Essay // Current TV

The Egg

A very interesting way of looking at life from an unknown author worth a read. Let me... more

HodeRules
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20 Most Entertaining Celebrity Thesis Statements

Here are 20 entertaining celebrity thesis statements to prove it. Some are bizarre,... more

sunnyspeaks
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I am seeking for dissertation help

Writing a friendship letter requires a fine technique of crafting words. It's... more

carla22
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not so new but still very relevant.

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It's a suburban neighborhood, on Sunday morning. There is a three-way stop at which hardly anyone ever goes the other direction than the main one. But you often see a police car in the nearby parking lot, keeping his sharp eye out for evil lawbreakers. These are the dangerous criminals who slow down almost to a full stop that causes the car to shift back the other direction, but don't quite do this. Instead they do what is sometimes called a "rolling stop" which stops short of full immobilization.The policeman in the car regards this as "running a stop sign," as if you paid no attention to it at all, and he'll give you a ticket whenever he catches you doing it.

From the policeman's point of view, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. One recent empirical accounting at this intersection (I dragooned some neighborhood kids into keeping count) observed that more than 9 in 10 people do not come to what the law regards as a "full stop."

I should know about this because, try as I might to be a law-abiding citizen, I have now received my fifth ticket this year at this very intersection one block from my house. That's not a typo. Five! I know it sounds crazy — why the heck can't I obey those who are ordained to keep me safe? — but when you consider that I go through this intersection several times per day, I'm actually doing rather well.

It goes without saying that this is a racket. The city is many hundreds of dollars richer because of my penchant for law breaking alone, and probably hundreds of thousands richer if you include everyone else's.

But it wasn't until someone drew my attention to this link that I understood the full extent of what this whole racket is about. Yes, it's about money. But there is more to it than that. You see, it turns out that I'm an archetype, a person who rolls through stop signs in my safe neighborhood and then gets outraged when the ticket is issued and attempts to "fight authority" rather than pay up. So, fool that I am, I actually believe in "challenging the system." I take seriously the claim that I'm innocent until proven guilty. Can you believe the naïveté?

Itnot so new but still very relevant. ----------------------- It's a suburban... more

Darevalo
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"The World as I See It" - an essay by Einstein + documentary

"In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am... more

worrg
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"As the Arabs see the Jews" - essay, written by King Abdullah I 1948. - the real Palestine history

This fascinating essay, written by King Hussein's grandfather King Abdullah,... more

worrg
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2 years ago
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3 comments

The Limit of anything is not a natural place.

http://thehouseilivein.me/2010/05/06/the-limit-of-anything-is-not-a-natural-place/... more

dougbrun
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The necessity of flexible boundaries

In life, flexible boundaries are a must and are the key to respect. Stand up for... more

transreporter
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Miley Cyrus: Twitter Quitter

Guest blogger Jenn Themelis brings insight to Miley Cyrus' decision to stop... more

joshuaheller
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Night on the Very Top of a Skyscraper

Greeting the night on the very top of a skyscraper… Well, maybe not that... more

AlexL5
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Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net

... his great work is a constant elegy on the irretrievable decay of good society; his... more

sk8bs55
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The Rights Of Existence

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The Triumphant Sound of Egotistical, Angst-Riddled Youth

This is a post from several years ago. I wrote it in anticipation of being able to usurp the authority of my English teacher and incidentally received a massive rejection letter to a literary arts institute.

