Asa Nisi Masa

So I should have been studying last night, and I was, well half-heartedly, when I got the grand idea to watch Fellini's 8 1/2 instead. Materials science really sucks and you can only glean so much and my roommates were out at the "library" so I had access to the downstairs TV which is rare.

It was a marvel of modern cinema. Loved it. It was so oddly haunting/ sad it affected my dreams. Last night I dreamt that I was going to get A Lover's Discourse by Barthes from McClures and I was on my bike...the sky was really gray to the point that it seemed that everything was in grayscale...all the colours were really washed out...downright depressing really. SO I rode down there and everything was closed. Beyond being closed, there were no people, it was deserted, a ghost down. Perhaps a subconscious personal interpretation of the movie? I dunno, these things just happen.

I liked Luisa best. Her character. It exuded something, some fuzzy meaning that I couldn't quite capture with words but I know is there. Barthes had a work for this...like a secondary meaning that is implied but not completely presented. Guido was really kind of vile, but there still is some ID with him as well. To not love. Such a horrible thing.

Speaking of love, writing was the topic of my last Chemical Engineering class. He gave us an article by Tom Friedman. Prof asked who knew who Friedman was. I immediately said "op-ed writer for the NY Times, wrote World is Flat, Lexus and Olive Branch, Letters from Beirut to Lebanon, and he has a new book coming out tomorrow..." and then he asked who has read him...only my hand was raised.

The funny part. He asked us to analyze the article (about global warming of course). He asked his style. Poeple started throughing out the ethos, "I liked it", "it was silly", "informative"...the classics. The prof obviously was frustrated with these answers so I decided to chime in with "It is highly rhetoric driven with the first paragraph speaking to the classical nostalgic lore of nature's beauty attempting make an emotional connection with the reader while use the facts to establish some authority for his message, though they are highly rhetorical within themselves.Can you explain that? I did not want to explain it, but I did. Everyone looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language.

Then he asked who reads the NY Times.
Their Answers
-liberals
-people who hold power and influence
-literate people

He then said, well it is viewed as the newspaper of note for the us by the world, this is how we get represented.

Then we talked about technical writing. Apparently the writing we do in history, literature and art is not focused on clarity and uses too high of diction...etc i will type my notes at one point.

I started to get bored so I pull out my book and started to read (thanks Freddy Dostoevsky).

It makes me sick to be in a room with this gross disdain on the language that we use. People really need to read some stuff occasionally and stop playing all these video games and such.

Makes me sad is all.