I think its interesting to mention that when Nicolas Ealy came into the class he talked about how desire was the ultimate cause of all pain. Many of the songs I listened to were written as a response to unfulfilled desire. Sarah McLachlan literally says in her song "Possession", "Would I spend forever here and not be satisfied". This song, like many other songs, is describing a situation of unrequited love, which is really unfulfilled desire and is indeed one of the most painful lessons to learn. Alanis Morisette knows what I’m talking about too. "You oughta know" is a song all about being replaced. One side moves on and the other side is left pining. Taylor Swift’s song "Teardrops" is about unrequited love in the sense that the person she loves will never know or love her back and yet she can’t give up her feelings for him.

I find a lot of pain comes from feeling isolated and lonely. Like in the Travis song he thinks he is the only one persecuted by the world. He asks "Why does it always rain one me? Is it because I lied when I was seventeen?" as if his pain comes as a result of some karmic retribution.

I found the Eamon and Frankee duo very interesting. They sing to each other and like Frankee says "There are two sides to every story". They are both on the defensive about each other and I’m sure Frankee really ripped into Eamon’s ego when she released her song. Its funny because after you put your walls down and get defeated by love its natural to be on the defensive, building back your walls in attempt to not get hurt again.

Top fourty songs don’t really inspire pain in me. I think it’s because I feel like these songs are fabricated and not necessarily written from experience. They have ulterior motives of making money and I don’t trust the singers so I can’t feel their pain. But I had never before heard the song "Soap and Water", or a song so bluntly talking about divorce so it was more poignant than many others. And I clearly know that Kurt Cobain was a very distraught individual so I don’t feel like his songs are faking. When I think of the most painful songs I immediately think of Jeff Buckley. He has some real tearjerkers I’ve cried along to.

The timing of having to read Beautiful Boy could not be more ominous. My best friend’s little brother has always been a mixed up kid. He’s a senior in high school failing all his classes with no motivation to do anything other than smoke pot and hang out with his friends. I had taken Steve’s senior pictures for his yearbook so I dropped them off last Sunday when I was in town. When I saw him he looked about forty pounds lighter than the month before, when I had taken the pictures. He ran in and out of the house, not acknowledging anyone, just running into his room to grab some clothes and money and he was off. His hair was disgusting, he looked like he hadn’t showered in a week, he was gaunt, pale, dark circles under his eyes. Then my best friend broke down and told me the whole story.

Steve hasn’t gone to school in weeks, he’s been suspended and hasn’t bothered to come back. He doesn’t sleep at home, he doesn’t eat at home, he lives with his friend. The last time he came home he stole a credit card and four hundred dollars from his parents. The last time I saw him was when I was taking his senior pictures. None of this had happened yet. This downward spiral snowballed out of control in a month. It’s obvious that he’s doing some type of drugs, how else could you explain his rapid weight loss and stealing money? When my friend told me this I was halfway through reading Beautiful Boy.

I was terrified for Steve. Because I was reading this book I was learning all this information and seeing it through a parent’s point of view. I felt horrible for my friend and her family. I didn’t want them to go through what I was reading about in this book. I told my friend about the book and suggested maybe he should go to rehab before he turns 18, remembering what David Sheff wished he could do to Nic. I couldn’t believe something like this could happen to a sweet boy like Steve. I couldn’t believe that this could happen in Granby, CT, to someone from a small upper-middle class town, someone from a close family and good upbringing.

As of this weekend Steve is in the hospital. He was forced to go after his parents called the police. After this weekend he will move to an outpatient facility for 10 days but from reading this book I don’t think that will be enough time. I fear he will revert back to his old ways and continue to hurt himself and others. Everytime I read I get so depressed. I want to keep reading, hoping to learn more and more, but at the same time I feel twice the pain because I can witness it first hand destroying my best friend’s brother. I just hope that his story ends up like Nic’s, a happy ending.

I found this article much more interesting that Murray’s but the scene that Rehling starts out with is silly. I know the article says that 90% of serial killers are young adult, white males but what percentage of young adult white males between the ages of 20 and 35 are actually serial killers?

