Reflexive Reading: Undead Edition

 Our Fascination With Vampires and the Walking Dead

        I have always found the proliferation of zombies and vampires to be interesting as I had been interested in them before their major spike, especially vampires. I think that the spread of vampire literature and film is responding to something much different than what the zombie culture is responding to. First I'd like to discuss my ideas on the changes in what vampires were and what they are now. To me the image of the vampire had always been Bram Stoker's portrayal of a monster who hid behind the mask of a man, who was alluring and dark, who lived in an old dark castle. True even Stoker's image of the vampire is not something terrifying, but it delved into the idea that evil would hide within a man without any clear signs until it was too late. Evil in Stoker's Dracula hid behind a charismatic man, it was not too far from other renditions of evil that we saw in class. Although Osmond was not supernatural in any sense of the word he too put on a charismatic persona to allure his pray. Nevertheless, what is important here is the idea that evil to me was terrifying because it could be anywhere, it could be anyone, and therefore vampires could hold in my mind a sort of status as a monster and not just an alluring handsome young gentleman. Later on with the novels of Anne Rice the vampire became more of a tragic Byronic hero that was a monster because he had to subsist on human blood, but who was internally tormented by this fact. These types of the vampires are the type that now prevail in our popular culture and I think in a sense it is our culture trying to embrace that darkness, that evil, which is inside of us all. If we look at the type of vampire that are very popular now and take into consideration their current attributes it becomes obvious that these vampires are the ground upon which are trying to reconcile the internal evil that plagues us all. One of the characteristics which Interview with the Vampire, Vampire Dairies, and Twilight all have is that their central vampire figures choose to not give into their dark instinct to take blood from human beings and instead resort to become “vegetarian” vampires, feeding only on animals. At the same time these vampires are trying to find a place in the world,

The Vampire Diaries

 a person who will accept the monster that they are and will love them. These main attributes that connect all these popular text are metaphors for the fight that we as humans have to fight every day within ourselves. We may not feed off blood, but we regularly feed on other people's kindness and their willingness to do things for us. This idea of feeding off the blood of human beings in the context of these romantic stories represents the one sided relationships that we humans often carry out. We use people regularly for our own selfish reasons and never as much care about them after we have received what we were looking for. This is the same type of selfishness that was seen in many of the novels we have read in class thus far but placed within a romantic context, where matters of the heart are seems to be mainly at stake. However, it is interesting that these vampiric characters who can take our blood and life, are pictured as even more human than ourselves. That is to say that despite the fact that they are suppose to be monsters often they are the ones who are most sympathetic, they feel more and understand pain and suffering a lot more than the people who's heart still literally beat. These vampires are made out to be “super human” so as to give us home of the idea that despite our selfishness and evil desires there is a kindness with us that will win out if we let it. For this reason these “monster” are constantly looking for acceptance and love, it is this search that gives them soul, the relatively happy endings that these characters have in their respective worlds give us hope of not only finding love, but also being able to placate our evil so as to be able to do what is best for all, and not only for ourselves, so that we may stop using others as a means to an end. 
 

        When it comes to zombies however, there are very rare instance where they can appear as loveable because where as vampires are responding to the internal turmoil zombies in our time have to respond to those things which are beyond our control, that evil in nature which is even more impossible to reconcile than that which is found within us. Zombies are the product of world after World War II, Vietnam, Afghanistan, but also after the rise of diseases like AIDS, and a world in which our consumerist culture has begun to put our lives in mortal danger because our resources, specifically oil, have begun to rapidly dwindle. Zombie movies are responding to our biggest fears as a society, when we stop contemplating the evil within and realize everyone around is capable of major evil we become paranoid and begin to fear our neighbors. At the same time zombie movies explore the fact that we cannot trust the government to protect us in case of natural disasters, wars or even pandemics. This is in response specifically in American culture to the post Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 world. There sparked in the American consciousness a realization that we are vulnerable to the whims of nature and that even with preventive measures in place they are not enough to help us neither during or after. This is why zombie movies often revolve around the time when the pandemic is first starting to spring, showing how people are trying to desperately survive, or take place in a devastated world where human kind is left to pick up the remains and is forced to build up their world once again. 

