words the actions one may take in order to pursue one’s desires or as Krakauer says “god given rights,” may end up harming oneself or as in the case of Chris Mccandless’ might possibly end up being fatal.

B) http://www.flickr.com/photos/rivello/130503459/

“You are wrong if you think joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience.” (Chris Mccandless, Into the Wild, 57)

this quote is from a line in a letter that Chris wrote to Ron in which he tells him to give up all his worldly possessions and basically go into a life of asceticism. I chose this photo because I feel that it exemplifies what Chris means by his statement that joy can be found in any thing. the man in the photo has his hands raised as he looks out onto the sunny beach. The area where the photo is shot seems to me to look mostly desolate and from what I gather the man is completely enjoying his surroundings. I feel that is the same sort of enjoyment that Chris got from his experiences out in the wilderness. He loved to be somewhere that he felt nobody else was or would be. As he says he found joy in every thing natural that God put around him.

C) http://www.flickr.com/photos/18759075@N00/131072010/

“DEATH LOOMS AS SERIOUS THREAT. TOO WEAK TO WALK OUT, HAVE LITERALLY BECOME TRAPPED IN THE WILD.” (Chris Mccandless, Into the Wild, 195)

The photo depicts a fire hydrant in the middle of the forest. I chose this to go along with that passage because this is what I think of his depiction of being trapped in the wild. If by wild he means in a bus 6 miles north of a park ranger outpost then this fire hydrant is just as wild as a bear. I see it as Chris must have had some sort of death wish to give up so easily as to just accept that he can’t move anymore and just lay down and accept death. If he truly wanted to live nobody would have found him in a bus inside of a sleeping bag.

D) http://www.flickr.com/photos/riel/100277853/

“My father’s faith in this blueprint was unshakable. It was, after all, the path he had followed to prosperity.”
(John Krakauer, Into the Wild, 148)

this is a photo of a syringe laying next to some cigarettes in a trash can. I chose this because he refers to his father as successful in this passage when later on in this section we read that he ends up completely addicted to drugs and eventually in a mental institute. it seems to me that the impression he had of his father throughout his childhood lead him to make some poor decisions early in life and he ended up going down his father’s path fairly quickly. this shows some of the mistakes they both made. He obviously smoked though I do not know if he still does, and his father fell into hard drugs which eventually lead to his down fall.

(synthesis)
Though the photo may influence how we look at the caption placed below it and in turn how we look at Into the Wild as a whole, I feel it is the image that is effected by the caption more so than the text. But this I feel exemplifies how Krakauer’s choices of what to include in the book effects how we look at the story as a whole. Just as how the image I chose with the boy outside of the cave and the caption about how God places joy all around us may force us to look deeper into that image, Krakauer’s inclusion of misquoted material from James Joyce forces us to look at Alex/Chris in a different way. There are probably hundreds of captions from the book that we could use to describe a number of pictures on here, just as there are many quotes he could have chosen to explain what Chris was going through. But he chose them for a specific reason and also to push our opinion in a certain direction. Just as I took a fire hydrant that is out in the middle of nowhere and used it to make Chris seem week or foolish, I also took the image of the cave and made him look philosophical. This assignment made me truly question Krakauer as the one conveying this story. It made understand that even though he feels Chris was in some way a great person, honestly nobody really knows what his intentions were. It could have easily been that Chris was just foolish and didn’t know what to expect. It just goes to show you, you can’t always believe what you read.

The style in which this play seems to be presented is from within the mind of Bill. He sees a girl at a table in a cafe and decides he is going to go and talk to her. Before he goes to talk to her he decides to run through all the different ways this conversation could possibly go. Every time the soft bell rings he has messed up and the conversation has ended, thus it picks back up from where he started to lead the conversation in the wrong direction and goes from there in the hope to eventually have some sort of connection with Betty. But as I read on I see that this may not be the case, and what may be happening instead is completely different scenarios over and over again, as was mentioned in the first post for this week about it being like the movie ground hogs day. Either way I think that Ives is tying to make a point more than just tell a story. When I read this it makes me think that Ives is poking fun at how petty people really are when it comes to social interaction, and specifically when it involves some form of courtship. For example, we like to just assume things about people or blow them off once they disinterest us. The point where this stood out to me the most is right after the 14th bell rings and we have Betty accusing him of just wanting to take her home with him and sleep with her. She than proceeds to make up some story about how he will neglect her and then tell her about his girlfriend, only for her in the end to say that she wouldn’t care. Now this is a farcical situation, but I think that some people think this way and it definitely may have crossed some women’s mind in a situation like this before. It seems to me that Ives is just trying to make the point that we assume people are completely different than us based on one response. Where as just as easily as they could by happenstance say the correct thing and have you eating out of their hand. What his ultimate point is I can’t say, but it would seem to me that he is trying to get people to look at the way we interact with one another in such a situation, and see how just by the change of one response or even one word we can immediately decide what we think of a person.

In the blog “What happened to enjoyment?” my fellow class mate mentions that he thinks that these websites have no meaning, and are only meant for enjoyment. Although I would agree that they are placed on the net for our enjoyment I do not agree that they have no meaning at all. I feel that in saying so you are cutting this literature short. Though they are confusing and don’t seem to make sense at first, as you read them and enjoy the creativity that has gone into them all, they begin to make you think in much the same way that some literature does. To pick up a copy of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and say that this is just meant for our enjoyment and is just a strange story, is without a doubt not looking at the text in the way it is intended to be looked at.
what intrigued me the most from the websites for the reading this week was “Bust Down the Doors!”. As with many types of text, when this first plays one might look at it in puzzlement. It is hard to even make out the whole of the text, but as you watch it over and over you begin to piece it together. Once you have done this you then might question why, when this character is pulled out of bed and killed in front of his neighbors, it is “life saving” to remember the dream he was having about the beach. Once the cycle finishes telling you the story with the person this is all happening to, being “you”, it begins to restart; this time it tells us it is happening to “him”, and it continues in this fashion through a few different variations. It then proceeds to mix them all together before restarting its cycle again with “you”. Although I can’t tell you the direct meaning of this, if I were to take it off of a website and place it onto a piece of paper it could easily be argued as poetry, First of all there are so many different emotions expressed in this piece: the hatred of the onlookers, the shame of the person or persons killed, and the release that remembering the dream brings to those killed. Another peculiar thing about this web sight is that all the letters “O” in the text are crossed like a numeric zero.
I understand the argument that people do tend to over analyze many texts, but in my experience that only happens when the meaning is clearly stated and the reader decides to go out on a limb and pull some absurd meaning out of another wise simple story. Some forms of literature are intended to be looked into. Although the author may not have had an intended meaning or moral, they want the reader to be provoked in such a way that it makes him or her think about the text, and learn from it, or at least attempt to make sense of its madness. Even though I am not able to tell you the meaning of this and the other the hyper texts, it is easy to see that one could look into them from many different angles and derive multiple meanings from them that are otherwise not clearly given to the reader.