Forbidden Books: Fight Club!

                                         Introduction

Welcome to the birth of a podcast formed from the words of a banned book. In my class "Forbidden Books," we looked at banned books all over the world, including reading two for class, and one all individually. The two books we read were "Fahrenheit 451", and "The Diary of a Part-Time Indian." We analyzed these books all as a group to decide what content would be considered dangerous and what could possibly have to lead to its banning. 

We also decided to look into (mainly) two religions. We studied their holy books and interpreting their contents to our best understanding, or what we thought to be the main idea of whatever verse we were reading. The two books being the Koran, and the Bible. From there we tried to decide what they meant in a literal sense, metaphorical, and ethical (I believe?). 

The project I am going to present to you is a podcast where I pretend and voice the main character from the book Fight Club, which was banned for sexual content in Texas, and also myself as the "interrogator" of some sorts for this character. We had to pull quotes that showed their dogma to the listeners through quotes and what we believe they would say if they were to be in the scenario we put them in. Below you'll find my script for this podcast (if you're not in the mood to put in your headphones), and below the script is the podcast itself. 

                                                          Script

Close your eyes for a minute. We’re gonna play around with your imagination. Imagine a mirror. Take a look in the mirror. What do you see? Just you. Imagine a version of you that is everything you wanted to be. A version of you that has done everything that you wanted to do but never could. The better you. The perfect you. Everything that would’ve been you, but isn’t you. You are not what you see in this mirror. You are flawless. Open your eyes. That was not the real you.  What if you could be your idea of perfect though? What if everything you just saw in that mirror roamed around the night while you thought you were asleep. That perfect you taking over your body when you shut your eyes. 

Welcome to the life of the Narrator, or maybe you know him as Tyler Durden. Street lights are dim, it’s a warm peaceful night out in 1996, Delaware city. America itself isn’t too peaceful. Bill Clinton re-elected as president, the operation “Desert Strike” was carried out. Then Khobar towers got bombed, the Olympics experienced a terrorist attack with a pipe bomb for the first time again since the 1960’s. It’s a secret war and it’s hell. Cuban fighter planes shoot down American planes, even a hostage crisis in Hawaii. 

Now despite all the chaos, we’re here with the Narrator, or as some call him around here, Tyler Durden, who is currently sitting with me in a mental hospital. 

“So Tyler, tell me again why you’re here. It says here that you’re here because of a severe split personality disorder?”

“Yeah. Tyler isn’t my name, it’s the identity I subconsciously took when I thought I was sleeping.”

“And you’ve been claiming that you.. Killed Tyler? You shot yourself in the head when the police were after you. It’s a miracle you survived by the way. Were you intending to kill yourself or something inside of you?”

“I’m not killing myself. I’m killing Tyler.” (153)

“What did Tyler tell you before you pulled the trigger on that rooftop? What made you do it?”

“He said to me, “Picture this; you’re on top of the world’s tallest building. The whole building is taken over by Project Mayhem. Smoke rolling out the windows. Desks falling into crowds on the street. A real opera of death. That’s what you’re gonna get.” (151)

“You were working a 9 to 5 job at a company, then you.. I’m sorry, “Tyler”, killed your boss. What were his motives?”

“Tyler thought the middle class were worthless. We were nothing to him. He was an anarchist.. And a nihilist.”

“What makes you so sure that he was these things? I understand you ran Fight Club and the rules there kind of point in that direction, but I wanna know more.” 

“You broke two rules already by even bringing it up. Tyler always told the space monkeys one thing constantly. They just kept repeating it over and over again. He kept making them read to each other a verse. It went, “You are not special. You’re not beautiful and a unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everybody else” (96)

“You called these cultists “space monkeys,” huh?”

“They only did what they were told, nothing more or less. They weren’t people.”

“People are censoring your story, specifically because of sexual contents of it, do you agree with that?” 

“Sexual content? That’s it? I mean I guess that's more generous than anything. Fight Club is a lot more than just one or two mentionings of sex, but that’s fine by me. Less people to get worked up about this.”

“Thank you for your time.”

"Whatever."

https://soundcloud.com/diego-chavez-745276722/fight-club-podcast/s-C8qVo

Citations:

https://epdf.pub/fight-club-a-novelaff4dfbaa3612ba50630192c1311f99a73297.html (BOOK)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTFLYCMkyiM (SFX)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBC0H87vnKc (SFX)

The Socratic Dialogue

The Socratic Dialogue

In our class "Forbidden books," our main focus is understanding why books are banned by certain places in the world, where book banning originated from, and why they're still getting banned today. We read books like Fahrenheit 451 (really good book, highly recommend giving it a read), which taught us how terrifying a world would be without the freedom to knowledge about subjects. We looked over Socrates life and learned about why he was forced to drink poison for his actions, along with studying how he thought and how he teached those that would listen to him. One of which is known as the Socratic method.

The Socratic method is basically just questioning everything like a toddler curious about the world. "Why is the sky blue?" A question I'm sure we've all asked as children. There is a danger to this method for one reason. If you question everything about someone, they will begin to dig deeper and deeper into their beliefs, their understanding of it. You can only go as far as somebody knows about what you're questioning, so once you reach that point where they can no longer answer, it is more than likely that they're gonna be aggravated with the fact they can no longer defend their beliefs. Nobody likes that feeling so often it won't be of best interest to push somebody that far unless you know they can handle it. That is why Socrates got sentenced to death, because it was due to him questioning every single thing that it just got on everybody's last nerves. 

We take a similar approach in this action project by creating a controversial question to make a script for. Where we have one playing the role of Socrates in this case me and another as the one being questioned about their thoughts of whatever question is given. My partner Trinity and me, after some arguments, came around to decide that our question would be "Is a mosquito's life worth that of a human being?" Personally I enjoy film and just overall acting in general. I also wanted to take a less depressing approach than most of my peers and past people that have done this project. This is the end result and I hope you enjoy.

https://vimeo.com/388642317

Error 404: Oxygen Not Found

Error 404: Oxygen Not Found.

Introduction

We've all lost our breath every now and then, be it running to class/work or during a game of tag. Sometimes we just need to sit down and take a breather. Imagine having to do that, but so frequent that you have to carry around a medical device to shoot medication in your lungs to feel better. That would be asthma. A well known and highly common disease that almost everyone seems to have. Most of have if not one but multiple friends with this disease. But what exactly is it? That's what I'm going to be informing you on this post. 

In our class "Disease" we learned about the eleven body systems, what they do to support the body's functions, and what could go wrong with each and every one of them. We looked at viruses, cells, and many diseases. We also went through learning about how people label diseases, splitting them into four different ways of classification. The four ways of classifying a disease goes into these four sections: Infectious, genetic, environmental, and multifactorial. We even drove the class into learning a thing or two about cloning and how it works, along with why it's illegal to clone humans and a bunch of other strange questions about it that I'm surprised our teacher could answer. 

The project itself was to draw a life sized "gingerbread man" as we called them, put in the organs that we theorized were affected by the disease of choice (which was an influenced choice based on a anonymous interviewee from our family). After this we were free to do whatever with how we presented our collected information in the project. I chose to make it entirely in a slideshow format as I found it easier to work with than just typing it out on this post.

Without further hesitation.

Here is my slideshow, it contains practically everything I know and learned about the subject, along with how my interviewee deals with his asthma and how it affects his lifestyle.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1aHkrx0aZd5Uq2zSckcMM2B_WrPQlYl4hcjgZoBJFb24/edit?usp=sharing