These are some self-questioning that aroused by the speech, they may not directly link to the speech, but they are questions that I want to find out their answers.
What are our stories? What will it appear as if we inspect our life and society as if inspecting American Son? These questions came to me earlier this semester, and this speech recalled them.
Is it true that literature is eternal? We have been watching and studying the novel that depicted a life of immigrants of the Philippines in LA, which happened 15 years ago. What about us? Are we progressing? Are we having a time lag? By studying the contemporary era, we are referring the stories within 20 years, which seems to be recent in comparison with 20 decades, or 20 centuries. Yet, the society is progressing, yet, all we read, studies are still sometimes appear to be in the past. If all the written memories are in the past, then what are our ones that is generating for the future. There is always a distance between present experience and the written stories that are being red. Furthermore, we are reading the society invented by the author with his experience and knowledge. Likewise, we read many other things that we don’t really know, while neglecting our own experience and society. Strangely, we discuss them as if they are our own experience and life. Moreover, we even write and reinvent them as if they are derived from our own experience. For example, one could write a story about the Japanese invasion in omniscient view basing on the partial knowing, experiencing, and even imagination; yet, we read as if they are true experience and derive information from them. Meanwhile, we may even base on this knowledge to crate more stories of them, and there will be someone who also consider this as our experience. The magical power of making up experiences works. People around the world know Dracula, who deeply implanted in the popular culture. It even developed its own system of rules that is saying the Transylvanian vampire developed into a sub-culture society around the world, and there are people actually studying them. (Yes, I’ve seen a classmate wrote an academic essay on the history of vampire.) However, in the Irish writer Bram Stoker’s novel, it’s just a fiction basing on the rumor and conjecture, and there was no vampire world. The real Vlad is said to have received his “prestige” for impaling enemies and rival civilians; also, we are not sure about this as well. If someone really wants to know the fact, there will be infinite traces, too. We have also discussed that could we really touches the Cuban experience with Mira Nair’s movie, which she inspected and tried to reinvent the Cuban immigrant experience she never had, while we inspect and experience from her expressed experience. However, what also attracts me is that regardless of the factual excavation, the issues and themes are still eternal. All the stories of the past, out of invention, they are still linking with issues and problems of the present. “Literature is the home of nonstandard space and time.” The themes that discussed in classical literatures are still useful on analyzing the contemporary issues. Yet, if the focus kept on the past, the present will be blurred. Literature has the ability to preview the problems of the future by inspecting the past as long as one can grasp beyond and between the lines. Yet, after we have reached the issue, could the invention process convey the issue out that people can easily realize?
The idea of photography is repeated when discussing how people experience events in the past. In “Another Way of Telling,” a book discussing the essence of photography by John Berger and Jean Mohr, stated the idea that the quotation of images by camera is capable of creating authenticity; therefore, it does not lie while making up deceptions. The visual feature of camera is believed to be the path of constructing the truth in 1800s, while nowadays they became even more deceptive. According to John Berger, the ambiguity of photography came from the discontinuity of time in photos. Roland Barthes mentioned photography as messages without a code. However, John further stated that the tableau made up by photograph contains an inherited language of symbols. Furthermore, the readers read the correspondences of coherence from his former experience, linking everything in the photo together to gather information. In the chapter “What Did I See,” there is an interesting experiment that he exhibited photos to different people of different classes, asking them to explain the photo without any other information. It came out that not only the outcome differs; none of them matches the real situation. In another chapter “If Each Time…,” John Berger and Jean Mohr presented a series of photos, constructing up a life experience of a rural woman from the first point of view. The continuous images form a long quotation. The readers will link them like a thread piercing them. However, the fact is that the photos are not really related. The woman, of course, does not exist as well. The authenticity of photos created the concept for the reader that someone is there witnessing something happening. The selectivity of photographer makes the photo to show what he wanted the world appears to be. By selecting the target, controlling the lighting and composing, photographer can even turn a wedding into a funeral. Yet, people still tend to believe the photograph for they are never fiction in essence, and turning them into their own experiences.
