The Last Blog

It's hard to believe that the end of the school year is already here; this post may well be the "last" on this blog about memory. Of course, I wonder if I may continue to write later on if I happen to find blog-worthy topics that might benefit from a "memory" point-of-view analysis. However, for now, I want to look back into the past and see what I have done with this website. 

You may all assume that I chose memory as my lens because I had a particular interest in neuroscience or psychology. However, the complete opposite is true. Before this year, I never believed that I wanted to study a subject related to those two disciplines, so that's why I decided to try out the topic of memory. While I dreaded not being able to find enough substantive topics to blog about throughout the year, I eventually found that a perspective of memory can essentially be superimposed onto any normal-day aspect of my life, such as photographs on Facebook or history-oriented discussions in English. 

In retrospect, I believe that I did a lot of horizontal exploration in my blog rather than vertical. What I mean by that is that I dabbled in a whole bunch of topics, but I never really earned the satisfaction of deeply analyzing the nuances that memory imbues when it's associated with a seemingly unrelated concept. The first couple posts that I wrote had to do with current events, such as the Rabaa al-Adawiya Square massacre in Egypt as well as the tendency for in-court testimonials to alter in truth due to stress and other factors that are often unaccounted for. I even played around with the association between stereotypes and cultural memories. The category that I was frequently marked off on was analysis. I want to make the excuse that I had very little time to analyze the relationship between, let's say, memory and ecocriticism; however, the honest truth is that I never really tried and I regret not having done so. 

But, I don't want to get too sentimental. One important thing that I've learned from blogging this year is the connection between social constructs, such as race and class, and cultural attitudes towards them. In my more recent posts, I researched for more blog ideas on Lens, the New York Times photojournalism blog, and I found many articles on photographs relating to race. For example, I wrote a post on how distorted images of famous African American singers, such as Ella Fitzgerald and Mahalia Jackson, represented that today's generation no longer really remembered them as a mere result of their race and gender. 

Overall, I had a wonderful experience just from frequently contributing to my own blog about memory as a perspective. I learned more about the simple things that are around me and how they can be critically analyzed with simple changes in thought. I want to end this blog by talking about what I stand for. Because I will soon graduate from high school, I am constantly thinking about what kind of legacy I will leave behind. Obviously, I hope that the life I've led at school can be a paradigm; however, that's very unlikely. But one of the ways that I want to say my good-byes is to really state who I am. I never had any strong beliefs in high school, and that's why not many people associated me with certain buzzwords. My inspiration for this comes from an activity that we've recently been doing in Stand for Peace, a student organization at my high school that tries to raise awareness about human rights violations that are taking place around the world, such as sex trafficking in Southeast Asia. This activity is the Power of One, in which we write on a white board what we stand for and hope to accomplish personally. So, I'll end this by saying that I want to become a person of conviction. I want the people around me to identify me as a person who's willing to listen to other perspectives. I stand for the people who are rarely given the chance to express their voices. 

#PowerOfOne

The Road: Ecocriticism and Memory

Ecocriticism, or the interdisciplinary study of literature to explore the relationship between the natural world and humanity, has been one of my favorite subjects in English because our class was able to critically analyze the portrayal of environments in several childhood favorites, such as The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lorax. Because I did not think much of the connection between a book’s environment and plot structure as a child, our discussions about, for example, the efficacy of the Lorax as a spokesperson for the environment, were remarkable. While we have finished the ecocriticism unit, I still wonder about whether I have misinterpreted any other books that I have read before. For this post, I will look at one of my favorite books of all time, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which can be analyzed with both ecocriticism and memory. You can read more about this novel here.

First of all, The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel set somewhere in the United States at an undescribed time. Both of the main characters, an anonymous father and his son, are in the middle of their expedition on the “road” to the south coast, in hopes of a better life. The ubiquitous anonymity of the novel’s characters and objects adds to the bleakness of the Kafkaesque environment. Indeed, the ecocritical aspect of the book is obvious: the landscape is barren and uninhabitable due to an unknown but possibly human-caused catastrophe. On the road, the father and son often come upon towns and cities that once thrived but now only carried remnants of the old world, such as billboards and homes.

