I found the majority of the reading assigned for this week to be puzzling. However, the assigned Roland Barthes reading bewildered me the most by far. Barthes passion for the written word was evident in his work. He proposes a sort sexual relationship between the reader and text, breaking text down into two components: the text of pleasure and the text of bliss. He defines the text of pleasure as text that comes from culture and brings you back to that moment of bliss. Text of bliss is text that stirs up feelings of nostalgia for the reader.

I found a strong connection between what Barthes meant by pleasure of the text, how it serves as a "flash back" so to speak, and music. I struggled for a while when attempting to apply my own literal interpretation of the word "text", and how the only text found in music is the lyrics. More often than not the instruments, sounds, and overall structure of a song is what normally "brings someone back" to a certain feeling or memory than just the lyrics alone.

During our first class meeting we were asked if we could define the word "text". In my head I thought, "of course? books, magazines, text messages...etc.". Dr. Cummings proceeded to explain that a text is anything that can be read. Music can be read. It allows people to return to a moment in time, a memory. Barthes explains that the pleasure in a text also brings pain to the reader once he or she realizes they cannot return back to that moment in time. The strongest example of this that I can think of was when the "American Airlines" song was played in class. Immediately I thought of the Great Gatsby and how that track was presented in the movie. I remembered watching the movie for the first time in high school. I remembered how much I enjoyed reading the novel my junior year. I remembered how young and free I was. My classmates opinions of the song quickly took me out of that reverie. Some annoyed by how brutal the American Airlines commercial was. Others smiling simply recalling where the song came from. I experienced both the text of pleasure and the text of bliss at that moment. I can't speak for my classmates because everyones interprets texts in different ways. What I do know is that there was clearly a relationship between the reader and text. It may not have been as "sexual" as Barthes would have hoped, but it was present.