Welcome...and initial guidelines...

This blog will be used in the spring of 2008 by 80+ students at Drexel University to investigate the effects of Iraq on culture and the reverse. Our goal will be to better understand why the US is in Iraq, and to question whether literature can help us on this journey.

Weekly plans and other materials will always be posted in Vista, not this blog. So go to Bb Vista to get the discussion prompts and other instructions.

I intend this blog to manage our discussions and track our collective investigation.

You should have received an email from me inviting you to become a contributor to this blog. The email was sent Monday afternoon to your official Drexel email address.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Tomorrow I willl Steal Someone's Heater

Gaurdian.co.uk is a blog news site that anyone can read. Based on the bogs I have read the tone of the writers is varied by post. Posts are from soldiers telling about their day-to-day activity in Iraq. Authors will write about sadness in one blog, yet in the next a soldier speaks of how much he loves being over in Iraq. One author writes about living in an abandoned house, eating their food, and enjoying what they had left behind. The soldier will go out and pilfer for mattresses and heaters to help them become semi-comfortable in the night. Reading these blogs reminded me that the soldiers are just like you and I in Iraq. They need food, sleep, and entertainment. The army did not change them to dislike those activities. It made possible to imagine myself there, searching along for mattresses, fearing the next day’s battle. From that aspect alone I believe that this blog has a positive effect of readers. The emotions evoked after reading allows you to empathize and support the troops, thus making the blog a success. This goal seem very different then the rest of the news blog’s stories. It seems as if they allow Iraqi blogs become an opinion piece whereas the rest of their post are more fact based.

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