necessity is the mother of invention. lack of necessity is the mother of self-invented struggle.

"I hate people." hell, if there's one phrase i can't stand over any other, it'd have to be that one. i hate when people don't think. when things just pour out of their mouths, unfiltered. they let all the trash spew out without monitoring it. and all that trash falls right onto my feet. really, though, how can you hate all people? i know that's not what you mean when you say it; again, that's just your pent-up frustration with life exploding out with mostly trash thrown in. you hate the things that people want you to feel and think. you're so fed-up with conformity but something is holding you back. you're a hopeless cynic yet you chose to conform to what society wants you to believe. sometimes i think you do it just for the thrill of the anger.

i was talking indirectly to holden there, by the way. indirectly because he's a character only. however i'm finding uncanny similarities between him and the personalities i see floating around the halls of our school. the attitude that you face everything with, you come face-to-face with your superiors with a look of contempt, "rebellion", without a chance all you offer the world in your adolescence is immediate anger. i really can't stand it when people don't think. when as a teenager you rush into your challenges - or "challenges" - with no preparation, or even contemplation as to what lays ahead of you.

i came into the catcher in the rye like any other adolescent would. i accepted it at face-value, taking holden for what he was, as an endearing and immediately likable and accessible character, at least to the reader. i felt that way after i finished the book, too. partly because i don't think about book when i finish them because i'm afraid i'll never come up with any good ideas, and partly because i just wasn't thinking at all, about anything. i don't think i wanted to see anything deeper and potentially dislikable in holden's character by analyzing his personality any further.

but now, as i'm required to write this post, the inevitable horror has occurred, and i am thoroughly pissed off at holden. (only at the first portion of the book, though. by the end the burden of vexation had lightened, if only very slightly.) it's a habit of his to complain, primarily about his discontent with people and the way the world works. of course it's understandable and very common to have grudges or annoyance against others, but as you progress in the story there seems to be no end to his worldly criticism, most of which he could have easily kept quiet. if he had actually thought about other people's lives, i think maybe the complaining would lessen. this has been suggested to everyone who has ever complained about another individual, and from experience we all know it's harder than it seems.

but what i find interesting is holden's reluctance to tell his story in the very beginning of the book, and his immediate negative attitude towards his audience. "...in the first place, that stuff bores me... i'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything." i find it interesting that the things he does choose to tell us about are his complaints. i can imagine that if holden were a real person, the composition of this story would be a delightfully liberating cathartic experience. and that's the theme i get from all these coming of age books - what it all boils down to is complaint. rebellion's built upon complaints, discontents with the world, nothing going "your way". is it really all necessary?

are some of holden's complaints about the world really just things he invented in his own mind as excuses to rebel? is he making up society's expectations just to have something to rebel against, when really society doesn't expect that much of him? he doesn't realize it, but even that hunt for a rebellion excuse is a way of conforming to society - it's expected for young'uns to rebel. he wouldn't feel mature without that "struggle".

maybe i'm minimizing the challenges that holden has to face. but it's hard to have perspective on holden's annoyances when the entire story is filled with them...you can't compare one to another. i'm just assuming here, but some of the things that bother holden seem so unreasonable, irrational that i can't help getting the impression that he's exaggerating.

at the heart of the coming of age experience there is essentially one huge, enormous, godzilla-like struggle that dominates all, the all branch off of. it's the desire, the need, to be understood and accepted as how you are. we need pity, we need sympathy for our own personal struggles, ones that we are convinced no one will understand. when no one offers us that kind of understanding, we look for things that will give us a pitiable sheen to ourselves. sometimes, like in holden's case, we invent our own struggles in our desperate search for kindness, artificial challenges in hopes that we'll get some compassion.

it took me a while to realize exactly how holden changed by the end of the book. he kept his rants, his friendly and familiar tone. but by the end i think he found out that his complaints were utterly fruitless, and that he was purposely seeking out people's faults to make people feel sorry for him. if not that, he was just judging them too harshly, looking for ways to rebel against the people he was close with.

in the end, i thought that the catcher in the rye had a fairly satisfying conclusion. this was when i wasn't thinking, before i really looked into holden's character as a complex mass of passion. but i feel even more so now that by the end of the story holden grew and matured as a character. it was holden against the world, when really the world had given him nothing to complain about.

