Q2 Journal 4

For my last big reading session of this quarter, I read even more of A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.  This time, I read thirteen pages in about half an hour.  I am back in Nao’s section of the book in the middle of her explaining her life at home and at school, which certainly is not ideal.  I learned that Nao and her family used to live in the United States but had to move back to Japan after her father lost his job.  There, Nao was bullied at school for being a foreigner and for being poor.  It is especially in the bullying part that she uses Japanese vocabulary to give a better idea of what exactly she is called.  For example, there is ijime, a term that means “bullying”; Iyada!  Gaijin kusai, which means “Gross!  She stinks like a foreigner!” and Bimbo kusai, which means “She stinks like a poor person!”  The insults are combined with some offensive Engrish (misspelling intended), which I can’t help but laugh at because the bullies try to sound so cool but really just jumble a bunch of English derogatory terms together.

This part of Nao’s story is more exposition than any other literary devices, but it gives us as readers more information about Nao’s hard life.  She lives in an apartment where her family can hear everything from the rooms above and below them, and her father has attempted suicide after his return to Japan and loss of even more money.  It is hard for me to really identify with this because I have never been in such a tight financial or familial situation, but I am sure that some others who may come upon this book can relate better.  I also find it hard to see a similarity with, in Nao’s words, how the “Man of the House makes all the Big Financial Decisions” in America compared to how the woman takes care of the money in Japan mostly because my mother and father share that responsibility almost equally.  Nao’s section ends with how karma, according to Jiko, punishes people for bad things that they have done, such as in the way that Nao’s father ends up feeding crows in the park instead of having a solid job after he spent all of his money betting on horses.  Perhaps these crows will have a greater significance later on, but only time will tell for that.  It was interesting to learn more about Nao, and I hope to read much more of this book as my time frees up for Christmas break.

Q2 Journal 3

The third time I read for pleasure this quarter, I continued Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.  This time, I read about thirteen pages in half an hour mostly in Ruth’s section of the book.  It must have taken longer to read because to me, Ruth’s chapters proceed more slowly than Nao’s.  Here, we are introduced to a retired anthropologist named Muriel who helps examine the Hello Kitty lunchbox.  Muriel takes a very critical, scientific approach to the find, unbiased about how the lunchbox ended up in the sea compared to how Ruth almost automatically thinks that it washed up from a tsunami a few years ago.  It makes me think that perhaps the diary may not have arrived in the West Coast in dramatic circumstances.  However, after reading this part, I predicted that Muriel will not take on a major role later on in the story because she was so suddenly introduced and just as suddenly not in any more scenes so far.

The most important part of this section was probably when the watch from the lunchbox starts to tick again.  There are many possibilities for its meaning as a symbol because a supposedly dead watch starting to tick again is no normal occurrence.  It could have something to do with what has been said before about lost time.  Perhaps by starting to work after a long time of being stopped, the watch represents time being found again.  Nao seems to be communicating to Ruth, the reader, what Ruth currently thinks of the entire situation with the diary:  “I am reaching through time to touch you.”  As Ruth listens to the watch ticking near her, this moment makes it clear to me that Ruth and Nao are connected through the boundaries of time.  Ruth’s section ends with her having a dream about Jiko, Nao’s great-grandmother, saying something about things going up and down.  Currently, I am not sure what this means exactly, but I guess that it will have significance later on.  This reading session ended when I began a little bit more of Nao’s story, which starts to give us a better idea of Nao’s family and school life.  Overall, though I was not drawn in as much to this part of the book, I still enjoyed it and am willing to read and write about more of the novel again. 

Q2 Journal 2

The second time I sat down to read this quarter, I continued reading more of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.  Again, I read about fourteen pages within half an hour.  Ozeki resumes the story from Nao’s perspective and later switches back to Ruth’s.  I find the structure of this novel to be a major point of discussion because it could possibly give us, the readers, more of a feeling for Ozeki’s purpose (which I am still trying to figure out) that she tries to convey with this work.  From what I currently see, the sections alternate between Nao’s diary entries and Ruth’s reactions to them.  This gives me the feeling that I am reading Nao’s diary along with Ruth and registering similar responses.  It is also interesting that Ruth eventually begins to annotate the diary because of all of the Japanese cultural references because there are also many footnotes at the bottom of most pages of Nao’s section.  It is as if we have received the diary after Ruth has written her notes about Japanese allusions down, which certainly makes our lives easier because we will not have to look up a term two or three times per page. 

