Category: Lit and Utopia

Podcast Reflection

“Man that was difficult” 

–Me

For the podcast project, I was mainly the technical guy. The majority of my contributions to the group were in the form of editing together our recorded audio, editing in sound effects, and making sound effects. That’s not to say that this was all I did, though. I, as well as everyone in the group, voice acted one of the characters, as well as designed their personality. Mine was Cyrus. We also all wrote part of the script – my part was scene six (the reveal, which was later revised by Mitchell but I digress).

For audio editing I used the software called Audacity. I had previous experience with audacity due to being mildly creative in the past. I had used it to make sound effects by making a funny noise with my mouth before distorting it wildly (this was all for the sake of making sound effects for a mod for the game minecraft). I had never done a vast audio editing project before though, so this was definitely a new experience for me! It wasn’t too bad, though, due to Audacity’s good UI and intuitiveness. I think the most annoying part of audio editing was moving half the audio snippets when an earlier clip was replaced with a longer or shorter one. I eventually figured out how to do it properly, but in the beginning I was manually moving every snippet. It was fun editing things together!

I got all of the sound effects from the BBC sound library – except two. The first one was the beeping sound at the end – that was the podcast studio’s censor noise slightly edited. The second one was the police yelling sound effect. I couldn’t find any stock sound effects for it, so I simply looked up real police break-in footage and took it from there. I then isolated the yelling and plopped it into the project!

I also made the chiptune style music for the podcast – the intro/outro tune, the in between sections tune, and the adbreak tune. I made them all using a browser program called beepbox, which is very easy to use and beginner friendly. To be totally honest, I have no musical training at all, and simply messed around with the tool until the songs sounded half decent. 

I also helped in the discussion on how the world should be built – factors, group division, etc. I don;t remember exactly what I proposed or if any of my idea made it into the final project, but I did work on them. I also designed Cyrus the character. I made him a philosopher, since he is the more questioning one out of the two hosts. I also wanted to make him a bit sarcastic – being comfortable in his role as host. I also voice acted him, which wa really fun. I loved being and writing him as sarcastic and or witty, especially as he gets annoyed with the government at the end of the podcast.

Overall, I think I learned a lot in this project. I learned more about my strengths – I can edit audio pretty well, and I also enjoy voice acting. I learned that audio editing takes a while to do, as well as voice acting. I gained a lot of insight into these two industries. I also, for the first time, enjoyed working in a group. I usually don’t, but my groupmates were very helpful and enthusiastic! The project made me dislike group projects less, I’d say.

1984

“Who controls the past controls the future”

– George Orwell

On a first read-through of 1984, one might be annoyed or confused at the ending. “What’s the point if Winston loses, after an entire book of resistance” you might ask. Well, I believe that Winston’s loss is integral in the point that Orwell is trying to make – which is best embodied through the quote: “Who controls the past controls the future…”

A central tenet of the story of 1984 is the “mutability of the past.”  The party views the past and the present as existing only in the mind – leading to the conclusion that reality can be whatever the party wants, as long as they can control memory. Thus, comes the latter part of the quote.With the absolute control of the present, the party dictates what has happened. If nothing is real outside the mind, then it is easier to rationalize anything as existing (helping to justify doublethink for instance). Next, comes the first part of the quote. With the malleability of events, the party gains their control – if all events are malleable, then they can say or do anything, thus leading to their absolute power and forever control.

Language is also an important facet of all of this. With the control over the present, language can be altered – any ideas can be changed, added, or removed. With no room for creative ideas, the spark of revolution or rebellion fails to start a fire. The past is also controlled intrinsically from this – as the removal of words is the removal of their linguistic history and evolution.

Now, here is where Winston comes in. The point of 1984 isn’t to be a normal, satisfying narrative. It may be to some, but that isn’t Orwell’s main point. What he’s trying to do is to give us a warning; the book is an espousal of his opinions on authoritarianism, and its end products. Winston’s position at the end of the book is a result of this espousal of ideology. He is necessary for the point to come across better. I believe that Winston is at his core a sort of representation of how we think we’d react in an authoritarian dictatorship. We think that we’d be immune, perhaps be rebellious and such, but in the end, propaganda and tactics of torture and convincing are always effective. Even without this consideration, Winston’s downfall is still necessary overall. In order for the point of the story – that the tactics of authoritarianism are effective – that Orwell specifically’s idea of authoritarianism is effective and evil, Winston needs to fail. If he didn’t, then we might think, “Oh this evil government are wussies, with ineffective tactics,” when in reality, they are far from that. He wants to get his point across, because what he writes about isn’t totally fictional. Authoritarian governments exist, take Russia, or some countries in the Middle East, or according to some even America is going down a terrible path. For crying out loud, we have screens with built-in speakers which we carry wherever we go, and that’s even worse than anything in 1984 that Orwell could think of! We have all the devices in place that Orwell warned of in 1984, so now is a time more than ever to be wary, and to take the book seriously, and not just as a work of fiction.