Source Link: tinyurl.com/mk55ccm

For me, the main characters’ harsh expedition seems to be an experiment on how the environment informs human behavior. The father and son are sometimes forced to make difficult choices and even compromise their morality. For example, when they meet a severely hurt man on the road, the boy wishes to help him out of compassion, yet the father states they do not have the resources. In addition, due to the lack of food in the barren environment, the road is full of cannibalistic bandits who kidnap people and lock them in basements for later. The existence of such “bad” people inevitably leads to the father and son’s creation of an ostensibly simplistic dichotomy between “good” and “evil.” While such a distinction may seem childish in a normal setting, the fact that they identify themselves to be “good” amidst the nightmarish environment constantly reminds them of their duty to “carry the fire.”

In addition to ecocriticism, The Road is clearly a novel about memory. The father has several experiences in which the border between the world of the past and the current post-apocalyptic reality seems to blur. For example, the father has flashbacks about his wife, who left him and the son sometime before the expedition. He also remembers that he delivered the son himself, which explains why he treats the son as an extremely precious object. Like I stated before, the dilapidated communities act as skeletons of the old world, with empty barns, cars, and even trains scattered about, making especially the father sentimental about the past.

In the end, the main characters do reach their destination, but for the sake of those who have not read the excellent novel yet, I will not elaborate any further. It has been a while since I read The Road, and I remember that I had chills whenever the father and son encountered the cannibalistic bandits. But other than that, I never consciously paid attention to the environment at the time. As a result, when I revisited the novel with the topics of ecocriticism and memory in mind, I realized that human relationships were portrayed as so malleable and dependent on the environment.

Mirror of Race

Last week, cultural historian and professor Maurice Berger published another remarkable article in his essay series "Race Stories" on Lens, the photojournalism blog of the New York Times. This time, he discussed his experience with an incredible, interactive website called "Mirror of Race," which provides actual photographs of people with different races from the 1800s. While museums usually provide context and expert analysis to complement displayed photographs or artifacts, the founders of the website intentionally withheld that seemingly crucial information from its viewers for the purpose of executing a social experiment: to force viewers to confront the photographs, which depict ambiguous situations without any descriptions, with only their personal interpretations and assumptions. 

Given that the interactive website is dedicated to the abolitionist movement and past racial violence, it's no surprise that the founders of "Mirror of Race" had the intention of badgering Americans into contemplating today's racial anxieties and stereotypes, which are prevalent yet not discussed as often as they should be. While other methods of accomplishing the purpose of the website do exist, Mr. Fried, one of the founders, stipulated the best aspect of using de-contextualized photographs: they have the intriguing ability of allowing people to think about their message intimately yet simultaneously from a safe distance. At least for now, this seems to solve the widely held generalization that public discussions about racial stereotypes and identity are inevitably uncomfortable and should only be ostensibly acknowledged as "culturally important" rather than be pursued actively. When people view the photographs on the "Mirror of Race" website, they should theoretically sense a connection between the present and the past and ask about their own perceptions of race. Berger goes beyond and hopes that the website’s viewers come to realize that white supremacists and other extremely prejudiced groups should not simply be treated as the scapegoat of the currently inescapable problem that racism is; rather, it’s a thorn in everyone’s sides.

Ox cart. Outdoor scene. Circa 1875

Source Link

For me, I believe that analyzing photographs is a very interesting way of addressing racial stereotypes and other misinformed perceptions of race. And while these issues are not necessarily deadly, they are very difficult to change. As a result, when I first viewed the photographs on the website, I thought that the lack of descriptions was counter-productive; the founders could have clearly stated their goal of making people realize that racism is a problem that should be the subject of more public discourse. Yet, I realized that the curatorial interpretations often distract people from self-analyzing their understanding and assumptions of what race is. Paradoxically, the fact that the viewers are on their own while viewing the decontextualized images forces them to face up to the obvious yet unstated purpose: the photographs are fundamentally about race and make a clear statement about the forms that race discussions have taken today.  