Now back to a little bit of what is going on with the plot.  The motif of time continues to show importance, as seen in Nao’s diary and in her description of her great-grandmother, Jiko.  Nao’s diary is what is known as a hack because it contains the cover of an old book, but its contents were replaced with stationery in which Nao writes her story.  This hack merges the past and present into one being.  Moreover, the cover is from a philosophical book written by Marcel Proust titled A la recherche du temps perdu, which means “In search of lost time.”  This raises the question from both Nao and the reader, “How do you search for lost time?”  It is highly doubtful that Ozeki used this work to be the cover of Nao’s diary as a mere coincidence.  Perhaps Nao will discover more about time and find an answer to the question.  She asks this question to Jiko, who, according to Nao, really understands time.  Jiko responds, “For the time being,/Words scatter. . ./Are they fallen leaves?”  This probably sounds more melodic in Japanese because the original version of this text forms a haiku.  With this, we and Nao think about how searching for time could in a way be like looking through fallen leaves.  Though Jiko apparently knows much about time, I find it ironic that she does not even know her exact age or her birthday.  Yet perhaps this means that time measured in numbers is irrelevant compared to the bigger picture of time itself as one perceives it.  Again, I enjoyed reading this part of the book, and I look forward to writing more about it later.

Q2 Journal 1

For the second quarter, I chose to read A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki because Mrs. Healey said that the reading experience was entertaining yet still deserving of literary merit.  In about half an hour, I completed the first fourteen pages of the book, which is certainly not bad progress at all.  In this beginning, I noticed three major literary devices:  allusions, a change in point of view, and the motif of time.  The allusions generally come from Nao’s sections of the book, and they usually relate to Japanese culture.  For example, in just the first three pages, Ozeki includes mentions about otakus (obsessive fans or fanatics, often referring to computer geeks or nerds), keitais (cell phones), and hentais (perverts).  She likely leaves the Japanese terms for everything instead of translating them literally because the literal translations for most of the cultural allusions are bulky or lacking in power.  Without the Japanese words, the book would certainly feel more boring to me, and I would be less convinced of the book’s setting, which is at Akiba Electricity Town in Nao’s sections sometime around the present.  The second device, a change in point of view, is evident at the end of Nao’s first section of the book when all of a sudden the writing shifts from a first person point of view of sixteen-year-old Nao to the third person limited omniscient perspective of a married woman named Ruth.  Ruth’s section is set in the West Coast of the U.S. sometime after Nao had written her diary.  Ruth finds Nao’s diary in the beach covered with a Hello Kitty lunchbox and Ziploc plastic bags, and she would have thrown it away if her husband had not uncovered the diary before she had done so.  I am still not completely sure about what place Ruth’s story has in the novel so far, but I predict that it will have something to do with how we as readers know that someone will read and remember Nao’s story and that Nao’s hard work of writing about herself and her great-grandmother will not go to waste.  Lastly, Ozeki introduces time as an important motif right in the first long sentence of the novel when she writes in Nao’s perspective, “My name is Nao, and I am a time being.”  She continues this motif again when Nao thinks that she will soon “graduate from time” or, more accurately, “drop out of time.”  Time is very important to Nao because she does not have much of it left. From this language, I can also tell that Nao is seriously considering suicide, though she does not explicitly state that or her reasons for doing so.  Overall, I enjoyed this part of the book, and I look forward to reading more.