 This can be found in movies like Zombiland where our hero takes us through his experience during and after the outbreak and gives us helpful tips on how to survive along the way. The real message in movies like these is that the only person we can rely on is ourselves. In The Walking Dead we see a world that is devastated and we follow a band a survivors, not much trying rebuild, but trying to survive because a lot of the time there will not be enough resources to rebuild. In Max Brooks's World War Z Brooks tackles the consequences of war, the unfairness that occurs during such hard times in a society where the rich can buy all possible protection they can for themselves, and where a corrupt government does more to unsure its survival than the survival of its people. Zombies can therefore be seen as representing our fear of lacking a safety net on which to fall on when we rely so much on a social structure previously built for us, not necessarily by us. When our moral system are simply rules meant to police our instincts, rather than an actual moral code which takes into consideration the emotions and well being of others. Zombies reflect our greatest fear, that when we are left unchecked, that when our society crumbles, we will not be able to survive.

Reflexive Reading: The Killer Inside Me Edition

Casey Affleck playing Lou Ford in the 2010 adaptation of the novel

       From the moment I began to read The Killer Inside Me I found that there was something strange about Lou. Obviously was meant to do right away because in the first pages of the book Lou assaults and beats Joyce, but they both enjoyed the encounter so who's to say that it was weird? Maybe for them it was just a “kink,” a way to arouse themselves sexually that I just did not identify with. What I found most strange in Lou was his will to admit that he put on a face all the time and that he found it amusing to pester people with boring cliches and platitudes. Lou states in the first chapter, “If there's anything worse than a bore, it's a corny bore. But how can you brush off a nice friendly fellow who'd give you his shirt if you asked for it?” (Thompson 5) This immediately in my mind made me realize that I could not trust this man, that he pretended to be a sensitive and kind man who's purpose in life was nothing but to look out for the well being of others. Furthermore, it made me realize that he wanted people to view him a bit of a dolt. It seemed strange who someone who seemed so aware of himself and his actions would want people to have such an erroneous image of him unless he was hiding something. From the very beginning of the text I could not trust anything that Lou told us. He did not only seem to be lying to people to protect himself and his secret, but it seemed he also enjoyed lying to people about who he really was.

        The moment that Lou mentioned “the sickness” as a justification for his first murder I understood that this was a man who had delusions of what and who was for sure. He viewed himself as suffering some sort of illness, but not a mental illness as he believed to be very cunning smart and capable. In a sense I believe that part of trying to keep up a charade of being a good cop and a good person was not entirely for the purposes of hiding his “sickness” from others but from himself. To the last minute Lou was unable to admit that he was truly ill. Lou believed that “[p]lenty of pretty smart psychiatrists [had] been fooled by guys like [him]” and that he might have “the condition; or [he] might just be cold-blooded and smart as hell.” (Thompson 222) This to me resonates with the ideas expressed in the DSM IV on Sociopathology where it is expressed that people with Antisocial Personality Disorder often see themselves as calculating and looking out for their best interest, as if life were some sort of game for them. 

 Lou actually at the end of the book states, “All of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and got so little...” (Thompson 244) Lou seems to have viewed life as a reign where only the fittest survive and found himself to be among the fittest at least in terms of intelligence as seen in the previous statement. The DSM IV on Sociopathology helped me to understand that Lou is the perfect picture of a mental illness, but it did not help me understand the “why” of why Lou did what he did. The ideas behind Antisocial Personality Disorder are as vague as the concept of “the sickness” that Lou comes up with, there is no why, it just is. The DSM IV states that there are several things that affect people who have Antisocial Personality Disorder and that it appears “to be associated with low socioeconomic status and urban settings,” (Osksenborg 334) and that men are more prone than women to suffer from this, but other than that there is no clear explanation as to why this disorder arises. I understand the symptoms that Lou showcased in the novel a lot better but I did not find any justification for what did. Moreover, his explanations for his killings and hurting others were not very rational either. Lou spoke of “the sickness” as a justification, and when he attempted to murder Joyce and murdered Elmer he stated. “Joyce had asked for it. The Conways had asked for it.” (Thompson 44) Although, he appeared to himself to be a reasonable man full of knowledge and insight into other people's mind I believe he failed to understand the one person that mattered, himself. There is no logic or reason behind the murders except that they had it coming, that it was their destiny in a sense. The idea of the “sickness” is an obscure concept as well that does not explain anything about what is really going on in Lou's mind. I feel as though my understanding of evil has decreased even more as we read through text like Primo Levi's survival tale and this novel. There are no clear motivations, no clear reasons behind causing harm and pain to others, except because “I was told to” or because “I felt like it.” More and more it seems to be that the heart of man is akin to the indescribable darkness that Conrad explored in his novel, as if there were no real rationality behind it and as if we will never be able to explain and explore it even with all our science.