Excerpt #2:
In the Beginning the End came

In a time of crisis…
There will be fear and there will be wonder. Streets will be vacated, as nobody uses them anymore, save for trolling about within the confines of automobiles. Buildings will be packed full of people, scared and ignorant. A great wind will blow, breaking the glass of those buildings, forcing the masses outside into the vortex that they helped to create. This will be the beginning.
Later, when the winds die down and people can contemplate for a moment what might have happened, what events might have transpired to cause this current situation, they will start to realize with glazed eyes that there is a silent accusation, right and true, and they will acknowledge it for the first time. They will imagine a world without life, without meaning, without God. Blame will be realized fully as something to be assigned to each one of them, individually, personally, and satisfactorily sublime. This was His fault and Hers, their fault and mine.
And the winds will pick up, spreading heavily over what looks to be the remains of a distant warning, some time-honored event called 9/11, and the people will leave here, in some regimented fashion, not knowing why they are leaving, yet knowing full well that there is a reason and that reason can be easily assigned to each of them alone.
I will remain here with the Others. We will desert the cities and claim our natural place amidst the order of Things. We will sow seeds, reap fruit, irrigate land and navigate the long passages of land that were abandoned long ago, when that first heap of cars and trucks laid waste to the earth and gave to the people the freedom to travel on strict lines with white and yellow slashes and dots percolating it’s surfaces. We will burn all remnants of modern life in pursuit of something Real. We will take away names and give back Meaning and Purpose to all things. We will annihilate religion and worship Mankind, Ego, Individualism and the Great Collective of those Individuals. We will celebrate Oneness and Difference the same. We will be alien to the life that the winds forced…allowed us to abandon.
Then there will be the followers, those too scared to believe the guilt they felt was absolute truth. They will come from distant places, cities, with obsolete technologies striving to make amends for crimes they dare not speak of. We will not allow them in. We will test them and realize that there journey was a worthy test in itself, but still, we will not want to believe that they are true to the cause as we all were, staring patiently into starry skies waiting for the day that the great winds would blow away the world that made us so unhappy, so fragmented in our minds, so insignificant. So, we will test those that seek us out as some sort of shelter from the real truth of all things. Those that we allow in will remain as original seekers of truth. We will grant them that gift of privilege.
Eventually time will pass us into the future, far away from any conceivalbe tie to the past, and we will be happy, joyous, grateful, and proud. We will have conquered the ideology of the Macro and underwritten the Micro with our blood and sweat.
Suddenly, as I shake myself from the view of the night sky, I realize how singular life is for us all, how individualized our perceptions are, and how insubordinate I am. The wind blows through my hair and I say to myself, so that no one will hear my plea for help, “Please blow away that which is not right. Please destroy that which has killed the spirit of Man and show me a pathway toward a new life, toward the Real. Please! Tell me where the Others are.”
And the wind continues to blow, the water continues to run from a heavily chlorinated pond, onto my garden, into the soil that my hands have committed so much time to, and I start to realize that the destruction is already here, breathing its life into itself through Us, our own twisted design for a brighter world, twisted again by nature to bring us the fruit of our labor…waiting. As we sow the seeds for our own extinction, I see clearly that the seeds have grown into trees larger than society, that those trees have been here for a very long time, waiting.
Soon there will be an end. Soon life will return to the minds of the sufferring. Soon, all of the second-handers of the world will fight each other for scraps as myself and the Others laugh and drink in fields of merry content and harvests of food like that of false gods and prophets from story books like the Bible, or the Quran. Soon…soon…”Please tell me where the Others are.”This is a post from several years ago. I wrote it in anticipation of being able to... more

getrounder
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Odd Comic Couple; Science-Fiction and Fantasy

Notes from New Sodom: The Marriage(s) of Science Fiction / Fantasy
December 2nd, 2009 by Hal Duncan
The Great Debate

