Month: January 2016

Hey readers,

Lately my ASTU class has been reading a lot of writing based around the “war on terror”. Many of the works, such as Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? highlight the distinction that such occurrences have made between “us” and “them”, “good” and “evil”. Evidence will often point to the acts of the United States against the Middle East after the terrorist attack on 9/11 as the starting point of these assertions. Many scholars have even referred to our era as the “post 9/11 world”. What Judith Butler asserts is that these acts have shaped our idea as humans of who we should grieve for, and not grieve for, whose lives are valuable and whose aren’t. I agree with Butler on this manner, and believe that our reactions have been expertly crafted from decades of assigning emotions to certain news stories: sadness at the death of our soldiers, fear at the sight of a war scene, and relief at the death of an enemy. Recently the media instilled sadness in the public using the picture of the little refugee boy, Alan Kurdi, who washed up on shore. He represented the loss of innocent life, however, we were still meant to feel threatened by the mass volume of syrian refugees seeking safety in our countries. We are meant to mourn the life of the one little boy who was on his way to safety, but not the lives of the thousands of civilians who died in the war zones that they were escaping.

In the first chapter of her book, Judith Butler describes in great detail the process through which we as a society decide which lives are worth grieving for and which ones are not. On page 51 Butler states “It is only by challenging the dominant media that certain kinds of lives may become visible or knowable in their precariousness” meaning that currently the media is determining which lives we find worthy or unworthy, as Butler puts it quite poetically ” The tactic interpretive scheme that divides worthy from unworthy lives works fundamentally through the senses, differentiating the cries we hear from those we cannot, and likewise the level of touch and even smell.”(51). We cannot properly grieve for people we have never known or been introduced to, people who have been characterized as unlike us. What Butler is saying is that we mourn for the cries we can hear, the cries that are shown to us BY the media, and represented as “like us”. This represents a problem which I believe needs to be more publicly addressed: the problem of picking and choosing which lives hold more value than others. If we go off of the standards shown, then who is to say that our lives aren’t worthless to those we perceive as “others”?

The chapter that we read of Judith Butler’s book gave me a lot to think about, and left me with many more questions than answers. I look forward to reading and learning more!

Till next time,

Mia Spare

Hello readers,

It’s not very often that I describe a book as being “curious”. I believe such personification requires a truly deserving novel, but I don’t think there is a book more deserving of the description than Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”. His novel is set in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade center in New York City.Written from three perspectives, it follows the story of a nine year old boy named Oskar, his grandmother, and his grandfather. Foer’s novel is bursting with curiosity, mostly towards the key he found in his father’s closet in an envelope labeled “Black”. This discovery sends him on a quest around New York to find the lock that the key fits, hoping it will reveal something that could keep him close to his father after his death. But when I use the term “curious” I don’t only mean it in the sense that the characters had questions they wanted answered. I also use it to describe the situations that the characters find themselves in: The grandfather’s inability to speak, the grandmother lying about her “crummy eyes” and her life story of blank pages, the small connection of everyone with the last name “Black”, the “something” and “nothing” spaces grandma and grandpa created around their house, and Oskar’s array of unique inventions.Each of these situations leaves the reader asking so many questions, and leaves them forever, and frustratingly, curious.

Oskar’s inventions remain a theme throughout the book, showing up at times when he feels emotional and vulnerable. As I was reading the novel I began to view his inventions as one of his coping mechanisms- a way to take his mind off of the stress and grief of losing his father. When Oskar invents, he is inventing ways that he can improve the world, or make other people’s lives better. A number of his inventions involve ambulances, ones that tell you if the person inside them will be okay, and even one long enough to stretch from a house to the hospital. I think these represent Oskar’s fear of loss, and his desperate want to fix things. In the last paragraph of the novel, Oskar imagines what would have happened if his father hadn’t gone into work that day, he says “He would’ve gotten back into bed, the alarm would’ve rung backward, he would have dreamt backward. He would’ve gotten up again at the end of the night before the worst day. …He would have been safe”.

Foer’s novel left me more curious than I’ve been in a while. I fell in love with his style of writing, and I look forward to reading his other books. I hope you all enjoyed the book as much as I did, and continue to check in as I analyze it more.

Talk to you soon!

Mia Spare