Sleep Tight, Ya Morons!...revised and revisited.

Sorry about that last post, guys. I was doing what I usually resort to when I'm frustrated with writing... limitless rants that often merge into anarchist, anti-authoritative speeches. I realized this was unacceptable under educational standards. Right now I'll make an attempt at gathering my ideas and presenting them like prissy, rich people bouquets. In the good way, of course.

What I did come to at the conclusion of the previous post was that the topic of coming of age is horrendously difficult, if not impossible, to write about or represent in another other medium without coming off as generalizational (real word? somebody spot me on this one) or corny without offending someone or minimizing the experience of maturity. Because it's the kind of issue that every person thats ever been born has faced, or is going to face, or is facing, yet is different for everyone, makes it hard to express in something that will be mentally consumed by the public.

I've realized that the reason why I admire JD Salinger's writing style and storytelling skills so much is that he can pull of the teenage life story very well in an honest way that doesn't make the reader feel uncomfortable, bored or confused. In fact, it's the perfect coming of age story. The endearing hero, Holden Caulfield, is an easily distracted and hopelessly cynical sixteen-year old who is kicked out of his boarding school and then goes to New York.

Holden is such an interesting character yet I'm finding it incredibly hard to find things to say about him. Like me, he goes on rants in the middle of talking about something else. I can connect to him in lots of ways, yet there's no meaningful conclusion I can come to.

I realize that it takes a true artist and a helluva lot of thinking to create a piece on the coming of age experience without "trying to hard" and inevitably failing. True artists like JD Salinger, Harper Lee and SE Hinton, who have written some of the most heartbreaking coming of age stories, ones that are so impossibly good that I can't wrap my mind around the fact that they were produced by humans, not created by some god. Well, that might be exaggerating a bit.

The essence of coming of age is rebellion, formless actions and personalities, independence and freedom. How can those things be conformed into a rectangle of writing without becoming paradoxical? I'm too unseasoned a writer to possess the art of writing about a topic this free without ruining its philosophies and lessons.

Holden Caulfield's personality is unfamiliar to me. He's passionate, silly, and deeply opinionated, and doesn't glamourize his life story, nor does he dumb it down. He tells it as it is, or maybe a little skewed with some of his opinions of all those morons and phonies. But even his style of talking shows the essence of maturity - he doesn't conform to the formal dialogue and actions of the people around him.

Well, this is turning out to be another failed post. What I'm trying to get through with these disconnected paragraphs is that Holden Caulfield is the personification of coming of age because he tells it like it is. JD Salinger captured the quirks of that period of life through an imperfect but friendly character, who makes us see the truth of teenage life.

Sleep Tight, Ya Morons!

before you read... theres grammar mistakes in this entry, there's also some things you may not understand because they are unpolished gems from the mind of a futterman, and i ramble, but please give it a try and try to see what i mean. it's not a four-paragraph thing, and it's not a thousand pages long, but i think i made my point, if you can pick it out of the mess.

what am i thinking about from the catcher in the rye? i love the book, thats obvious, but how the hell am i supposed to write a decent entry about it when its main character is an easily distracted little person who goes off on long,. drawn out monologues generously seasoned with goddamn's and phonies? where is there to go? i just read and follow the story as its told, and maybe here and there there's some bits of wisdom sprouting, but my mental capacity's too small to come up with anything deep concerning the coming of age experience of holden caulfield. maybe someone would say the moment he left pencey, his private school, before he was told, was the moment he transformed into an adult. i hardly thik this is evidence, as the kid was kicked out for his bad grades and had just spent the night complaining about his roommates. but wait...maybe thats it! ok, so holden spends the very first part of the book talking to stuffy teachers and whining about his school life, but the minute he leaves, he complains more...ok, so thats not it either. maybe coming of age is realizing that you can still complain and by cynical and act like a child while maintaining your maturity. everybody wants holden to be this big man who gets good grades, and people look down on him because he goes on mindless rants that actually aren't mindless, and they're all so condescending because they wont give him drinks at bars and he knows vain men who spend their time horsing around with no-g00d girls and combing their hair in mirrors, and everyone just tells him to be like them, but maybe their views of adulthood are all wrong! maybe that's the reason why holden's so cynical, because everything is just operating incorrectly and he doesn't even know it! its just instincts! and when he calls people morons, it's not because he thinks they're stupid, but maybe because he has this internal mechanism that tells him that everyone who misunderstands him is wrong, and he just uses the only vocabulary he knows, which is heavily dosed with "morons. "

