John Carey: The Intellectuals and the Masses

After making many notes, I thought I would add them on here. They are jsut points from the book that I found interesting and that give the overall theme of the book. The theme being that the rich intellectuals are trying to stop the poor masses gain any knowledge and better themselves. Seb rightly pointed out that the intellectuals were probably afraid of the masses bettering themselves and as a result tried and did stop this. They did this by making literature harder to read. This meant that the masses wouldn't be able to read it, get better jobs or earn more money. Here's the run down:

The different themes throughout the book:
The revolt of the masses,
Rewriting the masses,
The suburbs and the clerks,
Natural aristocrats.

-“The purpose of modernist writing, it suggests, was to exclude these newly educated (or semi-educated) readers and so to preserve the intellectual’s seclusion from the mass.”
-“Modernist literature and art can be seen as a hostile reaction to the un-precedently large reading public created by the C19th educational reforms.”
-Spanish philosopher, Jose Orteg Y Gasset – the revolt of the masses. Root of their worries was the population explosion from 1800 to 1914 from 180 to 460 million.
-3 Consequences to the explosion of population. 1. Overcrowding, doctors, cafes, beaches, waiting rooms etc. 2. Intrusion, the crowd takes possession of places that were designed for the best people. 3. The dictatorship of the masses.
-H.G.Wells said that the explosion of the new births was “the essential disaster to the C19th.”
-Nietzsche agrees with Ortega and says that many too many are born and Zarathustra declares, “they hang on to their branches much too long.”
-“The difference between the C19th mob and the C20th mass is literacy”. This was after they bought in the educational legislation which introduced universal elementary education.
-The mass is a metaphor for the unknowable and the invisible. It denies them individuality which we ascribe ourselves and the people we know.
-Tinned Salmon is repeatedly a feature in lower class cuisine.
-George Orwell says that tinned food destroyed the health of the British people.
-In Ortega's view, a mass man is that he is un-ambitious and common. The aim of all of his writings was to segregate the intellectuals from the masses and to acquire control over them with that that language gives. Pg 23
-Nietzsche's idea of mass is a large herd of animals.
-Virginia Wolf, Nietzsche, William Inge, T.S.Eliot all think that they should eliminate the humanity of the masses and degrade them in to weeds, a rabble, a shapeless jelly of human stuff, occasionally wobbling this way or that.
-Hitler refers to Jews as a bacterial disease.
-According to Le Bon, crowds are mentally inferior and intent on destruction. As soon as a man joins a crowd he automatically drops a few rungs on the ladder.
-Trotter thinks that there are many different sorts of herds/masses. Some are good like bees and others are bad like wolves. He thinks that the Germans are a bad mass and that they need a good thrashing.
-Kodak, invented by George Eastmen in New York in 1888 bought photography with the reach of every human being.
-Forster travelled from Japan to England to Italy to India and took note of the lower classes and found India the most colourful.
-Writers made the poorer side of the mass, cosmetically ugly. No teeth, begging, bulging etc
-Graham Greene did not feel sorry for the workers/unemployed as when the great Strike happened he sided opposite the workers and got a job beating them. He remarked on it being like rugger at school.
-George Orwell noticed the caste system when he was about 6. His parents did not allow him to play with the ‘common’ children. He does not blame his family for this as it is normal middle class snobbishness but the lower class ceased to be ‘a race of friendly and wonderful human beings’ and became enemies – ‘almost subhuman’ and ‘brutal’. Pg 40
-Indoctrination on young children of the caste system and who should and should not be friends with. Who are humans and who are not.
-Somerset Maugham says that it is not the lower class fault of their smelling sweat, they do not have bathrooms.
-Orwell renamed the masses the Proles and said that they live in dirt, among rats and bed bugs. Pg 43 They are also ignorant, stupid and gullible.
-The Frankfurt theorists, not Benjamin, shared the view that mass culture and the mass media, as developed under capitalism, had degraded civilization in the C20. They blamed radio, cinema, newspapers and cheap books for the ‘disappearance of the inner life’.
-They also believe that if the mass turned in to individuals and fought the bourgeoisie life would be better. However they won’t and O’Briens warns Winston: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever”.
-There was an increase in people moving to suburban areas and commuting to the big cities as it was cheaper. People did however not like the eating up of the countryside around London and such places. Pg 46
-People did not like the rows and rows of housing. Nietzsche commented on it as a child taking them out of his toy box.
-Nice middle class homes surrounded by meadows now occupied terraced houses on every bit of green land.
-The masses caused irreparable damage with their cheap housing taking up the countryside. Another reason for upper classes to not like the poorer ones. Pg 49
-The speed of it too. A couple of decades and everything’s gone.
-This made writers head to other places to write. Pg 50 They did this to escape ugly Britain but tourist destinations were being made just as ugly.
-Greene thought that because of the cremation act the masses had turned even death in to a conveyor belt level. Pg 51
-Writers had different opinions on what suburbia was like. Pg 52
-Northcliffe Daily Mail aiming it at Clerks with the cycle column, tit bits and answers, pg 58
-George Bernard Shaw and Nietzsche strive for the overman, the ubermensch .

