Finally!

So, I have finally been shown how to access this website and post a post. Although it's extremely late, I feel as though in this case it's better late than never. All I can say is that "The Man in the High Castle" was hard to interpret and made class participation difficult (I found myself oblivious to what points were being made in the conversation). Writing an essay on it, however, forced me to use thought processing and helped me to understand some of the points Dick intended to make. I enjoy writing essays... Anyway, I am looking forward to reading Kindred on my plane ride home!

This video might be a little nerdy.
Anyway, this is how this class is making me read now. Focusing more about how effects are made and how the book wants me to think. I don't really see anymore into truth or lies in things now, but I am starting to think more about if effects are intentional or accidental and if things can be different for different people.

What Is Reality? Does It Matter?

I just wanted to comment on what is my biggest problem with understanding this novel and this entire course: the idea of reality and truth. Throughout the entire course we have been wrestling with this idea of what is true, what is real, what is factual, and what do these things even mean. My problem with all of this is that throughout high school most of my english teachers taught me that none of this matters. Most of them were in the reader response school of thought, and taught us that the most important thing about reading a book is your own view of it and what you learned or gained from it, not necessarily what the author actually intended you to think. Although we can all contemplate other truths, we can only experience life from one perspective and that is our own. This is why it only makes sense for Juliana to react the way she does to the revelation that her world is fictional. This is the world that she is experiencing and the only one she ever will, so in her life it is still true. We could all be characters in a fictional world right now, but it simply does not matter because we will only ever be able to experience this world, so contemplating other realities is ultimately frivolous.

The sand art.

This is the video of the woman who does sand art about WWII.

A Stretch At The Truth

Out of all the books we have read this semester thus far, I have to say that this one holds the closest thing to the truth.....just a very, very, very stretched out truth. In this book, the author uses actual, highly noted historical events and twists them around the way that he wants to to produce an alternative "what-if" kind of world, which to me is genius. It's safe to say that all of us always think of the "what-if", from simply "what if I had toast for breakfast instead of eggs" to a more complex "what if I had chosen a different university", etc. The place we're at today, at this very moment, was compiled of decisions we have made in our lives, some easy, some hard. With that, what if the US hadn't won WWII? In an alternate world, would Dick's novel be a history book used in classrooms? It's scary to think about, but hypothetically speaking, would there have been a better world out there if history had run a different course?

Gresham's Law

On page 48: "A Gresham's law: the fakes would undermine the value of the real"

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Gresham%27s+law


Apparently, it's a real thing. I wasn't sure if it was a 'law' that only existed in this Axis-won-the-war world or not so I googled it.