One of Them Newfangled Picture Blogs

Now, I could have typed these up. And I will, if you find them unreadable in their current state. But then it wouldn't be an image blog anymore, would it?  

This is London, not that I expect you to listen to or share my musical tastes.  Just for reference.  Just in case you were curious.  Etcetera, etcetera.  And I am really sorry that second picture is cropped a bit off, my scanner is evil and hates me.  And I'm sorry this is late, I did have it finished by 8:30 this morning. 

The Interconnection of Art and Life

Is there any inherent meaning and purpose to the arts? That question is one that has come to me in recent days, especially through our readings of Virginia Woolf and Dorian Gray.
 The message of A Room Of One's Own, in such ways as it doesn't pertain to women and history, begins with the presumption that for women to be involved in fiction, to be depicted in it, to create it, would be a goodly and wonderful thing. She assumes that art is the work of genius, with all its precepts and requirements to achieve its inherent greatness. We don't say why, but we presume art is a wonderful thing.
As far as I have gotten in The Picture of Dorian Gray, we are still being bombarded by a certain characters fool opinions concerning the desirism of hedonism and beauty for its own sake, straight-out asserting that beauty is the most important thing, not for its ability to bring happiness to others but for its inherent (though unexplained) value.
This line of thinking brings me to a video essay I'd seen a few years ago, pretty sure it was this one: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html. He mainly is discussing happiness ( I watched/read a great deal of essays upon the topic not that long ago ), but touches upon a study where people showed their preference for things that they owned, even people with memory disorders that couldn't remember what they owned. And so from there, I'd say that art matters because it is ours and we feel that it should matter because of that.
As for me, I guess I do believe in the value of fiction. I'll go along with one of the main threads of Gaiman's The Sandman, that we are a species of storytellers, and that their truth in no way effects their effect upon us. Yet I also feel that personally I have too great of a tendency to fall into fiction and never come out again, bouncing from world to world and never touching down on solid ground. There is great value in stories, but there is greater value in life and more value in our own stories than those of others.

The Meek, the Brave and Gender

Is there still a double standard for women characters, wherein their passivity is treated as a virtue, where the same levels of internalization would be used to demonize a male? Moreover, does that double standard extend into actual society? That is the question that has been in my mind so far in our gender dynamics unit. I see this model played out two different ways in our readings. In the Doll's House and also in A Thousand Splendid Suns, the female characters begins the story as passive followers, grow as people and take action to change their circumstances at the end. It would be hard to effectively argue that Laila and Miriam were ever totally passive, but they go along until they can't any longer. Theirs is more a patience than passive thought processes. But still, all these women; Laila, Miriam and Nora are portrayed as being more thoughtful and internal than the men in the world around them, who were always going off and doing something. They weren't the heroes, but they were the actors. On the other hand, in The Awakening were are to take Edna as the height of human struggle, but that struggle rarely gets out of her head. So here her internalization is treated not as a flaw but as part of her nature. This question occurred to me in the planning of my next story, with the question being Cap and Oliver. The main struggles of the book are Oliver's internal struggles over right and wrong, but they come out as physical struggles. And then I worry that I'm only trying to reverse this trend – that instead of treating men and women as equals I just make the women the opposite of what fiction as done before, that in doing so she'll end up as emotionally stunted as the quietest 1890s housewife. And even more so, I worry that Cap will no be treated seriously as a character because he's a man who conquers his internal problems internally, no sword fights needed or necessary. In researching the dynamics of having a female main character, something I've done only rarely and generally badly, I stumbled across this article: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenderDynamicsIndex, a casual investigation of all common media uses of gender. The general takeaway I got from the article is that through history men have been portrayed by what they do, because men are generic and must distinguish themselves through action. Women are distinguished by what they think, which is why they are given a pass for being passive. I would warn that the site that comes from is highly addictive to anyone with an interest in literary criticism, because it is standard procedure to give such a warning before linking anyone to the wikipedia of fiction usage and perception. I think this idea is still in use in fiction and in real life. It is no longer taken as an imperative that all women must be passive, but it is still acceptable that women might be passive. In effect, it has become another in a long line of double standards against men. When the whole feminist movement got rolling we pushed the boundaries of what it was acceptable for women to do – so that girls could play with trucks and become engineers and action heroes. But nobody ever crusaded for the reverse to become true and men to be welcomed into the roles and archetypes that women had held exclusively for so long. (As far as I know) And thus does one problem lead to another and them again to society all over again. Sheesh.