In Jim Powell's Postmodernism for Beginners, he says "To attempt to represent Auschwitz in language--to reduce the degradation, death and stench to a concept--drowns out the screams.  According to Lyotard, it is therefore necessary that the Holocaust remains immemorial--that it remains that which cannot be remembered--but also that which cannot be forgotten.  Thus, any art attempting to represent the Holocaust should continue to haunt us with its inability to represent the unrepresentable, to say the unsayable.  It should continue to haunt us with the feeling that there is something Other than representation."  This brings to light a very important question: How can we talk about heavy, heavy topics like the holocaust without belittling the magnitude of the horror?  Is it through, art?  Literature?  Music?!??  Personal relationships?!?!?!?  Art Spiegelman attempts to talk about the holocaust in his graphic novel Maus.  His use of the graphic novel provides several aspects that are able to attempt to represent the horrors of Auschwitz for better than some trashy novella.  One way he does this is through his explicit use of visual rhetoric.

some visual rhetoric

A Map is shown above, showing the logistics of a long arduous march, as well as showing the realities of discrimination put on the shoulders of countless victims by showing a large mass of people on march.  A level of verisimilitude is also shown here by including an actual map layered over a mass of suffering individuals.  Maus embellishes the piece with symbolism, motifs, character develop, and like 18 layers of "meta"

Another example of World War Two literature to Maus to is Shostakovitch's Eighth Symphony, a powerful Russian piece of music about tragedy and chaos.  It was written right after the Russian won battle of Stalingrad, the turning point in the war for Russia.  It's dissonant patterns and tortured attitude allows for pensive thematic development and rich emotional context.

For the narrative type story that Maus is, a piece of music, or even straight up literature does not do it justice.  Maus creates a level of verisimilitude and nonlinear storytelling that is simply not suited for other mediums.  The graphic novel guides the reader to impactful realizations about the supported themes while not force feeding the information to the reader.  

"They are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards."  Primo Levi, a famous holocaust survivor, once said this about the camp bands of Auschwitz.  He talks about the Nazi's systematic use of music as a propaganda tool, as well as a medium, to demoralize prisoners.  The atmosphere created by the rhythmic and provocative beats of the camp's marching music, accompanied with the melancholy realization of the grim reality of the death camp, Auschwitz, is horrifically palpable.  The camp band is talked about in Art Spiegelman's book "Maus"; Art asks his father if he remembers the camp band, Vladek says, "NO, I REMEMBER ONLY MARCHING, NOT ANY  ORCHESTRAS..." (Spiegelman, 54)  The systematic use of music has made Vladek numb, the atrocities of Auschwitz have disassociated him from even music, leaving him a hollow, hollow, carcass of a man.  An image of the band is shown, and then shown again with a mass of worker prisoners walking in front of the orchestra covering them like a really uncomfortable blanket.  Art draws this to show how everything but the primitive necessities to survival dimmed to just senseless background noise mixing in and out of the confusion under the mortifying conditions of auschwitz.

"What the hell is water?" (Wallace, 232)  It's a question posed by two fish and it really captures the melancholy lifestyle where we dully just go through the steps of our lives, but i think it also relate's to feminism, or rather the opposition of feminism.  Over the week, as i quietly have eaten my lunch trying to keep to myself, there has been a group of boys who've since the beginning of the school year talked about their outrage over feminism.  You can probably imagine some of the things they've said, and other things i don't think i couldn't have even imagined.  I think a lot of the angst of anti-feminist individuals comes from backlash to, what they think is, a movement which makes them the enemy.  A lot of this also comes from not being educated on what feminism actually is, which Bell Hooks defines as, "a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression." (Hooks, 1)  However, a lack of education is no excuse for enforcing prejudices against, and the oppression of half the world's population.  There's a tendency to judge and stereotype people whenever it makes life simpler, and it's a poison that plagues the patriarchy.  It's the fuel behind jingoism, and institutional racism, and sexism on a national level.  As a society were slow and lethargic to making social changes, but i think it kind of starts on a local level and spreads out and expands from there.  I don't think I can say where we'll be in like 40 years from now, i don't think anyone can say for sure, but hopefully it won't be a place where people still will have to protest to be treated like people.

On Our Monotonous Lives

In David Foster Wallace's speech at Kenyon University, he mentions the mundane nothingness that is the adult workforce, describing it as "day in, and day out" (Wallace, 234).  This brought to mind our lives as Juniors, or specifically, my life as a Junior.  It got me thinking, what do i really do, like with my precious, and very limited time.  I try to use my time wisely, but who can say how much long I stare off blankly into the luminescent screen of my phone, or just blatantly do nothing.  It's a problem that plagues the human race as a whole, it's what truly blocks us from our dreams, and prepares us for a mundane 9-5 job and a lackluster family life.

(Pictured above: hopefully not me in 10 years)

I think there's a sort of mentality that's been embedded into our minds from a very young age.  We're told to follow our dreams, that we are truly capable of anything if we just worked hard enough.  But somewhere along the line that mentality's gotten distorted, to you can do anything you want that pays over $X a year, and you can't go to music school, and you can't be a zoologist, and you can't, blah blah blah.  I was talking to a friend once, it was about what we really, actually wanted to be, not the bullshit jobs our parents wanted us to have.  We talked for maybe 15 long and thoughtful minutes, i think i finished the conversation saying something about the difficulties of being a professional musician is, and the likelihood of me living out of a box somewhere on the streets.  And he said something like, "Yeah, that's a problem with a lot of youth nowadays, people are unrealistic with their dreams and end up ruining themselves."  It's not like he was wrong, our capitalistic society is fueled by crushing the dreams of the individual, turning them into our doctors, garbage collectors, and bus boys.  But I'm not sure how far that mentality can really take you.  The pressure I think that most influences my career is my terror of dying, 72 years old, at a desk, and being bald, at a desk.      "[Taking] risks is  jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down" (Ray Bradbury)