I thought it was coincidental that the article talked about the genre of a "white trash" serial killer, since for Halloween my costume was white trash and Halloween is the ideal time of year for fear and horror. I think what Thomas DiPiero mentioned about the white male protagonist was interesting. He argued that these characters are dependent on women and people of color to define their identity. So in essence white masculinity "is not represented so much as an identity as a hysterical response to a perceived lack of identity".

I like how covertly these stereotypes are placed within horror films and yet as the viewer we still don’t even realize it. It’s like a math equation where the stereotypes follow a certain pattern and I love how Rehling breaks apart the equation and analyzes them in this article. I.e. "The female detective, as Carol Clover has noted, has her roots in the slasher genre, in which increasingly the male rescuer/survivor function has been rendered "marginal or dispensed with altogether."

I love the archetypal framework for every character and plot that is examined in this article. For instance, the protagonist in each movie is always a foil of the antagonist. I think I will be more aware of the patterns and stereotypes after reading these articles. I may even be able to predict the plot of the next slasher movie I see.

In her article Hostel II Representations of the body in pain, Gabrielle Murray comments that teenagers who were 10 when 9/11 happened are now 16 or 17. They are "grown up being told you are going to get blown-up. Terror Alert Orange… They want something to scream at" that is as shocking as the events of their lives. I think this is an interesting point to bring up. It says something about that generation which I think could be true. I’ve heard that my generation has a three minute attention span because that was how long it used to take for a modem to dial up to the internet. I think it could be the same reaction. When these children are brought up watching the news with topics like 9/11 and bred on orange, yellow, and red alerts, they will need horror equivalent or greater to entertain them in movies. It only makes sense.

In Edelstein’s review he claims ‘fear supplants empathy and makes us all potential torturers, doesn’t it?’ which is true, especially in relation to Abu Ghraib. I said this in a previous blog post and I think that when humans are in a situation of fear they will turn on their morals, logic, and better understanding in order to save oneself. This is the common archetype of ‘torture porn’. Murray writes that torture is not used to ‘unearth secret information’ in times of war and hostility, but torture serves the sole purpose of isolating and therefore controlling a group through their bodily vulnerability. We see this statement supported by the predicament in Abu Ghraib.

The label "torture porn" repulses me a little. Murray defines it as ‘the representations of mutilation and torture in films are pornography because they are illegal or at least unacceptable to contemporary cinema audiences’ while Susan Sontag claims that torture has predominately a sexual nature.

I really enjoyed the part in the article in which Murray discusses the exhibit in the art gallery, Blind Light. I would have liked to see and experience it myself. I think the disassociation between mind and body happens so often that we forget we function as one. The mind controls what the body does, the body controls what the mind thinks. It takes a piece like this in which one is totally incapacitated visually to create a connection between body and mind once again. And just thinking further on this idea, Sontag says "the Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one", which I agree with. But take away our visual dependency such as in this piece of art and we are panic stricken. I imagine myself in this glass cube terrified, heart palpitating, trying to escape, clawing at the sides like a rat. Though horror and torture porn movies depend on visuals to frighten and entice, there is much to be said about a new degree of horror that is created by obstructing our vision.

The first thing I noticed about this book, The Wounded Stroyteller by Arthur Frank was how the topics of modernism and postmodernism were following me everywhere. The day I started reading this book a teacher in another class of mine was asking us the difference between modernism and post-modernism regarding art. I felt foolish because as a senior art major I should definitely know the answer to that question but after being plagued by it through this entire book luckily I’ll never forget it. To sum it up, I think modernism could be described as the absence of decoration or excess. Form follows function. Postmodernism came about as a reaction against modernism and embraced ornamental and attractive elements again. The medical version that Frank describes is similar to the artistic approach. Frank says modernism occurs when technical medical expertise overtakes the bodily experience of illness. Postmodernism is then when ill people realize more is involved in their experience than the medical story they can tell. The similarity between the art and medical world is that humanized detail is subtracted from modernism and again restored with postmodernism.