A Blur in Music and Memory

While I am not familiar with the tunes of Frank Sinatra and other white-American superstar artists, I still consider them, for some reason, to be the crème-de-la-crème of music in the mid-1900s. For some context, I was bored this weekend and decided to take a look at my family’s somewhat sizeable collection of old CD albums. In the end, I was able to find a favorite Christmas classic—which I had often listened to before as a child—of Mahalia Jackson, an incredible African-American vocalist who made extraordinary contributions to music that matched or even surpassed those of Sinatra and his famous contemporaries. However, as I listened to her album, I wondered how come I had to be reminded that Jackson was as talented as the white-American vocalists whom I labeled as “the best” for no apparent reason.

Thinking about this issue eventually led me to the article "Black Performers, Fading from Frame, and Memory" on Lens, the photojournalism blog of the New York Times. The writer, Maurice Berger, described a recent exhibit entitled "Slow Fade to Black," by the famous American artist Carrie Mae Weems, that showcased photographs of legendary African-American vocalists from the mid-20th Century such as Jackson and Ella Fitzgerald. Here's an image of Fitzgerald that Weems used in her exhibit:

Ella Fitzgerald

In case you're wondering about the blur, I was also initially puzzled, but I found from the article that Weems intentionally distorted the photograph by employing a technique called "cinematic fade," which creates the illusion of making the image's subjects either materialize or vanish. The blur was an ingenious metaphor for addressing the problem that I realized that I had, but on a much larger scale: the memory of Fitzgerald, Marian Anderson, and other African-American legends more than fifty years ago is slowly disappearing from our current generation's "collective imagination." But if this is the case, how come Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin are still remembered so well today? Berger attributes this to gender and racial prejudice. Even though the previously mentioned African-American women were extremely talented, their race and gender, rather than their extraordinary work, are unjustifiably spearheading the dissolution of their legacies. So, it's clear that this exhibit is a message suggesting the impossibility of separating the societal generalizations imposed on women and African Americans and their contributions.

However, both Berger and Weems clearly noted that the exhibit is fundamentally about the connections between memory and photography. But as our generation slowly becomes ignorant of the musical innovations made by Jackson, Fitzgerald, other African-American singers, I wonder whether that memory-photography connection will become lost. As the meaning of the exhibit is fluid in itself, what I take from looking at the photos--which were all taken in a way that creates the illusion that the image's subjects are actually animated--is that the singers' legacies cannot disappear and must be preserved, even in a blurry way that strikes viewers as unpleasant or unexpected. Had Weems used images with much clarity, I would not have experienced the realization that I am not truly recognizing Jackson, Fitzgerald, and others for who they are and what they have done.

Age-Related Memory Loss and Alzheimer's

In the previous series on stereotypes, I wrote a post about how old people "have" poor memory issues only because they subconsciously reinforce that generalization imposed by society. From what I researched, it seemed that the idea that old people and poor memory are closely related should be considered specious, but I recently stumbled upon an article in the Scientific American about a particular gene in the human brain called RbAp48, whose decrease in amount apparently corresponds, according to Columbia University neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel, with atrophied memories in aged people. While this seems to be somewhat of a contradiction, the article has many valuable points on what implications that the discovery of this memory-related gene may have in the future for aged people.

To first describe the research, Kandel’s intention in his study was to search for a method that effectively differentiates between age-related memory loss and Alzheimer’s Disease, which both materialize in the hippocampus--the human brain’s memory factory and storage facility--and share numerous early symptoms. The similarities sometimes causes people to not consider the two afflictions as separate. However, one clear difference that Kandel and other researchers discovered was that RbAp48 levels in people with age-related memory loss changed noticeably while people with Alzheimer’s experienced almost no alterations in those levels. This seems to be correlated with the fact that brain cells affected by age-related memory loss are just “sick” or “offline” and therefore have less RbAp48 levels than normal.

