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Please write the notes as mentioned in the file acceptable and not acceptable notes.
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NOT Acceptable (The AI-Generated Notes) Your notes should be written in a linear
progression from beginning to end of the work, not organized the way AI tends to do it.
Plot Summary: “Memento” follows the story of Leonard Shelby, a man suffering from short-term
memory loss due to a traumatic incident involving his wife’s murder. The film is presented in a
unique non-linear narrative style, with scenes alternating between black-and-white sequences in
chronological order and color sequences presented in reverse order. This narrative structure
effectively places the audience in Leonard’s shoes, as they experience his confusion and
disorientation.
Key Themes:
1. Memory and Identity: The film explores the fragility of memory and its impact on one’s
sense of self. Leonard’s memory loss leaves him unable to form new memories, leading
to a constant struggle to reconstruct his past and understand his identity.
2. Perception and Reality: “Memento” challenges the reliability of perception and how
memories shape one’s understanding of reality. The characters’ motivations and actions
are often unclear, blurring the lines between truth and deception.
3. Revenge and Obsession: Leonard’s quest for vengeance against his wife’s supposed killer
becomes an all-consuming obsession. The film delves into the consequences of
unrelenting revenge and how it can distort one’s sense of purpose.
4. Moral Ambiguity: Characters in the film often exhibit ambiguous motives and actions,
leading to a sense of moral uncertainty. The boundaries between good and evil are
blurred, raising questions about the nature of justice.
5. Manipulation and Control: The narrative structure of the film reflects the manipulation
and control exerted by both external forces and the characters themselves. Leonard’s
notes, tattoos, and Polaroid photos become his means of exerting control over his own
life.
6. Existential Themes: The film raises existential questions about the nature of reality, time,
and human existence. Leonard’s condition forces him to confront the fleeting nature of
life and the impermanence of memory.
7. Symbolism: Various symbols, such as the tattooed phrases and the Polaroid photos, carry
deeper meanings that contribute to the film’s themes and narrative complexity.
Notable Elements:
1. Leonard’s Tattoos: Leonard’s body is covered in tattoos with important information about
his mission and suspects. These tattoos serve as his memory substitute, aiding him in his
quest for revenge.
2. Polaroid Photos: Leonard uses Polaroid photos to document people and events, creating a
visual record of his experiences since he cannot rely on his memory. These photos help
him piece together his fragmented reality.
3. Leonard’s Car: Leonard’s car, a Jaguar, becomes a recurring motif throughout the film,
symbolizing his relentless pursuit of answers and revenge.
NOT Acceptable (The Internet Analysis Notes) Really? These are your first
reactions to a story you’re reading for the first time?
The war’s haunting presence lingers in the description of the Villa San Girolamo – a fortress
now a shell, much like the characters themselves. It’s a vivid backdrop for their stories.
The burned English patient’s connection to peacock bone as a healer adds an enigmatic layer,
raising questions about the role of belief and superstition in the midst of war’s brutality.
Caravaggio’s nocturnal wanderings become a metaphor for the restlessness that permeates the
post-war world. As he moves through the night, the ruined statues serve as a visual testament
to the characters’ internal scars, reflecting the ravages of conflict. The statues, once proud and
whole, now mirror the fragmented lives of those who survived the war, underscoring the
profound impact of trauma on both individuals and their surroundings.
Caravaggio’s nocturnal wanderings convey a sense of restlessness, mirroring the unsettled
post-war world. The ruined statues speak to the ravages of conflict, a visual metaphor for the
characters’ own scars.
The English patient’s fascination with the night sky introduces a poetic dimension to the
narrative, juxtaposing the beauty of the cosmos with the harsh reality of his physical
suffering. In his contemplation of the stars, there’s a poignant exploration of the human
spirit’s capacity for awe and wonder, even amid profound pain. This cosmic connection
serves as a poignant reminder that, despite the earthly devastation, the universe remains a
source of solace and inspiration.
Caravaggio’s dual identity as a wartime thief and his vulnerability in the aftermath point to
the complex aftermath of conflict, where survival often requires compromising one’s
principles.
The burned man’s reminiscences evoke a poignant nostalgia for pre-war moments, acting as a
poignant reminder of the profound impact of conflict on personal histories. As he reflects on
times before the war, the narrative captures a sense of loss and longing, underlining how war
has not only physically scarred but also emotionally altered the characters. The juxtaposition
of past and present adds depth to the narrative, inviting readers to witness the emotional toll
of war on individual lives. Hana’s loyalty, expressed through her decision to stay, prompts
questions about the nature of connection forged in the crucible of war, transcending
traditional bonds.
Caravaggio’s narrative of wartime photography underscores the irony of a stolen moment
capturing him and altering the course of his life, adding a tragic dimension to his character.
