Transparency, Social Media and Cultural Patterns » Essential book parts

Death in Venice – Thomas Mann

@collentine — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:11:02 +0000

A presentation made with two others for my literature course about Thomas Mann who wrote Death in Venice.

Thomas Mann has a very strong and rich language with many images to evoke connections: “Black as nothing else on eath except a coffin”. He uses many symbols and comparison in his texts. Throughout Death in Venice we see several comparisons with greek gods: Apollo, Dionysus, Phaex, Eros etc. By using such a rich language he does wonders with his writing.

“This was a broad and tolerant atmosphere, of wide horizons. Subdued voices were speaking most of the principal European tongues. That uniform of civilization, the conventional evening dress, gave outward conformity to the varied types”

Death in Venice is about an artist named Gustav and his travels to Venice where he gets obsessed with a boy named Tadzio. The text is written from Gustavs perspective and gives us an insight into his inner world. One of the main themes running through this text is the struggle between the aestheticism and intellectualism.

In Thomas Mann’s diary from 1965 it seems like he suffered from repressed homosexuality. He grew up in a conservative and religious family with a strict father. Many parts of Death in Venice are autobiographical references to his own trip to Venice where he met a boy named Baron Wladyslow Moes.

[pic: CC-BY-NC-SA, shapeshift ]

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

@collentine — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:22:56 +0000

This was the second time I read the metamorphosis but I still don’t like it. The story is in the sphere of magic realism where a traveling salesman gets turned into a giant cockroach and his family is forced to take care of him. Apart from this first metamorphosis nothing really happens, it’s a realistic description of how life would be like without thoughts on why this happened. One explanation might be that Gregor was living like a cockroach before, anti-social and just working his life away.

Gregor lives through the goals of others and doesn’t have any life plans himself. Taking care of the family this way makes them inactive and lazy. Once the metamorphosis takes place it forces the rest of the family to get active again. The sister and father take up work whilst the mother works from home.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the apartment layout. This is the closest I got.

Summary Through Essential Quotes: The Picture of Dorian Gray

@collentine — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 04:01:02 +0000

Oscar Wilde was a fascinating man. He was called “the first counter-culture celebrity” by some and was essential at parties with his epigrams. It seems as if he wrote for fame and to make money as he once confessed that “writing bored him”. Because of the type of person Wilde was it is hard to tell what was merely a facade and what was true. This is in many parts repeated in his book “The Picture of Dorian Gray”.

What I love about the book is not the content or ideas. The part that makes the book good, in my opinion, is the beautiful language. No better way of displaying this by showing some parts of the book for you. In this text I will summarize my impressions of the book by some favorite quotations from it followed by a summary of each chapter.

“But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins” (p.7)

“I have Grown to love secrecy [...] The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it” (p.8)

“The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul” (p.10)

“Lord Henry [...] plucked a pink-petaled daisy from the grass and examined it. ‘I am quite sure I shall understand it’” (p.10)

“I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects” (p.13)

“He is never more present in my work than when no image of him is there” (p.16) [Basil talking about Dorian]

“An artist should create beautiful things, but put nothing of his own life into them” (p.16)

“I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat” (p.17)

“The worst of having a romance [...] is that it leaves one so unromantic” (p.18)

“We are punished for our refusals [...] The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it” (p.25)

“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die” (p.34)

“Punctuality is the thief of time” (p.54)

“A ‘grande passion’ is the privilege of people who have nothing to do” (p.59)

“She did not listen. She was free in her prison of passion” (p.73)

“I never approve or disapprove of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices” (p.87)

“The secret to remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming” (p.99)

“One should absorb the colour of life but one should never remember its details” (p.118)

“The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died” (p.120)

“If one doesn’t talk about a thing it has never happened. It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things” (p.126)

“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them” (p.126)

“It had been all that art should be, unconscious, ideal, and remote” (p.133)

“You forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite” (p.175)

“Felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life” (p.202)

“Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues” (p.225)

“I wish it were stopped forever [...] The whole thing is hideous and cruel” (p.233)

Ch. 1 – Basil & Lord Henry discuss art and Dorian Gray.
Ch. 2 – Harry transforms Dorian. Portrait is bewitched.
Ch. 3 – Harry finds out about Dorian Gray’s past. Big Dinner where Harry is the star.
Ch. 4 – Dorian Gray tells Harry about his new love: Sybil Vane.
Ch. 5 – Getting to know Sybil Vane, her brother and her mother.
Ch. 6 – Dorian tells about his engagement. Basil and Dorian have grown apart.
Ch. 7 – Sybil acts bad, Dorian breaks up with her. Portrait changes, a confused mind.
Ch. 8 – Decides to be good. Gets news about Sybil’s suicide, changes his mind.
Ch. 9 – Dorian callous and changed. Basil and Dorian discuss portrait. Dorian hides feelings.
Ch. 10 – Hides away the ugly parts of himself (portrait). Becomes more sinful (book).
Ch. 11 – Crazy monologue about how he sins and people change around him.
Ch. 12 – Basil confronts Dorian about his sins. Dorian shows his soul (portrait).
Ch. 13 – Revealing his soul to Basil makes Dorian kill him.
Ch. 14 – Entreats a friend, blackmails him to get rid of the body.
Ch. 15 – Goes to a boring party. Banter with Henry but sins eating him.
Ch. 16 – The lowest low. Describes his heroin trip. James almost kills Dorian.
Ch. 17 – Contrast with last chapter showing double-life. Visit at Duchess with many epigrams. Faints when seeing James.
Ch. 18 – A mess of emotions. Guilt feelings and scared of James. Man gets shot by accident on hunt.
Ch. 19 – Feeling bad about dead man, turns into joy when discovering it was James.
Ch. 20 – Realizes he can never change, acts of goodness were only hypocritical. Stabs the portrait with a knife resulting in a suicide.

