Gantt Chart for Professional skills

Link to Gantt chart

Post 13

Whew. It has been an interesting semester for me. Some of the things in this course are not new to me as a writer, such as voice, use of details, and sentence structure, but other elements of this course were very challenging. I jumped back into a full course load after being away from school for a decade, and there were many adjustments that needed to be made to my personal time management strategies.  There were some things that are new to me in this course, namely the whole analysis of literature paradigm, and I have never considered doing formal analysis of a book before. I usually read because I enjoy reading, not to manufacture a deeper meaning from literature. However learning to attempt to read beyond the words may be something that helps me in the future, perhaps if I get into politics, or switch to a legal major. Learning the conventions of the MLA style have limited application in the technical degree that I am pursuing, but I’m sure that it will turn up in other college courses before I graduate. The organizational and development strategies are something that I have struggled with the entire term, in part due to outside factors, and in part due to not being inspired by the literature selected for the later part of the course. For me, the most challenging part of this course is the attempt to add depth of meaning in a story that was not written with depth in mind. I have a hard time trying to make things more complex and convoluted than they are by design. It is in my nature and training to simplify, and make things identify on a basic nature. To try to expand a story into a thing of deeper meaning goes counter to everything that I do and work towards. There were many things that I learned in this course, and my writing will be better for it, but this class was very frustrating to me.

up in the air

Jacob Sanchez
4/20/2012
Laura Cline
English 102

Up in the Air

Any time that a book is adapted to film, there are many obstacles preventing effective transposition of the plot. The internal conflict and monologue that makes up so much of a book is very difficult to show on a television screen. In addition, the audience for a film is generally a different demographic than the book would be. The time factor is another consideration. No one will watch a sixteen hour plus film. Also, the cost of filming is always a consideration. Too many sets, too many locations, and too much money gets spent.The screenwriter and director have to make the difficult decisions, deciding what elements to change, what to leave out, and what to dispense with altogether. The Walter Kirn book, Up in the Air, and the movie by the same title, make up one such adaptation.

The book, authored by Walter Kirn, was published in 2001,  the year that Wikipedia opened the floodgates of crowd sourced knowledge(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001). In this pre-9/11 environment, Ryan Bingham, of Integrated Strategic Management, or ISM, is a mid-thirties career transition counselor. His career consists of flying hither, yon, and beyond, counseling those unfortunates whose jobs have recently left the building(Kirn, 5). The job itself recedes into the background, acting as an enabler for his personal goals, and the occasional element of external friction. Much of the story is a monologue, one man telling a story to another inveterate traveler.

Ryan lives in a different world. He calls it, “Airworld,” and it is a place where he is never alone(Kirn, 8). He is about to leave it, though, due to several factors. Bingham has a life goal. He aspires to be the tenth person to reach one million frequent flier miles on the fictional airline, “Great West.” He has a time limit, however. His boss is on vacation, and Ryan has left his resignation letter on his boss’s desk. He has six days and 8 cities to go before his supervisor returns from a fishing trip, finds it, and cancels his company credit card. The reason why Ryan is leaving is simple. He had an accident in his childhood that resulted in periodic memory loss and loss of consciousness. His symptoms have been worsening, and it is time for him to get treatment for it.

The movie, which was released in 2009, is quite a bit different. The story arc has a much greater emphasis on his work, with it beginning with him acting as a headhunter, firing a group of people. He is employed by Career Transitions Corporation, traveling to workplaces around the country, firing people. His goal in the movie is much loftier than in the book, with ten million miles being his goal. He meets a woman who becomes a casual love interest, before being called back to the main office. A new hire from the internet generation, Natalie Keener, is promoting a plan to cut costs by doing all of the firing via an interface similar to Skype. Ryan opposes her plan based on several grounds, starting with a moral objection, and ending with her inexperience in the field. His boss agrees, and sends her with him to get her sea legs, before they begin the transition. Natalie, during the field training, is very much disturbed by the whole process. During their time together, Natalie spends an inordinate amount of time questioning Bingham’s life goals, ambitions and philosophy, eventually resulting in a lasting change in his viewpoint. Eventually, he finds himself unable to deliver the motivational speech that on dropping attachments, and flies to his love interest’s house in Illinois, where he discovers that she is married and has children. once he realizes this, he leaves, and breaks his mileage goal on the way home to start training on the remote firing system. When he returns to his office, he finds out that one of the women whom Natalie had fired had jumped off of a bridge, and killed herself. His boss informed him that Natalie had quit, and that he was going to be back in the air.

The film and the book are vastly different, and nearly unrecognizable as being the same story. As Kirn stated in an interview for cinemablend.com, “...the book is to the movie, what a piece of paper is to a paper airplane.”(cinemablend.com, NP) He stated that his creative spark was evident, but that the director had taken it in a fresh direction. Of the many elements that were different from book to film, the one that stands out the most is the time, and the story being tailored to the modern audience. By adapting the film to a modern technology versus human dignity prime conflict, the movie’s director/ screenwriter made it more palatable and saleable to today’s moviegoers.