Kandel’s research partner, director of Alzheimer’s research at Columbia named Scott Small, posits that the reintroduction of RbAp48 at specific loci in the human brain may lead to the reversal of age-related memory loss. With more tests and research, pharmaceuticals containing the gene may be distributed for aging people with poor memory levels in the future. However, as wonderful as curing age-related memory loss seems, one main issue still remains: how to cure Alzheimer’s Disease. Unlike memory loss, Alzheimer’s permanently eliminates brain cells rather than make them “sick,” and the RbAp48 “treatment” would not work simply because the disease does not seem to be related to amounts of the gene. Another question that leaves from the Columbia researchers’ work is why the RbAp48 levels decrease in age-related memory loss and not in Alzheimer’s. It’s hard to note whether the knowledge of this gene’s role in natural memory loss may be a key step in perhaps understanding Alzheimer’s more or may be a red herring that distracts researchers from looking for other explanations.

Shakespeare, Memory, and the 21st Century

For the past several posts, I have examined many topics in memory that relate mainly to psychology and brain science, but as my class nears the end of the masterpiece Hamlet by Shakespeare, I believe it is important to note that the study of memory is also an extremely hot topic in the humanities, especially in literary analysis. To write this post, I tried to learn about the relationship between memory and specifically the role of Shakespearean literature in society today, but I was surprised to discover that my research was nearly fruitless; after all, memory seems to be an important theme in Shakespeare’s works. Even in Hamlet alone, the concepts of memory and remembrance are discussed quite often, notably when Hamlet felt that Gertrude and other people’s commemoration of his father’s death was only pretended and ephemeral. Nevertheless, I was lucky to locate one incredible anthology, named Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance by Peter Holland--described by one reviewer as the “first of its kind”--that explore the relationship. Here are some of the ideas that I was able to parse out.

While the book is divided thematically into five sections, I want to focus primarily on the last one, which is about the incorporation of memory and modern technologies into Shakespearean performances. In one (page 281) of the articles, “Fond Records: Remembering Theater in the Digital Age,” the author W. B. Worthen entertains the question, “How are Shakespeare’s masterpieces relevant today?” He claims that whether or not Shakespeare’s readers believe characters such as Hamlet are apt representations of ourselves is irrelevant; the beauty of the plays is that they discuss a “slice of human experience in some way.” That seems to be the principal explanation for the ability of Shakespeare’s works to remain insightful even in today’s society--so much different from the Elizabethan era. As a result, the medium for performing Shakespeare may be subject to change. On this point, Worthen focuses on how contemporary Shakespeare dramatizes the impact of new technologies on the “performance of human experience.”

One such notable example that Worthen discusses is Michael Almereyda's Hamlet. Here's the film's version of the famous "Mousetrap" scene:

Source Link

Your reactions? When I first watched that scene in class, I was immediately struck by how anachronistic it seemed in comparison to other versions that are much more in line with the original context of Hamlet. While the fact that the “Mousetrap” is a combination of film segments rather than a theatrical performance was pretty novel, I felt that Almereyda’s version was just a confusing juxtaposition of modern society and Shakespeare’s language. However, I realized that the version still retained major aspects of the original Hamlet, most importantly the overall themes of the masterpiece. As Worthen noted, while the version ironically made no reference to theater performance, it proved itself to be a very different yet effective way of capturing and preserving, through “recording,” the “human action” in Hamlet. Almereyda’s focus on the “recording experience” may shed some light on how memory can play in Shakespeare in the 21st Century. Worthen lists numerous examples from the entire film: Hamlet’s video diary, the Ghost stuck in an elevator on a security monitor, and Ophelia’s photographs all suggest different ways that people and objects are preserved in memory.