-Adam and eve mentioned briefly on pg 67
-Nietzsche says that men are not equal. The mistaken belief that they are is to blame for the degeneracy of Europe. The truly noble man is egotistic. He despises pity, which is unhealthy and us valued only by slaves. The warrior is the type of the finest man. Pg 72
-Pg 80 If society wants to be civilized it must establish conditions favourable to the preservation of the gifted few.
-Pg 82 Iany theory of natural aristocracy must attribute the aristocrats superiority either to intrinsic qualities, (secret knowledge, better artistic taste, superior vitality, etc) or to some kind of supernatural selection.
-He saves his maximum invective for last – and unleashes it on Wyndham Lewis, whose views he argues are not dissimilar to those of Adolf Hitler. And just in case we misunderstand, he points out that this is not simply crude anti-semitism and a hatred for jazz music and Negroes, but that Hitler, like the other intellectuals of modernism, believed in an intellectual hierarchy, in great art which was produced by special individuals endowed with quasi-religious insights (rather like God, in fact) and that none of this was accessible to the masses. The implication however was that it was accessible to the people making these judgments – such as Clive Bell up on his cold white peaks.

I hope that proves useful to anyone wanting a simple explanation of John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses.

Critical Evaluation of Winol - 17th November

I loved Winol this week. This week everyone reproduced their packages, making them better. This meant that there were no new news stories. We produced four or five bulletins with everybody swapping and learning roles in the Studio and Gallery for each one. However we did produce a documentary style bulletin of the student demo of last week. It is really great to watch so head over to winol.co.uk if you want to watch.

I have already learnt how to do the script, auto cue and the VT's but this week I learnt how to present, vision mix and PA. Look out for a blog soon on 'how to' do all of these different parts of production. I've always said that I do not want to be in front of the camera and that I would be no good at it because I do not think that my voice is very good. I was pleasently surprised, however that I loved it. I was relaxed and laid back and the auto cue wasnt half as hard as I thought it would be to read. I defintely think that everyone should give it a go.

Vision mixing was a bit harder than the rest as I had to pay attention to when the VT were coming on and what camera we were going to next but I loved doing this too. I do not think that when I did it there were any black holes but I did realise that I needed to press the green screen button a second quicker than the button for camera 2 as they were coming up a bit weirdly.

I have always dreaded doing PA as I'm not that great with numbers. As in if a package is 1.13 I find it a little hard to get half way etc. However, you guessed it, I enjoyed this too. It was not as hard as I thought it would be to coutn and I got them all correct with the help of the stop watch on my phone; who knew that was one there. The package timings wern't correct for a few of the packages though and this meant that when I told Charlotte, the director, to count down she was about 5 seconds late. This can be corrected if the timings were perfect and the people doing packages left some time at the end so it did not go to a black hole.

Overall though I really enjoyed Winol this week and can't wait to get back in to the Studio next week.

Win With Winol - My First Time Presenting

This week I did a range of roles for the bulletin throughout the course of the day but to begin with I presented 'Win With Winol.' I've never really watched myself on camera before and was pleasently shocked when I first watched it. I do not look awful; which was a start but I do think I sound rather nasaly. This may due to an oncoming cold but I shall look out for it in future and try to master a better television/radio voice. However, for my first time on camera I think I did quite well. Watch me below, I'm just after Kayleigh presenting, 'What's on in Winchester'.

Critical Evaluation of Winol - 10th November

This week did not go to plan as we had hoped. It was the student demo where over 40,000 students went to London to protest against the rise in tuition fees. We decided that it would be amazing if we could get a reporter down there and report it live on to Winol about what was happening and get live footage. We would then fill the rest of the bulletin with the regular news stories and sport.

I was on script this week. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would but it was also more hard work than I first thought. The script relies on every other person getting their timings, in and out words and link in to the person doing the script by their deadline in order for the script to be written and printed out for the presenter and production team on time. Relying on many other people is automatically hard and with just one person missing their deadline means that the script is going to miss its deadline.