Caravaggio’s narrative of wartime photography adds a layer of irony to his character, as a
stolen moment captures him, altering the course of his life. The stolen image becomes a
metaphor for the unpredictable and often tragic turns in wartime. This revelation adds a
tragic dimension to Caravaggio’s character, underscoring how seemingly inconsequential
moments can have far-reaching consequences in the chaotic landscape of conflict.
The English patient’s inability to care for himself and Hana’s nurturing role create a poignant
dynamic, symbolizing the fragility of life and the human capacity for compassion amid
devastation.
NOT Acceptable (The Film or Book Review)
Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” is a miraculous achievement of storytelling and a landmark of visual
mastery. Inspired by a worldwide best-seller that many readers must have assumed was
unfilmable, it is a triumph over its difficulties. It is also a moving spiritual achievement, a movie
whose title could have been shortened to “life.”reyhound’ – Movie Review
The story involves the 227 days that its teenage hero spends drifting across the Pacific in a
lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. They find themselves in the same boat after an amusing and colorful
prologue, which in itself could have been enlarged into an exciting family film. Then it expands
into a parable of survival, acceptance and adaptation. I imagine even Yann Martel, the novel’s
French-Canadian author, must be delighted to see how the usual kind of Hollywood manhandling
has been sidestepped by Lee’s poetic idealism.
The story begins in a small family zoo in Pondichery, India, where the boy christened Piscine is
raised. Piscine translates from French to English as “swimming pool,” but in an India where
many more speak English than French, his playmates of course nickname him “pee.” Determined
to put an end to this, he adopts the name “Pi,” demonstrating an uncanny ability to write down
that mathematical constant that begins with 3.14 and never ends. If Pi is a limitless number, that
is the perfect name for a boy who seems to accept no limitations.
The zoo goes broke, and Pi’s father puts his family and a few valuable animals on a ship bound
for Canada. In a bruising series of falls, a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and the lion tumble into
the boat with the boy, and are swept away by high seas. His family is never seen again, and the
last we see of the ship is its lights disappearing into the deep — a haunting shot that reminds me
of the sinking train in Bill Forsyth’s “Housekeeping” (1987).
This is a hazardous situation for the boy (Suraj Sharma), because the film steadfastly refuses to
sentimentalize the tiger (fancifully named “Richard Parker”). A crucial early scene at the zoo
shows that wild animals are indeed wild and indeed animals, and it serves as a caution for
children in the audience, who must not make the mistake of thinking this is a Disney tiger.
The heart of the film focuses on the sea journey, during which the human demonstrates that he
can think with great ingenuity and the tiger shows that it can learn. I won’t spoil for you how
those things happen. The possibilities are surprising.
What astonishes me is how much I love the use of 3-D in “Life of Pi.” I’ve never seen the
medium better employed, not even in “Avatar,” and although I continue to have doubts about it in
general, Lee never uses it for surprises or sensations, but only to deepen the film’s sense of places
and events.
Let me try to describe one point of view. The camera is placed in the sea, looking up at the
lifeboat and beyond it. The surface of the sea is like the enchanted membrane upon which it
floats. There is nothing in particular to define it; it is just … there. This is not a shot of a boat
floating in the ocean. It is a shot of ocean, boat and sky as one glorious place.
Acceptable (Your Own Thoughts, Observations, and Questions Written in a Linear
Progression from Beginning to End of the Text or Film)
The house seems to be a symbol of their fortunes.
The throne chair! Shows what David thinks of himself.
What are those pictures? These people have bad taste.
Jackie is smart and hardworking; she earned a degree in computer engineering, but she made her
money through her looks.
Three refrigerators, really?
Miss America party is cringey!
Extreme wealth and poverty (Jonquil, the housekeeper, Jackie’s upbringing, Jackie’s friend,
David’s kids by his first wife)
The stuffed dogs are really gross.
Exercising and telling her daughter to peddle faster to burn calories?
Limo and McDonald’s – what a contrast.
All of Jackie’s kids (seven plus Jonquil) vs. the housekeeper/nanny not having seen her son since
he was seven. Very sad.
The lizard!!!
Kids might have to go to college, as though the only reason to go to college is to get a job. What
is this teaching them?
Jackie’s friend’s life vs. Jackie’s. Very different, yet Jackie is still so nice to her.
Jackie’s attitude about their declining fortunes vs. David’s and Jackie’s emphasis on love and
family vs. David’s focus on business shows what’s important to them.
The Walmart Christmas – she has a housekeeper carry a bike past a bunch of other bikes, she
eats caviar.
Blaming the bankers vs. David refusing to sell his Vegas business/building
The housekeeper takes the tiny house/playhouse. This is so sad and shows how much Jackie and
David really have.
David – “my employees, my children, etc. are better for having known me; I’ve helped people”
vs. feeling bad because he had to lay people off and their lives were affected/worse is interesting.