The Giver

“If he had stayed, he would have starved in other ways. He would have lived a life hungry for feelings, for color, for love.”

– Lois Lowry

The Giver’s ending is iconic. It is a classic that a lot of people read in 6th, perhaps 7th grade, and one of the questions that your teacher likely asked you is whether you thought that Jonas survived his escape from the community. Was his final ride down the snowy hill into a warm village filled with music real, or a vision which arose from his freezing brain succumbing to the elements. This ambiguity was unfortunately dispelled by the existence of a sequel with Jonas in it, but for this discussion I will focus on only The Giver in isolation. It is in my opinion that it thematically makes sense for Jonas to have died at the end of the book.

Jonas’ journey into the wilderness includes a major characteristic which is relevant for this discussion: hunger. This real, material hunger stands in comparison to the hunger described in this article’s quote – that being a metaphorical hunger for the memory of “feelings, for color, for love.” I would even say that the physical hunger is a representation of the emotional hunger that he feels at this moment. All the memories of his time as the receiver are being stripped of him as he ventures farther and farther away from the community, and he simultaneously has less and less food, thus becoming even more physically starved. 

What he is doing parallels the action of The Giver onto Jonas throughout the book – except that this time, it’s all ending with a bang. The people of the community are, at least in a metaphorical sense, “starving.” They have no memory, no color, no feelings. They are in a way “dead” from this hunger. In his final actions, paralleling The Giver’s role, he transfers the memories of his year of being a receiver to the people of the community, so that they won’t be stuck forever dead, forever starving. The thing is, that as a result of this, Jonas will no longer have the memories. He will have husks of them – remnants of once they once were, as evidenced by The Giver’s conversation about memories earlier in the book. Thus, he will once again be starving. Considering that the result of starvation is death, it makes sense that the obvious conclusion to Jonas’ story would be his heroic death. 

One might ask: “How do you explain the sled and the lights and the village? If they aren’t real, then he shouldn’t be able to remember them and form a hallucination of them” Well, here I argue that it is simply the husks of memories resurfacing. Earlier in the book, The Giver explained that  “[He] will. I am left with a vague wisp of that one.” There is still something left of memories after transfer, and the remnants might just be being brought back up subconsciously. It could also be that the memories simply aren’t gone yet. There isn’t a concrete memory loss range defined anywhere in the book, so he might simply be holding onto one of his earliest memories and that of love and holidays. Him hearing music also doesn’t really make sense. Earlier in the book, the giver describes his extra sense awakening as “It was different. For me, it was hearing-beyond,” in reference specifically to hearing music. He also says that “[He’ll] give you some before I go,” implying that Jonas has never heard music or had a memory of it shared with him by The Giver, and that some sort of sensory field blocked it, as with color. Jonas would have never been able to recognize music at the end of the book, which I believe implies that his brain just made up what it thought music was. Everything about the ending can be explained as a hallucination, and as such, Jonas died.

“You’re an orogene who’s been living in the little nothing town of Tirimo

for ten years. Only three people here know what you are, and two of them you

gave birth to.”

– N. K. Jemisin

The N. K. Jemisin novel The Fifth Season has a rather unique world – one filled with stone, tectonics, and geology related names for everything (“go the rust away”). In this journal, I want to focus on how Jemisin uses specific writing techniques that build this world naturally and in an interesting manor. More specifically, it will be about how the work’s smart structuring enriches the story’s worldbuilding aspects of language and setting. 

Diving into the quote, what I find the most interesting about Jemisin’s style of writing is that she doesn’t just tell you what something is. The word pops up, like the term “orogene” for instance in one of the book’s first lines. At first, you don’t understand what the word means, but slowly, through obvious context clues, its meaning is revealed naturally. Soon, you’’ come across the text: “ so you put something in its way—a breakwater of sorts, composed of your focused will and a bit of kinetic energy borrowed from the thing itself.” Nothing is explicitly stated when the concept of the orogenes are introduced about what they do – until after the reader is allowed to piece things together for themselves. Later parts of the book more directly confirm what the orogenes are, which might be considered a sort of safety net in case a few people haven’t figured out how the fictional subject works. Another example would be the guardians – they are introduced early in the story, when Damaya is being taken away. We are given a vague line about them being warriors, assassins, etc. but we do not have any specifics on the guardians until later in the book.

This doesn’t only apply to fictional story terms, though. It can also be applied to general knowledge about characters and plot, such as in this quote: “Only three people here know what you are, and two of them you gave birth to. Well. One left who knows, now.” We don’t know who this one other person is yet, and we are left to wonder. Could it be Essun’s husband, or someone else? It is to be noted that this has much less of the “piecing things together on your own” aspect than how the story handles in-universe terms. This is more of a “not giving information at first, but then revealing it,” as it is later specifically mentioned that Lerna is the other one who knows her secret. Nevertheless, it has a similar effect. It gives off an air of mystery, which the book then resolves in a satisfying way, leading to more reader engagement. 