Reflexive Reading: Paradise Lost Edition

        Milton gives Satan some very interesting characteristics in Paradise Lost, he makes him appear heroic, valiant, purposeful, a great rhetorician and all in spite of the fact that he is presented as rebelling against the ultimate power, God. At the same time it interesting to note that it is rebelliousness that also makes him relatable to us as a character, we find something noble in his fight for freedom. I think people in general seem to love rebels, law breakers, when they see their cause as being noble in someway and what is more noble to us Americans than fighting for freedom?

I think, as I've said that Satan's motivation in Paradise Lost seems to be a freedom, to not be tied down by rules. In a way it seems as though Satan is trying to escape the limits that God has set, he's trying to possess more than he already has and feels he deserves to have more power than he is seems to be allowed to have. Satan's quest seems superficially to be heroic but really when we strip him of all his fanciful rhetoric his motives are just those of greed and envy for something that has not been permitted to him. In really his motives aren't really freedom against an unjust ruler, as God does not seem to have anything that isn’t understandable from Satan and the rest of the fallen angels, or if he had we will never know because Milton never made it quite clear why the war was started. Servitude seems to be an issue for Satan, perhaps God is a harsh dictator. This can be seen when Satan claims “To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:/ Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.” (Milton, 262-263) Here it is apparent that Satan had the ambition to try to rule Heaven, or at least be in power in some place, because while his first intent was to rule Heaven, he seems to accept the idea of having some sort of power to rule even if it is in Hell. Therefore, it appears that Satan's true motives are selfish and greedy, and although it appears as though they are noble nothing positive comes of it, something which Milton represented in a literal way by placing Sin and Death as the offspring of Satan's rebellion.

        I feel as though Satan in Heaven found himself questioning why there were rules and boundaries, why he could not obtain more power, or knowledge than what he already possessed from God. I find it curious that Satan asks to himself when spying upon Adam and Eve the reasons that God might have for forbidding them to eat from the tree of knowledge, it is an example of the true nature of Satan. He states, “Knowledge forbidden?/ Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord/ Envy them that? Can it be sin to know,/ Can it be death? And do they only stand/ By ignorance, is that their happy state,/ The proof of their obedience and their faith?” (515-520) Satan is not simply jealous or envious of Adam and Eve
because they are beautiful creations but because they are innocent and ignorant, without sin, and this caused by the fact that they have knowledge of good or evil, which is God has seemingly endowed the angels with. However, at the same time Satan also questions if their happiness and the harmonious relationship they carry on with their Lord is only based on the fact that they are ignorant. Satan brings up some interesting questions like whether only obliviousness can keep the peace? Or whether God can only secure their faith and obedience by having them be ignorant? These are interesting questions for Milton to ask in his poem, because it pertains not only to God, or religion but to politics as well, a topic which concerned him very much as well. Can we trust a ruler, a human or deity, to rule humanity honestly and justly when we as subjects are kept in ignorance? Is that not in some sense evil? Despite the fact that this text is suppose to be religious, the ideas of what is good and what is evil are not always made clear. Evil is not necessarily Satan's rebellion, evil is not Adam and Eve's defiance, in other words these things are not considered evil, neither for Milton nor God. I don't believe that Paradise Lost really explores the nature of evil, to me it seems to explore questions of oppression, power, motivation, and knowledge. Satan might have caused the fall of human kind and while it could be thought of as destructive and malicious, but in a sense he also set Eve and Adam free of the bonds of ignorance and gave them the ability to aspire to something higher than themselves.