“The question of whether a certain story of imagination is a fantasy or a science fiction work would depend upon the device the author uses to explain his projected or unreal world. If he uses the gimmick or device of saying: ‘This is a logical or probable assumption based upon known science, which is going to develop from known science or from investigations of areas not yet quite explored but suspected,’ then one could call it science fiction. But if he asks the reader to suspend his disbelief simply because of the fun of it, in other words, just to say: ‘Here is a fairy tale I’m going to tell you,’ then it is fantasy. It could actually be the same story.”
Sam J. Lundwall
Down in the ghetto of Genre, in the SF Café that is our literary salon, in this scene of zines and forums, conventions and clubs, there’s a Great Debate that kicks off every so often. The diversity of the clientele maps to a diversity of opinions — convictions, even — and few of these are as contentious as those addressing the differences or lack thereof between science fiction and fantasy. To be fair, the taxonomy of literary genres is a game that appeals to the geek in me as much as anyone, but the diversity we’re dealing with in the SF Café is obscured by the very word genre, its meaning muddled by a conflation of openly-defined aesthetic idioms with conventional forms that are closely-defined and marketing categories that are all but empty of definition.

There’s genre and there’s genre.

Across the city of Writing — and in the SF Café most of all perhaps — we’ve forgotten that the word genre derives from the Latin generis, meaning family, that if a genre is a family of fiction, then a work can be a member of that family by marriage or adoption as much as by birth. Aesthetic idioms are constantly reshaped by writers marrying one technique with another, adopting unfamiliar aims, methods born in other idioms entirely. This is genre as one big open clan. I’ve joked that being a “Celt” is actually fuck-all to do with birth; all you have to do is drink with a Celt, and that’s you initiated into the clan whether you like it or not. It’s like Richard Harris becoming Sioux in A Man Called Horse, only less painful than hanging by your nipples. (Although the hangover the next day…)
But then there’s genre. Buying into a bullshit of blood-lines, many are proud of the traits inherited with the tartan — so proud of their clan name they’ve forgotten that family can be openly defined, that the in-laws with different names are still family if we accept them as such. For certain feuding factions indeed that very notion is anathema. The clan name is everything, and a pox on any cur who slights it. Any pure-bred work of Science Fiction (or as they will call it, science fiction) is entirely unrelated, they’ll insist, to that damnable Fantasy (or as they will call it, fantasy). There’s Campbells and MacDonalds, and ne’er the twain shall meet.

But all we really have, others will say, is a tartan of a marketing category with an empty definition. The presentation of this stuff as a genre of Science Fiction is just bagpipes-and-haggis branding. In truth, it’s an open idiom, a genre of works which may be in various genres, an extended family of fictions better described as Hard SF, Space Opera, Cyberpunk, Technothriller, and so on. Fantasy is in the same position, a tartan label slapped on a box containing the closely-defined forms of Epic Fantasy, Swords & Sorcery, Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Romance, etc..
http://www.bscreview.com/2009/12/notes-from-new-sodom-the-marriages-of-science-fiction-fantasy/

http://www.evolvefish.com/fish/media/S-TreeLifeColor2.gifNotes from New Sodom: The Marriage(s) of Science Fiction / Fantasy December 2nd, 2009... more

remanns
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Quest For the Truth - Contrast Essay: War Versus Peace

This is the final essay I wrote for my English Composition I class. I got a perfect score on it. I thought I might share it with you all. Enjoy the read

