Introducing Quotations in Your Research Paper
Introduction: You might write a narrative about someone who suffered the rising/falling motif.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "Winter Dreams" is about the false hope and false rising of a man whose winter dreams descend him into a wasted, futile existence. You can can use the story for your intro (summarizing its major themes) if you don't have a personal interview.
Also consider these films:
One. You Can't Rise If You Don't Fall First:
Part of Redemption Is the Journey to the Dark Side or the Fall.
A common part of this darkness is a form of insanity called concupiscence.
We can define concupiscence as limitless, selfish desires that don't sate our appetites. To the contrary, the process of feeding our concupiscence only serves to make our desires greater than before. The result of concupiscence is insanity. For a recent example, we can look at Tiger Woods who is an example of concupiscence, which is the sum of temptation plus opportunity.
Some of us don't go completely insane in our quest to feed our desires. We mature, grow up, and join the adult world. Part of being an adult is knowing our limits in eating, spending, pleasure-seeking, etc.
In other words, being an adult is about conquering concupiscence.
When we mature and realize we must assert limits on ourselves, we often have an awakening to Existential Ache, the realization of two things:
One, we are not, as we once believed in childhood, the center of the universe.
Two, we come to realize that our desires will ALWAYS outstrip our capacity to satisfy them.
Failure to realize the latter principle of Existential Ache results in concupiscence, the futile struggle to appease our ever-growing appetites.
Concupiscence is stimulated by opportunity and imagination. We have the money to sate our appetites and we imagine the satisfaction of increasing our appetites while finding the necessary resources to satisfy those freshly honed desires.
Example of concupiscence:
A businessman travels frequently to Miami where he frequents a swanky club. The club's outer rim terrace is cluttered with women of the most exquistite beauty and pulchritude. But inside, it is rumored, in the VIP suite, the women are even more beautiful than the one's visible on the outside plaza. So the businessman pays the handsome fee to become a VIP and comforts himself with the thought that he, as an exclusive club member, has access to Miami's most lovely women.
Wrong. Rumors abound that there is an inner chamber, requiring a surreptious descent down a trap door, where the women are even more outrageously beautiful than in the VIP room. Our troubled businessman pays the bouncer $500 and is escorted through the trapdoor where, once again, he is comforted with the belief that he has access to Miami's most beautiful women.
Wrong. Rumors abound about another trapdoor leading to a chamber of even more rarified beauties and another and another until the businessman collapses with the despair that Miami's most beautiful women will elude him forever. He shrinks with anguish, forgoes all interests and passions, and spends the rest of his life languishing in self-pity.
This is the story of concupiscence.
And it is the story of Jeff Henderson before he "falls" in prison where his opportunities to fuel his concupiscence have all but ended.
One. Concupiscence and Its Causes
1. Concupiscence is the search for happiness based on gratifying pleasure and ego without a moral compass. The result is moral dissolution, a fancy term for the loss of morality and sanity. Tennessee Williams became famous after writing the play A Streetcar Named Desire and lived in a fancy hotel where he had room service and escorts visit him every day. One evening he poured gravy over his banana split and realized he had become insane. He left the hotel, went to Mexico and resumed with his writing career.
2. Concupiscence is the pursuit of happiness without a moral compass; in other words, you have no vision of anything beyond gratifying your base appetites and therefore have a misguided definition of happiness.
3. When you have no vision beyond your base appetites, you are what we call “Bread and Circus,” which means all you desire is food and entertainment.
4. Concupiscence compels you to feed your irrational appetites, which wage war against your powers of reason. For example, one of my students knows a guy who lives in expensive Brentwood and drives a BMW but he has to eat his sister’s government cheese and other handouts because he has no money for food. That’s not a reasonable situation.
5. Concupiscence grows inside us when we have role models without a moral compass. In Jeff Henderson’s case, he sees all the major “players,” like T-Row, glory in the life of concupiscence.
6. Concupiscence grows inside us from the anger that is born from having a sense of deprivation: “I’m gonna get mine.”
7. The writer Jonathan Franzen gives concupiscence another name, Ache: Being overwhelmed by desires that always outrun our capacity to fulfill them.
8. Another cause behind concupiscence is vanity, also called the libido ostentandi: The need to show off. A rich woman in Argentina, a landlady, wears a body length mink coat at an outdoor bazaar where the temperature is 105 degrees. She wants everyone to know she is of a higher stature. She passes out and dies of heat stroke.
Another example: A student wrote an essay about his friend who, buying a BMW 5 series, had to work 2 jobs and drop out of El Camino College. The misguided young man’s didn’t know how depressed he was when he realized all his friends, the people who would be impressed with his BMW, could not see it since they were attending college. One day this BMW owner made a special trip to the college and yelled to his buddies to come look at his car but they had to go to his class and my student’s final vision of his friend was screaming from his BMW on the Crenshaw parking lot for someone to check out his car. No one cared.
9. As I said before, concupiscence is the result of temptation plus opportunity. Jeff Henderson had both.
Two. Concupiscence and Its Effects: Moral Dissolution
1. If concupiscence goes its full course, we arrive at a condition of moral dissolution like Tennessee Williams mentioned above. Here’s another example: A man cheats on his girlfriend or wife once and feels the searing pain from his conscience. He cheats on her 1,000 times and feels nothing because his conscience has decomposed into what we call moral dissolution. In other words, he’s lost his soul.