i cant do this. i cannot come to a logical, deep conclusion. what do people expect from me! i'm not freud, or any of those other guys with high iq's, right? when i try so hard to create a good piece of writing that will get me a decent grade all i get is this, some lame excuse for a "thoughtful" entry. how can i write about holden when he doesn't want to be written about? how can i write about rebellion and coming of age when they just want to be left alone to fester in the stomachs of youth? how can i compress it into a rectangle when all it wants to do is be a formless mess on the floor? JD Salinger ended up a recluse and wouldnt let them make a movie based on the book. The Catcher in The Rye was instantly popular but did he care? does holden care? Do rebels need to be publicized in glamour shots and gushing reviews?

so this, i believe, is the philosophy of holden caulfield, and salinger, and everyone who comes of age... it's not something that should be glamourized. holden's rants are seamless and formless and go in different directions, but he is the true image of the coming of age experience. what i'm trying to say is that the only true way you can capture rebellion in a novel is to make it squishy... passionate... long and drawn our with maybe a few or more hints of madness thrown in.

Rex Reese as Peer Pressure.

Rex Reese is the boy at the party with the hair over his ears and in his face who doesn't look particularly sober. Rex Reese is the boy who drunkenly drives his car into a lake, escapes, but leaves his girlfriend in it to sink to her death. Rex Reese is the boy who eyes girls maliciously and blows smoke in others' mouths for fun. Rex Reese is the boy who makes us all believe that it's ok to do things you're not supposed to. He's the boy who said it was ok for Calliope and the Obscure Object and Jerome and him to go deep into the woods to "party". Who lit up Calliope's first joint and drove her to losing her virginity with a boy she didn't like "in that way". There's a Rex Reese at every high school, lingering in the corners of hallways and at the backs of classrooms. A Rex Reese comes to every house party and gets everybody worked up. There's a strong dose of influence that Rex Reese administers to all who cross his path, influence that makes us lightheaded and giddy and guilty when we come to.

We do forbidden things because some anonymous (or many times not) force tells us that it's ok, that one time won't hurt you, that it's no big deal, just go ahead because everyone else is doing it. I don't believe in peer pressure. In the end it all just boils down to you making your own decisions, and those decisions are based on a large number of factors - not only friends. But I do believe in the Rex Reese present in all situations. The lingering spirit that doesn't outright tell you to go ahead and do it, but has just been doing it all along itself that you must be sure it's ok. The spirit that makes you passionate and jealous and hungry for vengeance. That sly young creature that woos the one you love and draws you in with tactics that you barely notice until you've already done everything you're not supposed to. It's not peer pressure. In fact, it's the exact opposite. You're taunted by the subtle actions and almost unnoticeable things that the Rex Reese spirit performs, things that don't just jump upon you but snake their way gently into your life.

Calliope first discovers her "lesbianism" (if you can call it that - she's not exactly a "girl") when she encounters the new girl in her class, an unnamed redhead who goes by the alias "The Obscure Object", usually shortened to simply "The Object". Calliope hides in the shadows of her affection, admiring The Object from afar, making the occasional "risky" move, yet never venturing too far. One day at a party, The Object's brother, Jerome, brings along his friend Rex Reese, the handsome bad boy rumored to have driven his car into a lake, with his girlfriend in it. The Object is smitten with him as he makes eyes at her, and immediately Calliope picks it up and her jealousy radars start firing. Suddenly nothing is too risky. Calliope does what Rex does, trying to emulate his persona to win back The Object. One debauched night in the middle of the woods, Calliope follows the actions of Rex and The Object - smoking weed, inhaling someone else's fumes, drinking cans of beer, and eventually, in her drunkeness, lets Jerome, well, you know. It's a totally sudden shift in personality, caused in part by Rex Reese.