These methods simultaneously create an air of mystery and clarity. They both help to engage the reader critically, treating them competently, while also dishing out worldbuilding elements in a way that is digestible and exciting. I believe that this is because Jemisin’s writing methods are the epitome of the age old saying “show don’t tell.” By letting things play out naturally, as they would happen in the created world, the fictional concepts are laid in clear view and are easily understood by the audience. 

— Jorge Luis Borges

The library of babel is a universe which consists entirely of a seemingly never ending library, neatly divided into hexagons, which each have 4 shelves of 5 rows of 32 books and so on. Each book contains a jumble of 25 characters arranged randomly. Despite this seemingly infinite amount of gibberish, books with meaningful combinations of words are found in the library.  For example, there is the book with “two pages of homogenous lines” found by a chief. The struggle to find meaning in the infinite library of babel is similar to the human desire for a lack of suffering, to create a utopia from the many non-functional designs of an ideal society. 

The different types of people meandering through the library of babel can be compared to the different types of conceptual utopia’s that mankind has thought of. Firstly, there is the utopia of escape – a utopia in which an entirely new world is constructed, with little thought for our already existing infrastructure. The equivalent objective in the library would be the book which contains “the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest,” more specifically the person who read this book, who is now analogous with a god. These are both the results of the search for all the answers at once. It is the dream of everything being perfect without the consideration of how we will get there. In both cases, the search is utterly futile. The one in seemingly infinite books will likely never be found, and of course the perfect utopia will not come to be without a solid plan on how to get there. 

There is also the utopia of reconstruction, which is a modification of our existing societal systems, in an effort to turn it into the perfect society. This attempt at paradise is similar to the library’s residents who search for vindications – books which prophecy a person’s future and perhaps fortune. The desire for these two things is similar in that both want to work off of what was originally given to achieve something greater. Society wishes to advance into a better state, and so does the person. They both want a recipe to this success, whether it be a description of how society was changed for the better, or whether it be a book of prophecy. 

The general desire for utopia and the search for some form of coherence in the ever-going hallways of the library of babel are similar in that they are both a search for a needle in a haystack. In the library, you are searching through shelf after shelf of gibberish, hoping to come across the one book which will enlighten you, vindicate your future, or perhaps solve the secret of the library. The search for a viable form of utopia can also be likened to sorting through gibberish. One must discard all the ideologies and plans which are “gibberish” and which won’t work, in search of the one that you think will. But how does one know which plan will work? It is the same conundrum in the library of babel! The one book which seems to be gibberish, which you can’t understand, might in some way be the key to deciphering another text, which might finally lay the path to the searcher’s goal. We don’t know what ideology or path will lead us to utopia, and that is what keeps us from it.

“Running parallel to the utopian literary genre is that of the ideal city. In the former, the social arrangement appears to be of primary concern and the urban of secondary; in the latter, this is usually reversed.” 

– Ruth Eaton

The history of designing the idealistic, utopian city is a long and turbulent one. While the idea of a utopia usually stays in the theoretical, the idea of the perfect city sits on the precipice between fiction and reality, and has often crossed that border. While the utopia seeks to redesign society in its entirety, the ideal city seeks to fix the flaws of the old cities by fitting in with the world that has changed since the last city was constructed. Artists saw the waning social structures and physical structures of the past, and recognized an opportunity to demonstrate their newfound individuality with the designing of cities of the future.

One of the main factors of these cities’ “idealness” was their perceived perfection. They were often designed to be massive grids, or radiating out in a circle from a central point. Perfection was in the aesthetic. What wasn’t in perfection, though, was anything else. What made these cities better than the old ones? The example that the text gives is da Vinci’s (valid) concern of disorderliness and disease prevalent in the old cities, which the designs of the new cities seem to solve via orderliness and less compact conditions. Other than that, there seems to be no obvious benefit. 

Another problem with the idea of the ideal city lies in the very problem that caused these cities to be dreamed of in the first place – human change. Artists designed the cities of the future in response to the changing political, social and cultural climate of the era. By the time you’ve finished constructing the idealized city, a lot will have changed already. One generation down might have ideals similar to those of the designing generation, but once we get to two or three generations down the culture will have completely shifted. Take the United State’s car culture, for instance. With the advent of car-centric cities in the 1920s and 30s, an entire generation was raised with a certain type of designed city as the norm. Skip ahead a few generations, and people realize that walkable, human based cities are also a viable option, and some people prefer those. If anti-car-centric city sentiment ever grew to a level at which it would be recognized by politicians, what could even be done? The entire country of the United States is built on the idea of car-centric infrastructure. It would require an inconceivable amount of money to even begin to dig up the deeply ingrained city designs of the past.

It is this which is the fatal flaw of the ideal city – its immutability. If you champion an idea as the ideal, the best, an idea which is the most suitable for humanity at the moment, people will want to adopt that idea. That is what the ideal city’s artist wants as well – Thomas More had fifty-four of his cities. Since the idea is popular, it will be widespread, and something which is widespread tends to be resistant to change. The artist of the ideal city has unfortunately become the victim of the very thing that they wanted to account for – human change and progress.