Of course, on a mad day with many different problems and trying to get Skype to work, some people missed their deadlines and as a result the script was not done on time. I also found it hard as I had never worked on the script before and very few people actually knew how to work it. This meant that I only had one or two people to help me with it and they were very busy due to trying to get the Skype to work and bring the whole bulletin together. However I did enjoy working on the script and feel I now know another production tool on Winol. The last problem with the script was that just as I had printed one lot of the script we changed some points around and added more points. This meant that the script I had originally printed was useless and had to be teared up. In order to get the script on to the auto cue it has to be copied in to Microsoft Word and then put on to a memory stick to be put on to the laptop for the auto cue. This had to be changed and rearranged then put back on to the auto cue after I had made the changes. Did I mention that this was all happening at about 10 minutes until we were about to go live.

Luckily I got the scripts printed, put in to the right order, put it on to the auto cue and ready to go just in time. I loved that I had got it all done and that it was correct however I know that it should have been done at least two hours before we were due to go live. This week we are trying to put the script together on the Tuesday so that everyone has a copy and is ready to go Wednesday morning. This means that there is one less problem to deal with on the day of the bulletin. I worked on the auto cue again this week and now feel I can fully work the system and will be able to deal with any problems arising with it.

Another problem this week was that when it came to recording the show Skype was not working. When Jake said, "over to Andy in London," the program did not work and Andy didn't come up. I think we tried this about four or five times, only once did he come on to the screen but even then he did not know he was live and as a result did not speak and did not answer any questions. This meant that the whole set up for the London demo was wasted for this bulletin. Jake did really well improvising and ad-libbing when Andy did not come up on screen though and I think this shows that Jake is a really good presenter. This week however, the filming of the London demo has not gone to waste as most of the bulletin is being allotted to the video footage we have of the riots.

Lastly, all of these problems, everything being down to the wire and nobody really knowing what was happening was made worse as it all happened when we had our guest editor in, head of training at SKY, Rob Kirk. Luckily he has visited Winol before and knows what we are capable of but was not very happy with what he saw. He noticed that our main problem was organisation and that if we were a lot more organised and everyones deadlines were not only met, but that the deadline was hours earlier then our bulletin should go on without any problems. If there are problems then we have plenty of time to sort them out.

This is what we have tried to accomplish this week. We are doing the script a day early and everyones packages are of previous bulletins so they just need to re-edit them and hand them in. These look very promising to be done in time too. We are also having five bulletins this Wednesday, starting at 9am. This means that by the fifth bulletin everything should be PERFECT and go on with no problems. With a de-brief after every bulletin we should be able to see what is wrong and correct it by the next bulletin. We are also rotating on all the different roles of production for each bulletin so by the end of the day, everyone should understand and know what each role entails.

This week, I am writing off as one bad week and look forward to getting back on track for the next bulletin.

I Got a Pocket Full of Sunshine...

Now we're in November, the sunlight is only appearing for a couple of hours, on good days and getting out of bed in the morning is proving harder and harder; here's something to make you smile...

Critical Evaluation of Winol - 3rd November

This week the newsroom had mixed emotions, it was very stressful this week with the bulletin changing stories right up until the last minute but was also very apprehensive. We had Chesney Hawkes, singer of 'One and Only', in for an interview. Because he had limited time everyone was rushing about and it did put added stress on people.

I worked on the auto cue again this week and feel I have now got the hang of this. I put the headlines and links on to the auto cue, which I hadn't done before and it went well. However there were many problems with it this week. To begin with the writing was back to front, and upside down. After trying to carry on and have a couple of run through's with Jake Gable, the presenter I found it nearly impossible to do. I couldn't move the writing to the correct place as I couldn't read where he was at. After sorting this problem out it then decided that it would freeze and not roll through. Next the arrow needed putting in the correct place as when the writing was in line with the arrow the presenter could not read it. Lastly, after reading through it a couple of times I noticed that the bulletins were in twice and one lot needed deleting, as well as last minute alterations on Kayleighs 'what's on' piece. After all that though, the auto cue worked out well and there were no problems whilst filming.

The news bulletin went well the first time but we then filmed another one where we corrected the fact that it was Aimee's voice for the scores and not Karens. This was easily mended with Jake simply saying, "thanks for that", instead of "thanks for that Karen."

I thought that all of the news stories went well and thought that we did really well with swapping round the headlines and link order after we could not put up Andy's piece because of technical problems. Luckily Joey had a great headline link and VT piece to replace Andy's at the last minute.