Now, the overprotective mothers of the world would place the blame solely on that Rex kid, the bad one who had a negative influence on the young'uns. But no, that's only the tip of the iceberg. Besides the whole aspect of willpower in people (or lack therof), there are a thousand other things we have to take into consideration about why we're driven to do the things we do. In Calliope's case, jealousy and undying affection for The Obscure Object was the biggest factor which made her do all those things. Peer pressure can take many forms, and in some cases it can't even be considered peer pressure because of its ingenious subtlety. Rex Reese's tactics were so effective and clever that he probably didn't even realize that he was doing them. It was his lack of pressure that drove Calliope crazy. It was the effortlessness with which he wooed The Object that made Calliope go crazy. Peer pressure, if it even exists, doesn't really depend on the verbal aspects, it's almost always the person who's saying them that matters. The most effective form of "peer pressure" is one that is so sneaky that it takes you over before you even notice. It's personified with actions, not words. Peer pressure takes the form of Rex Reese, the boy at the party and in the back of the classroom.

Please, Judge Me By My Cover. No Kidding.

When I was brainstorming ideas about Jeffery Eugenides' novel Middlesex, I found myself continuously straying back to the ever-popular last resort of a thesis - it's what's on the inside that counts. Yeah, this is really nice and considerate, I just feel like hugging fluffy bunnies when I hear someone say it. However - and I'm probably going to get a boatload of hater comments from you guys - this book is seriously making me change my thoughts about that theory - and yes, it is theory, not fact. Although our "inside" emotions and traits are what people try to focus on and care the most about, those "important" and "meaningful" factors of an individual's identity depend largely on outward appearance.

Take Calliope, or Cal, for instance, the main character in Middlesex. Born a hermaphrodite due to mutations on chromosomes and negative-two-generations-back incest, Calliope lives most of her young life as a girl before adopting the male sex, along with her/his new name, Cal. The first half of the book focuses on the lives of Cal's grandparents, from their inter-family romance, and then the lives of his parents, and then finally on the life of Cal himself, his transformation from one sex to another told in explicit detail. Clearly, this book focuses on the outward appearances of a person and how they affect life, so it's inevitable that that person's feelings are going to be almost completely controlled by his/her mutation. At times we forget about Cal's physical state, yet small tidbits sneak their way subtly into the text and remind just how important the middle sex actually is - Cal's doctor making a point of how she is a "beautiful, healthy girl" at birth, only reinforcing the fact that she in truth isn't; detailed descriptions of her boyish, adolescent body and frequent reminders of her "high testosterone levels"; her/his date suspecting that he is a homosexual. Without these reminders of Cal's body and mind, the story would lack the depth and discomfort that readers experience while reading it. He suffers extreme self-consciousness about his body as a teenager, especially when faced with potential sexual encounters. Those aren't really things that single-sexed humans have to worry about, but in Cal's case, his physical traits control his life. His outward appearance makes up so much of the story that you can't help but begin to believe that the outside counts more than the inside. In fact, it appears as if his hermaphroditism not only affects his view of himself and his own feelings, but the feelings and judgements of others.

Hermaphroditism seems like an nontraditional, somewhat awkward topic to write about, but Jeffery Eugenides actually made a smart choice in picking it. In a society where gender is as little thought about or pondered on as it is, Eugenides forces us to take into account our true identities that are controlled largely on our sexes. Gender in itself is to blame for countless limits and bans and unspoken rules that are placed upon our heads, yet they're molded themselves into our daily lives so seamlessly that we take little to no notice of them. Sometimes I believe that Cal's physical appearance affects so much of his daily life only because of his rare condition. I mean, it must completely consume your thoughts and subconscious when you're part of that kind of minority. But gender defines us, and it only amplifies that when you don't know if you're supposed to conform to the male or female sex. Our lives are built upon our genders - we've been brought up like girls if we're girls, so we think what girls are supposed to think. Cal has boyish thoughts, but he also mentions his feminine side reemerging through almost indiscernible actions, like a hair flip. All this is because of his double-sexed identity, and that's an outside factor.