They don’t seem like they really feel like they’ll lose the house. They talk about it like it will still
be theirs. Observation deck for fireworks Jackie shows at the beginning/fireworks are shown out
of that window at the end. Interesting. What does it mean?
Acceptable (The Annotation) It is always okay to annotate and upload a text.
Week 2 pt1
Notes/Questions on “On Fluency and Surrender” and “10.23.15”
A. As you read “On Fluency and Surrender” and “10.23.15” (on Canvas under Module
Week Two), please take about a page or two of notes (double spaced) on your
impressions, questions, and thoughts. These should be linear, from start to finish as
you read. You may hand write, scan, and upload your notes, type them directly into the
text box, or upload a typed copy. Alternatively, you may upload an annotated copy of
the texts.
Mainly, I should be able to get an idea of your thought process about the narratives and
anything that catches your attention. Think also about point of view and perspective and
how those choices affect the narratives.
Remember that literature is subjective! There is no “right” answer like there is in a subject
like math; you just have to be able to back up your ideas with evidence from the text.
Therefore, just take your notes on what you notice and think as you’re reading, and don’t
worry about what other people think.
B. Choose one of the focus questions for this week and reflect on it in one-two paragraphs, giving
evidence from the text(s) to support your opinions.
Focus Questions: What does it mean to tell one’s own story? Why do we tell our own stories?
How does bias/control of the narrative figure in? What does it mean to tell our stories
authentically (or not authentically)? What are the implications of having a first-person vs. a
second-person point of view? How do nonfiction and fiction stories differ? What can we identify
with and connect to, even if these stories are not reflective of our own experiences or make us
uncomfortable? Why is important to consider the experiences of others?
On Fluency and Surrender
by MAYA OSMAN-KRINSKY • September 12, 2020
Google’s first result for “stutter synonyms” is “stammer” but I prefer the former. It always
feels like a letdown when synonyms don’t ring true. Stammerers approximate. Stutterers
struggle.
“Stammer” comes from a Proto-Germanic variant of the verb “stumm,” meaning “to mute.”
“Stutter” also comes from a Proto-Germanic verb, but this one, “staut,” means to push,
thrust, hit, or knock against. My speech has never been mute. It’s been violent, syllabic,
percussive, uncomfortable. It’s been morphemes squeezing out from between my teeth and
bringing color to my cheeks, racing ideas to the roof of my mouth before I can breathe air
into the sounds they need to exist in the world. It’s the table-shaking knee jiggles during
dreaded name games, while I wrestle through the prolongations in my hometown, N-nnnnew York, the repetitions in my major, Ling-ling-liiinguistics, the abnormal stoppages in my
name. Mmm. MMm. Maya.
My stutter sorts the world into safe and unsafe. One of my most vivid childhood memories
is writing out the alphabet in two different colored crayons—red for hard sounds, blue for
easy. Consistently fluent words were a light green, and impossible ones black. The letters
floated in a cool haze behind my eyes while I spoke, creeping crimson into my peripheral
vision when I felt the resistance start to wrap itself around my tongue. Darcy
Steinke said wrote it best: “It was around [elementary school] that I started separating the
alphabet into good letters […] and bad letters.” These red and blue groups have remained in
my mind and mouth as I’ve grown up, but now I’m more aware of their combinations.
Steinke continues that “the central irony of [her] life remains that [her] stutter, which at
times caused so much suffering, is also responsible for [her] obsession with language.” I
wish I’d written this sentence. My infatuation with language began with my inability to
produce it, and I declared a major in Linguistics early in my college career, when merely
introducing myself was excruciating. In sophomore year phonology, the blue and red letters
fell into patterns with more scientific names. My back-open vowels after palatal stops are
briny waves against gravel in flat-soled shoes, my bilabial and alveolar nasals are a stalling
engine, and velar plosives hang on my hard palate and push their pointy fingertips into
bottom of my tongue.
I’ve become proficient in the lexicon of approximation. I’ve reached fluency in talkingaround; synonyms have become my second language, thinking and dreaming in them when
I feel a bodily resistance to my words of choice. But sometimes redefinition falls short as
well, and I’m forced to struggle through a word glowing red. The breaths I take mid-word
are my stammering moments, fermatas on tacet measures of a percussive moment of
speech. I hate giving up on the intentional chain of sounds that God or a linguist or
centuries of speakers of Indo-European languages put on this earth for us to say, but when I
do, my speech is mute. Reading out loud is agonizing, probably more so than
extemporaneous speech, because the slivers of page between words and lines magnify and
swell and shatter the continuity of a phrase on its way out of my mouth. I begin, but my
tongue and throat freeze. I pause. This white space is vulnerability, and my command of a
room hangs there for a moment, until the silence has gone on a beat too long. The
response to this is unfortunately unchanging: stifled laughter, quips that I’ve forgotten my
own name, and English teachers guessing the end of a word that’s put up a hard,
transparent wall just one or two letters away from completion. These beats of muteness are
an inhale and a reset, but they are also a surrender to the violence of a stutter. It’s not a
push back or a push through or a push out of the way. I do these things too. But a stammer
is a seat taken, a palm extended and retracted, a white flag raised.
