Materialism in The Dharma Bums and Goodbye, Columbus Several works we have read thus far have criticized the prosperity of American suburbia. Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, and an excerpt from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem "A Coney Island of the Mind" all pass judgement on the denizens of the middle-class and the materialism in which they surround themselves. However, each work does not make the same analysis, as the stories are told from different viewpoints. The Dharma Bums and "A Coney Island of the Mind" are critiques of materialism by people who have rejected the middle-class ideals. In Goodbye, Columbus, however, Roth makes his point via Neil, a dweller of the lower class who wants to join the prosperous rank of the Patimkin family. The difference is that Kerouac and Ferlinghetti mock the suburbanites, yet pay them little attention while several characters in Goodbye, Columbus are disdainful of the materialism exuded by the Patimkins while feeling excluded from their social class. In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac strengthens his argument for the Zen ideal of poverty and freedom by this criticism of the conformity practiced by the middle-class: ...you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention probably on one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of wheels. You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips. (104) Kerouac's point is that freedom doesn't exist in a place where everyone is watching the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time. Kerouac also reflects on the futile trap of materialism. Japhy discusses "all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least fancy new cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume.
McCandless’ had a noble goal – to find his true self outside of the constraints of an organized society and return to “nature”. A philosophy espoused by Tolstoy, Muir, Rousseau, Kerouac and Thoreau and others, McCandless believed that person was essentially free only in state of nature, in connection with himself, the earth and exempt from the material needs and wants of modern civilization. McCandless’ cynicism and rejection of material goods, (symbolized in the novel by the burning of his paper money and identification cards) are something that many disillusioned with the ceaseless toil and routines of modern society can certainly relate to.
...McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. New York: Random House, 1979.
After reading from the novels The Last Hurrah and The Living is Easy, both surrounding the city of Boston in similar eras with similar views on public and political life, what comes to mind most of all is the portrayal of the middle class. This middle class is not the idea conjured from traditional historical figures, but rather a constantly fluctuating zone of monetary and social value. Being vague by definition, the middle class arises as people move from the inner city to the suburbs and form newly constructed neighborhoods, which were previously held by the wealthy. In The Living is Easy, Cleo desperately tries to rid herself of the stigmatism surrounding her race and the stereotypes, which follow it. By moving to Brookline, she attempts to move up in the world. The Irish immigrants in West’s novel are even more visible in The Last Hurrah. O’Connor’s novel fast-forwards to the beginning of the Irish expansion to the suburbs and into a state of normalcy and association with the middle class. Race is a prevalent issue in both novels and surrounds the commencement of moving to a new social and political stature within city society. While Cleo looks inward and remains aware of the state of her appearance and that of others around her, Skeffington is maintaining his own image and does not wish to evolve towards any new horizon. Racially, the novels’ protagonists share a differentiation from other people in their society. Cleo is of a minority among the middle class and Skeffington has made his life to serve and be idolized by them. With each story coming into contact with racial migration, it’s fair to say that the construction of each of these novels leaves the reader with a view of a changed city, where neighborhoods are changing...
Kerouac guides the reader to the understanding that "IT" can be different for everyone. Sal began his search for "IT" because he was restless in ...
The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still by Dinty M. Moore is a personal memoir about Moore’s journey into the world of American Buddhism. Although Moore is an Irish-American who lives in central Pennsylvania, was raised in a Catholic family, and attended Catholic school, he decided at a young age that God had let him down, he gave up religion. However, later on in his adult life he came across the book Being Peace by Thich Naht Hanh, and desired to know what the “Buddhists had discovered” and what he was “missing” (19). Moore thought that the most effective way of finding out how to incorporate Buddhism into his own life would be to find out how other Americans are accomplishing this; He wanted to uncover how this old Asian-practice fits into modern American culture, essentially, what is American Buddhism? To answer this question, Moore visited Monasteries, read books, attended meditation sessions, and talked to multiple revered monks. By the end of his exploration Moore cannot define exactly what American Buddhism is, but he suggests that there is a place for Buddhism in American culture, and as long as the basic practices and teachings are followed, Buddhism can be altered in many ways to fit into all types of modern American lives.
Originally from Japan, Soyen Shaku was the first Zen master to arrive in America. His followers urged him not to come to a nation that was so ill-mannered and uncultivated and that the Japanese were facing extreme discrimination. Shaku’s countrymen Hirai Ryuge Kinzo “offered pointed examples: the barring of a Japanese student from a university on the basis of his race; the exclusion of Japanese children from the San Francisco public schools; the processions of American citizens bearing placards saying ‘Japs Must Go!’” (Eck 185). After several decades, there was a Zen boom of the 1950s and that was how Buddhism affected western culture, especially in regards to entertainment. “‘Zen’ is “the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese character "chan," which is in turn the Chinese translation from the Indian Sanskrit term "dhyana," which means meditation’” (Lin).