Since the beginning of mankind, there has been conflict and unrest among us. The undeniable differences that separate men from other men escalate and devolve into violent outbursts. Fighting, rioting, murders, assassinations, and war are all by-products of man’s inability to relate and empathize with different cultures, ideas, and beliefs. It is our human stubbornness and stupidity giving way to violence and genocidal extermination as opposed to looking for compassion and understanding within each other. We use war to strive for peace under the false assumption that killing those who disagree will give us peace. It is a logical fallacy to believe that those who suffer the murdering of their loved ones will simply lay down their arms and accept a shaky peace. However, it is abundantly clear that when given the choice between peace and war, peace is the more desirable option among the two choices. This is because peace is more prosperous for all than war, which leads to the bloodshed of many.
Peace is the end result of war, and its desired outcome. It’s also the state that occurs before wars begin. This is a preferred state of living for all people, because peace can allow for happiness and tranquility to blossom and flourish. Peace is a state where people are at their happiest and their most productive. More energy tends to be focused on the advancement of humanity through various aspects of human culture. The money that would be invested into war would instead be invested into that country’s economy. There is also a considerably less death and destruction to the infrastructure and cities within a country without the destructive elements of war. It would be intellectually dishonest to say that there would be no violence within a peaceful country’s borders; however, it would be acceptable to assume that the violence within a peaceful country’s border would pale in comparison to one whose borders are engulfed in the flames of war. Diplomacy could be the reason behind the increase of non-violence within a peaceful nation. Problems are solved by discussion and compromise rather than military might, and everyone may not be in agreement with each other at the end of the discussion, but everyone lives on.
War is the opposite of peace, and arises from conflicts from different or even the same country. War is bred by violence, and leads to more violence. Within that initial violence it creates survivors, who within their survival can become vengeful and create more violence. The energy that would be used to create and build is now used to kill and destroy anything perceived as an enemy. Death and destruction are abundant and surround the streets that children played or people ventured down during their everyday lives. The playgrounds have now become the killing fields; corpses lay where kids once ran and played. Mortar shells destroy school buildings and national libraries, destroying the histories and educations of the population. While force has been touted as the ultimate trump card since the creation of the bronze spear, violence seems to create more problems than it solves. For centuries, we have used war as the solutions to conflicts and yet we still have more conflicts that we attempt to solve through war.
Is war inevitable or can we stop the eternal suffering caused by the death, destruction, and annihilation of the seemingly unstoppable conflicts caused by our differences? It seems that despite our advancements in technology, medicine, and society, we cannot escape the violence and terror that inspires war. We do not strive to lay down arms and eliminate nuclear armaments; we instead find ways to build deadlier guns, rockets, and bombs. The terrorist attack of September 11th, 2001 is a prime example of how far people are willing to go to commit atrocities against one another. While one of the greatest strengths of humanity is to learn from its mistakes, war is a mistake we continually make over and over again.
As long as war continues, there can be no world peace. Peace is a fragile state that needs consistent stability to flourish and prosper. The world cannot be at peace when people are fighting each other. The chaos created by war does nothing to help bring stability to any country. Each time there is hope that we will not have to resort to wars again, because peace is a desirable state. There have been several shining examples of peaceful people making a difference, and non-violent movements creating social changes on both a community and a nationwide scale. There are more ways to change the world than putting people down the cross-hairs of a gun; however, there are people unwilling to see it in terms of pacifism. The new generation of leaders must find a way to provide peace to the constituents of their communities, and promote peace and tranquility above all else.
The youth of our current generation has finally been exposed to war. They have seen the televised horrors of terrorism, and experienced the horrific images of battle. While we have always justified the use of force to end conflicts, perhaps the youth have finally realized that it is time to change our ways. We possess the power to change the fate of the world for the better through peace. It is through our compassion and understanding for our fellow man that we can bring ourselves to the next stage in human and social evolution. Without our compassion and empathy for one another, we are nothing more than animals lashing out at the throat of our own against our own betterment. There is a better way to solve our problems than with a gun; it is to use our hearts and our minds.This is the final essay I wrote for my English Composition I class. I got a perfect... more

lifestudentno83
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Jonathan Ames Scripting Adaptation of His Novel Wake Up, Sir!

Bored to Death’s Jonathan Ames - the show’s creator, writer and all around... more

atomiclegion
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Just wanted to say hello and point to my collection of essays

I am very excited about joining this group and I look forward to writing new essays... more

jubal
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2 years ago
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5 comments

Beatle's essay found 50 years on

An essay written by Sir Paul McCartney as a 10-year-old has been found after lying... more

unclepete
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Writing an essay conclusion

Guidelines on writing expository essay conclusion: ideas posted by experienced writers

domcir1
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Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Poet

In this short essay, Portland, Maine poet, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc reads a poem about... more

dougbrun
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