[Oe List ...] Jaime for Jan. 8, Thursday ST

[via OE]

Like the proverbial Zen Buddhist, eventually the monk, out of boredom, writes and becomes an addict.  It looks like I have fallen into the Zen path.  Will share with you the two submissions per week (I promised only one) and quit at the end of the month.


Jaime


Dys 2015
 
We are playingwith images here. 
 
Thomas More(1478-1545) wrote "Utopia" in Latin, with a long title: Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus,de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia, which translates, "A truly golden little book, no lessbeneficial than entertaining, of a republic's best state and of the new islandUtopia".  
 
He obviouslywas not short on self-confidence!  It was,of course, fiction, though from its well-known title "Utopia" alone,we get the Greek "ou" (not) and "tupos" (place), so"utopia" is "not an actual real place" but a frolic on theimagination.
 
Thomas More isknown for literally losing his head when he refused Henry VIII's ascendancy to headthe Church of England against the Vatican that opposed Henry's cohabitationwith Anne Boleyn; Thomas was tried and found guilty of treason.
 
A"dys" in our title refers to dystopia (an imagined place or state whereeverything is bad like a totalitarian regime or an environmentally degradedone), opposite to utopia though when H. G. Wells in 1905 used the term in A Modern Utopia, (best known for its voluntary order of nobility known asthe Samurai that could effectively rule a "kinetic and not static"world state) he was overly dreaming.
 
"Dystopian"in common reference points to We bythe Russian Yevegeby Zamyatin published in English in 1924, the Brave New World 1931 of Aldous Huxley'ssci-fi, the drug culture in Karin Boye's classic Swedish Kallocain of 1940, the Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) of GeorgeOrwell in 1949, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, and AClockwork Orange of Anthony Burgess in 1962. 
 
Related butdistinct, "dys" also refers to the dysfunctional-anything incontemporary English literature.  Thepopularity of the following names comes from their colorful description of thedysfunctional nature of individual and family life, and societal and glocalarrangements.
 
Thefirst five are sources of fiction and faction: Norman Mailer, John Updike, E.L. Doctorow, Alex Haley, and John Irving.  Alice Walker is known and John Kennedy Toole,Chuck Palahniuk, William Kennedy, and Don DeLillo hold up their own literarycandles.  
 
I added the following to the shopping list of a North America friend forher next trip to the secondhand bookstore in case I she puts a care package together:David Foster Wallace, Cormac McCarthy, Charles Frazier, Michael Chabon,Jonathan Franzen, Richard Russo, Jeffrey Eugenides, T.C. Boyle, Tim O’Brien, JonathanSafran Foer, Thomas Pynchon, and Dave Eggers.
 
The anti-hero theme of Joseph Conrad influenced D. H Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Gerald Basil Edwards, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Green, William Golding, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, J. G. Ballard, Chinua Achebe, John Le Carré, V. S. Naipaul, Hunter S. Thompson, J. M. Coetze, Stephen donaldson, and Salmon Rushdie.  Like ToniMorrison, Barbara Kingsolver and Philip Roth, some in the list graced mybookshelf at one time or another.
 
OK, I have not read the works of some of those I listed, but as an Englishteacher, it is often well to be able to pretend, as if . . .  
 
"Dys"is, however, our interest, particularly on whether we stay that way again thisyear, our choice.  I decided on the offeringsof what is real, what IS rather than what-could-be of wishful thinking, or thewhat-if of utopian dreaming.  Dysfunctionand dystopia are popularly chosen perspectives to reality, perhaps a pretentionof a heart broken once too many times, or a head-trip of thinking what isfashionable, rather than the gut-trip of actual living.  
 
The four humansources of discourses are our senses, emotions, thoughts, and action. People findit easier to see the glass half-empty (e.g., victim's news precedes that ofvictors); I am not promoting a pollyanna focus on seeing how it is half-full, Iwould rather that we just look at the glass!
 
Reality TV hasbeen bashed as being short on reality and full of TV.  The critique is unkind, but perhaps, appropriateto the commercial requirement of the media. We know that documentaries are scripted and are hardly spontaneous butto pretend that Reality TV is all unedited is unreal!
 
A roommate atan Institute was fond of saying, "its a matter of attitude".  He made Solicitor General of the Philippineslater; his phrase stuck with me a long while.
 
Dystopian anddysfunctional novels deal with "real" things, but the perspective choiceis a matter of attitude.  The long counton the authors mentioned foregoing attests to this choice of perspective asmore academically respectable, and sells more copies at the bookstand!
 
We hold thistruth to be self-evident that life is better lived "well" rather thanit "sucks", a choice, a matter of atttitude!  Perhaps, it is time to shift our brains backto experience (sense) and resolve (action) and leave emotions and cognition tothe privacy of their internal states of being.  Dys,I believe!
 
 


j'aime la vie
pinoypanda2031 at aol.com

yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. in all, celebrate!

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