I thought the sports was quite good and different too as Karen was presenting from a football ground. This made it easier for everyone, having sports pre-recorded and added something different to the weeks bulletin.

The interview with Chesney Hawkes was ok but Kayleigh was very nervous and it came across in the first take but she did much better the second time. I know that I'll definitely be as nervous, if not more nervous if I had to present, let alone interview a celebrity . Overall I think this week went well and was a lot different to our normal bulletin.

James Joyce, Ulysses - Circe

Chapter 15 of James Joyce's Ulysses is a pretty strange bit of reading. It is the largest chapter in the book but has the smallest time scale in which everything happens in. It is also written like a play with stage directions. This makes it even harder to understand, especially when Bloom and Stephen hallucinate, it is hard to tell when this is happening. Joyce also said that he wants people to be talking about it and to never really understand it. I have looked over a few different websites to get a deeper in look as, whilst reading I found it hard to understand what was going on. I hope to give a quick and simple over view of what happens in this chapter.

The majority of what happens is in the form of hallucinations from Stephen or Bloom. However all of Blooms hallucinations happen in a couple of seconds in 'real time' and his hallucinations don't affect him in any way whereas Stephen has an apparition of his dead mother which is in real time and affects him in a hard and difficult way.

Blooms hallucinations focus on sexual guilt and have a persecutory tone or have elements of wish involvement. Such as his hallucination with Josie Breen, a woman that has a history of flirting with Bloom.

Stephens hallucinations focus on elements of his day and of Blooms day too. This makes it hard to understand who is having which hallucination. Both their hallucinations also have parts of each others day in, which they wouldn't already know about. This means that the hallucinations are emanating from the characters and from the novel itself.

Throughout the whole chapter Bloom is trying to look after Stephen, from following him to Nighttown, to the Brothel, to looking after his money and giving him back the extra he put down to following him out of the Brothel and trying to calm down the situation he creates with the British Army Private. I felt bad for Stephen in this part as he is obviously letting out some anger he wouldn't normally if he wasn't drunk. The British Private could also be a symbol of England looking and beating down Ireland. This was a time in history that Ireland wanted to get out of Englands grasp so this may be a symbol of that in the book.

Stephen also names Lynch, "Judas," for leaving him when he gets knocked out. Stephen has many people leave him and this may have been the reason for naming him Judas. His mother died less than a year ago, resulting in his feeling of being abandoned by people but this chapter does bring Bloom and Stephen closer as friends. I think that this helps Stephen, Bloom is a constant friend and looks after Stephen throughout this chapter and I think that that is what Stephen needs, especially after his appartition of his dead mum.

The scene in which Stephen has an apparition of his mum is one of the most important scenes in the chapter. In this scene we are shown how Stephen feels and now his friends know too, as well as Bellas prostitutes. This scene deals with Stephen feeling guilty for not following Christianity any more. He knows that his mum thinks he is going to Hell if he doesn't follow the religion but he says that he would rather go to Hell than live by someone elses (Gods) rules.

When Bloom is stood over Stephens body it is very symbolic of a father and son. This then leads to Bloom hallucinating about his dead son, Rudy. This then also has the tone of wish fulfillment for Bloom. This theme of wish fulfillment runs throughout the whole chapter. That is what Bloom mostly hallucinates about. His wishes coming true and allowing him to lead another life next to his reality. A life that he would want, his son back and some flirting with an old flame.

Sources:

My own reading of Ulysees and Seminar discussions

www.sparknotes.com

A Dollar a Day Dressing

I am an avid shopper, I love to shop, I love new shops, I love bargains. Yes it is true, I do love a great bargain. The kind of bargain where the dress I've been eyeing for a week or two has a fiver off, not the Primark bargain. I know many, many people love Primark and I often love someones outfit and when asked where they got it, they reply, "it's from Primark, the whole outfit, fifteen pounds." I am not one of those girls that can walk in to Primark with ten pounds in my pocket and walk out, purse lighter with an entire outfit that looks amazing. The most I ever really manage is socks or a tee. This is frustrating, having never enough money for my favorite stores, (being a student in all) like River Island, New Look and Republic.

However, myself and girls alike fear the credit card bill no more, I have found a blog by a fellow shopper that has given herself a task. A task of 365 days, 365 outfits on $365. Her name is, Marisa Lynch and she is a fellow blogger with a purpose in mind. After watching Julie and Julia, a true story which has been made in to a film. It tracks the year of Julie Powell, a women that has decided to set herself a challenge of working through Julia Child's cookbook. Making one of her recipes and blogging about it every day. After watching this, Marisa decided to get her own creative juices flowing and giving herself her own challenge or re-inventing a dress a day. Saving old clothes from thrift stores and snipping, hemming and dyeing them in to the fashion of today.

