A Message of Hope in Love Medicine Essay -- Medicine College Admission

A Message of Hope in Love Medicine   Love Medicine, by Louis Eldridge attempts to confront the popular stereotypes of American Indians. The novel generally follows the history of a family of Chippewa Indians who live on and off a reservation. In a thoroughly humanist approach, Ms. Eldrige narrates each chapter in a different voice, and through extremely varied characters effectively shows the diversity of the Indians. This is an important aspect of the novel, as it demonstrates that there is no single stereotypical "Indian". The book begins with two scenes from a modern perspective, showing a turbulent family with fairly disturbing problems. Then the author flashes back to the lives of the Chippewa's family two generations earlier, and moves more or less chronologically to the present day. One of the major conflicts in the story is the reconciliation of the Native Americans to their cultural past, while still embracing the future. The words "Indian", American Indian, or Native American, all bring to mind stereotypes of a race of people with specific stigma attached to themselves in modern American culture. The word "Indian" can conjure up a multiplicity of images, from the barbaric, blood-thirsty savages straight out of a western movie, to the more romantic image of a noble, intelligent, and tribal people, living in harmony with nature. These extremes in the modern stereotyping of the American Indian and all of their various moderations are wrong for a very important reason: They are rooted in the past. The war between popular European culture and Indian culture was over practically before it had even begun. After the frontier closed around the turn of the century all that was left of untouched Indian culture ... ...ety. Lipsha then in his own words, "took an evil shortcut". He purchased frozen turkey's from a store and tried to have them blessed by Catholic priests. This represents the ways in which native Americans lean on the modern day conveniences of Western society. This not only makes their cultural power diminish, it turns the power completely back around on them. In Lipsha's case, the medicine killed his grandfather. The struggle of the native American people today, as illustrated in Love Medicine is one of cultural identity. The other problems of poverty, alcoholism, hate, and infidelity, are only symptoms of the "bad medicine", which is made easy by the omnipresence of Western culture. The message of Love Medicine is one of hope for a people who have everything in the world to despair about, who suffer from a sickness which only one medicine will heal.    A Message of Hope in Love Medicine Essay -- Medicine College Admission A Message of Hope in Love Medicine   Love Medicine, by Louis Eldridge attempts to confront the popular stereotypes of American Indians. The novel generally follows the history of a family of Chippewa Indians who live on and off a reservation. In a thoroughly humanist approach, Ms. Eldrige narrates each chapter in a different voice, and through extremely varied characters effectively shows the diversity of the Indians. This is an important aspect of the novel, as it demonstrates that there is no single stereotypical "Indian". The book begins with two scenes from a modern perspective, showing a turbulent family with fairly disturbing problems. Then the author flashes back to the lives of the Chippewa's family two generations earlier, and moves more or less chronologically to the present day. One of the major conflicts in the story is the reconciliation of the Native Americans to their cultural past, while still embracing the future. The words "Indian", American Indian, or Native American, all bring to mind stereotypes of a race of people with specific stigma attached to themselves in modern American culture. The word "Indian" can conjure up a multiplicity of images, from the barbaric, blood-thirsty savages straight out of a western movie, to the more romantic image of a noble, intelligent, and tribal people, living in harmony with nature. These extremes in the modern stereotyping of the American Indian and all of their various moderations are wrong for a very important reason: They are rooted in the past. The war between popular European culture and Indian culture was over practically before it had even begun. After the frontier closed around the turn of the century all that was left of untouched Indian culture ... ...ety. Lipsha then in his own words, "took an evil shortcut". He purchased frozen turkey's from a store and tried to have them blessed by Catholic priests. This represents the ways in which native Americans lean on the modern day conveniences of Western society. This not only makes their cultural power diminish, it turns the power completely back around on them. In Lipsha's case, the medicine killed his grandfather. The struggle of the native American people today, as illustrated in Love Medicine is one of cultural identity. The other problems of poverty, alcoholism, hate, and infidelity, are only symptoms of the "bad medicine", which is made easy by the omnipresence of Western culture. The message of Love Medicine is one of hope for a people who have everything in the world to despair about, who suffer from a sickness which only one medicine will heal.   

