On the Road

After a month and a half of on-again, off-again reading, I have finally finished On the Road by Jack Kerouac. This book had been idolized, raved about and put on a pedestal so it felt like I was joining some kind of cult just by reading it.

But reading a book that was basically legendary, I found it left a lot to be desired. I had really high expectations when I began on page one and those expectations were not fulfilled. The narrations were too jumpy and there was a profound lack of detail. It was something that worked in fellow Beat-Generation author William S Burroughs's Junky but only left me wishing there was more substance in On the Road.

Once I started reading On the Road in class or at home, it was fun to read. It was entertaining to emerse myself in Kerouac and his friends' lives (as he used pseudonyms for each character). But it was hard to find the motivation to sit down and read the book (which is completely the opposite for Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest which I am reading now).

One thing unrelated to the novel itself but I find really interesting is that Neal Cassady is featured as Dean Moriarty in On the Road and now I am reading One Flew... and Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady totally hung out together in the sixties. So the two books that took my interest and that I am reading one after the other have a pop-culture legend to link the two.

AP Psych video links

We Like Psychology
--A clever song about various and some very RANDOM aspects of psychology.
Psych School Musical Parts 1-7
--Tons of great, catchy songs to help you remember related terms of psychology.
Psychology Tutorials and Demonstrations
--Helpful demonstrations of informative experiments to help students remember lessons of more technical aspects of the chapters.

Chapter 3: Nature and Nurture of Behavior
Nature versus Nurture
--A really short, animated cartoon about nature and nuture.
nature vs. nurture
--An informed look at the nature vs nurture debate.
The Science of Sexual Orientation; CBS News
-Interesting video about a study of twins that develop difference gender identities and sexual orientations, which fuels the nature vs nurture debate.

Chapter 7: States of Consciousness
Sleep Disorders
--Homemade psychology video about 4-5 different sleep disorders.
Drugs
--Vague video about the effects of various consciousness-altering drugs.
Dream Symbols
--Fun site for the "decoding" of dreams.
Dreams and Consciousness Links
--Links to various dream sites - where I found the Symbols page.

Chapter 8: Learning
Classical Conditioning
--Good animated, voiced-over video that gives the basics on classical conditioning.
Skinner box
--A recorded example of a Skinner box
Bobo Doll experiment
--Video of the Bobo Doll experiment

Chapter 10: Thinking and Language
Language - Psychology
--Homemade demonstrations of thinking with and without language
Psychology and Language
--Can animals think? Gorilla matches nonsense symbols to words!
Miley Cyrus, JabbawockeeZ and Psychology
--Entertaining video (without the first minute or so) about thinking/expressing thoughts without words.
Prototypes and Heuristics - Psych School Musical (Part 1)
--Fun video set to a High School Musical song that discusses prototypes and heuristics.

Chapter 12: Motivation
Aspects of Motivation in Office Space - Psych 4024
--Fun video giving examples of motivation from the movie "Office Space."
Psych Project - Motivation and Gender Roles
--Analyzes commercials to find the gender roles as well as motivational parts of psychology buried within them.
Maslow's Pyramid
--Homemade video showing the layers of Maslow's Pyramid (heirarchy of needs).

Chapter 14: Personality
Cluster A personality disorders in "The Wizard of Oz"
--Fun, memorable video showing various personality disorders through characters in the Wizard of Oz

Chapter 16: Therapy
Anxiety Treatment: Psychotherapy
--A video demonstrating one type of therapy, best suited for one of the most common disorders: anxiety.

Chapter 18: Social Psychology
social psychology project
--Social psychology demonstrated by strangers' reactions to a "madwoman" roaming the streets.
Social Psychology - Psych School Musical (Part 7)
--Another memorable Psych School Musical production, this time the song is from the Little Mermaid.
Social Psychology Experiment
--How many people will switch doors when the see the "Men" and "Women" signs on the door to a school building?

Gloomy Sunday

On a mix that one of my friends made me a couple of weeks ago, there was a song called "Gloomy Sunday." Before looking at the artist, I thought that it would be some sort of indie-emo song that would be melancholy and pretty to listen to. Instead, I got a hit song from 1941 by Billie Holiday that is called, when not by name, "The Hungarian Suicide Song."

The song has been produced by countless artists since the 1930s. The Holiday version has a beautiful, sad orchestration behind the simplistic vocals. It flows gently from phrase to phrase but there is a definite sense of sentimentality and sadness in the tones of the instruments and with Holiday's soulful interpretation of the lyrics.

Since the song was released, there have been many urban legends regarding suicide rates. It was rumored that many radio networks banned the song from the airwaves beacuse, when played, suicide rates spiked. More legends can be found at the song's Wikipedia page.

According to Wikipedia, the Holiday version of the song has an additional stanza. Dreaming, I was only dreaming/I wake and I find you asleep/In the deep of my heart here... This gives the song a dreamlike quality and takes away some of the heartbreaking quality of the Hungarian suicide song.

House of Leaves

Early this year, I basically consumed the book House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski. It was like nothing I'd ever read before, and for several reasons. First of all, there were three different storylines going on all at once. There were layers of stories upon layers of stories, which made it altogether entrancing. Somehow, each storyline was kept seperate so confusion was barely noticable.

Another reason was the gigantic and numerous footnotes. It was crazy how many footnotes there were in the whole thing. And sometimes, one footnote would run for pages. But the footnotes were like their own story, which made the stories blend closely even though they were totally different despite similar themes of chaos and insanity.

But the third reason was the typography of the book. Danielewski played with all sorts of text layouts, font changes and colors and all sorts of ways to keep the reader turning pages such as: footnotes that ran for pages as mirror-reflection text, pages with 1-10 words on a page to keep the suspense high and text that comes in designs to represent something from the story.

After finishing this book, I was hoping that I'd be able to find some sort of movie version of The Navidson Record. Everything in the novel made all documentation of the House seem eerily real, like something that could be transferred from pages to real life. It's a novel that would be stunning as a film, but there's no way to conquer something so conceptual as House of Leaves. It is something that must be kept as a book to be cherished that way by everyone dedicated enough to hack through the mystery of its pages.