Obama's victory

Election Results Prezi on Prezi

TED; Amy Cuddy: Your body language shapes who you are

I'm posting this TED video to relate to my assignment; fiction-body language

Isn't life

"Isn't life," she stammered, "isn't life-"

But what life was she couldn't explain. No matter. He quite understood.

"Isn't it, darling?" said Laurie.

From "The Garden Party" by Katherine Mansfield

Fiction-Assignment

Body English. Write a “conversation” in which no words are said.  This exercise is meant to challenge you to work with gesture, body language (or, as a baseball announcer I heard once misspeak it, body English), all the things we convey to each other without words.  We often learn more about characters in stories from the things characters do with their hands than from what they say.  It might be best to have some stranger observe this conversation, rather than showing us the thoughts of one of the people involved in the conversation, because the temptation to tell us what the conversation is about is so great from inside the conversation.  “I was doing the opposite of Freud,” Desmond Morris says, of his famous book The Naked Ape that first studied the ways humans speak with their bodies.  “He listened to people and didn’t watch; I watched people and didn’t listen.”  Because of Morris, according to Cassandra Jardine, “when politicians scratch their noses they are now assumed to be lying—and the sight of the Queen [Elizabeth] crossing her legs at the ankles is known to be a signal that her status is too high for her to need to show sexual interest by crossing them further up.”  Autistic children cannot understand human conversation even when they understand individual words because they cannot read facial expressions, which is clear evidence of how important other forms of language are.  600 words.

I'm totally in the same place with this prompt that body language is sometimes even more important than actual words when communicating, especially with emotions. 
I'm planning to write a story based on my experience when I was 9 years old. I have an experience of witnessing a ghost inside a car around 11 in front of my apartment. It was so shocking that I still remember exactly how I felt then. 
I'm going to change the point of view from me to "a girl." In that way, I could be able to illustrate my emotion through gestures.

Relating to the author, Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Throughout three chapters, we can easily find the common characteristics of Oscar Wilde and the main characters in Dorian Gray. While some experts claim that we should analyze literature within itself, not relating it to the life of the author, it is necessary to think of the relationship between the author and his works.

The very first thing that struck me was the issue of homosexuality. Both the demeanors and words of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry and Basil are not the expression of mere "liking," but more of romantic feelings toward each other. When Lord Henry asks how often does he see Dorian, Basil answers, “Every day. I couldn’t be happy if I didn’t see him everyday. He is absolutely necessary to me.” Dorian, on the other hand, is totally charmed by Lord Henry, who is a magical speaker burping out witty saying every time he opens his mouth. Dorian is so in love with him that he asks Henry to “promise to talk to me all the time.” Other than these, there are numerous quotes in the book that indicate the cheesy, romantic sentiment. Furthermore, the love between men and women are almost ignored, especially by Lord Henry. He defines marriage as to be short-lived and temporary, and asserts that women are a decorative sex. This imparted comparison between homosexual and heterosexual love emphasizes the homosexual romance among three guys. Lastly, Sibyl Vane, the actress of Shakespeare plays, is portrayed as a foolish young woman who is enthralled by "Prince Charming" whom she doesn't even know the name of. She instantly falls in love with Dorian, and in later chapters, forsakes her whole career just for him. How foolish is that? This stupidity of Sibyl Vane also indicates the triviality of love between different sexes.

Homosexuality, the prevailing thought of this book, was one of the characteristics of Oscar Wilde; he was a gay. During his time, the Victorian Era, it was difficult to express this feature of himself because of the zeitgeist of the time. In my opinion, instead, he expressed this feeling in his literature.

Other common factors are instilled in Lord Henry's personality and his views on certain subjects; Oscar Wilde and Lord Henry are awfully similar to each other. First one is hedonism, the appreciation of pleasure more than anything else. Lord Henry actually insists that one’s life should be spent appreciating beauty and seeking out pleasure rather than searching for ways to alleviate pain and tragedy. Oscar was also a believer of hedonism as well. Second common factor is the idea that art and life are not only closely related to each other, but also interchangeable. Thus, Lord Henry claims that vice and virtue are only the subsidiaries of aestheticism; they are merely the tools to create beauty. Oscar talked about this a lot in his preface of this book; he is into aestheticism. Moreover, Lord Henry loves social comedy and satire, so did Oscar.