In the movie, Natalie has the brilliant idea to do all of the firing via videoconferencing. This isn’t that original, as any coder or remote salesperson can attest. Much work is done over the web, with many companies becoming decentralized, and doing more and more work from the home office(www.readwriteweb.com). With this under consideration, it makes sense to a modern audience to push the technology over the face to face.

The major paradigm shift between these two pauses in time was the shift to the internet. In 2001, when the book was written, the, "road warrior," was more common and relevant than in 2009, when the movie was made. The dotcom boom was in bloom, but not yet fully developed. To remain relevant, the writers of the film chose to use the internet as the threat, rather than a company transition. It's less nebulous, and easier to capture, as the internal monologue of the protagonist is difficult to transition to film.

http://blog.addictinggames.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/smash-computer.jpg

Reaction to "Up in the Air"

As I was reading this book, I felt vaguely uneasy, and not because of the massive Easter dinner that I had just consumed. My first thoughts went to the people that I have conversed with on long flights, and how many of them were so disconcertingly Airworld. It makes me happy that I missed that generation. The gamer generation has its own problems, but that's another line of thought. I did enjoy this particular book more than the last one, but it quickly became obvious that he was suffering from TBI complications, and had developed some serious mental health issues. The author did leave me wondering what the point of the protagonist's obsession with the 1000000 mile marker was. Then, there it was, in the very last pages. Airworld gave him a lease on life, and when his time was played out, he gave back more than he was given. Maybe it wasn't an entirely altruistic gift, but it was a magnificent gesture, nonetheless. He made it possible for other children to get treatments that they might not otherwise been able to receive. To himself, airworld had not only given life, but a vast macroview of the human condition, and a love of its many varied parts. He also proved to himself that he could reach an impossible goal, no matter what the odds, or the personal challenges that he faced. It is that confidence that will stand him in good stead as he makes the lifestyle adjustments that will be needed while he goes through his treatment and into the next phase of his life. As the saying goes, "Go big, or go home." 

Picture from: http://i.imgur.com/0YRZk.jpg

Letter to the professor; mid term

Dear Mrs. Kline,

       This course has posed some unique challenges for me personally, and has allowed me to see some perspectives I would not have normally seen. Literary analysis of the type that we are being exposed to is going to have limited use in the long term, due to the nature of my occupational choices. The challenge of transposition of data from one form of media to another pose technical challenges that I would have had to deal with eventually, which is helpful, but it also makes following course instructions challenging. As an example, a full double spaced page on the word processing application is significantly smaller in the blog, which is designed on a single spaced format. I do think that working out the technical interfacing between mediums will turn out to be the most beneficial part of the course for me. Of course, jumping into college coursework with two writing intensive courses has helped me work out some new time management techniques that will stand me in good stead on future projects. 
     The reading that we have done thus far in class haven't really exposed me to any new concepts, but I do read quite heavily, and have not been lived a sheltered life. It was hard for me to get excited by the Winter's Bone projects, as I do not enjoy the writing style employed by Woodrell, but I survived it. Literary analysis of a story that does not grip me is much more challenging than the work on Bartleby and the Swift work, which I enjoyed. One thing that has fascinated me about literary analysis is that there is no focus on truth. Instead, it is an opinion written about stories which, many times, have no deeper significance than being a good story. As the saying goes, it truly is,"much ado about nothing." This is endlessly fascinating to me, being that I generally work in fact and substance. 
     My goals for the second half of the semester are pretty simple. I want to get all of my assignments in on time, which I have had difficulty with due to other commitments. Also, I would like to improve the structure of my analysis, as I tend to write as I speak, moving fluidly from one topic to the next without transition or preamble. 

Winter's bone

Jacob Sanchez
Professor Laura Cline
English 102
March 22, 2012

Winter’s Bone: of Meth and Life

The book Winter’s Bone, by Daniel Woodrell, has many recurring themes, from the difficulty of rural life, to the transience of childhood. However, one recurring theme is the rampant use and production of methamphetamines in the small towns of the rural Ozarks. In this book, many, if not the majority, of the characters are using, cooking, distributing, or any combination of the triumvirate of the methamphetamine life cycle. As can be seen in the text, it is a cultural cycle that is very difficult to break out of, and is highly destructive both to families and to individuals.
Ree, the protagonist of the text, is repeatedly offered, and occasionally partakes of, various forms of illicit intoxicants, from so called “magic mushrooms” (Woodrell, 55) to prescription pills (Woodrell, 145), but never touches crank. It’s never stated outright, but you get the impression that she knows that it will lead her to places she doesn’t want to go. There is significant other picturization in the text of the damage that meth does to the individual, and the paranoia that is inherent in the long term use of the drug. According to Methland, by Nick Reding, the “ultimate effects are psychopathology such as intolerable depression, profound sleep and memory loss, debilitating anxiety, severe hallucinations, and acute, schizophrenic bouts of paranoia.