2. Another word for moral dissolution is debauchery, which means the moral pillars that hold up your morality have fallen and your morality has fallen with them.
3. Ennui; you’ve filled your senses with so much pleasure that you can no longer feel anything. You have become incurably numb to life and now must suffer the desperation of needing to feel anything, no matter what the cost. This process is also called the “hedonic treadmill” in which you constantly have to spike the pleasure quotient before you adapt to the pleasure, become numb to it and have to spike the pleasure again. This cycle goes on and on with you always losing.
4. Nihilism; the death of meaning. There is no right or wrong. Life has no meaning. The world is merely a playground for your desires. The world is a giant margarita glass and you suck on the straw, slurp every last drop and then die. Hedonism always ends in nihilism.
Three. In addition to concupiscence, Jeff Henderson becomes a victim of his own success. One of the memoir’s major themes is that misguided success can be a great misfortune leading to insanity.
1. One of the major themes in Cooked is that in life when we think we’re rising, we’re actually falling. Henderson's redemption is not born from his rise to wealth but during his fall in prison.
2. The problem with success is that most of us have a misguided definition of it. If success is based on concupiscence, then the “success” we achieve will drive us insane.
3. Another problem with success is that it creates the illusion of invincibility. The more successful Henderson’s drug operation becomes, for example, the more safe he feels. He believes he is “untouchable.”
4. When we feel invincible we go into denial. For example, Henderson minimizes, to his detriment, his drug dealer associations, some of whom will be kidnapped and killed. He also underestimates the stupidity and back-stabbing nature of another one, which will result in his demise. Finally, Henderson is in denial about the feds’ suspicions regarding Henderson’s covert drug operations. The feds arrest him without even catching Henderson with any drugs at all because they have a long list of records, phone conversations, ancillary transactions, witness testimony, etc.
5. Another form of denial is moral denial. Henderson rationalizes that he is a drug dealer but he does so “strictly as a businessman.” He’s not about violence, taking drugs, or hanging out with gang bangers. But the fact of the matter is his operations are harmful, a painful fact he doesn’t realize until he’s in prison.
6. When our success generates easy money, we go insane because suddenly we lose our sense of value and hard work and our sense of goals. We live in Another Universe, one that most people don’t live in. The films City of God and Goodfellas illustrate this point.
7. When money is easy for us and we see the rest of the world “getting punked,” being forced to do real work to make their money, we start to feel so superior to the rest of humanity that we think we’re gods. We think this to our own detriment.
Review of when we think we're rising we're really falling:
One. Concupiscence
Two. Moral dissolution
Three. Misguided definition of success divorced from a moral code
Four. Denial
Five. Illusion of invincibility
Six. Insanity resulting from living a bubble of sycophants
Common Grammar Errors: Pronouns
Types of Pronoun Errors
Indefinite Pronoun is singular
Everyone with a ticket can take their passport to the front of the train.
Because "everyone" is singular, we can't use the pronoun "their."
Pronoun Number Error
The student without an MLA format on their paper will lose two grades.
"Student" is singular and does not agree with "their."
Pronoun Should be Object, Not Subject
Between you and I, there is too much sugar in this peanut butter pie.
The object of the preposition "between" must be just that, an object, so "I" must be changed to "me."
She gave the BMW to my wife and I.
The object of "gave" must be just that, an object, so "I" should be "me."
Pronoun Point of View Consistency
we, you, one, he/she/ they
We must wonder if we are on the right subject when you find a different thesis in the third paragraph.
The pronoun "we" cannot change randomly to "you" or any other pronoun shift.
Vague Pronoun Reference
Although the BMW hit the telephone pole, it was not damaged.
Does "it" refer to the BMW or the pole?
Pronoun Point of View Consistency
Changes in Pronoun Point of ViewMcMahon Grammar Exercises: Pronoun Errors
Rewrite each sentence below so that you’ve corrected the pronoun errors.
One. Between you and I, there are too many all-you-can-eat buffets mushrooming over southern California because a person thinks they’re getting a good deal when we can eat endless plates food for a mere ten dollars.
Two. When children grow up eating at buffets, they expand their bellies and sometimes you find you cannot get “full” no matter how much we eat.
Three. As thousands of children gorged on pastrami at HomeTown Buffet, you could tell we would have to address the needs of a lot of sick children.
Four. Although I like the idea of eating all I want, you can sense that there is danger in this unlimited eating mentality that can escort us down the path of gluttony and predispose you to diabetes.
Five. When a customer feels he’s getting all the food they want, you know we can increase your business.
Six. If a student studies the correct MLA format, you can expect academic success.
Seven. It’s not easy for instructors to keep their students’ attention for a three-hour lecture. He or she must mix up the class-time with lecture, discussion, and in-class exercises.
Eight. It is good for a student to read the assigned text at least three times. When they do, they develop better reading comprehension.
Nine. The instructor gave the essays back to Bob and I.
Ten. We must find meaning to overcome the existential vacuum. Otherwise, you will descend into a rabbit hole of despair and they will find themselves behaving in all manners of self-destruction.
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