walkingshadow | Unless we follow our leaders blindly, there is no possible way we can remain free.

Okay, FIRST of all there was Chapter 40 of THE ARCHER and it was good. I loved Sean's POV at the beginning, seeing but not hearing. The Sean/Orlando gave me hope again, those crazy kids! And I can't believe Viggo, of all people, forgot Orlando can get out of anything you try to tie him up with. I also can't believe that Viggo really thinks he's a threat. I have a feeling we're going to find out they're all on the same side after all. I mean, points to Eric for trying to stay mad, but he lasted, like, thirty seconds. Naww, they're cute trained killers. Still dying to find out about Karl. He knows things that we don't!

Follows next a list of the top 110 banned books, yoinked directly from

deepsix. The ones I've read (27 of them; about 25%) are bolded; of those, 12 (a little more than one in ten) are also italicized, indicating the ones I was assigned to read in school. Which I suppose says a lot about the school I went to.

1. The Bible (read parts of it, but not, like, cover-to-cover; and are we talking King James, the Plaut Commentary, what?)
2. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
4. The Koran
5. Arabian Nights
6. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
7. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
8. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
9. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
11. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
13. Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
14. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
15. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
16. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
17. Dracula by Bram Stoker
18. Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
19. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
20. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
21. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
23. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
24. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
25. Ulysses by James Joyce
26. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27. Animal Farm by George Orwell
28. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (started it three times but never got all the way through)
29. Candide by Voltaire
30. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
31. Analects by Confucius
32. Dubliners by James Joyce
33. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
34. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
35. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
36. Das Capital by Karl Marx
37. Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
38. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
39. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
40. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
41. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
42. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
43. Jungle by Upton Sinclair
44. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
45. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
46. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
47. Diary by Samuel Pepys
48. Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
49. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
50. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
51. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
52. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
53. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
54. In Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
55. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
56. Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
57. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
58. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
59. Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
60. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
61. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
62. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
63. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
64. The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
65. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
66. Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
67. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
68. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
69. The Talmud (like the Bible, I've read bits and pieces but not the whole thing, not being a rabbinic scholar)
70. The Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
71. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
72. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
73. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
74. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
75. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. Red Pony by John Steinbeck
78. Popol Vuh
79. Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
80. Satyricon by Petronius
81. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
82. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
83. Black Boy by Richard Wright
84. Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
85. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
86. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
87. Metaphysics by Aristotle
88. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
89. Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
90. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
91. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
92. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
93. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
94. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
95. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
96. Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
97. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
98. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
99. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
100. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
101. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
102. Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
103. Nana by Émile Zola
104. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
105. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
106. Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
107. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
108. The Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
109. The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
110. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
-Dr. Laurence Peter

Anthropology was fantastic, as always, today. I didn't get up at 5:30 yesterday morning to chase after a garbage man on his route, but two of my group members did. The pictures they got were . . . okay. Some were interesting, and it turns out they were hampered by the fact that they were usually shooting on the move, through the sunroof of the car as they drove. The man they found and followed was happy to talk to them, but adamant about remaining anonymous. He has no union; he works from six a.m. to eight p.m. and gets paid less for overtime. He has no recourse when his truck breaks down or he busts his shoulder. He is one man, driving the truck, hopping in and out, lifting garbage all day. We throw things away all day, all the time, without thinking; their last shot was one of a woman tossing a white trash bag into a dumpster, and she has the attitude that we all sometimes adopt, not just of ew, garbage, but a sense of accomplishment, relishing the fact that you've tied it off and tossed it out, and it's done. But it goes somewhere; everything has to go somewhere. They included a picture they took of construction debris, slabs of concrete stacked high next to a yellow dumpster. The assignment was a broad one, meant to focus on an "interaction"; and driving by garbage on the side of the road is an interaction, something we do all the time and never notice. The few pictures of the man in action are long-shots, and we only see his back, or his face is obscured by whatever overflowing recycling bin he's holding in front of it. He's alone all day; at seven in the morning, few people are around, and what kind of interaction would they have with him? I mentioned that in my neighborhood at home we have alleys; even if I were up at sunrise I would never see the garbage men. He's a good story. A few more like him and we'll have ourselves a web page and a cool final project.

