In-class Journal 1/11/10

With the start of a new semester comes a new unit as well. Our "Body Unit" readings this week were very different from other readings that we have seen in previous units. For one, they were very short (thankfully), but they were also very cleverly written as demonstrated by Brady's essay I Want a Wife. I thought that this was one of the best essays we had to read all week. I had never seen that sort of style in which anaphora was used so many times throughout a piece in order to stress her main point - how stressful and strenuous a wife's job can be. I found the ending to this essay very interesting as well. Brady ended her piece with a rhetorical question that I thought really tied up the essay nicely. It was succinct but very to-the-point.
Now I want to talk about a reading that I didn't really like too much. Sontag's essay titled A Woman's Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source? seemed to be a bit overdone. I believe that her writing is over-the-top and over complicated. Sontag, in my opinion, writes so complexly that I find myself re-reading almost every paragraph in order to follow the point she is trying to make. This could be because of my lack of ability to comprehend this sort of writing, or because of Sontag's extremely sophisticated style of writing. After all, she was in school for probably half of her life if not more. I read her background information in the Bedford Reader which said she had masters in all sorts of fields from philosophy to writing to religion if I can remember correctly. I felt the exact same way about her novel Regarding the Pain of Others as well. Overall, I think I'm going to try to avoid Sontag's writing for the rest of my high school career.
I read an article on msnbc.com this past week for a current event for US History and it was about how a company, Weatherproof, used a giant picture of Obama in an advertisment in Times Square, New York. The White House and Obama were angry because they felt the company had no right to use his picture without permission. The company however, argued that they obtained the picture from the photographer and had full rights to use it how they pleased. I thought the ad was actually very effective. It was a picture of Obama wearing a Weatherproof jacket and in the background was the Great Wall of China. Obama administration feared that people would think that Obama approved this "message" whatever that happened to be and I find that to be a little but ridiculous. Why is Obama so carried away by the smallest things when he has literally a thousand other problems to be worrying about? I did, though, believe that the company's president, Freddie Stollmack, handled the issue very professionally. He said that he recieved full permission from the photographer and that's all he thought was needed and that he never intended to make people believe the message was approved by Obama.