<font color='black' size='4' face='Times New Roman, Times, serif'>
<div style="font-family:helvetica,arial;font-size:10pt;color:black">
<div id="AOLMsgPart_1_cf18b4e3-49dd-4d5e-b919-5b093a3e5e3f"><font color="black" size="3" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">
<div class="MsoNormal"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">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.</font></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><br>
</font></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Jaime</font></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><b><span style="font-family:"><br>
</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><b><span style="font-family:">Dys 2015</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:">We are playing
with images here. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:">Thomas More
(1478-1545) wrote "Utopia" in Latin, with a long title: <i><span style="color:#1C1C1C">Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus,
de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia, </span></i><span style="color:#1C1C1C;mso-bidi-font-style:italic">which</span><span style="color:#1C1C1C"> translates, "A truly golden little book, no less
beneficial than entertaining, of a republic's best state and of the new island
Utopia"</span>. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:">He obviously
was 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 the
imagination.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:">Thomas More is
known for literally losing his head when he refused Henry VIII's ascendancy to head
the Church of England against the Vatican that opposed Henry's cohabitation
with Anne Boleyn; Thomas was tried and found guilty of treason.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:">A
"dys" in our title refers to dystopia (an imagined place or state where
everything is bad like a totalitarian regime or an environmentally degraded
one), opposite to utopia though when H. G. Wells in 1905 used the term in <i>A Modern Utopia</i>, (<span style="color:#1C1C1C">best known for its voluntary order of nobility known as
the Samurai that could effectively rule a "kinetic and not static"
world state) he was overly dreaming.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:">"Dystopian"
in common reference points to <i>We</i> by
the Russian Yevegeby Zamyatin published in English in 1924, the <i>Brave New World </i>1931 of Aldous Huxley's
sci-fi, the drug culture in Karin Boye's classic Swedish <i>Kallocain </i>of 1940<i>, </i>the <i>Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) </i>of George
Orwell in 1949<i>, </i>Ray Bradbury's <i>Fahrenheit 451 </i>in 1953,<i> </i>and <i>A
Clockwork Orange </i>of Anthony Burgess in 1962.<i> </i><b></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><i><span style="font-family:"> </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:">Related but
distinct, "dys" also refers to the dysfunctional-anything in
contemporary English literature. The
popularity of the following names comes from their colorful description of the
dysfunctional nature of individual and family life, and societal and glocal
arrangements.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:">The
first 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 literary
candles. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:">I added the following to the shopping list of a North America friend for
her 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, Jonathan
Safran Foer, Thomas Pynchon, and Dave Eggers.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The anti-hero theme of Joseph Conrad influenced</span><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> 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,</font><span style="font-size: 12pt; color: windowtext; text-decoration: none;"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> J. G. Ballard, Chinua Achebe, John Le Carré, V. S. Naipaul, Hunter S. Thompson, J. M. Coetze, Stephen donaldson, and Salmon Rushdie.</font></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> Like Toni
Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver and<b> </b>Philip Roth, some in the list graced my
bookshelf at one time or another.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">OK, I h</span><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">ave not read the works of some of those I listed</font><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">, but as an English
teacher, it is often well to be able to pretend, as if . . . </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:">"Dys"
is, however, our interest, particularly on whether we stay that way again this
year, our choice. I decided on the offerings
of what is real, what IS rather than what-could-be of wishful thinking, or the
what-if of utopian dreaming. Dysfunction
and dystopia are popularly chosen perspectives to reality, perhaps a pretention
of a heart broken once too many times, or a head-trip of thinking what is
fashionable, rather than the gut-trip of actual living. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:">The four human
sources of discourses are our senses, emotions, thoughts, and action. People find
it easier to see the glass half-empty (e.g., victim's news precedes that of
victors); I am not promoting a pollyanna focus on seeing how it is half-full, I
would rather that we just look at the glass!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:">Reality TV has
been bashed as being short on reality and full of TV. The critique is unkind, but perhaps, appropriate
to the commercial requirement of the media.
We know that documentaries are scripted and are hardly spontaneous but
to pretend that Reality TV is all unedited is unreal!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:">A roommate at
an Institute was fond of saying, "its a matter of attitude". He made Solicitor General of the Philippines
later; his phrase stuck with me a long while.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:">Dystopian and
dysfunctional novels deal with "real" things, but the perspective choice
is a matter of attitude. The long count
on the authors mentioned foregoing attests to this choice of perspective as
more academically respectable, and sells more copies at the bookstand!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">We hold this
truth to be self-evident that life is better lived "well" rather than
it "sucks", a choice, a matter of atttitude! Perhaps, it is time to shift our brains back
to experience (sense) and resolve (action) and leave emotions and cognition to
the </span><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">privacy of </font><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">their internal states of being. Dys,
I believe!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<br>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; clear: both;"><i>j'aime la vie</i><br>
<a href="mailto:pinoypanda2031@aol.com">pinoypanda2031@aol.com</a><br>
<div><i>yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. in all, celebrate!</i></div>
</div>
</font>
</div>
</div>
</font>