The article we read was a pretty technical one on interviewing techniques and strategies, so the discussion was general and wide-ranging. Pre-interviews are good, giving interviewees the questions in advance for a sit-down interview is also good; people deserve the courtesy, and it also gives them the chance to think about their answers, to look things up, to include things they might not have remembered if you asked them once while the camera was rolling. We went over "talking heads" and what we mean by that. Personally, I think of a local news anchor, talk show or game show hosts, anyone who's reading off a teleprompter because that's what they get paid to do, rather than anyone who's giving you information or stories they know or found out themselves. There are different styles of interviews, and we decided that they work depending on context; there are different interviewers, and their styles widely diverge, to different effects. I like Charlie Rose. He sits down with one person across a table in a dark room and talks with them for a long time. He asks questions, but the questions aren't as important as the conversation that develops; he gets stories out of his subjects that I don't know if I'd ever hear otherwise, because he lets people talk, lets them follow their own tangents, and pipes in whenever they lose steam, to encourage them on a bit more or to change direction; it never feels like he's moving on to the next question on the list. He is the anti- sound byte. But I don't always need to see the interviewer; Ken Burns' documentaries have a lot of interviewees and he just keeps jumping between them. That's also highly effective—just let them talk, and let the transitions between people tell you what the question was, how many different points of view are being represented, what everyone agrees on. We brought up VH1's I Love the 90s, the way they not only have lots of jumps and short bursts of dialog, but video clips and sound clips and things floating across the screen all the time. We decided that it works for what they're going for—comedic effect. We don't necessarily want animations wandering across the screen on Dateline interviews.

I've been spending a lot of time on the PBS Frontline webpage, watching their archive of documentaries; they're all done by different people, so it's interesting to note the stylistic differences, what's effective and what isn't. The guy who did Diet Wars kept inserting himself so much he talked over his interview subjects; he kept turning it back to himself, and I wanted to tell him to shut up and let them talk. As the prof said, it's obviously a fine line, because it's good to remind your audience that this documentary is something somebody had to make—it's one person's opinion—but the film you're making isn't about you.

And then she showed us two films. The first was The Color Line, a video shot in New York in 1990, where the video consisted of still shots of close-cropped portraits with a quote underneath, and the audio was people talking about racism; the two weren't synched. At the end, it was explained (briefly, in white text on a black screen) that 150 subjects in three New York neighborhoods (Wall Street, Chelsea, Harlem) had been asked two questions. The first was what is the cause of racism in America? and those were the responses we heard. The second was how would you describe yourself in terms of your identity? and their answers ran underneath their portraits. They described themselves as things like "black male," "Afro-Caribbean," "female college student," "Italian-German-American," "white female professional," and very occasionally as "human being," one as "earthling," one as "I'm just me," and one as "just lives one day at a time." The second video was our prof's Masters project on one member of the Osage Indian tribe who creates Indian artwork; her focus was on authenticity, what constitutes it and who has the right to determine it. She'd mentioned she uses a lot of layers, and she does, usually to great effect. The artist who was her subject had this smooth Oklahoma accent I could have listened to all day.

I sorted out the cap-and-gown business at the bookstore after class, and with my student ID I can pick it up starting April 18th. Let's not think about it anymore. I sat in the Architecture Lab for a while messing around online, then ate lunch at Broward Dining, then read the Alligator during African History. Another video! With the same guy! Thankfully only for a few minutes. With all the lights off, it's too dark to do the crossword.

All night I've been tinkering with my pictures (when I wasn't helping N. with her linguistics pre-test; she really isn't super-smart, and her professor does sound like she doesn't know what she's doing, but it would probably help quite a lot if she didn't fall asleep in class). There are some I want to keep vertical, for the sake of the picture and to break up the grid, but it means I lose two spaces to one photo, and I'm already so dithery about what to put in. I just remember what the ANT prof keeps reminding us—that we're only as strong as our weakest picture.

It just started raining so softly I didn't even hear it, and I'm sitting right next to my open window. I only noticed when I looked out and saw it falling through the halo around the streetlamp.