The Neo-Victorian Revolution Of Lady K. G. Silva

I think it is interesting that after my experience with the Gothic that I would move on in my college years onto reading a genre that was much less Romantic in nature. I think part of this change had to do with the fact that while at UCLA I was made to cram British literature and while I enjoy most of it now, at that moment I found it tedious, and needed some sort of escape. This escape came in the form of laser guns, androids, and post-apocalyptic worlds. I became a huge Science Fiction fan and would watch and read anything that had any futuristic elements to it. Since I was a child my dad had fermented in me a love for action movies, but most notably Science Fiction action movies like The Terminator and Aliens, to this day these two are on my top list of favorite films. I loved the ideas of time travel, as well as the contradictions that it created, but I was always very curious of the world that Kyle Reese claimed to come from, dominated by evil cyborgs who threatened to wipe out humanity. It was this idea that drove me to look at movies like The Matrix which also followed a similar idea and presented humanity as having to fight against something they had created. I admired the fact that these stories were metaphors for the self-destructive nature of man, and that they put into question our ability to handle the power that we have obtained in the 21st century. In a similar way Alien and its continuing series made me interested in space and the idea the we were not alone in this universe, but more terrifyingly so that there could be unknown things that could destroy us. The first movie in the Aliens franchise really explores the idea of fear of the

unknown, which to me is very
interesting because it represents the way in which man's nature is to expand and discover without measuring the consequences, but also tells us that at many times we are not prepared to handle the truth of the unknown. All these ideas began to interest me because I did not see them in the books and poems that I was reading at the time that I was studying at UCLA, or at least not in the same form. Nevertheless, to me these ideas didn't have any less importance than the ideas that authors like Shakespeare or Joyce explored and their writings, and in fact I found them more relevant to what was going on in the world than a lot of what Shakespeare had to say.

Later on in my college career I became fascinated by the graphic novel and by writers like Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Warren Ellis and China Mieville. I came to realize that there were concepts that were not
being explored in my English Literature classes that merited attention
and I sought out to discover these themes and study them. Some of my favorite books now are Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, and Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis. While all this took place I met a friend who was on the UCLA fencing team along with me who introduced me into costuming. I don't actually remember how it came about but I expressed an interest in going with her to a convention she attended annually with her mother called Costume College, it was there among all the period costumes that I became interested in the idea of sewing. It was also around this time when I attend to my first ever San Diego Comic Con. The combination of the two made me realize that I could bring the two together. In Stephenson's The Diamond Age the world is a futuristic world where Neo-Victorianism rules and when I read this it made me want to live in a world like this. I really love to use my imagination and I love to bring these ideas to life because I like to make my life more colorful and extravagant, you only live once so why not? With these ideas in mind I went on to discover Steampunk, Dieselpunk and Clockpunk, which all fit into my aesthetic, and my love for combining the new with the old. Over a period of a couple of months I taught myself to sew with some help from my friend to bring to life some of my ideas of what a Steampunk outfit would be, it would soon become "my thing," and the costumes I would make for Costume College and San Diego Comic Con would all be in this style. Now that Steampunk is out of my system I look forward to making costumes from movies that I love which are in that vein of Science Fiction. While I love period costumes, just like I love the classics in literature, Science Fiction has maintained a special place in my heart and this is what I truly want to explore in my costuming and my writing. I hope to one day also venture into writing some Science Fiction stories, my hope as a writer is to be versatile, some day I will achieve this.

Tim Burton and the Gothic Allure

I like dark things, anyone who knows me well enough will immediately describe me as being Goth. I have over the years figured out that the meaning of Goth in the pop culture context and the high art context have actually begun to blend for me. I simultaneously love architecture with high arks, stained glass windows, and dark make-up, the feel of reading the Castle of Otranto, and the sound of Nine Inch Nails. To me the idea of Goth encompasses the old frightening castles, Gothic churches, and the paranormal creatures that might reside there, as well as a dark outlook on life, pessimistic and somewhat twisted. I identify with these ideas because I like the idea of living on the fringe, and I like the idea of the unexplainable and mysterious, but also because I've lived a very melancholy and lonely life. Being an only child in my opinion has more disadvantages than perks, at least this has been my experience. I think that part of the reason why I have secluded myself into a dark corner with nothing but a book and my imagination was because since I did not have a sibling to interact with I was not able to learn the proper social interactions of a playground. Over the years after being thrown to the wolves I came to the conclusion that in my case it was probably better to stay hidden away with my ghosts, cob webs and spiders, than to venture out into the complicated world outside of my books. I have always been fascinated by shadows and what could lurk behind them, and what better place to find them than in strange castles, tucked away behind forests and high mountains. Castles are behemoths filled with dark secrets that I wanted to figure out. Gothic fashion is interesting to me because I see it in a way a sort of dress up that sucks you into a fantastical world where vampires, werewolves, and ghosts dwell. I have submerge myself in this Gothic culture in many different senses and it has had an affect on my writing, and the kind of stories I write. However, my love of Gothic culture did not begin with books, but with with Tim Burton.