Another bent to this memory concept is how actors and editors collaborate to produce performances of Shakespeare’s works. Also included in the collection with Worthen’s article, the essays of Michael Cordner and Margaret Kidnie, according to this review by Alexander Huang, how the intersection of performances and editorial practices is affected by cultural memory. The authors state that actors face a “clash” while performing between speaking their authentic feelings and reciting their actual parts. This problem results partly from the fact that editors can be excessively prescriptive in their interpretation of Shakespeare. This seems somewhat counterintuitive because certain limits on how to perform Shakespeare’s plays, whose fictional worlds are very disparate from today’s society, should be implemented so that the overarching meaning and themes are not distorted. However, the authors state that actors should not be told definitively what and what not to do; in actuality, the act of memorizing specific aspects of the play contributes, according to Kidnie, to performance disruptions. The freedom of the actors to play Shakespearean roles naturally allows the audience to understand society’s cultural memory. All of the actions and props that today’s Shakespearean actors make and use have their own narratives that contribute to their unique interpretation of the plays. 

In all, because the significance of Shakespeare’s works today is due to their representation of the timeless human experience, how Shakespeare plays in the 21st Century is not defined by how disparate they are, but how the editors and actors collaborate to perform Shakespeare with their cultural memory.

Stereotypes: Part 2

As I claimed in the first post of this series, stereotypes are so embedded in our everyday vernacular that people use them very liberally in daily conversations and on social media. While I believe that it is hard to explain the so-called “dehumanization” behind a seemingly harmless joke such as “He’s so athletic because he’s African American,” the main problem here is that society condones such generalizations that impose particular identities on individuals, with negative consequences such as the lack of confidence in memory performance for older adults. The prevalence of stereotypes, whether used jokingly or hurtfully, in our daily lives as well as society’s lack of action to stop generalizing are a bit disconcerting. What’s even worse is the existence of pathological stereotypes, which an article in Psychology Today by a professor named Monnica Williams states are “ideas that exist to explain and justify inequalities.”

To me, these types of stereotypes are the worst items that our society can offer because, especially in the case of race, they affect the criminal justice system. The article notes that the people believe in the stereotype that typical drug dealers and “junkies” are African American; this “truth” apparently explains how come African Americans are disproportionately arrested and targeted for drug-related crimes. However, a study by the National Comorbidity Survey Replication showed that African Americans are less likely to consume alcohol and use drugs than white Americans. Of course, the evident discrimination against African Americans is clearly reprehensible, but as Williams continues to state, the biggest problem is that our society is under the impression that our justice system is completely fair and that the disproportionately large representation of African Americans in jail can be explained by their “problems.”

In tandem to that research, a fairly old but still pertinent study by Pennsylvania State University found that what people remember about crime stories is affected by racial stereotypes. The researchers asked over 150 undergraduate students to one out of four stories about a fictitious man. One of the four stories focused on violent crime, and most of the people who received that piece reconstructed a photograph using certain facial features that were strikingly characteristic of African Americans. The catch: the people used in the study seemed to be unaware of their “associations of violent crime with the physical characteristics of African Americans.” This showed the researchers that these racial stereotypes were embedded in the subjects’ unconscious. This reminds me of a post that I wrote in the past about how the malleability of memory can lead to faulty court decisions. Likewise, in this case, the influence of racial stereotypes may influence a victim of some violent attack to choose an innocent African American person over another person of another race.

As with the last post, I think concluding with some solutions to the racial, pathological stereotype would be ideal, but as one researcher in the Penn State study stated, “The idea that this type of stereotyping may occur largely outside of viewers' awareness will make it particularly challenging to curb these kinds of responses." In other words, I think that reversing the effects of the obviously harmful racial stereotype on the criminal justice system and other parts of our society will be extremely difficult. It seems that the only real solution is to increase awareness of the faultiness of such stereotypes and actively work to eliminate them. But in the near future, that unfortunately doesn’t seem like an attainable reality.