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Covid and The Plague

My first impression of The Plague (before reading the book of course) was that it was going to discuss an incredibly different scenario than the modern-day quarantine.  The modern knowledge of medicine, the technology we have, and the biological makeup of each disease is so different, I thought I would get a completely different perspective.  For some reason, it conveys much more similar conditions than I thought. I think this parallel phenomenon can mainly be attributed to how the governing body had handled the plague over time.  Dr. Rieux and the medical board had warned the governing body and political leaders, just like the United States had in the early stages of Covid.  Yet, most chose to ignore it, and suppress it's spread through the media.  They downplayed the disease much like the US did, and when they declared it as a social threat, it was already too late.  The disease had spread extremely quickly, resulting in disastrous effects on the town, ju...
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The Sun Also Rises, but don't forget it sets too

 I'd have to say the ending of this story was almost too anticlimactic for my taste.  I was expecting a character to be killed off, whether it be Cohn, Brett, or Jake. Most importantly, I think it symbolized some sort of loop in Brett and Jake's relationship. I am assuming that some way or another, every event in the story that we have seen in the story, has happened somewhat similarly before, and will continue to towards the future.  This is not only seen in the repetitive nature (constant drinking at bars, eating at restaurants, drama with Brett, and drunk chaos), but it is especially intimated by the ending. "Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together." Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me. "Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?"    Notice Brett's wording, "we could".  Their whole relations...
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The Hours, a Chronologically disjointed story

 Personally, I was very confused after watching The Hours for myself.  This confusion can probably be attributed to the chronological distortion of different stories merging together.  In a sense, from the first story, starring Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, I can witness a deeper background to Mrs. Dalloway and how it relates to Woolf's personality and characteristics.  The idea of suicide is abundant throughout the movie, yet in the end Woolf is the only one to actually submit to this idea.   I think there can be some connections made between the 3 different women, but I also feel it is wrong to say that they are essentially personality clones of each other in different time frames.  Woolf in a way feels a lot more like Septimus in this sense, while the others who reflected and chose lightly felt a lot closer to the character of Mrs. Dalloway.  (In this case, Clarissa Vaughan who is played by Meryl Streep is actually called "Mrs. Dalloway" by ...
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Some Sadistic Drinking Game

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I'm going to have to be upfront with this one.  I'm not a very big fan of Hemingway's writing.  I generally have bad memories writing essays on it and have a hard time reading in between the lines of what he says.  Regardless, this blog post is my interpretation of some of themes he chooses to use throughout his book, specifically drinking. It is an undeniable truth that people in the 1920s drank heavily, but I think Hemingway chooses an exceptional amount of detail that he devotes to drinking alcohol especially.  "Pernod is greenish imitation absinthe. When you add water it turns milky. It tastes like licorice and it has a good uplift, but it drops you just as far. We sat and drank it, and the girl looked sullen."   Pernod Absinthe as I've researched is actually the very first French Absinthe made in the local distillery. It's funny how Jake calls it "imitation absinthe" almost just insulting it as a whole, and even a little tone of racism.  Gen...
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Mrs. Dalloway and Animal Crossing

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The first time I played Animal Crossing was probably in middle school. I booted up dolphin emulator and I would just play as a villager among a town of wacky animals.  The game took a step back into more relaxing gameplay, unlike others I played.  I could fish, dig up fossils, catch bugs, buy furniture, decorate my house, and organize parties with loan shark raccoons.  (Sound familiar huh? New Horizons wasn't a revolutionary game either).   Now why did I just ramble about Animal Crossing?  It was a very conservative gameplay that tried to emulate a conservative lifestyle.  But it was Addictive .   It felt like careless life.  No homework, no school, just make money from fishing and bug-catching, pay off my debt to the loan shark raccoon, buy furniture and clothes, and decorate the house.  And while I do belief to some extent that Clarissa Dalloway was socially pressured into her Conservative lifestyle, it also had an addictiveness that c...
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Mrs. Dalloway? Conservatism and Liberalism in Government?

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  Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, we see several references to Clarissa's Husband, Mr. Richard Dalloway.  As far as we all know, he is a conservative politician in the parliament of the United Kingdom.  Otherwise, up until this point, he is considered "a minor character".  In this blog post, I have tried to mirror the setting and characters of the story into the relative social politics of today.  Yet, the stark contrast between liberalism and conservatism is brought up through Clarissa's thought process and symbols.  Furthermore, Clarissa's past also brings up a liberal lifestyle quite contrary to her manner in the present form. "Sally went out, picked hollyhocks, dahlias - all sorts of flowers that had never been seen together - cut their heads off, and made them swim on the top of water in bowls.  The effect was extraordinary - coming in to dinner in the sunset (Of course Aunt Helena thought it wicked to treat flowers like that)."  In this, Aunt Hele...
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Capitalism, Innovation, and Olives

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In the summer of 1994, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon, an online bookstore from his garage in Seattle.  In the first month of 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched theFacebook, an attempt to put all of college life online, from his Harvard dorm room (fun fact: I lived in Boston at the time while my father worked in the lab right next to that dorm).  Many more like Bezos and Zuckerberg started out like this and continue to use their large companies to perpetuate this system of capitalism throughout the country.  So what does that have to do with The Mezzanine ?  The detailed observances, the slight faults in life, and the mystery is all carefully dissected by Baker in this tangential novel of his. It is however, these very observations that eventually lead to such innovation and legacy.   Yes, while I believe that the author is creating this satire of a capitalistic society by creating overly illustrious descriptions of relatively meaningless commercial things, he hims...
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