There are some things that are so "normal" to us that we never notice them unless we look or think hard enough. We forget that those things shape our own identities, so we disregard them; make them something that we think doesn't matter or just seems wrong or silly. That's where this whole "don't judge a book by its cover" idea came in. We think that since gender is such a "small" part of our lives that it doesn't matter. What I admire so much about Jeffery Eugenides, however, is his insight to the importance of the outward appearances of people. He's completely changed by views about human identity through Middlesex, and made me see just how significant gender and a person's facade can be. I'm shaped on being a girl, and everything I do and say, down to the way I walk, is reflecting my feminism, just like Cal's often androgynous persona is a display of his being a hermaphrodite. So this is why I say, please judge me by the way I look, the way I dress, the way I act. I'm a girl, and that's the most important thing about me. So jump to conclusions, because it's only natural.

The Words and Images of Romeo and Juliet and The Genius of Baz Luhrmann.

Baz Luhrmann made an interesting choice when he transported the classic story of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to a modern setting yet kept the original language. I'm glad he stuck to the old script - reading the play has made me appreciate the beauty of Shakespeare's words so much more. I wasn't sure that it would work with a modern setting when I was first told about the movie, but walking away from it I realized that the themes of this story are still present and will always exist, and it turned out I had barely any trouble interpreting and understanding the story at all, regardless of the old-fashioned language. So was it necessary for Luhrmann to change put the story in a current setting? If I had seen this in its original state, time period and costumes intact, would I have understood it as well?

Baz Luhrmann's directing style is very distinct - you could watch two of his movies, Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet, and immediately be able to identify the intense visual aspects that they have in common: fast, choppy cutting, overly-saturated colors, an overall energetic and dizzying way of presenting a story. Even without watching his film interpretation of R+J, by just reading the play you can see the importance of images, settings, and personalities and the way they add a subtle, deeper meaning to the story. Baz does something very smart by utilizing these powerful bits of the story and amplifying them by making them much more obvious to the viewer and putting a modern twist on them.

R+J is not only a play, it's a work of art - in the literal sense, too. It's not enough to just read about it, but you have to see the play to experience the subtle imagery of the two houses, the warlike allusions they sprinkle throughout the story, and just the all-powerful image of the two authoritative, violent, passionate houses. The entire story is based upon image: the beauty of Juliet, the grandeur of the lives they live, and the general basis of teenage love in this story, which "lies not in their hearts, but in their eyes". This story was written for the stage; it was written for people to look at and experience. Shakespeare's other plays seem to include this intense imagery as well: the powerful image of the African king Othello, the ghost of Hamlet's father and Ophelia's fateful beauty, the fanciful and imaginative characters of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It's all visuals.

It's pretty clear why BL wanted to put this story in present time - to make it more appealing to the masses and give a classic story a new twist. But it's the images he uses that really set this movie apart from other film interpretations. The close-ups of the Montague's cowboy boots in the very first fight scene, the "Wherefore L'Amour" sign that he shows in several scenes, the costumes that R and J wear at the party (Juliet as an angel, Romeo as a knight. Could you make it any more obvious, Baz?) He takes Shakespeare's images and uses them to create a passionate, romantic film while still sticking to not only the script, but the way that Shakespeare writes. In his little behind-the-scenes sheet, he even says "Martin and costume designer Kym Barrett drew on all sorts of imagery, giving completely different looks to the Capulets and the Montagues. The Capulets became Hispanic, adorned with very Catholic cultural icons. For the Montagues they wanted something far more Anglo; hence the "GI Joe" imagery" of the Hawaiian shirts. With such distinctly different wardrobes the two opposing gangs become easy to understand and follow". Isn't this exactly what I was talking about?