I have no desire to be rid of my stutter. Moments of fluency are a relief, of course, a
welcome break from the exhaustion of empty space, redundant redefinitions, and taxing
fragmentations. But without my stutter I don’t feel like myself—my struggling staccato is my
authentic voice, and my awkward cadence is the way I speak. The hard stops and
prolongations and repetitions are my own. So are the silences in between. My hope is that
I’m heard in both.
10.23.15
by JEANENE HARLICK • September 12, 2020
You want to—or at least feel you should try to—make some meaning out of that night, the
night you jumped off the roof. Everything went black, you weren’t expecting that to lift, but
it did and you find yourself in ICU three days later, intubated; every limb and appendage in
your body broken; a smashed jaw and fractures throughout your skull… You know you
should try to find something profound underneath the wreckage of why you survived… [But]
you’re not sure if reflecting on what happened will unearth epiphanies and finally annihilate
your fucked-up, inner paradigm—the ideal outcome—or whether it will, instead, just
confirm that your original, entropic intuition and inclinations had been right all along.
Because all you can think about all day and night is how unbearable your throbbing, swollen
gums, fused to metal wires, and barely pieced-together jaw is; how your mouth is a fountain
of drool and puss; how the puffy skin covering your broken skull feels like some weird,
rubbery, alligator-like amalgamation of patches—some of which are completely numb; how
your bones ache and your splinted limbs can’t possibly ever feel normal again; how your
bowels won’t move and it’s driving you absolutely crazy with discomfort, on top of the fact
the fucking catheter makes you feel like you always have to pee. Not to mention Jesus Christ
you have a fucking catheter!! How freakish your jack-o-lantern head bobbing atop a human
body looks and how bad you feel for anybody who has to talk to you and pretend they’re
not as repulsed by the monstrosity as you are; how there’s still clumps and layers of blood
matting your hair but you can’t wash the tangled mop until you’re ambulatory.
And you still yell at the nursing aids’ incompetence and are rude beyond measure; you don’t
feel blessed by laser beams of cold hard wisdom and don’t feel passion for anything in
particular—when you’ve always had a surfeit of the latter…
But [now] you just don’t feel it and aren’t sure if you ever will. You don’t feel amazed at the
body’s ability to heal or survive nor confirmed that it’s a brilliantly-designed machine
marking evidence of some higher order or meaning. On the contrary all you feel you are
now is body, flesh and bones, period. Body stripped of soul which makes you wonder if all
those “intimations of immortality” you used to feel, all those groundswells of passion and
fervor and other-worldly purpose were all just neurons’ coincidental firing and shit, straws of
purpose you grasped at that were never any more real than the masses’ idiotic gods. You
wonder whether art and words, subtle beauties and gestures, and the children of this world
which had been your gods and your center weren’t just as much hokum as the other,
obviously ludicrous “sacred.” Because even though you’re supposed to make a full recovery
death never felt closer and while you’ve always thought of death here and there, you
wonder how you’ve still yet, like most, managed to so successfully ignore the frailty and
grossness of the human body. You just feel more disgust with the organism you’re trapped
in than you had already—and that was a lot. Revolted by bodily functions, saliva and stool,
frail limbs and non-shatter proof jaws. You wonder if scientists and atheists and matter-ists
and all those folks haven’t always been right all along—there is no beauty or love, no
greater, hidden messages encrypted on the surfaces of our lives and nature and family,
waiting to be found, and there never have been. All there is is atoms. You always knew this
was a possibility but had hoped your art and your Dubliners moments indicated otherwise
but now it seems that may not be so.
I mean it’s not like you’ve given up, yet. Maybe you’re still suffering from narcotic-induced
brain fog and an unwillingness to think about that night whatsoever, some kind of blah blah
post-traumatic emotional shock. Nonetheless. This is not how you imagined it going down if
you were to survive your first, real, bona fide—I mean, this was supposed to work!—thistakes-guts-and-is-the-real-deal suicide. You hadn’t really considered any afterward—but if
you had considered alternative endings, this most certainly would not have been one of
them.
__
Above were the first words I wrote following my Oct. 23, 2015 jump from the roof of my fourstory apartment building, early on in what would become two months of hospitalization. My
jaw was nearly fused shut due to surgery, and it was difficult to speak. The piece is unedited,
for the sake of authenticity. ~ JH
__
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