Tales From This Side

The notion that speech is a singularly human skill is one that has only slowly been accepted as false. Repeated experiments, dating back at least 40 years, have shown that several species outside man have the ability to command intelligent thought patterns that express more than mere emotion. Sure, a dog can display anger or affection with ease in a manner that can be comprehended by virtually any other mammal that it encounters, but short of a clear acceptance or rejection of a bowl of food, can it tell you what it wants to eat for breakfast? Be they dolphins, apes, or even birds, long term encounters with individuals from certain species have shown us that communication beyond this basic level is, indeed, possible. Take, for instance, Akeakamai and Phoenix, two dolphins from the Kewalo Basin Marine mammal Laboratory in Hawaii that were heavily studied in the 1980's. Akeakamai and Phoenix are asked to create a trick and do it together. The two dolphins swim away from...

Student : Joyce, James – Sophomore class Offense : Plagiarism Remarks : Having just turned in his cumulative piece of creative fiction for the term, I was immediately struck by the similarities between James’ work and a novel we read earlier in the term. His work, which he titles Ulysses , seems markedly similar in thematic form and structure to Homer’s The Odyssey , which we finished reading several weeks ago. Upon deeper investigation, I uncovered a multitude of thematic ideas, apparently lifted, wholesale, from Homer’s work. After reviewing several chapters of James’ lengthy piece I had already accumulated enough evidence to find him guilty of plagiarism. Such evidence includes the use of names and chapter titles identical to those that Homer uses. Nowhere is this content cited as Homer’s own. Furthermore, the tale finds James’ characters on quests virtually identical to those that Homer sends his characters on, such as Stephen Dedalus, a character that James seems to parall...

What a terrible power is bestowed upon he who can, and does, smash a smile that is untethered by the foolish concerns of a stringent society. It is a power derived from the self-righteous inspiration of self-discipline, so sharp in contrast to the airy smile whose only discipline is desire. The jealousy of such an undisciplined freedom is that which drives the hard word and the judgmental gaze. Cruel ironies rise from the attacker's seething surface when he realizes that the very thing that his self-imposed rigidity had hoped to cultivate was that which was, instead, banished from his presence. There's a sunny bench in front of a convenience store that holds a girl in a light dress, barely covering her legs, that is, yet, heavier than the spirit it contains. Just heavy enough to keep her from floating off on the breeze in a laugh. The bounce with which she moves reveals her ethereal composition and the resulting, airy frame is so free of sharp angles that nothing undesired...

I have friends who have friends who watch movies, and sometimes those movies land in my P.O. Box. Me And You And Everyone We Know is one of these. The movie as a whole, encompassing the different, intertwining plot lines that make it up, endeavors to remedy the psychological and physical isolation that is pervasive for all of the characters. It is a purely sentimental movie, however, failing to address the modern, social causes of this isolation, even if it does expose them in the art museum which showcases representations of human interaction in the "digital age." The beauty of the art show is that it mirrors the relationships that exist throughout the majority of the film that are, in fact, merely representations of real interactions. Two people strolling down a sidewalk, for instance, create a scene that is, via their conversation, symbolic of the phases of a real relationship that may, or may not, come to pass. The happy ending, of course, is that it does come toget...

Continued from Part II Taking a cue from my former mouse-friend, I settle my back into the deeply chiseled bark of a cottonwood tree. Having begun its downward slide, the sun seems now to take on a rapid pace, dismissing the long hours it had tenuously held to its blazing pinnacle in the sky. With the change in location, the brilliance of the sun begins to diminish and pitiless, white light gives way to a burnt, orange tone that seeps into the air and landscape. All things take on a softer feeling and scenery once outshined by the sheer strength of the sun now becomes highlighted, almost glowing in this moment of lighted revelry. Facing the sun across the Missouri, my eyes begin to crease and half close as I watch the river. From my perspective it flows in bands, some moving swiftly, some moving slowly, aqueous layer stacked upon layer from shore to shore. Pockets of tanish bubbles float in the separate streams, along with various other flotsam, revealing the different paces a...

Continued from Part I Lazy hours ticked away on an invisible clock, I having long ago shed my watch, without further rodent-related incidents, and the settled torpor brought me back to my summer reading. As the stage silently reset itself, however, a new player, like the previous, entered from stage up . A crashing sound in the canopy above, protracted and increasing in volume, as the sound of a boulder tumbling through underbrush towards us, roused Doug and I from our second bout of river-induced malaise. As suddenly as it had started, it ceased, and we caught each other staring idly at the ground in the space between us, empty as it had been before the ruckus. This, of course, led our gazes upward. Perhaps ten feet off the ground, the lowest hanging collection of light cottonwood branches was swaying rhythmically in a broad, two foot arc, entirely at odds with the lack of prevailing breeze. At first glance it seemed a simple anomaly, but between the twirling, serrated fringed...

Though Montana is the setting for rivers that run through it , the Blackfoot is not the only waterway of note winding through the vast plains of the northern mid-west. The Missouri is famous for hosting Lewis and Clark’s transcontinental voyage, for overwhelming its banks and wreaking havoc on homesteaders, and, more recently, for driving me mad with its muddy, sinkhole-dotted shorelines and the biting insects that love them. There is something greater than my history or theirs’, though, at work on this river. Gazing down the river from its center, it appears to run into infinity as the banks move progressively closer and closer together. Turning around, the same view greets the eyes and one realizes that looking backward is really the same as looking forward on this river, filled with activity that registers only on the small scale, seemingly begging you to look into the water rather than past it. Lewis and Clark were on a mission to find the headwaters of the Missouri, a conclu...