30 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2018
    1. So that was the deal. The Professor had walked out with the data on me. He'd applied it to some private research project of his, with me as the sample on which to advance the principle of shuffling generations beyond anyone else. And now, as my friend Junior had suggested, the Professor was ready for me. His primary sample was to become his guinea pig. He'd probably given me bogus data to shuffle, planting it with a code that would react in my consciousness.

      confused about this

    2. "I want you to tell me about your shadow," I say. "I may have met her in my old world." "Yes, that may be so. I remember the time you said we might have met before."

      pink suit girl??

    3. he has handed the boots to my shadow personally.

      has he?

    4. I do not mean to pry, but you called out to her in your fever dream. It is nothing to be ashamed of. All young people fall in love

      weird

  2. Nov 2017
    1. it comes to belong more to the organization and less to the self

      Even beyond corporate emotion-management, there is a huge societal pressure to be happy. Rather than accepting their full range of emotions, many people ask the questions, "how can I feel happy all the time?", and "how can I avoid feeling sad/angry?" because society places a significant premium on happiness. Negative emotions can't and shouldn't be eradicated; they are signifiers that something has gone wrong and in some cases alert the "feeler" to potential problems to be solved.

    2. assertiveness training,

      Potentially the opposite process of training to be a flight attendant. Why do we promote one process for improved mental health and the opposite for a stable job? I'm amazed people in these jobs can put up with this degree of dissonance.

    3. She may refuse to act at all, thus withdrawing her emotional labor altogether

      All of this is incredibly relatable to the previous passage. BS might require less work than actually becoming invested in, for example, an essay topic, but it still requires work. If even BS proves to be too difficult to create, a student or author is likely to just give up, or create BS which is too obviously phony to make the cut for a teacher or publisher.

    1. there was no bullshit

      perhaps the lack of study on the concept of bullshit is the literary society's attempt to pretend that our standards for written content by students haven't been lowering drastically as teachers' resources and patience dwindle in the modern political environment. (this isn't supposed to sound like a conspiracy theory)

    2. sketchily

      Appropriate register considering that the entire essay is focused on the rather informal subject of "bullshit"

  3. Oct 2017
    1. the relationship between th.is African-American identity and the city not only remained intact. but also. In feet. continued to reinforce one another

      This section in particular is extra engaging because Grant draws strong and frequent parallels between the rap music she is studying and real-world conditions, followed by analysis of how the two interact. The section does a much better job of integrating all three promised subjects in the title of the essay than the last section.

    2. The mwmve explosion of pent-up frustration following the Rodney King verdict ln 1992 perhaps only points to the deep impact of this gangstll image on the south central communities and lndMduals 'Compton' tnltlelly represented.

      This attempt to wrap up the entire discussion of gangsta image and causation of violence the course of a sentence is kind of disappointing. The subject matter was so intriguing, it would have been great to have an equally interesting and thorough conclusion.

    3. I Intend to show not only how the gang.stu Image manipulated by pngsta rap to project e.n empowered vision of south central was also used to crlmlmdbe ll. but also the disastrous elTects of this dash between Los Angeles and its real and Imagined gangstas

      I agree with Matthew's following comment that structure seems to be somewhat chronological in this article, but I don't think that it was the most effective structure she could have used. The peak of interest in this essay as far as complexity of ideas and intertextuality feels to me like it occurs in the middle, and the phrase "best for last" has cliche status for good reason. Having the most complex and exciting argument at the end of an essay tends to leave more of a lasting impact on a reader.

    1. Although itis a common assessment of country, I must rely on readers’ inevitablyvaried familiarity with the music to gauge the accuracy of my critique

      Here is a second instance of Mann using the personal experience of readers to the advantage of his argument. A standpoint reached from my own experience will stick with me more than anything Mann can form with his own examples. I find this technique to be quite potent.

    2. ‘patinated

      they've used the word patina so frequently on HGTV that the word alone holds a strong white association for me. Perhaps white Americans like patinas both on music and metal home decorations.

    3. ne never hears non-southern country artists criticized for putting on a ‘phoney’ accent

      at least country music is inclusive in this regard! You don't have to be an Okie from Muskogee to sing country music.

    4. It bears emphasis that the point here is not to discover some‘natural’ sound of whiteness, which can never be anything but ‘culture’

      The wording of this is just short of clear, and I'm bothered by it.