I feel when Frank first starts describing “The Remission Society” he is describing what Wall talks about in the last chapter of his book Pain: The Science of Suffering. There is really nothing being done about the people in pain. Scientists and pharmaceutical companies are researching for the cure to ailments to help prevent pain, and Doctors and Surgeons are taking care of injuries, but those with chronic pain after seeing a doctor and before being cured by a miracle drug, they are left isolated. These are the people in the remission society.

I wish the book actually told the patient’s stories instead of just analyzing them. It’s a disheartening topic because it really makes me think how fragile life is and puts it into perspective. Some parts I found interesting were the breakdown of the archetypes of the stories in the Restitution Narrative, and how Frank describes an ill body as similar to a car breaking down. The chapter I loved in the book was the Chaos Narrative. I feel like my life is a chaos narrative! I can relate to the parts about chaos the best. It made me think about Abu Ghraib. When we make a judgment about what those soldiers did we are creating a Chaos Narrative. “Chaos Narrative often begins with the listener asserting how in such circumstances he would find a way out.” If we fell in, we could get out.

I think there was a lesson for me reading this book. Frank talks a lot about the voice of the person with illness. How the voice is lost or gained or how it is taken away from the ill person. My little brother has been suffering with some stomach illness for more than 3 years. He’s the leading valedictorian in his 11th grade class but he’s a procrastinator and since academics come so easily to him he doesn’t have to try. He hardly ever goes to school and probably misses about 3 days of school every week due to his stomach problems. He’s been to doctors and specialists but they don’t know what is plaguing him so they can’t diagnose him and therefore don’t know how to help him. For the last 3 years I have been a brat of a sister always making comments about him missing school because he could get away with it just because he was so smart. That he was using his stomach problems to his advantage and he didn’t need to miss so much school, he was just being lazy. Honestly I don’t know what the f was my problem but I’m glad I read this book because it gave me an epiphany. This whole book defends and explains the character of the ill person, talking about how society doesn’t take their illness seriously if it doesn’t have a clear diagnosis and if the illness lingers, those in the remission society are belittled. I feel ashamed to admit that I was doing exactly this to my brother, someone whom I should have never condemned no matter the circumstances. I have to thank Arthur Frank for making me realize this.

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib was a difficult movie to watch. I can’t believe what a terrible situation these soldiers were put in. I am so thankful that I don’t have to do what they do.

First off it’s hard for me to make any kind of verdict about these soldiers because I am not and was not in their situation. To be able to leave the life we have always known in America, our family, our friends, and go to war on the other side of the world I think you have to be in a certain mindset to be able to cope. Clearly this mindset includes a hardened heart and some kind of hatred for the opposing side. Simply kill or be killed. It would be necessary to have this mindset to survive over in Iraq. Therefore I can’t possibly sit in comfortable old Hartford, Connecticut and point fingers at anyone. That’s exactly what Donald Rumsfeld did to these soldiers. First he sent a memo approving the harshest torture techniques since the country’s creation, basically telling these soldiers to “keep up the good work”. But then when the pictures leaked, Donald Rumsfeld himself accused these soldiers of sadistic activity, stabbing them in the back and calling what they did shameful, putting these soldiers on trial and in jail.

Now I know what’s ethical and what’s not. The prisoners in Abu Ghraib should have never been treated the way they were. They should never have been violated and debased by the prison guards. No living human being should ever be dishonored in the way that they were, this is unethical. But it happens. It happens because these soldiers are thousands of miles away and they are fighting an ambiguous conflict in a foreign land where everyone could be an enemy. To these soldiers everyone could be an enemy because we don’t know who isn’t an enemy, who isn’t in Al Qaeda, and who isn’t interested in distressing Americans. They must take this very grey area and try to do their best to divide in into black and white and somewhere between this division they got mixed up dividing duty from morals.