When I was young I fell in love with Tim Burton's rendition of Batman and his movie Edward Scissorhands. Batman from the cartoons had always been a dark melancholy figure who fought for justice and as someone who was often picked on at school I appreciated what he did, and wished I could do it myself. Tim Burton glamorized Batman even more for me by bringing his dark world to life, a world that was caught between the forties and the modern day. I wanted to live in this world where the old and the new merged, where anything seemed possible. I think that the main attraction for me in Tim Burton films was that he could make me believe that anything could be possible in the world. Despite the fact that his worlds looked cartoonish, even to the special effects standards of his day, his ideas and his characters seemed real, and I could believe in them because I could believe in their stories. It would be difficult to deny that Johnny Depp was probably
my first actor crush as a child. His performance as Edward Scissorhands moved me to the point of tears
because I felt the sadness of the young man he portrayed, who had been left incomplete and abandoned without the love of his creator/father. I didn't ever feel like I lacked love because my parents have always been very nurturing, but I did many times feel the same as he did, as if I had come down from my dark castle to a world I didn't quite understand, where people wanted to use me for their own ends, and where I would only be a piece of entertainment until the novelty of meeting me passed. Tim Burton just seemed to speak to me in my formative years. I fell in love with so many of his characters. For a very long time I dreamed of being Lydia, Winona Ryder's character in Beetlejuice, and I would have to say that it was thanks to characters like her that I began to build my own worlds in my head. From my early childhood I liked the idea of using my imagination and so I created imagery friends with backgrounds and stories to play with. When I was a little girl I could not live in Lydia's dark world, but as I got older I began to put down stories on paper, and to change my attire as well. I began to explore the meaning of the word Goth and became familiar with all its uses and meanings, and took what I could and made it my own.

I always had my nose stuck in a book but I was not familiar with the works of writers like Charlotte Bronte, or Bram Stoker. I soon widened my research of the Gothic to include literature and found Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as well as those previously mentioned, and from then on I would move on to things like the dark fantasy novels, such as The Tithe by Holly Black, and the tales of Clive Barker. I've never written a ghost story, or a mystery of any sort, but my stories often have a sense of melancholy, and many of my early stories end with tragedy and death. The Gothic mystery of Northanger Abbey  and the "absurdist" worlds of Tim Burton have filled my imagination and to this day they inspire me. One of my goals is to begin to write literature that involves that eerie feel that I get from reading those old Gothic classics, but I would also like to write more modern stories that involved gore, and blood, and vampires, trying to near the pop culture ideal of what Gothic is today. Nevertheless, my ultimate goal is to somehow find the middle ground in writing, like I have in my life style, to write a modern tale of the Gothic that encompasses all the elements of the early Gothic novel, and the quirky creepiness of a Tim Burton film.

"I don't want to play Soccer dad"

I am pretty convinced that when I was born my father was a bit disappointed to discover that I was a girl. My father has been playing soccer for most of his life, and even now at fifty-two he continues to play soccer competitively on various teams. I'm very proud of him, but soccer has been somewhat of a shadow in my life because I refused to be part of this tradition with him. It was not because I was a girl and I found soccer masculine, but because I preferred more Romantic sports. What I mean by that, are sports like archery, fencing, horseback riding, martial arts, anything that had a heroic sort of element to it, that was what I wanted to do. Soccer to me was too mundane and everyday, it did not inspire my imagination and therefore I could not partake in it with as much fervor as my dad did. My interest in these type of activities came from all the fairy tales and heroic stories of knights that I read. 

