Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 3)

Daniel Richardson

Professor Jesse Miller

ENG 110, H-4

8 November 2017

            To many, having a direct involvement in the death process of a loved one may seem a disturbing thought. However, it is a philosophy nowhere near as inane as it seems. Throughout most of our lives we have possessed fond pets, developing a sense of love and caring for them that they become part of the family. Yet, as cordial these additional members of the family may be, they are a sad reminder of mortality. For years you have taken care of them, played with them, and loved them. Suddenly everything comes to a heart-shattering halt and you find yourself building a pine box for them. You sit there in remembrance, pet them one last time, and maybe give them a hug and kiss. Then you close the box, lower them down, and send them off into the next. You prepare them, spend their last moments on earth with them, and carry out a service for them, just as Caitlin Doughty urges potential cliental to do for their relatives. That brave flush of the toilet for the dead fish, is very much the same as pushing the button that sends human relatives “off to their final disposition.”

            Caitlin Doughty feels that it is important to humanize the industrial crematorium so that the last moments that this person is flesh, they will have a more symbolic sendoff, rather than just be another part of industry. She urges families to be more involved in the death process to take responsibility for their loved one, rather than leave the burden to someone who never knew them. She would rather the process seem more ceremonial than industrial and bland. Above all, she wishes to instill families with a sense of mortality gained from sending their loved one off for the final time.

            I was aware that the process of cremation was an industrial process, not the ritualistic way that it is depicted. However, I was unaware of the alkaline hydrolysis method of disintegrating a body, that Doughty describes. I’m sure that the mob was worlds ahead of society in putting it to practice. On top of this, I did know a decent bit about the process of embalming that Mitford describes, from my studies in high school, but I had no idea that it was not practiced in other countries. I just took this as a fact of common practice. I certainly did not know that there are toxic chemicals put into chicken mcnuggets, such as TBHQ, a form of lighter fluid, yet I did expect there to certainly be more ingredients than just chicken. Pollan has really turned me off from even wanting a taste of these “white meat” creations.

Daniel Richardson

Professor Jesse Miller

ENG 110, H-4

6 October 2017

In her “The American Way of Death Revisited”, Jessica Mitford presents an overlying argument that death has become an industrialized within North America. She claims that funeral directors are deceptive in their work. To support this, Mitford borrows a passage from Edward A. Martin’s Psychology of Funeral Service, which reads: “He may not always do as much as the family thinks that he is doing… the important thing is that his services may be used to make the family believe that they are giving unlimited expression to their own sentiment” (pg. 50). Having attended many funerals myself, I agree with Mitford. The funeral director merely makes arrangements and checks in, like a waiter. Mitford compares the funeral director to a salesman. To make this point, she brings up the practice of embalmment, as well as the cost caskets. She reports “The purpose of embalming is to make the corpse suitable for viewing in a suitably costly container; and here too the funeral director, routinely, without first consulting the family, prepares the body for public display” (pg. 43). Once again, firsthand knowledge comes into play, as I have seen catalogs for caskets, and experienced the push of funeral directors to spend more money. Mitford blames this expectation for extravagance on the greedy will of the industry, forcing their wishes upon rattled, grieving families. She points out on page 43 that “No law requires embalming, no religious doctrine commends in, nor is it dictated by considerations of health, sanitation, or even of personal daintiness. In no part of the world, but North American is it widely used.” Never being to a foreign funeral, I have little though about this before. But the more I think about it, the more the practice of embalmment seems just as another sickly way of marketing a deceased. Mitford believes a possible cause of the funeral industry’s control on how death is perceived in North America, is their elusiveness, hiding their process from the public. Mitford asserts that “A close look at what takes place in the [preparation room] may explain in large measure the undertaker’s intractable reticence concerning a procedure that has become his major raison d’etre (pg. 45). I must once again agree with Mitford. Why do we not know more about what the funeral directors do. We trust them. But just how much do they push us around?

Daniel Richardson
Professor Jesse Miller
ENG 104, H-4
25 October 2017
“The American Way of Death Revisited”
“The American Way of Death Revisited”, is a short piece written by Jessica Mitford. Mitford’s goal in writing this piece is to expose the funeral industry for taking advantage of grieving families. Mitford notes on page 42, that Preferred Funeral Directors International, an organization of private funeral directors, advertise their funerals as including “an additional forty hours of service required by members of other local allied professions, including the work of the cemeteries, newspapers, and of course, the most important of all, the service of your clergyman. These some 20 hours of labor are the basic value on which the cost of funeral rests.” However, as Mitford points out, a clergy service lasts “no more than 15 minutes” and are not paid for by the funeral director. The funeral director does not foot the bill for the closing of the grave either.
One of the heaviest expenses on a funeral bill, can be the embalmment process. Yet as Mitford again points out “[Sic] no law requires embalming, no religious doctrine commends it, nor is it dictated by considerations of health, sanitation, or even personal daintiness. In no part of the world but in North America is it widely used.” If it’s not required, how come it is such a common practice? Mitford supplies us an answer on pg. 44 when she reveals that per Federal Trade Commission standards, permission is only required for the process of embalming “only if a change is made to the procedure”. Embalming the American dead was made popular only by the funeral homes as a marketing scheme. Mitford paints a picture of this, by including the passage from the English-woman, detailing her sheer horror of knowing that American funerals are open-casket and are presented for viewing in make-up, realizing “Then and there I decided that I could never face another American funeral—even dead.” This firsthand account of the horror of a foreigner is eye-opening to me. As an American, I thought embalmment a common practice worldwide. Upon hearing this testimony, I question not only the origins, but the value of embalmment as a whole.

