Tina's Second Paper Draft

What is history? In my point of view, history is the things past and can not be changed. We can learn from history and thus change our future. So how does Cayce Pollard, “a world-renowned “coolhunter” who predicts the hottest trends” (P1), view history? How does the process of searching footage make her thinking of the past and future? How does the history influence her? Everything begins to be different since that day, a day that almost changed the entire world, September 11, 2001.

“Cayce will watch the towers burn, and eventually fall, and though she will know she must have seen people jumping, falling, there will be no memory of it. It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. An experience outside of culture.”(P140) For Cayce, it is a turning point to view the world differently. She is confused about what is happening. The culture and the world which is familiar with her have gone, together with her father, Wingrove Pollard, a designer for security system. The old world ends while the new world begins. She knows “the world had gone in such a different direction” and “nothing really is the same now”. (P203)

Cayce turns out to work for Bigend to search the maker of footage. “History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when.” (P59) As Bigend thinks that history could be made up while Cayce thinks history should become absolute. “The future is there looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”(p59) She believes history is original and absolute so does everything else should be. Her allergy to Michelin Man and Tommy is the example for this. Time plays a big role in the fashion trend. In one way, her understanding of past and the unique view of the time shaped her talent in the career.

Their unique views towards the history also make their attitude towards the footage to be different. As Bigend said, “My passion is marketing, advertising, media strategy, and when I first discovered the footage, that is what responded in me.”(p67) What Bigend care is money and the footage’s application in the market will attract people’s attention around the world which can make him wealth. For Cayce, a talented consultant in the field of logos and ads, she cares about the art behind the footage.

People view art from different perspective. In Cayce’s view, art should be original and has element filled with humanity. In the technology world, the footage still has its shinning point of humanity with expression of certain meaning. “Stella finds her in the hallway, her face wet with tears, eyes closed, shoulders braced against plaster as uneven as the bone of Nora’s forehead.” (P316) If Cayce does not value humanity that much, she will not act that way after she watched Nora’s work.

“Parkaboy says you should go to new footage as though you've seen no previous footage at all, thereby momentarily escaping the film or films you've been assembling with, consciously or unconsciously, since first exposure. Homo sapiens are about pattern recognition, he says.”(P22-23) Cayce work really hard to recognition different patterns using all kinds of methods. She use emails to connect with all kinds of people and went to forum F:F:F to check out the film clips. She also gets information from the dreams her father send to her. All those different patterns compose to a history, a truth which helps to find out the footage.

Cayce’s intention to find out the maker of footage makes her travel around the world, from London to Tokyo to Moscow. She finally got to know Nora is the creator. Their appreciation toward the originality of the art and the similarity of the 9.11 tragedy happened on them brought them together. “The doctors had asked me her interests and of course there was only film.”(P289) Nora use her unique way to express her sense of the past, losing parents. The difference of Cayce and Nora are Cayce lives in the new world while she still live in their old past world.

People do view things differently after the 9.11 attack. And they are trying to interpreting the past in our modern society. Throughout the book, Cayce’s father Win is always a secret figure with important influence on Cayce. “Had there not been men like her father, on the side of democracy and the free market, where would we be today? Nor would this assisting the progress of art while bettering the lives and futures of those less fortunate.” (p352) Although her father’s death remains a mystery, Cayce begin to know how to react toward it.

Cayce lives in a modern world with a strong past connection on her. She likes to wear older and unbranded cloth but has a sensity towards brand, like Prada. Like Magda said, “What I mean is no customers, no cool. It’s about a group behavior pattern around a particular class of object. What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does.”(P88) Therefore, she can predict the future brand very well. The novel also describes a lot of things which was taken place in the 20th century like the Hobbs’s antique calculator. Cayce’s feeling towards where Hobbs lives is “There is a silence here.”(P245) We can view Hobb’s existing as a past, and Cayce as a future. Depending on Hobb’s help, Cayce found out Nora sisters’ email address. It turns out we discover the future depend on the past.

There is still not a right or wrong answer for how we view the history. We build our future on the history and we use history to discover future. Cayce have discovered the footage and did what she can to find out her father. The history has laid down in her memory and she begins a new life with Parkaboy.

Peer Review (Nate):
The author in this writing uses questions to help make her paragraphs flow in her own unique style. Most of her paragraphs use transitions to help the paper flow, but she does run into some grammatical errors occasionally. For example, the first paragraph of paragraph 7 needs to be revised. In terms of evidence, Tina does a very good job at finding the right quotes. Each paragraph has the minimum amount, but I think the last paragraph could be a little lengthier. I believe that Tina presents her argument very well, but could strengthen her argument in her conclusion with maybe a personal experience.

Peer Review (Aric):
The author has some errors in grammar, but the spelling looks to be pretty good. One example is in the first paragraph "history is the things past and can not be changed." Also there is some transitioning problems from paragraph to paragraph in the sense that not all of her ideas follow along with her thesis. There are plenty of quotes, but the quotes sometimes take up most of the paragraphs. Consider taking out some of the quotes and/or lengthening the other paragraphs. This would give me weight to your arguments, and allow you to cover a more specific topic. If you were going to work on one specific paragraph I would work on the one about Cayce's and Bigend's views of history. Possibly talking about the advantages for Cayce for viewing history in the way that she does. The argument made about Hobbs and Cayce is very interesting and you could probably find parallels in how other past events also helped get the storyline ahead in a way. Also the quote about how Russia is only the way it is because of democracy quote is interesting and could be developed more to show how the past changed the future, and how the past was permanent in this situation. You also talk about no right or wrong answer with history, but it might be more beneficial if you argue that Cayce or Bigend is right about history so that the essay proves something then just 'shrugging' at the end.

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