Q1 Journal 4

For my last journal, I decided to record my experiences of The Circle’s ending.  By this time, I had completely lost track of how long it took me to read the last forty or so pages in the middle of the night.  Up to this point, Mae has acquired a camera that hangs from her neck at all waking moments, Mercer has committed suicide after Mae tested an invention that tracks people down on him, and Annie has undergone a total breakdown after completely unveiling her parents’ and ancestors’ terrible past through a new invention.  Even after all of these events happen to her loved ones, Mae continues to work for and support the Circle.  Any reasonable person including me would have quit by this time after seeing all the damage done.  The ending begins when Stenton, a Wise Man, decides to combine seahorses, an octopus, and a shark in one tank to create something close to a real environment in the ocean.  Bailey, the second Wise Man, is present as well, and he introduces Mae to the final Wise Man, Ty.  However, Eggers throws in his biggest plot twist yet, the revelation to Mae that Ty is actually Kalden, the mysterious man who looked at her work before.  I did not expect this at all, but as I thought of his actions throughout the story, everything clicked into place about how he knew old names as well as what the Wise Men liked to see.  Obviously, since this scene happens near the ending, it must have serious symbolic meaning.  First in the tank enters the seahorse and his many offspring, both of which probably represent the masses of people in the world.  Next enters the octopus, which wants to “know all, touch all,” but not in a disturbing way.  The octopus possibly symbolizes the Internet before corruption, and it lived in peaceful coexistence with the seahorses.  They are oblivious of the disaster that would happen next.  Bailey even comments the following: “Look at these happy creatures.  A peaceable kingdom.  Seems almost a shame to change it in any way.”  The world as it is before the shark is introduced is perfect if they change nothing else.  Finally, however, the aquarium’s caretaker drops the shark into the tank.  The shark gobbles up the octopus and the seahorses within seconds and turned it into ash.  This animal dramatically represents the Circle, a trust that wishes to control every aspect of human life in every part of the world.  It lays waste to everything in its path, and any opposition to it has no chance of success.  Bailey and the reader are horrified, Ty looks as if he expected it, and Stenton is fascinated and proud of the creature.  This reveals that left unattended, the Circle will consume everything for the worse of society, destroying the peace that once was present.

After this, Ty/Kalden jams Mae’s camera transmission, and they meet in an underground area.  Ty warns Mae one last time to speak out against the imminent “Completion” of the Circle, the tracking of a person from birth to death.  He becomes another voice of reason to Mae, the final warning sign that the Circle is truly doing something wrong.  It is hard to believe that even after this, Mae doesn’t believe the person who started the company that is about to take over the world.  In the end, she tells the entire world what Ty had said, but then she covers for herself by saying that she had feigned cooperation with him.  With this action, Mae proves herself to be a coward who continues to flow with the popular opinion that Completion is good even though it is not right and though her loved ones were suffering from it.  This ending completely surprised me because I expected better of Mae.  Most protagonists in dystopian novels like these would have taken action at this point.  Unfortunately, she, who as I had previously stated represents a common person in our world, completely immerses herself into the culture of no privacy.  The ending is still appropriate though disappointing because it leaves a cautionary note to all readers of what might happen if we give up our privacy completely.  This book’s implications on how we as a society are acting to indirectly create a similar future does nothing less than blow me away.

Q1 Journal 3

Since I simply could not put my book down, I continued even more of The Circle by Dave Eggers.  In about a half hour, I read twenty-six more pages.  This section starts after a successful date with Francis, and the two sit together in front of an auditorium listening to another presentation.  The presenter shows off his new dating invention, and to Mae’s horror, Francis volunteers to test it.  With this system, Francis and the presenter demonstrate that it can find anything about a potential date, Mae in this case, ranging from allergies to food preferences.  Mae understandably runs off and refuses to talk to Francis, which is what I would do in this situation.  This is Mae’s first raw experience of the utter invasiveness of the Circle’s technology.  Shockingly, however, she was not annoyed by the violation of privacy but rather by the fact that Francis did not simply ask her about these preferences and that the profile was incomplete.

