Mystory entertainment discourse

I made this website http://linmystory.yolasite.com/about-us.php for mystory, entertaiment discourse. Ulmer's assignment in this chapter is to do a website that documenting a movie or a TV that one watched during his/her childhood. It seems that by doing this, he tries to use a potential analogy to connect entertainment discourse with cerntain periods of memory. Is it a way of doing a conceptually spacial conversion like what virillio do in his book? I could sense what he is trying to make his students feel here when I was doing this assignment. My entertainment discourse documented a Chinese TV series, which has a special postition in my childhood memory:Dream of the Red Chamber, which was adapted from the novel with the same title. As one of four China's great classical novels, Dream of the Red Chamber has been adapted to movies and TV series many times. But the one I introduce is generally acknowledged as the most successful one which created great sensation in the 1980s in China.

This TV series was produced in 1985, and it almost has the same age as me. When it was first shown on TV, I was too young to understand it. The only vague memory is my family sitting before TV together, having snacks while watching it, a cozy picture. Then the memory jumps to the middle school. I had a lecture of this novel after school one day. I was moved almost into tears.I set up my mind to read it. It has five volumes and almost 200 chapters. Plus, it is written in classical chinese (before 1919, all the chinese writtings use classical chinese). It is a challenge for me at first and I spent alomst a year to finish it. Then I found that it is such a brilliant work that you would never feel boring no matter how many times you read it. It is like a deep hole, you can never reach the bottom. The research of it has become an independent field (called redology). The whole book includes 30 main characters and 400 minor characters. Each of them has distinct features and detailed psychological description,which makes you feel like they were live people around you.

There are hundreds of brilliant poems in this book. One of my favorites is "Song of the Burial of Flowers" (葬花吟). I found the English translation of it (Please see the second subpage of mystory web http://linmystory.yolasite.com/about-us.ph) I do not think this translation accurately reflects the poetic imagery it describes, but I still want to express some of my own feelings based on this translation. I especially like this sentence: "I hold a burial when you die today, But there’s no telling when I pass away.Others laugh at me that have buried thee, Who will be the one that shall bury me?". Sadness, everything around us is "Nichts", no matter how glorious they once were. I did not understand this when I first read it. But as time goes by and my experiences get enriched, I find that many shining things are like shooting stars, shifting fast and finally are not there anymore.Like flowers, they bloom and wither, or the earth, the galaxy and even the whole universe has a day to end. People's life, compared to them, is nothing but a moment. Humans, from this sense, have nothing different from other beings. I see an obvious Daoist spirit from this poem.Chinese Daoism pursues "Nature and Man in one". It believes that humans as a part of the nature would return to the nautre when we die.All the rules of the nature apply to us no matter how strong our self-awareness are. Thus, nature was positioned highest (even higher than gods), unlike western culture, which stresses the importance of spirit, such as Descartes's "I think, therefore I am", Nietzsche's will to power, Hegel's absolute spirit,etc.

Actually, when I was doing this assigment, I suddenly realized what Ulmer wants us to feel. I was recalling my past with my present thoughts, but my present thoughts are based on my previous memories. I was documenting the memory about a digital formed TV series, but I was storming my mind by the undigital formed mental action, and the sparking point could be anything including an entertainment work. Thoughts can run through the time and space,

like shadow, the further you are from the light source, the longer the shadow could be.

week 9

If time is matter, what is space? (p.5) Virilio discusses “space” in terms of relativity of time and nature at the beginning of the book open sky. If nature abhors a vacuum, so too does life-size. Without weight or meausure, these is no’nature’any more or, at least, no idea of nature. Without a distant horizon, there is no longer any possibility of glimpsing reality...(p.6) In some classic physicists’ eyes (like Newton), time and space absolute existence, which means all the matters and events are being measured on the dimension of transcendentality (see wiki). That seems pretty simple that people do not waste time thinking the fourth dimention of time and space. However, when Einstein proposed the relativity, we are introduced into a “expanse of real world”(p.15): in this world, when we reached the speed of light, we could catch up with the time. In other words, when we get to the limit of speed, we could see the end of time. Could we say, at that moment, that we win the time, or we maybe at the same time lose the space? Then what is the nature, or our life would be? And how do we measure things then? In light of Bergson (see wiki), time is a kind of inner experience, a psychological time that does not depend on clocks in physical world. It is a time that instinct by our own heart. Thus, philosophers like Bergson, or Proust (see his In search of time) believe that it is hard to say space and time which one is more essential, but our own spiritual activities, our own psychological peace seems more important than them.
It seems to me that Virilio uses this relativity of time as a metaphor to reflect the obscurity that exists between virtuality and reality caused by modern technology or civilization to human beings’thought (p.13). “ Speed enables us to see, to hear, to perceive and thus to conceive the present world more intensely(p.12)...but it is not so much light illuminates things(the object, the subject, the path)...(p.13) Distance, speed, geography actually lost their meanings in traditional sense, and instead, they are equipped by modern technology and obtained the power of simulating real world. “The question is then no longer one of the global versus the local, or of the transnational versus national...to gain real time over delayed time is thus to commit to a quick way of physically eliminating the object and the subject and exclusively promoting the journey...”(p.20). Therefore, not just time, but space/distance is also granted a relativity. If we follow this logic, many art majors, like literature, philosophy, logics, psychology, etc., they all go in for pursuing the relative infinity of time under the context of the relative finite space, and one of their ways it to close the door and read all day long, like Kant, who spent like 80 years staying at his hometown: though he was invited to teach in some university at other places, he refused for the reason that new environment would influence his thinking. So from the perspective of space, he had not been to anywhere, but from the perspective of time, he became the explorer of the eternal spirit of human beings.