Prisha's Bizarre Takes on Lit

Hey! This week, we read a piece titled “Videotape”, which followed the story of a peaceful family car ride quickly escalating into something much more sinister. Throughout the piece, it takes on a very suspenseful tone that quickly turns ominous as a tragedy occurs, all through the innocent eyes of a child witnessing the whole scene. It starts out as an innocent family car ride, and turns left very fast. The piece starts out with sudden detail, and talks about the idea of family cameras used to signify calmness and peace. Delillo continues to describe the story in detail, and when he writes, “It is not just another video homicide”, the story takes a twist, switching to a gruesome tone. Delillo continues to describe the man in the story, and starts to employ a second perspective, writing, “You are looking into the mind of home video” (11). Through this, Delillo appeals to the audience, making the piece all more suspenseful. Delillo wants to emphasize the unsuspecting things that could o...

Bizarre Take #18 - The "Enchanted" Fairy Dust                                             A measure of Restraint. That’s all it was, and back then, many people were uneducated on the dangerous effects on chemicals, treating them as absolute cures. This exact idea is what was analyzed in Raymo’s piece titled, A measure of Restraint, which explores the discovery and soon disaster that radium caused through the early 1900s. Raymo uses various rhetorical features to enhance his writing, allowing for the audience to better connect with the storyline. First off, he uses various anecdotes from history to help bring a storytelling feel to the piece, starting off with the tragedy of 2 young men and their unexpected discovery of radium, thinking it was magical glowing dust that would cure everyone. This pulls the audience in, as they are hooked in by this mysterious story of unknown cha...

  Why do we do things that are bad for us? A rare question that we never consider and causes one to step back and think for a second. Smoking. Drinking. Doing drugs. Procrastination. All these things are conceived in a bad connotation and are disregarded in society, yet so many do it unconsciously. Akrasia, a lack of self control or acting against one's better judgment, stems from a desire to experience thrill as well as a habit of thinking in the present.  Certain things that are deemed as bad, such as teen pregnancy and drunk driving, are considered taboo, yet we hear about cases occurring  on a daily basis. For example, when Iwent to the Somerset mall with my mom, we saw a bunch of people smoking outside. My mom told me to cover my nose and I remember wondering, How are these people just smoking without a single worry for their health?? Do they not think about the future consequences? This is a clear example of akrasia, where people simply go for activities despite kno...