Chuckling with Huckleberry Finn

In general, mandatory reading assignments aren't my favorite thing. I find that being forced to read a book--much like being force-fed some kind of new food--makes the thought of the experience a bit less... appetizing.

That being said, however, I actually enjoyed Huck Finn more than most of the other required reading that I've had to do over the years. Once I began to pick up on the subtle jabs that Twain made toward literary cliches and social conventions of his time period, the novel become much more enjoyable to read.

Some memorable lines from the novel:
-"By-and-by they fetched the niggers in and had prayers, and then everybody was off to bed." (p. 5): That's just a little bit ironic. I suppose Christianity and slave ownership went hand-in-hand at the time. Makes perfect sense, of course. No contradictions at all there.
-"'Well,' says Buck, 'a feud is this way. A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man's brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another...'" (p. 127): Gotta love the classic feuding families. The guy's reasoning is spot-on, too. Killing people for a reason you don't quite remember? Normal.
-"To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin/ That makes calamity of so long life;/ For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane" (p. 160): So I'm reading along, thinking it's a perfectly valid passage from Hamlet when--low and behold--Birnam Wood and Dunsi--wait. Isn't that from Macbeth? Cue the chuckling.
-"'And there ain't no other way, that ever I heard of, and I've read all the books that gives any information about these things. They always dig out with a case-knife--and not through dirt, mind you; generly it's through solid rock.'" (p. 283): Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have a diehard Man in the Iron Mask fan on our hands. He has clearly done his research. And how hilarious he is.

Those lines are humorous for a reason that's hard to put into words, but their effect is a bit more obvious: laughing at society is just a less shocking way of accepting criticism of it, after all. Twain's humor gets to the heart of the matter, and everything is magnified through Huck's unique voice and dialect. With a few well-placed lines, Twain conveys the illogical and cruel nature of slavery and racism, the ease with which we're duped by others, and the laughable unoriginality of some of the stuff we read and then praise. Don't people say something about books that make people think being the good ones? Yeah. Well. That.

A response to Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite!

The video I watched, which was entitled "Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite!", was intended to persuade people that doodling, commonly dismissed as being a time-waster, is actually a powerful tool that facilitates processing of information.

I'll admit that I was initially very skeptical of the argument being made in this video. I'm not an avid doodler, and really, I'm probably one of those kill-joys that staunchly supports paying attention and taking notes when people are talking. Therefore, I have to say that the fact that I'm convinced means the speaker, Sunni Brown, was doing something right.

First of all, I feel like all of the visuals Brown used in her presentation were very effective. (And they related to the presentation since, wonder of all wonders, many of them were doodles!) In terms of their effects, Brown's visuals can be grouped into three categories:

1. They make the audience laugh, which consequently softens them up to be receptive to the argument. One great example of humor was Brown's claim that the commonly-known definition of doodling is "to do... nothing."

2. They make the information she presented very easy to digest but also very impactful. For example, she highlights all five modes/factors that contribute to learning information as she says that doodling uses all of them.

3. They make her argument seem relevant to the average person. The outdated-looking picture of Freud at 2:30, the picture associating an old man with words and a young man with doodles at 2:50, and a collection of pictures of normal people productively doodling at the end all seem to distance the idea of "us" (the audience, the younger generation, and the people who enjoy creativity) from "them" (the stiff, boring, rigid people).

Brown's primary appeal was probably ethos: she uses a lot of humor and also some other techniques to increase how much the audience relates to her thinking and trusts in her argument.

Brown definitely builds her ethos with her more informal speaking style: she talks to her audience in the same way that we'd talk to a friend we're getting coffee with. Brown is at times sarcastic but consistently well-spoken, which hints to the audience that she is reliable since we tend to put more stock in people who seem educated. Brown also builds a rapport with the audience by saying that she's "letting [us] in on a secret" or by sheepishly admitting that she was excited by something "nerdy." (This is making the assumption that her audience is a bit nerdy. Since that line worked on me and I'm a part of the audience, you can do the math.)

Link to video: http://www.ted.com/talks/sunni_brown.html