When the whole reason you are in a foreign land is to defend your own country, to interrogate prisoners to try and find some evidence to protect your country from getting attacked I think one could get carried away and forget to question if what they are doing is morally acceptable. It’s elementary but I think sometimes we all forget it is better to be kind than to be right. But then again, it’s easy to be a hero from the comfort of your living room but when faced with the actual situation, one might respond differently than originally anticipated.

The last thing I have to say is that I don’t agree with this war. I think we should work on democracy in our own country before we go stick our nose in someone else’s desert. Our government right now is a total bureaucracy. It’s not fair that the rich WASP government figures get to sit tight in Washington and make all the decisions exclusively for their benefit and try to pass them off on the American citizens as if they had our best intentions in mind. Like how Rumsfeld totally backstabbed the soldiers at Abu Ghraib as soon as the pictures leaked and sided against them and sent most of them to jail when it was he who advocated the torture tactics they implemented. Meanwhile General Miller got promoted after the scandal leaked at Abu Ghraib even though it was Miller who recommended that the military prison guards abuse the prisoners. It’s a disgraceful system in America where the top 1 percentile keeps getting richer and can be absolved from their delinquencies because their fathers are friends with the governor, or they have money. And its even more upsetting to me that there’s nothing the 99% of the rest of us can do about it. God bless America.

I don’t know if I would have been able to follow the information conveyed as well if The 9/11 Report was just written as a chapter book. It was a very unique approach to sending out the facts regarding 9/11 to the public. I thought I knew a lot more about what happened 9/11 and the events leading up to it until I read this book.

I think it is ridiculous how our country could have taken measures to prevent 9/11. There were many warnings including a daily briefing delivered to George W. himself that headlined, and I quote "Bin Ladin determined to strike US". That was the most obvious of the omens, but there were many other subtle ones including the threat in the London newspaper and the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Even after all this much attention wasn’t given to counter-terrorism.

I think it is very ironic that the US supplied billions of dollars in assistance to the Afghanis fighting against the Soviets. That same money would later be used against us when it fell into the wrong hands of Al Qaeda. No good deed goes unpunished, I always say. I also find it ridiculous that the sharing of information between administrations such as the FBI and CIA wasn’t encouraged. What kind of a childish grudge is going on between these two that they won’t get over themselves to help the greater good of their country and exchange pertinent resources? I could go on criticizing the government for its inefficiencies. How the FAA no fly-list contained only 12 names while the government’s contained thousands. And why wouldn’t the government give their list to the FAA since these were the people handling such matters?

On page 49 the book talks about how missile attacks against Bin Ladin were in conversation, yet the government was hesitant because as many as 200 people could be killed in collateral damage. If the United States flew over Kandahar and fired missiles aiming for Bin Ladin, but perhaps missing and killing hundreds because in fact Bin Ladin wasn’t actually there, do you mean to tell me Kandahar would not retaliate? One of the captions actually reads "And for one reason or another, no action was taken." HA!

The next page is just as asinine. The first caption states "Though it was believed that President Clinton wanted Bin Ladin dead…" …what? Was there really speculation about this topic? Isn’t it a pretty black and white issue? And wasn’t Clinton a liberal who was against the death penalty? Anyways I’m glad the US had Massoud to turn to, to help us in our fight against Bin Ladin, however I do disagree with his massacres of the innocent and heroin trafficking but hell, sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

There are a few questions I have that the book left unanswered. How was the message sent out in code? 2 sticks, a toothpick, and a lollipop? Why were the pilots to crash their planes if they could not reach their targets? In honor of the Taliban spirit wouldn’t it make more sense to choose any populated American destination and crash the plane there as opposed to an isolated field in Pennsylvania? Also a few points the book made that I found terrifying were how Bin Ladin considered acquiring WMD a "religious obligation" and how plutonium the size of an orange could level lower Manhattan. I really fear for these things falling into the wrong hands however I don’t think the war we are waging is helping. I think we should have never gotten ourselves involved at all, and I think the sooner we get out of this war, the better. Al Qaeda probably hates America because we get into everyone’s business, try to take over everything, and impose our lifestyle on them. If we were to just leave them alone we probably would have never made enemies. Its never too late to make peace.