Daniel Richardson

Professor Jesse Miller

ENG 110

Journals

11 October 2017

Journal 10, The Art of Summarizing

In this latest chapter of They Say/I Say, by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, the authors highlight the significance of summarizing the work of another author when one references in it their work, a trying dilemma for the grade school student, and writers alike, stating that many writers “fear that devoting too much time” to the ideas of others, “takes away from [that of] their own” (pg. 30). In fact, Graff and Birkenstein observe that oftentimes, students focused on only what the author at hand said, rather than that argument, or how it relates to the discussion at hand, causing instructors to “discourage their students from summarizing at all” (pg.36). However, this chapter is not to solely focus on what writers do wrong, but rather to provide a clinic in how to ultimately master “the art of summarizing.”

Before constructing a successful summary, one must initially come to a more neutral mindset. Mentioning the importance of balancing the work of the author, as well as your own, Birkenstein and Graff assert to write a good summary, one must be able to distance their own beliefs and put themselves “in the shoes of someone else” (pg.31).  In stating this, they most likely mean that when one comes to involve their own views in the summarization of others’ work, the results begin to skew, and the truths become distorted. One could relate this to obtaining news from a partisan news source, as an NBC or Fox News, rather than a more moderate outlet. After all, it is rude, as they suggest on (page 33), to enter a conversation with others and angrily start berating them, as it is boring just to repeat them.

Overall, I found the list of verbs at the end of the chapter to be most helpful to me, as they will come to be one of my biggest allies in summarizing the work of others. I also found the section on how to set up your argument through your summary to be most insightful.

Daniel Richardson
9 October 2017
Journal 9
In the short story “A Small, Good Thing”, by Raymond Carver, Ann, mother of 8-year-old Scotty, orders Scotty a cake for his birthday party for the next Monday from a local baker. However, a major plot twist comes into play on just the second page of the story, as Scotty is hit by a car and rushed to the hospital. Throughout the story Carver uses textual and sensory details to enhance his story the events of the story, invite the reader into the scenes, and ultimately structure the story. Although there are many cases of inclusionary details, possibly the pinnacle of the story, is how food is used in scenes that contain social interaction, and how food is used to describe the characters or setting in those scenes.
On page 204, Carver details Ann’s interaction with the baker. While Ann does not personally know the baker, she infers that a man of his age must have experienced through “this special time of cakes and birthday parties”, and have his own children who have gone through it with their children. While cakes can be used here to represent years going by, they are also customary in Western culture birthday parties, often a relatable object of celebration. Because of this, Ann believes that she shares common ground with the baker and he will hold friendly conversation with her.
One of the most vivid scenes describing the waiting process is the hospitals involves the. “Negro family”, first mentioned on page 239, who await word on their son Franklin’s condition. Like them, Scott’s parents await word on his condition. Ann interacts with them as she is going to go home for a spell. As restless as Scotty’s parents are, this family is that twofold. Carver depicts a scene of a table “littered with hamburger wrappers and Styrofoam cups.”. This could signal that they have been waiting for not just hours, but days. Yet this waiting depicts a relation between this family, and Ann’s. Ann realizes that she is not alone. Coming back from home, Ann returns to a table, still littered with the trash of the Franklin’s family, yet eerily empty of all human presence. She asks a nurse about Franklin, and learns that he has died.

At the end of the story, on page 218, when Scotty’s parents finally return to the bakery after his death, Scotty’s parents finally learn that in fact birthday cakes are a symbol of loneliness for the baker.
To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full of and endlessly empty. The party food and celebrations that he’d worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The tiny wedding couples stuck into cakes. Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just imagining all of those candles burning.
To be lonely and without children are a truly haunting motif in this story. The baker has sadly sat back and created these staples of family celebrations, but never got to experience any of it himself. While especially hard at first, he has begun to find solace in baking, noting that baking “was a better smell anytime than flowers”. While at first, Ann may have thought that she could relate to the baker at the beginning of the story, it is not now until she truly does.