    5. The discussion is organized as follows

      It's good that there's a give and take of complexity between argument and structure. The argument is tough to follow at times, but we can give it extra focus because the structure is laid out plainly.

    6. crosses the barriers of culture and language, capturing all the joys,struggles, laughter, and heartache that are part of our daily lives.

      I like that Mann doesn't lead with, "here's something incorrect Bush said," but instead merely presents the excerpt to the reader without framing it that way just yet . In reading this I felt some mental dissonance, which subtly told me that this definition of country music isn't all that accurate. Because all of this wasn't plainly stated, and came from my own experience, I paid closer attention to the rest of the article.

    1. “Human Sadness” by Julian Casablancas+The Voidz might be a bit unsuited for play at house party, and it is notably longer than the average song length at 11 minutes, but somehow I never grow tired of it. The broad title fits the song well, as it seems to be a narrative of both Julian Casablancas’ own sadness in his life as a result of estrangement from his father, as well as the sorrows that haunt all humans as a result of greed and too much dependence on emotion rather than reason. Casablancas writes lyrics that are quite personal and specific, such as “hits you on the head when nobody’s there / then he says ‘come here, could you fix my tie?’” regarding the way his father, the well-dressed founder of a modeling agency, treated him coldly when they weren’t in the public view. Between glimpses of Casablancas’ relationship with his father he writes about the human condition; “vanity overriding wisdom” being a way that social interaction can be corrupted. “Human Sadness”, by addressing both general woes of the human population and intimate details from Casablancas’ own life, is both relatable and personal. This seems to be the kind of alluring authenticity Barker and Taylor see in the blues songs they examine in their article.

      Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8k3qB61lhk

  4. Sep 2017
    1. disputes are always matters ofcharacter

      Reminds me a bit of fundamental attribution error. If politicians are unable to see opponents as individuals of character apart from the mistakes they've made in the past, they are making what psychology and also many voters call an error.

    1. define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes instruggle against, the things our significant others want to seein us.

      If this is true, and we create our identity out of a series of decisions to either satisfy or contradict the wishes of our "significant others," then of course our identity would be largely based on others' recognition. If others place some stereotype upon us, we only have the choice to comply with it or to reject it, without the option to act as if the stereotype doesn't exist and act freely in some middle ground. Thus recognition plays a large and somewhat irritating part in controlling who we are.

    2. I want to takelanguagein abroad sense, covering not only the words we speak, but alsoother modes of expression

      Defining words that could potentially be misinterpreted like this is a big part of getting one's point across. I need to do this more often.

    3. Within these perspectives, misrecognition shows not justa lack of due respect

      The structure of Taylor's argument flows notably well; I like that he presents the necessary examples for understanding an argument in a separate paragraph before continuing on to make his point.

    1. cross section of the Negro South in the one state.And then I realized that I was new myself, so it looked sensible for meto choose familiar ground.First place I aimed to stop to collect material

      phrases like "cross section" and "collect material" make Hurston's endeavor seem scientific, and thus probably more authentic from the public perspective at the time that desired to study "American Negro life".

  5. Aug 2017
    1. unenriched with strange e

      This fits with Wordsworth's desire to keep his subject matter realistic while still entertaining. Wordsworth doesn't need some freak occurrence to make his stories appealing to audiences like the novels of his day apparently do. Through his own power of storytelling he can spin interest even out of less than spectacular events.

    1. truly though not ostentatiously

      3 Wordsworth believes there is a distinction between his own poetry and others in that he writes realistically about significant events, but through a lens of "imagination", while other poets of the time write using language that veils the true nature of their subjects. How does Wordsworth define this distinction in his preface?

    2. real language of men in a state of vivid sensation

      2 With this statement Wordsworth clarifies that his motive is not to make poetry boring or overly tedious by any means, but rather to write about excerpts of real life which are extraordinary rather than manufacturing interest with excessive and pointless language.

    3. Several of my Friends are anxious for the success of these Poems, from a belief, that, if the views with which they were composed were indeed realized, a class of Poetry would be produced, well adapted to interest mankind permanently

      1 We now know in hindsight that the collaboration of Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge is indeed credited as a major contribution to the launch of the Romantic Age, but whether this form "[interests] mankind permanently" is still up for debate.

    1. different audiences

      how will we practice writing to be understood by audiences other than the college-age-writing-student audience currently available?