Alberti on Renaissance Painting and Technique

This essay will deal with the technical and metaphysical aspects of Alberti’s famous 1435 piece, On Painting, specifically, the paragraphs in Book II 25-34. What is significant about this selection is that it summarizes many of the technical and metaphysical principles that have come to define the renaissance, especially the dominance of Plato and the rule of Form.Hence, this selection is not merely a matter of painting technique, but a summary of the basic ontology of Renaissance thinking as it pertains to painting and sculpture, as Alberti considers these as â€Å"cognate arts.† The citations will be based on the paragraph number rather than the page.The professed aim of this section is to justify the honor and virtue of the painter as an artist. But of course, it is far more than that. Alberti depicts the painter almost as a sorcerer or sorts, someone who can make what is not present, present. The notion of re-creation, or even co-creation is a central element of the scientific revolution that the Renaissance both foreshadowed and participated in.For Alberti, the painter can, in a sense, bring the dead back to life (25). The painter does, on a regular basis, what the alchemist tries and struggles to bring about, to have a dominance over creation, to master it and force it to bend to the artists’ will. This is the real connection between Alberti’s work here and the scientific and alchemical ideology of the Renaissance (Caron, 1961 35-37).Alberti continues to contrast the painter’s art to the alchemists, holding that a painted jewel or piece of gold, because it is artistically rendered, is actually worth more than the actual stone or previous metal. This is a challenge to alchemy, having been reborn during the Renaissance. Alchemy sought to manipulate matter for the sake of wealth and power. But the painter does this on a regular basis, and is financially more successful than the alchemist (25).Therefore, painting is man†™s way of re-creating the already extant creation of God. It is the application of the human mind to what already exists, and in a sense, the artist becomes the creator, or more accurately, the architect of creation using what already exists to create something new, to take creation and raise it to a new level of understanding. If one can understand creation, then one can control it: the reward is money and glory (26, explicitly mentioned in 28 as the foal of the artist, which of course, is the same goal as the alchemist).Alberti makes the intriguing claim that the arts of painting and sculpture developed at the same time as religion (27). He does not elaborate on this claim, but the remainder of the selection under examination here might give us come clues.In paragraph 30, three specific steps of artistic technique and developed, though ultimately, only the first two really matter, that of circumspection and that of composition. The third, color or the â€Å"reception of lightâ €  is not treated in this selection. But this is not merely a technical manual, but a strong summary of the ontology of Alberti and the Florentine Renaissance. This ontology might help us answer the question that Alberti poses concerning the identical development of religion and painting.Specifically, there are three steps in re-creating the object under examination. First, and the most important, is the concept of circumspection. This is the most important because it is a reference to Plato’s Forms, or the ultimate grounding of all objects that exist. A Form is the true being of an object, outside of space and time, which is the â€Å"essence† of the object to be painted.It is this Form that the painter must understand, however incompletely, though the mind of the artist, since a Form cannot be seen with the senses. Only the intellect can apprehend the Form. In a more technical sense, the Form that can be perceived by the artist is the â€Å"outline† of the object. One first needs to eliminate what is specific about an object and reach its form.

Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock and Dualism in Psycho The characters in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) each have a dual nature that is masterfully portrayed through character development and use of mirrors throughout the film. The very first shot in Psycho is zooming in from an open view of the city where it is a bright and sunny day. As the shot zooms in further and further it comes into a dark and shaded room that shows Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and Sam Loomis (John Gavin) having an affair in a undisclosed hotel. This is dualistic image is just one example of many that Hitchcock has placed in this film.Marion Crane is the first main character that is focused upon for the first half of Psycho. â€Å"All that Marion Wants, after all, are the humble treasures of love, marriage, home, and family. † (Brill 227) [up and down] This is the reason why Marion steals the money in the first place. The money is her first real chance at escaping the life of meeting at cheap hotels in secret. The open ing scene shows the lack of money and personal isolation that Marion has while making love in secrecy in a hotel that â€Å"aren’t interested in you when you come in, but when your time is up. Marion is desperate for any type of companionship with Sam even claiming she would happily live in the spare room at his work. The progress of Marion in Psycho is followed very closely by her appearance and her apparel. â€Å"†¦the bag is a transgressive agent associated with stealing, escape, and independence. † (Gottlieb, Brookhouse 151) [Sarah Street 151] Before any crime was ever committed, Marion wore a white bag that matched her underwear and her clothing. After the money was taken, she made a choice to place the envelope of money in her black bag, rather than her suitcase which would completely hide the money.Along with the change in bags, Marion also changes her underwear to black, and her outer clothes to dark colors as well. Marion’s death is very symbolic and dualistic in a multitude of ways. â€Å"The fact that Marion is nonetheless murdered after her self-realization suggests that neither she nor the society that produced her is recuperable† (Gottlieb, Brookhouse 362) [Christopher Sharrett 362] Once Marion