What are our stories? What will it appear as if we inspect our life and society as if inspecting American Son? These questions came to me earlier this semester, and this speech recalled them.
Is it true that literature is eternal? We have been watching and studying the novel that depicted a life of immigrants of the Philippines in LA, which happened 15 years ago. What about us? Are we progressing? Are we having a time lag? By studying the contemporary era, we are referring the stories within 20 years, which seems to be recent in comparison with 20 decades, or 20 centuries. Yet, the society is progressing, yet, all we read, studies are still sometimes appear to be in the past. If all the written memories are in the past, then what are our ones that is generating for the future. There is always a distance between present experience and the written stories that are being red. Furthermore, we are reading the society invented by the author with his experience and knowledge. Likewise, we read many other things that we don’t really know, while neglecting our own experience and society. Strangely, we discuss them as if they are our own experience and life. Moreover, we even write and reinvent them as if they are derived from our own experience. For example, one could write a story about the Japanese invasion in omniscient view basing on the partial knowing, experiencing, and even imagination; yet, we read as if they are true experience and derive information from them. Meanwhile, we may even base on this knowledge to crate more stories of them, and there will be someone who also consider this as our experience. The magical power of making up experiences works. People around the world know Dracula, who deeply implanted in the popular culture. It even developed its own system of rules that is saying the Transylvanian vampire developed into a sub-culture society around the world, and there are people actually studying them. (Yes, I’ve seen a classmate wrote an academic essay on the history of vampire.) However, in the Irish writer Bram Stoker’s novel, it’s just a fiction basing on the rumor and conjecture, and there was no vampire world. The real Vlad is said to have received his “prestige” for impaling enemies and rival civilians; also, we are not sure about this as well. If someone really wants to know the fact, there will be infinite traces, too. We have also discussed that could we really touches the Cuban experience with Mira Nair’s movie, which she inspected and tried to reinvent the Cuban immigrant experience she never had, while we inspect and experience from her expressed experience. However, what also attracts me is that regardless of the factual excavation, the issues and themes are still eternal. All the stories of the past, out of invention, they are still linking with issues and problems of the present. “Literature is the home of nonstandard space and time.” The themes that discussed in classical literatures are still useful on analyzing the contemporary issues. Yet, if the focus kept on the past, the present will be blurred. Literature has the ability to preview the problems of the future by inspecting the past as long as one can grasp beyond and between the lines. Yet, after we have reached the issue, could the invention process convey the issue out that people can easily realize?
The idea of photography is repeated when discussing how people experience events in the past. In “Another Way of Telling,” a book discussing the essence of photography by John Berger and Jean Mohr, stated the idea that the quotation of images by camera is capable of creating authenticity; therefore, it does not lie while making up deceptions. The visual feature of camera is believed to be the path of constructing the truth in 1800s, while nowadays they became even more deceptive. According to John Berger, the ambiguity of photography came from the discontinuity of time in photos. Roland Barthes mentioned photography as messages without a code. However, John further stated that the tableau made up by photograph contains an inherited language of symbols. Furthermore, the readers read the correspondences of coherence from his former experience, linking everything in the photo together to gather information. In the chapter “What Did I See,” there is an interesting experiment that he exhibited photos to different people of different classes, asking them to explain the photo without any other information. It came out that not only the outcome differs; none of them matches the real situation. In another chapter “If Each Time…,” John Berger and Jean Mohr presented a series of photos, constructing up a life experience of a rural woman from the first point of view. The continuous images form a long quotation. The readers will link them like a thread piercing them. However, the fact is that the photos are not really related. The woman, of course, does not exist as well. The authenticity of photos created the concept for the reader that someone is there witnessing something happening. The selectivity of photographer makes the photo to show what he wanted the world appears to be. By selecting the target, controlling the lighting and composing, photographer can even turn a wedding into a funeral. Yet, people still tend to believe the photograph for they are never fiction in essence, and turning them into their own experiences.
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