Later that afternoon, she drives back to her parents’ home because her father had had a seizure the night before.  This later turns out to be a false alarm, but Eggers takes this opportunity to introduce us to Mae’s ex-boyfriend from college, Mercer, who had helped transport Mae’s father to the hospital.  He is a social foil to Mae in that he does not care one bit for social media or any of that technology.  They get into an argument in which Mercer calls basically all of the Circle’s social media and new inventions childish and dorky.  He rants on page 131, “You can ask me!  Actually ask me.  You know how weird that is, that you, my friend and ex-girlfriend, gets her information about me from some random person who’s never met me?  And then I have to sit across from you and it’s like we’re looking at each other through this strange fog.”  This beautifully explains how people in Mae’s time, which is very similar to ours, has become so overly obsessed with social media that they value the gossiping with random people more than consulting an actual person.  He then mocks the like and dislike system, known as smiles and frowns in the story, by saying that it is something that only middle school children would be expected to do.  It makes me wonder how badly we have distorted our communication with each other through the gossip that runs around our social networks and our thirst for affirmation from our peers.  Mae, on the other hand, can only think of benefits of social networking.  By the end of this conversation, Mae and Mercer find each other repulsive because of their differing ideas.  Now that I have met Mercer, I have begun to see him as a voice of reason whom we will likely see later on to provide even more insights into how the novel’s world and our society have made fools of themselves through technology.  This greatly develops a man vs. society conflict throughout the novel between humanity and the technological world of fancy gadgets and electronic communication.

The next day, when Mae goes kayaking for the second time in the novel, she finds that the rental company had digitized their system.  I immediately groaned because I predicted at that moment that the new technology would end up ruining this safe haven at some point.  When Mae returns to work the next Monday, she finds out that everyone is disappointed that she could not attend parties that happened over the weekend.  Again, the Circle sucks Mae back into the frenzied world of social obsession, and she loses herself again in her work.  By this time, she has virtually forgotten about her argument with Mercer just as life moves on relentlessly.  In this section, I became very interested in Mae’s conversation with Mercer because I now see the conflicting ideas of society that emerge in this book.  After this, I could not wait to read even more.

Q1 Journal 2

When I finally found the time to read again, I continued more of The Circle by Dave Eggers.  I read forty-five pages within an hour because the book had become very interesting.  Eggers begins this section by introducing us to Mae’s parents who are overjoyed with Mae’s new job.  Mae’s father has an unpredictable, disabling disease known as multiple sclerosis (MS), and her mother is stuck in battles with insurance companies, trying to make sure that her husband continues to have coverage with them.  Of course, this reminded me of what I read about diseases in summer reading.  When applying MS to the disease chapter (Chapter 23) of Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature like a Professor, I tried to see how MS would fit into the four main criteria of literary diseases.  It certainly looks better than other diseases mentioned in that book, and though it probably isn’t considered picturesque, MS certainly emphasizes the frailty of Mae’s father.  MS is still mysterious in origin, and it likely has symbolic possibilities that can be revealed in the future.

Later that day, Mae decides to go kayaking as a way to relax from the week’s stresses.  Everything in this scene seems peaceful and beautiful in a different way from the Circle’s campus.  She and the reader find pleasure with the simplest glittering pieces of seaweed and the seals that poke their heads out of the water.  Unlike the Circle where everything is human-made and technologically advanced, everything around her except the boats is naturally beautiful.  She finds peace in the bay, which is away from all worldly distractions.  This is the only part of the novel so far that seems incorruptibly perfect and removed from everything else.

When Mae shows up at work on her second Monday, she runs into a man named Kalden who introduces himself and takes a few minutes to watch her work.  As I read further about him in this section, he seemed more and more mysterious and clearly not normal as the two continued to converse.  He refers to Mae’s job title by its old name, and he seems to know much about what the Wise Men like.  The entire experience made Mae and the reader feel awkward and uncomfortable because it raises questions such as “Who is he?” and “Does he even work here?”  After he leaves, another worker named Gina, slightly annoyed that Mae had not done this earlier, appears to help her set up the Circle’s social network on her devices.  As she assists Mae, she stresses the importance of community at the Circle: “If you visit a coworker’s page and write something on the wall, that’s a positive thing.  That’s an act of community.  An act of reaching out.  And of course I don’t have to tell you that this company exists because of the social media you consider ‘extracurricular.’”  To me, this is the second warning sign about the Circle’s gradual invasiveness in people’s lives.  I do not identify with the Circle’s seeing participation in social media as an almost required activity, especially since I myself am not very active in sites such as Facebook (which, by the way, the Circle bought a while ago).  They value social media so much that they are hurt when Mae doesn’t respond to an invitation to a gathering and requiring that they meet up with her so that she can apologize.  This is where I simply roll my eyes and think that these people are idiots.   This part of the story again relates to the theme of privacy vs. transparency because the Circle basically makes participation in social media compulsory.  The company compels its workers to put themselves out in the open when these workers sometimes do not wish to share everything they do.  I was satisfied with this section of the book, and all of my questions and initial reactions kept me wishing for more.