had made that fatal mistake to become a criminal, she was destined to die as a criminal, with no chance of salvation. This is very dualistic of the ending of the frontier, which was right around the time Psycho was produced. the movement of the film is steadily downward and inward, away from the feeling of daylight, abundance, and expanse to a nightmarish claustrophobia that exteriorizes the unconscious mind. † (Gottlieb, Brookhouse 362) [Christopher Sharrett 362] The image of the West being a gigantic open expanse was coming to an end and Hitchcock showed that the frontier was finished and there was no chance of it coming back. Hitchcock places a large amount of dualism between the characters of Marion, Sam, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), and Lila Crane (Vera Miles). The first couple, Sam and Marion, engenders the second, Norman and Marion: Norman has thus taken the place of Sam. Yet he has actually, diegetically speaking, taken the place of Marion, given the mirror dialectic between the sexes and their psychic structurations. † (Deutalbaum, Poague 357) [Bellour 357] The couple of Marion and Sam never got a chance to be married, but as the film goes through the second half, it is Sam and Lila that are â€Å"married† as they go to the motel. Lila doubles as her lost sister as the heroine of the film, following nearly the same actions as Marion.The look on Lila’s face as she finds the mummy is identical to that of Marion’s in the shower Hitchcock uses mirrors quite a bit in Psycho to really help express dualism in this film. â€Å"†¦ depthless images in mirrors that are used systematically throughout Psycho to prefigure the shattering of its characters’ p ersonal coherence. † (Brill 227) [up and down] Brill states how Hitchcock uses mirrors to match up the different characters and to show that there is a lot more depth than what the viewer my first think.Through use of mirrors, Hitchcock brings a much deeper meaning to certain scenes with different characters than would otherwise be without mirrors. One of the most crucial uses of mirrors in Psycho is when Marion is at the car dealership. â€Å"When she takes the damning step of spending some of the money, she is radically bisected by a down word looking shot and a mirror in the washroom where she takes the cash from her purse. † (Brill 227) The image in this scene is extremely important to the dual nature of Marion.At this point, she passes the point of no return and is cut in half by the mirror. The half image of Marion shows that she has split herself in two, good and evil, and the evil side is the one that has taken over. The second half of Psycho, in which Marion is dead, shows the dualism between Marion and the other characters. When Detective Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam) first interrogates Norman, his back is to the mirror in the parlor, almost identical to that of Marion when she first entered the motel. Sam appears more than once in the same mirrors while uestioning Norman. When Lila is searching the house for Ms. Bates she comes upon the double mirrors in her bedroom. â€Å"This moment constitutes Hitchcock’s most explicit suggestion that his characters are experiencing-and we are watching- not something weirdly outside ordinary experience, but the expression of a potential for personal distortion and violence that is the other side, the mirror image, of human normality† (Brill 227) This moment is key for Hitchcock because he shows the viewers that something like this could actually happen.There are people in the world that are not mentally stable and that do the type of things that Norman Bates does. Hitchcock also shows a large amount of dualism between the characters in Psycho and birds. â€Å"†¦a complex analogy between bird and human that exists in Psycho and is announced in the opening sequence of the film. Over the bird’s-eye view of a city [†¦] evoke the point of view of a bird who glides down, alights on the window ledge, and slips into the room. (Gottlieb, Brookhouse 295) [Richard Allen] Another sense of duality is present in the last names of Marion Crane and Sam Loomis, both different types of birds and both can be seen as a pair of love-birds. The duality in with birds in Psycho becomes extremely apparent with Norman Bates. When Norman is talking to Marion, he tells her: â€Å"My hobby is stuffing things. You know, taxidermy. I guess I’d just rather stuff birds because I hate the look of beasts when they’re stuffed. You know, foxes and chimps. Some people even stuff dogs and cats but, oh, I can’t do that.I think only birds look well stuffed, well, because they’re kind of passive to begin with. Norman’s claim that birds are passive to begin with, is a reference to the habits of birds and is implied to being a habit of women as well. His obsession with stuffing birds culminated in the creation of his prized â€Å"stuffed bird†, the mummy of his mother. â€Å"This ‘stuffed bird’ was created by the act of ‘stuffing a bird’ in the sense that combines both a sexual act- the implied incest between Norman and his mother- and the act of killing.The monstrous figure of Norman’s mummy is condemned endlessly to repeat this act. † (Gottlieb, Brookhouse 296) [Richard Allen] Marion is the first victim of this sexual and murderous bird that swoops down from the house and attacks her. The knife can be seen as a form of â€Å"pecking† that is used to kill her. After being â€Å"pecked† Marion Crane eventually ends up slumped over, very dualistic to that of a bird with a broken neck staring blankly upward. The stare of death that remains on Marion’s face is a mirror image of the birds that hang in the parlor of the motel, permanently stuck staring out from death.The angles of the shots when Marion and Arbogast are being murdered are from a very high up view to symbolize even further to create a duality between Norman’s mother and a bird. â€Å"Hitchcock’s camera, initially indentified with the love-bird, now comes to occupy the gaze of the death-bird in a series of high-angled shots that accompany the murder of Marion [†¦] swoops down to murder Arbogast on the landing of the gothic staircase. † (Gottlieb, Brookhouse 296) [Richard Allen] Both murders relate to a frenzied bird swooping down from high above and attacking its prey with its vicious beak.