I had a favorite book, which to this day I still possess, it was already quite old when I got to it, and some of the pages were only loosely hanging onto the binding, but I loved the stories in my fairy tale book. This book was not a book put out by Disney, or by any big author, and it had many fairy tales that had not been made into big movies and it was part of the reason I enjoyed it so much. My favorite stories were always the ones that involved a young boy going off into the woods only to emerge from them a brave young man. In these stories the boys always had to use their cunning to fight off giants, find the way back home, or find treasure, and on the way they had to learn all sorts of handy skills. Many of these young men were hunters and knew
how to use a bow and arrow, and the idea of hunting in the woods fascinated me. However, what always got my attention, especially after seeing movies like El Zorro, or Hook, was sword fighting.  Wielding a sword to me when I was six years old was the coolest thing  I had ever seen, and all I knew was that I wanted to do that too. I still remember having a wide assortment of plastic swords at my disposal when I was a child, and begging my dad to play with me because none of the kids that were my friends were interested in those sorts of games. As I got older my dreams of becoming a swordsman vanished and were put at the back of mind to be taken over by other interests, but I never forgot how much I loved to watch, and read about heroic young men who took on the world with nothing but their horse and their sword. It was not until I was in high school when I was given the opportunity to learn how to fight with swords.


My biology teacher happened to be a fencer in college and when he started out at our school he began a small fencing club. By the time that I had joined, my sophomore year of high school, he had had the club for about 5 or 6 years, with various fencers going on to compete in college. I dedicated all of my free time into the sport and competed in all and every event that I could. I submerged myself in the sport completely. Finally when I was at the end of my junior year in high school my teacher told me he had exhausted all he could teach me and that I had to seek out someone more experienced if I meant to do fencing competitively for years to come. Fencing had taken over my life, to the point where my entire social circle changed,

That's me on the right!! Fencing off with someone from UC Irvine.

and long friendships were broken and replaced. Not many people could understand my fascination with fencing, or why I spent so much time practicing and competing. I then joined one of the biggest clubs in Southern California, Los Angeles International Fencing Center, and was coached by top level fencers, which helped me a lot to sharpen the skills I had learned in that hallway at school where fencing practices were held. I became the captain of my team in high school, and by the end of my last year I was able to take my team to first place in the high school league which had not happened in a very long time. To this day my old coach reminds me that it was the best year he ever had in the club. Now that I am older I don't compete as much because it has become difficult for me to manage the pressure of competition, but I continue to love fencing, and I love to practice and teach people how to fence. I help out and coach at UCLA, where I also fenced on the team for four years, and I enjoy teaching new comers because I want to try and make them feel the same excitement I feel when I think about fencing. Despite the fact that I did not play soccer, my dad has forgiven me, and shares my enthusiasm for fencing. He loves to watch me fence, and cheers me on at every competition. I think even though he might've been disappointed in the beginning that I did not play soccer with him, he is very proud of me and all that I've achieved in my sport. He eggs me on everyday to practice and to keep learning all I can so I can fulfill my childhood dream of becoming a sword master. 

My Beginnings

         HI! This is my first post here on my blog. I have decided that I am going to focus my blog on how literature and movies have affected my interests today. I read a lot as a child and I think the stories that I read really shaped the view of the world that I have now. I lived in a "magical fairy tale kingdom" for a lot of my life as a kid and as an adult it has evolved in me seeking more Romantic aspects in my life. One of these in my interests in sports that are not common, or everyday, like fencing and archery. As I got older and became a pre-teen I geared my interests more into movies but they were always movies that kept in a fantasy world. Some of the movies that were my favorite as a child are movies like Beetlejuice, Batman and Edward Scissorhands. These movies had a Gothic aesthetic to them which also had to do with my love of darker fairy tales and books like Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. When I became a teenager the Gothic aesthetic completely took over my life, but as I got older it took a darker tone and instead of being interested in ghosts and vampires I became interested in Science Fiction and the questions that sci-fi books and movies asked about humanity. Being surrounded by fantasy worlds created in me the desire to bring them to live in my own world which evolved into a want to create my own stories on paper, but also by trying to reproduce fantasy and period costumes.

         Today I have built my life around my favorite imaginary worlds and while I like to think that I don't have head in the clouds all the time, I at least have the certainty that my inner child lives and thrives within me happily. In my blog I will like to explore some of the more significant works of literature and film that have really inspired me through out my life beginning from childhood until now.