Now, I'm not going to pretend that I know much about Shakespeare. I'm not a drama student, but I'm an art student, which gives me an eye for visual details in film like color or camera angles. And Baz Luhrmann's film gave me a whole new idea and perspective on this play - that just as much as clever and beautiful writing, the story contains subtle images that make it especially intense, and BL uses those images to create a movie that is truly a work of art which both gives credit to Shakespeare's gorgeous words and includes smart, thoughtful, and modern images that symbolize thought-provoking deeper meanings throughout the story.

Standing Before Rebellion.

I didn't actually realize this at first, but my book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, has a major theme that ties perfectly into the not so long past protests in Egypt. When an unexpected guest checks in at the mental hospital, his bold and ambitious ideas soon spark a flame of rebellion and a kind of mutiny throughout almost the entire ward. Not in Egypt, I mean in my book. But our antagonist, Big Nurse, who rules over the hospital with a cold, strict eye, could certainly be compared to Egypt's past leader, Hosni Mubarak. I guess before I begin my real post I though it would be interesting to show the connections to the real world through this book, which was written almost fifty years ago.

But instead of digging deeper into the major theme of rebellion in this book, which I find a bit overused, I thought it would be more compelling to see rebellion through the eyes of a bystander, one who is caught between playing it safe and going by the rules, or standing up for their beliefs. But then again--what if they don't believe in rebellious ideas? What if they're fine with the way the system is running already?

Rebellion is an issue that you can probably see has much to many branches (and twigs off of the branches) for me to fit into one blog post. Attempting to would completely mess this up, and many of my posts have been the victim of too broad a topic. I'd like to take a walk in our main character (Chief Bromden)'s shoes for a moment.

Bromden, or "Broom" as he is called by his fellow patients, is a huge, silent "Chronic", or presumably very ill patient who also works most of the time as a janitor. When the unexpected guest, Randall McMurphy, steps into the hospital, he quickly realizes that the rules there are not for him and he's determined to crack the Big Nurse and change the way the hospital works, and in a while he has many of the other patients joining him on his quest. Bromden stands aside the whole time, staying out of the votes for cigarette distribution or television watching time. At first he doesn't see what's wrong with the ward, but then his eyes are opened up as McMurphy displays all of the horrors to the patients. Yet he still holds back. He has been labeled as an idiot and wants to keep that label and avoid trouble.

Change of subject once more--I'm studying acoustics in science class for my exit project. I learned about refraction today. Say you have two mediums-air and water. A sound wave can travel through air and into water, but the sound of it is changed as it passes from air to a much denser medium -- water. There's an imaginary line that's perpendicular to the boundary in which the two mediums meet -- the normal. Together they form an x -- the normal is the vertical, the boundary the horizontal. (Is this too confusing? Bear with me, please. I swear, it does relate to my book). As the sound wave hits the boundary at an angle, it bends towards the normal because the second medium is denser. If the first medium was denser and the second was less dense, then the sound wave would bend away from the normal.

Now, to the point. This is exactly how I feel with the issues in this book. The boundary represents the separation between the rest of the ward and Chief Bromden. The normal is exactly what it sounds like -- the strict policies of the ward that Bromden decides to live by. The sound waves are like Bromden himself. At first, Bromden's world is a dense, hard medium, and the rest of the ward is light as air. Bromden bends the sound waves towards the normal in order to contain himself and keep out of trouble. However, everybody else's sound waves are coming in and changing his medium into one so much lighter, one that can allow his waves to bend away from the normal and out into open space.

The point of all of these complex scientific analogies is really meant so I can explain that you have to believe in a rebellion in order to take part in it. That belief may be instilled by other people, and many times it is. Sometimes we get so enveloped in our corrupt worlds that we don't even realize the terrible things going on. We need a sound wave from a dense medium to break through and make us believe. It's not like you can just jump into a protest when you don't know what it's about. You need passion, information, and enlightenment.

You're probably really confused by now, what with all the wandering ideas and such, but I warned you that rebellion was much to broad a topic to be represented in one single blog post. But don't expect any more on this -- those science facts are as painful for me to write as they are for you to read.