The Most Ballin’ Blog Ever

1. I think Berger’s use of the word “history” is significant in this essay. I believe it stands for a sort of bank of information that we use to come to conclusions about present day questions, problems, and ideas. I think we can use this to look at pictures by looking back at the history of the picture and knowing the background and the feelings that people had about that picture.

2. I dont really understand what is going on in the reading while Berger is discussing Hals’ painting. I’m not really familiar with this and I’m not sure if I understand the “mystification.”

1. I’ll have to say that I didn’t recognize any real progress of thought. It seemed like Percy gave a central idea and built around that with different examples. In the case of the tourists at the Grand Canyon the idea was to recover the beauty of the canyon and to feel what it is like to discover this great thing as if you were the first to see it. With that he gives four examples or ways to go about recovering this feeling. In the example of the student disecting a dogfish in lab or reading Shakespeare and being compared to someone who randomly stumbles upon both, he tells about how the individual who finds these things in “the wild” so to speak, will learn a great amount more than the student. Percy says that the way the information is presented to the student, in its “educational package,” make it harder to learn from it. The student is almost forced to learn what they are supposed to learn without exploring outside of the cirriculum. These examples are much different than the recovering of the Grand Canyon but the idea of discovery remains important in each circumstance.

2. The talk of loss in this essay is important and I think it’s Percy’s main point that he is trying to make. The loss of the creature does exist in the case of the Grand Canyon. There is definitely something missing when you go through the system: the tour, the cameras, the “beaten track.” But Cardenas had “it,” whatever “it” is, and thats wut made the creature his and only his. The sight of the Grand Canyon was probably so breathtaking that he would not have been able to say “I claim this for my queen” or any of those cliche things that they say in the movies. He says in the essay that we lose our sovereignty to the experts, the ones we trust to tell us if what we experienced was genuine. We sacrifice sovereignty on purpose, so that we don’t know what we want to know, giving us a sense of ignorance and dependence on those “experts.”

I really enjoyed this essay and it really “got the wheels turning” so to speak about alot of different issues.  First of all, I respect the idea that no one can learn to appreciate things after they have already been found.  A question I have on this though is now that the Grand Canyon is found and treated as a tourist attraction, will it ever have the value that it once did?  Is there any way that a tourist or visitor, who already knows the Grand Canyon is there, can “discover” it and see it as Garcia Lopez de Cardenas did?  I also like the way Percy describes the “educational package.”  It definitely explains why sometimes I just don’t get things in labs or when reading from a text book.  I had trouble reading at a couple of points in the story but especially this sentence: “Their consciousness of the corn dance cannot escape their consciousness of their consciousness, so that with the onset of the first direct enjoyment, their higher consciousness pounces and certifies…”  I’m pretty confused about that statement.  This whole essay seems to be about cliche`.  It is saying that people for example, go to the Grand Canyon not to discover it, but because a million people before them have done it and now it is unoriginal and not creative.  At one point though, when Garcia Lopez de Cardenas first found it, the canyon was extremely powerful and creative because it was his and no one elses.

This is a picture of my dorm room. I believe the way we live is a big part of the college experience. It helps us learn organization and gives a sense of the bare minimum.

This picture is from www.3dwebbooks.com. Graduation is the reason we go to college. When all is said and done and everything is over with, graduation is all that matters. It is our last step before we head into the real world.

The social scene is possibly the biggest part of the college experience. If your not out there making new friends and having a good time then you aren’t really taking in the college atmosphere.

This person is asleep in the middle of the day. The college experience is all about going to sleep when your tired. It doesn’t have to be late. If you are tired, just go to sleep.