When there's something strange in the neighberhood, who you gonna call?

There's not too much to write about this week, that I haven't already said. The authorship in popular media project went smoothly, so it's on to "ghostwriting".

Having just read the "Artful Deception" article, some things come to mind:
Not wanting to discredit ghostwriters, but if you really don't like it, don't do it. The very fact that there's a business for ghostwriters and ghostwriting makes it clear that just like anything else, it's a business. And of course, where there's a business, there's money involved. No one is forcing ghostwriters to ghostwrite. Simply put, ghostwriters are employees who get paid to do their job.

As for the issue of celebrities not writing their own books: that was not a big surprise to me. After all, they don't get paid huge amounts of money because they can write well. Politicians, in the same aspect, are politicians because they know how to sell their ideas and market themselves. They made their names because they can "sell" the words written for them.

That being said, issues of completely discrediting the ghostwriter or authoring something after the author's death are a bit ridiculous.

Only in today's world can a guy still write books years after his death.

Aura + Caffeine=This Blog Post

We're all meeting in the computer lab in 7 hours. That gives me and my "aura" plenty of time to blog out a good post. I just hope I don't wake my roommate up typing this.

Never really having looked at literature or any sort of work of art from the angle that we're discussing it now (Barthes, Walter), I have found it to be pretty interesting. The printing press, camera, tape recorder have all been pretty useful in my opinion as well as to anyone else who isn't Amish. From what I took away in Wednesday's class, I am led to believe that there is "aura" in this blog post, as well as every other single blog post, idea, picture, piece of work that is being produced for the first time. So the printing press, camera, and tape recorder all are responsible for killing aura because they take away the presence of originality and in essence, creativity. Modern technology has many benefits, but killing originality and creativity isn't one of them.

"Mechanical reproduction", according to Walter or someone in the class, "changes the reaction of masses towards art." This is pretty big. I didn't know one could incorporate something as doctrinal as the political practice of Marxism into an article involving something as abstract as "aura". Spreading the "wealth" of art to the common masses for the price of originality is an idea which seems obvious, but which I would never have related to Marxism.
I definitely didn't learn that in history 101.

I also wikipedia'd this to try to cleverly tie this into what we're doing in class tomorrow, and somehow incorporate it into this post. That didn't work out as planned, and neither did the conclusion of this post.

It's Wednesday and I'm Tired

So I'm posting on this blog as part of schoolwork. This is pretty interesting.

I spent the last 15 minutes trying to remember my password, so that wasn't a good start. It's Wednesday night which means I had English early today and am pretty tired after classes, sports, and a new martial arts/dance program which I just joined on a whim. I just had some late dinner, so what better time to write this than after a very unhealthy meal.

Speaking of eating, I didn't get to "digest"(hehehhehe) the articles we read in class today (Barthes) as well as I would've liked. I think I did a somewhat decent job of finding his thesis for the first article, but that's about it. It was pretty odd to read something relating to taking the author out of the textual picture completely, in an English class, but it's a new way to look at things so that's always good. Besides those articles, I think I've settled on Finding Forrester for my author/movie project. I remember it was a deep movie from when I saw it a while back, so it'll be nice to expand on it. Sean Connery also has a cool accent.

That's about it, I'm going to spend the next half hour trying to find the homework in Learn@UW because I'm bad with computers, so more English for me.

Hi

Hi, my name is Raj and this is my blog for my English 201 class. I will be updating this once every week with something that relates to the class.