After visiting her blog, I have been inspired myself and am going to voluntarily walk in to my nearest Oxfam to see what I can find to re-invent this weekend. This will be a different sort of shopping but I look forward to my own challenge; 1 dress, 1 weekend, god knows how many pounds.

Visit Marisa's blog yourself, www.newdressaday.com

Sigmund Freud, Enough Said.

Sigmund Freud was a lovely Austrian fellow that is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind. In this blog I hope to make this a little more clear and explain his theories as best as I can.

He was nominated for a Nobel prize three times, one for literature and twice for medicine; however he never actually won one. He was seen as a sexual renegade which meant that society did not like his ideas and theories. His theories on sex made them out to be animals and not the noble creatures they like to think of themselves of.

Freud saw sex as a central motivational factor to our own actions. For example phallic symbols are all around us: fruit, buildings, stationary and glasses all can represent the male genitalia. Freud believes that these are all made by the subconscious to look like the penis.

Penis Envy. This is what women have towards there fathers. Girls believe that they do not have penis because they have been castrated for being naughty. Thus making them love and adore their fathers for having a penis and not loving their mothers as much because they have been naughty and have been castrated.

Oedipal Complex. This is when boys want to have sex with their mother. They want to kill their father and make love to their mother. However they realise that their fathers are a lot stronger and that if they try to kill them and loose they will be castrated and not have a penis anymore.

Freud thought of 'self love' as a race, was a barrier to science in three ways:
1. It has stopped us accepting that the Earth was not the centre of the universe.
2. Darwin's theory of evolution.
3. The conscious brain was not in charge.
This was the key the Freud, the unconscious, this has been his legacy. We were becoming more clever and understanding more things but Freud said that the mind is divided in to three main parts which are conflict. These three main parts were:
1. The ID - the unconscious. This part is active from birth, it is the animal part, the instincts and operates on the pleasure principle. The animal part, that just wants to have fun and loves symbols as it can not talk. It acts like a child and just wants to do whatever is going to pleasure he body.
2.Ego - the self, the conscious, the person, what we are aware of at present. Reality principle, how to satisfy pleasures of origin of consciousness.
3. Superego - internalised rules of parents or society. It is the policeman in your head, always trying to keep the ID under control. When you sleep the superego sleeps and so the ID is let loose to think and d what it wants, thus your dreams.

Freud believed that there were five stages of development and that if any of these stages were not completed successfully the person would never act correctly with that part of the stage.
1. Oral - mouth, premature weaning could lead to problems of eating too much or too little, smoking, sucking on pens etc
2. Anal - toilet training, if this stage isn't completed properly they may be compulsive, clean or stingy.
3. Phallic Phase - obsesses with penis of there lack of. Women need for domination and the Oedipus complex.
4.Latency - sexuality and sex isn't important.
5. Genitals- puberty, after this you are obsessed.

The battle between your Ego, Superego and ID can result in repression (censorship) and defense mechanisms. Such as:
- Sublimination - turning sexual energy in to something elsse, (art, sport.)
- Displacement - shameful thoughts, turn them in to something else/someone else.
- Projection - send feelings on to someone else.
- Rationalisation - more socially acceptable explanation.
- Regression - returning to earlier stage of development.

The key to psychoanalysis is that you are hiding something from yourself. Freud claimed that he had a way to deal directly with the unconscious, the ID. Freud believed that everyone was hiding something from themselves. His way to uncover the secret within the person was to get them to talk to him about everything and he would then find a direction with what you were talking about and uncover the secret from that. For example, if you were talking about an argument with your father, Freud may say that A. (if you are a girl) you had penis envy and you wanted your father to love you more, or B. (if you are a boy) that you want to have sex with your mother and that you wanted to kill your father but to not fail and let him castrate you. Freud also believed that dreams were the, 'royal road to the unconscious'.

He also said that the group (society) "wants to be dominated", and that there is a fear that no one is in charge now that "God is Dead." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Freud believed that civilization was there to control people and that groups gave up their sexual feelings to their leader and aggressive feelings are unleashed on the people outside the group.

Against Freud:
-Falsibility, proper scientific predictions could be proven wrong but Freud was so vague that it couldn't be tested. This was also the reason for him not winning the Nobel prize. There is also no proof that psychoanalysis actually works.