The Importance of Being Earnest

I attended the Ath on Wednesday to see our school's performance of Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest". I had never before seen a play at the Ath, so this was a new experience for me. I have seen this movie before and I signed up for this Ath presentation because it peaked my curiosity. The theater students did a marvelous job in their rendition of this piece of art. I quickly picked up several differences between the movie and the play. As the play was only one hour and forty five minutes long, as you would except, several scenes where not included. Nonetheless, the actors successfully demonstrated the take-away of how crucial it is to be earnest. After the play, the actress of Ms. Prism told me that the actors were given the freedom to individualize their lines. She mentioned that one actor often spun his scripted lines on the spot, adding a significantly larger number of lines each time! I enjoyed the entertainment that our fellow CMC students provided and loved seeing how they incorporated their own stylist preferences and interpenetration into this well known comedy. I hope that you all had a chance to see it to :).

Storytelling

Before the break, I attended Firoozeh Dumas' Athenaeum presentation. She grew up in Iran but her family moved to Whittier, Southern California when she turned seven. In her Ath talk, she explained her experiences as an immigrant in America through numerous anecdotes. Dumas has a natural gift for storytelling, as I should have expected from the title of the talk. She said that she learned this skill from her father, an optimistic man who attended school in the US and believed he could achieve the "American Dream". Although her presentation revealed the rough challenges of assimilation into American culture still faced by immigrants today, she tied humor into every experience. She is the author of several novels and is most known for "Funny in Farsi", "a memoir of growing up Iranian in America". Many of the anecdotes that she shared during the talk are incorporated into this novel. When her family arrived in America, many of their American neighbors knew nothing about Iran or where it was on a map. Neighbors welcomed Dumas and her family and helped them settle into their new environment. A few years later, Dumas experienced a second wave of culture shock when a news headline broke out: Iranians take American prisoners hostage. This was a turning point in which Dumas and her family experienced first-hand a hostile attitude towards Iranians. After hearing Dumas' talk, I immediately ordered this novel and started reading it. It is an eye-opening book and tactically includes the same humor as in her verbal speech. If you are looking for a humorous, captivating, and educational book with a twist on immigration, I recommend that you give it a read. This was by far the best Ath speaker I have heard and I now feel motivated to improve my own storytelling skills.

The State Against Blacks

This past Thursday I attended a talk by Jason Riley, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I must preface by stating that I was already reading some of Riley's book, "Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed", in my Black intellectuals class and already had some issues with him and his argument, but nothing could have prepared me for the Ath talk. Though I could not sit at the head table, a friend of mine did and said that he got into a heated discussion with him right before his talk. During the talk, he gave a number of statistics to argue that: Black representation in politics, government programs/help, increased employment, lenient on crime policies, etc. within the same vein actually have no correlation to Black incarceration rates and often times can have a more averse affect on the communities. He argued that the government should butt out of issues withe Black community for that such was the case in a time of great economic prosperity and low incarceration rates for Blacks, pre- Civil Rights movement and Great Society programs. He also blamed Black behavior for these trends and flirted with the concept of a shift in Black culture being necessary to change the behavior and how Blacks are perceived by the rest of society. This was proposed as opposed to using racism as a cop out for community trends. Naturally, this was met with a lot of animosity and the question and answer section of this talk was often characterized by bickering, nitpicking of data, disrespect, and raising of voices. A number of fellow attendees said that this was probably the wildest Ath talk they had been to.