Q1 Journal 1

The first time I read this quarter for pleasure, I began The Circle by Dave Eggers.  I read about seventy pages in around the first two hours, though I’m not sure exactly how much time it took because I stopped checking the time after immersing myself into the book.  The story first introduces the reader to the protagonist, Mae, a new worker at a company called the Circle who had a college roommate named Annie who already worked there.  Mae is simply a woman who had previously graduated from college and could not find work in anywhere except a utility place.  She seems to represent every one of us, the common people, though her new job gives her great opportunity and promise.  She and the reader are dazzled by how perfect the campus of this company seems, though the perfection, as I predicted as I read, probably implies that something will go terribly wrong in the future.  As Mae tours the campus, Annie plays friendly pranks on her from afar by showing embarrassing pictures of Mae on a big screen and by making a fake workspace for her lined ugly burlap.  Eggers puts the plot on hold for a few pages to reveal a flashback of Mae’s unpleasant experiences at her old job until Annie shows up, apologizes, and takes her around more of the campus.  I was shocked that Annie could have been able to find her high school yearbook picture and perfectly replicate Mae’s old workspace even though they only met in college.  As Annie tours Mae around the office of Bailey, one of the three Wise Men who run the Circle, she explains the history of the company probably more for our benefit than Mae’s.  Again, Eggers halts the plot, but he does this to give more information about the Circle.  It is interesting to see that the three men who run the place are called the Wise Men because it alludes to the Wise Men who were very knowledgeable about the stars and who brought gifts to the baby Jesus.  These men were probably called the Wise Men because they were geniuses and because their work was done to bear “gifts” to the public.  As I read, I learned that the Circle started with an invention called TruYou, a system that merges all of a person’s accounts into one and removes anonymity in the Internet, making everyone accountable for his or her actions online.  Though this has many benefits and I identify with the system’s purpose, I can see flaws in it.  I can think of many ways that multiple accounts could help people, such as when collaborating on something without the powers of editing another person’s posts, and I would be hesitant to give up all of my privacy whenever I post online.  Later that night, Mae attends a party on the campus where she meets a man named Francis, whom I assume would be her love interest throughout the story.  He is currently working on an invention called ChildTrack that shows the location of children at any point in time in order to prevent abductions.  Again, I see problems with this because parents can see their kids’ locations at any time, not just when the children are in danger.  I can see how people could abuse it by following their children’s every move. 

The next day, Mae starts her real work in the Customer Experience department, where we find that she is very good at her job from the start.  I like that the Circle values making their workers sound human as they do their jobs because I would hate asking questions to a robot.  Next, the workers attend a presentation in which Wise Man Bailey introduces a new product, SeeChange, which is basically a tiny hidden camera that can be used to track everything in an area without others noticing.  He makes an adage for this camera:  “All that happens must be known.”  Everyone in that audience is astounded, but I felt a little scared as I read that.  With all of these inventions, the Circle is gradually taking away our right to privacy, and the audience, which represents the public as a whole buys into these ideas.  This is the first clear warning that Eggers is trying to make a point about all of us being a mob that willingly gives up privacy for the sake of security.  This idea seems like it will become a main theme in the novel.  When I ended with that section, I could not wait to find even more time to read and to see how the story develops from there.

Q1 Book GET HYPED (NOT a journal entry)

So for the first quarter, I will be reading...

Not this: 

Or this:

But this:

Herro dere ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Welcome to the poor, unfortunate souls who have found their way here!  I fear for your sanity because this blog will be abused.  Though if you're a certified adventurer or trainee (you know who you are), you should be safe.  Key word:  should.  If you were already killed by the cancerous mass known as the Frankinception Google Doc which is currently at 131 pages and counting, getting more dead shouldn't be much of a problem too.  I hope to make this place entertaining/lulzy for you all in between all those journals.  Again, welcome!  8D