[pic: CC-BY-NC-SA, poetas]

Poetry of the Late 19th Century: Whitman and Rimbaud

@collentine — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:31:25 +0000

The 19th century was the top for poets within the Romanticism movement but it was also a time for profound change. Poetry moved to a more vaguely defined form containing more free verse and prose. At the end of the 19th Century the Symbolists emerged and stretched poetry outside the physical realm in search for new sensations.

Whitman
Romanticism was much about beautifying nature which can be seen in Walt Whitman‘s work but he was also very influenced by Scientific Realism. Walt Whitman kept writing and re-writing his masterpiece, titled Song of Myself, throughout his life. Whitman sees himself as a Seer, he was religious and equalized all living things (even the mundane was important). With a provocative rebellious attitude (for those times) he stretched concepts on what was considered poetry and inspired many.

Whitman is too religious for my liking. He also maintains a slightly condescending tone and at sections he “hammers in his points” through excessive use of catalogs which I feel dumbifies his readers. He also doesn’t like taking sides but prefers always listing dichotomies to stay in the “grey zone”. I don’t like the overall tone in the poem where he acts as the wise man teaching “his children” a lesson of life. Some of the quotes I like:

“I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven”

“The white-topt mountains show in the distance, I fling out my fancies toward them”

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

Rimbaud
The Symbolists worked with stretching reality into mental creations. Creating an ordered chaos to find beauty in evil. They take every sense into the extreme, making it very personal and close. Rimbaud was a very young poet who wrote all his work before he turned 20. He lived a very extreme life with plenty of drugs, sin, homosexuality and alcohol to reach the unknown. “The poet makes himself into a visionary by long derangement of all the senses”. In his poetry titled “A season in hell” he has a dyptic part between the sections named Delirium I and Delirium II. In the first delirium he mocks his own relationship through the voice of his lover where he compares himself to a devil. The second part is also a confession but this time mocking himself as a poet. The text utilizes a lot of parody, he is innocent but guilty. Rimbaud also stretches the imagination, how can Hell have seasons?

This poetry is more my style because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Utilizing a lot of black humor and seeing beauty even in evil which I like. Rimbaud also makes use of many strong contrasts next to each other like when he lists church latin, eroticism, grandmother novels and fairy tales after each other. Mixing and merging objects and ideas by creating beautiful poetry. I really like some of the small images he manages to create with just a few words e.g. “the slumber of virginity” and “I had been damned by the rainbow”. Not much more than this is needed. To me good poetry should take a while to understand fully which symbolism poetry definitely does.

“Beneath the bush a wolf will howl
Spitting bright feathers
From his feast of fowl:
Like him, I also devour”

“I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”

“For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.”

Edit: Several different versions are used by people reading this poem. Makes us see how drastically a text can change meaning depending on the form of it. Different translations means only that translators saw the meaning of the text very differently which is then multiplied with us reading their different translations deriving even more separate meanings from the words.

[pic: CC-BY-NC-ND, Thorsten Becker]

Argyris take on Organizational Learning

@collentine — Fri, 21 May 2010 20:51:32 +0000

Been reading some on Organizational learning lately for an essay I’m writing. Very interesting to read about and makes you think a lot. Argyris is one of the main persons behind the concept and writes brilliantly on it. Sharing two great paragraphs with you from the book titled “On organizational learning”.

“Learning is defined as occurring under two conditions. First, learning occurs when an organization achieves what it intended; that is, there is a match between its design for action and the actuality or outcome. Second, learning occurs when a mismatch between intentions and outcomes is identified and it is corrected; that is, a mismatch is turned into a match.
Organizations do not perform the actions that produce the learning. It is individuals acting as agents of organizations who produce the behavior that leads to learning. Organizations can create conditions that may significantly influence what individuals frame as the problem, design as a solution, and produce as action to solve a problem. Individuals, on the other hand, may also bring biases and constraints to the learning situation that are relatively independent of the organization’s requirements. An example of constraint is the human mind’s limited capability for information processing. An example of bias is the theories of action with which people are socialized and which they necessarily bring to the organization. These theories significantly influence how individuals and groups solve problems and make choices.”

(photo cred: Chicagogeek, cc-by-nd)