My Thin Blue Line

My thin blue line stretches from my hometown of Mobile, AL, to my Grandmother's home in Fort Lauderdale, FL, my family's vacations in Door County, WI, and then in New Orleans, LA.

This path ended up forming a shape reminiscent of a major feature near my home, that of Mobile Bay:

Chapter 3: Home and Family

This chapter starts with a discussion on self-identity. It is both fragile and robust, robust in that it is strongly held and built up over many years, but fragile (I would say something more like transformative) in that different circumstances and retellings of memories are able to alter it, at least in appearance.

Ulmer then describes the general form that describes most movies made in modern times, and uses it as a roadmap for the path the next few chapters will follow. I assume that this means that our mystories will detail similar trips we've taken, starting comfortable, entering a challenge, returning home, being resurrected. Ulmer also points out the circular nature of these epics, each ending with the hero (ourselves) returning home, which obviously puts us at the starting point for our next story.

His exposition on the ideas of alienation and homesickness are confusing. The alienation is based around the epic of Ulysses, trying to return to his home after the Trojan War. At some point, the hero begins to "fracture, and so to philosophize. (75)" He is alienated, apparently from himself, and in doing so is able to reflect on himself and study himself.

This fracture and alienation is apparently contained within the feeling of homesickness, the longing to return to the place of shelter or to the arms of loved ones.

Ulmer presents the TOTE decision process (76), which is very succintly made into the metaphor of driving a nail flush into a board - hit, see that its straight, drive through, leave be. This is the opposite, of what a homesick person does, which is to star something, but become lost in the punctum all around him and remember his home.

Ulmer spends the rest of the chapter focusing on the structure of the mystory, including the four different types of formation: Literary, Allegory, Moral, and Anagogy. He demonstrates with a sample mystory, written on behalf of James Joyce.

Internet Invention - Chapter 2: Image

Images contain three meanings - Literal, Figurative, and a third meaning: Signifiance.

Signifiance is not and cannot be contained within an image itself, instead it draws upon our cultural backgrounds and other information, often far outside of the image.

The example from Barthes is an old picture of a family, and he notices their fashion and how it helps date the image (44). Here's a more modern example.

The feeling you get when you see this picture and go "Oh, the 90s!" is part of the studium of the signifiance, which is the name that Barthes gives to the different interpretable meanings of the image.

Also in the image can be a punctum (44), which is what Barthes calls the more individualized version of the third meaning - one that has a basis in personal memories, held solely by you and not in the public trust like the idea of the 90s. An example of this could be an image of something you owned or experienced in childhood, such as Cinderella's Castle in Disneyworld, or the pokemon Pikachu.

While the studium may exist as an expansion of an image, the power of expansion truly lies with the punctum. You can look at an image and draw on the public culture to have some idea of its signifiance, but a personal signifiance can make an image mean the whole world to you.

Barthes compares this idea of the image's powerful hidden meaning to the poetic form of the haiku - by taking to simple images and carefully juxtaposing them, there is created a third image, submerged beneath the other two but perhaps far more powerful than both. (45)

Controlling the images and the cultural background is an important part of the haiku, and Ulmer also points out that this is critical for the widesite. The widesite, then, can quickly be analogized as some kind of imagistic poetry - each image must be carefully selected for the ideas and emotions that it evokes, in the way that a poet may choose "collapsed" over "fell." A thing which collapses is a thing that falls, but the denotive associations made with that word relate to exhaustion and internal failure, while "fell" conveys some kind of basic balance issue - similar, but entirely different for the purposes of poetry, and for the purposes of the widesite. (46-47)

Introduction

I'm Kenny, a second semester senior who plans on graduating in August. I'm from Mobile, Alabama, and chose Clemson in part because one of my main goals in going to college was to step as far outside of my comfort zone as I possibly could, and hopefully grow as a result.

It's hard to come up with one event that put me on my career path, in part because of how uncertain my career path is. After all, I'm an English major.