George Saunders, a writer with a particular inclination in modern America, carefully depicts the newly-emerged working class of America and its poor living condition in his literary works. By blending fact with fiction, Saunders intentionally chooses to expose the working class’s hardship, which greatly caused by poverty and illiteracy, through a satirical approach to criticize realistic contemporary situations. In his short story “Sea Oak,” the narrator Thomas who works at a strip club and his elder aunt Bernie who works at Drugtown for minimum are the only two contributors to their impoverished family. Thus, this family of six, including two babies, is only capable to afford a ragged house at Sea Oak,
After World War II, the United States of America became a much wealthier nation. As America gained wealth and the populations in urban cities and transportation technology increased, many Americans spread out, away from the urban cities, to fulfill the common dream of having a piece of land to call their own. The landscape constructed became known as the suburbs, exclusive residential areas within commuting distance of a city. The popularity and success of the suburban landscape caused suburbs to sprawl across the United States, from the east coast to the west coast and along the borders between Canada and Mexico. By the 1990s, many suburbs surrounding major urban cities developed into being more than merely exclusive residential areas. The new kind of area developed out of suburbia, the post-suburban environment, has the characteristics of the suburbs and the characteristics of the central city, or what postmodern political geographer and urban planner, Edward Soja calls, ‘the city turned inside out' (Foster 1). The post-suburban environment, is “a fundamentally decentralized spatial arrangement in which a variety of commercial, recreational, shopping, arts, residential, and religious activities are conducted in different places and are linked primarily by private automobile transportation” (Kling 1). The multifaceted aspects of the post-suburban environment make it an attractive and dynamic space with opportunities of employment. Topanga Canyon, near Los Angeles, California, is such an example of a suburb space that's developed into a dynamic post-suburban space. Since the post-suburban space of Topanga Canyon is dynamic and filled with employment opportunities, it's attractive to Mexican immigrants who wish to have a better l...
The next step for AES is to establish a human resource information management (HRIM) system. A HRIM system will allow employees to access information contained in the HR manual through a company intranet. A HRIM system could also help AES employees track their training and development, look for courses to take, search for job openings or cross training opportunities throughout the company, and locate benefit information. As AES plants become more geographically dispersed, a HRIM system will help to communicate the company’s values and strategy to all employees.
In Francis Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the city of New York possesses a “transitory” and “enchanted” quantity, which “for the last time in history” rivaled man's “capacity for wonder” (182). New York City, a symbol of American greatness and the American dream, contains very unamerican class distinction: those whose families have been prominent and rich for decades function as a de facto aristocracy, looking down upon and controlling (through vast wealth) the poor. These class distinctions are mirrored by geography, dividing up the maps into regions by wealth. The parallelism of the region and the residents results in the region symbolizing the residents. Through analyzing both the residents and the description of the region, a holistic understanding can be gained about the residents of Valley of Ashes, East Egg, and West Egg.
Operations of the system should allow only authorized personnel to view data relating to their department and daily use, offer effective use of the system and achieve full automation of the system functions.
This along with the lighter construction of a two-stroke makes it the preferred motor used in small vehicles and tools (Two Stroke Engine). A two-stroke engine is operated by first drawing the mixture of fuel and air into the chamber by the vacuum caused by the upward stroke of the piston. During the downward piston stroke, the poppet valve is forced closed due to the increased pressure within the chamber. The mixture is compressed in the chamber throughout the stroke. As the stroke ends, the intake port is exposed allowing the mixture to escape into the main cylinder, expelling the exhaust gasses in the process and some of the fuel mixture as well. Momentum then causes the piston to rise, compressing the mixture as another stroke is beginning. Once the stroke reaches its peak, the spark plug will ignite the mixture causing the fuel to expand driving the piston down thus completing the cycle while additionally initiating a new
The memory of a computer can be upgraded easily. The most effective way to do this is to get more RAM to plug into the motherboard. The user should first check in the manual for that specific computer to see if there is room on the motherboard for more memory. There is also a limit of memory a computer can have that should be checked as well as a recommended speed. If everything checks out giving a computer more memory is as simple as plugging it into the motherboard. (Raymond)
Kavanagh, M. J., Thite, M., Johnson, D. J., (2012). Human Resource Information Systems, Thousand Oaks, CA; SAGE Publications, Inc.
* Gopher. An early, text-only method for accessing internet documents. Gopher has been almost entirely subsumed in the World Wide Web, but you may still find gopher documents linked to in web pages.