April 30, 2013

Sherman Alexie took me by surprise in this literature class because I wasn't expecting Native American writings to come so late in American literature. I thought I was done with them after 221, but I was wrong. Alexie uses both old and new forms of Native American literature to create a nice mix of both the traditional – "wild horses" and "crows" – and more modern settings and scenarios – "pawn shops" and "football fields." Since it took me by surprise, Alexie's poems actually interested me more than the normal, ordinary Native American literature would. The combination of the different styles held my attention, and created imagery that gave me a new respect for the modern-day Native American. Also, seeing Alexie on the Colbert Report piqued my curiosity. His views on digital books and Native American culture were fresh and respectable, and it's the differing views like his that I appreciate to learn about to investigate the opinion further on my own.

In the same way, Jhumpa Lahiri's short story, "Sexy," was not what I was expecting to read at the end of the semester. Not only is she Indian American, but the title "Sexy" certainly got me interested (and not just because I'm a guy). It's not every day you read something as risque as Miranda and Dev's affair in literature class. Aside from it just being different and standing out with its title, "Sexy" was eye-opening with its story of an affair, and how it can affect both the married and the single that are involved. Dev's marriage could have potentially been ruined had his wife found out about the affair, and Miranda's self-respect and emotions were drastically played with, and became very unstable because of the player that Dev was. For a long time, I've never really taken the single person into account when it comes to the affairs that I see in both real life and on television. I figured, since they have nothing to lose, then they are free to do as they please (even though causing a married person to cheat is extremely stupid and immoral, in my opinion). But "Sexy" has surprisingly made me think a lot more about the single person, as he or she also develops feelings for the other person that's in the relationship, and is more or less just stuck, because the other person is in a committed relationship, and isn't able to just drop who they're with for the person they're having an affair with (although a person that cheats shouldn't be in a relationship with anyone, period).

I've thoroughly enjoyed this class, and it's taught me a lot about the post-Civil War American literature. It's changed my opinion about a lot of things, and made me think more critically about certain topics.

April 18, 2013

John Updike's "Separating" doesn't mean much to me, since my parents aren't divorced, even though they almost did about 7 years ago. At that age, not knowing there wasn't any tension between my parents, all I remember is that it was such a shock to me, and I was confused, to say the least. I can somewhat empathize with Richard's children, and understand where each of them are coming from in their confused states.
Now, I can actually relate to Phillip Roth's "Defender of the Faith," and I think, to a certain extent, everybody can. I've known lots of people in my short lifetime that have used Christianity to do something so ridiculous, such as skip class or wear something out of dress code at school. I believe that anyone that exploits their religion for selfish purposes has achieved an all-time low. That's something so wretched and disgusting to me, and to be frank, I'd like to slap some of those people a few good times.
I thoroughly enjoyed Billy Collins' poems "Forgetfulness," "I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of 'Three Blind Mice'," and "The Night House," not only because they were easy to read, but they each evoked a very specific mental imaged and caused me to genuinely think about the aspects of life – memory, purpose, and the mind. I actually listened to Art Blakey's "Three Blind Mice" as I read Collins' poem. The entire song is instrumental, so Collins obviously knows the poem by heart as he writes about it, questioning the mice's purpose and motives. I personally love to see people think on a deeper, more critical level, such as this, even if it doesn't relate to anything going on in their life. Thinking is always good, and all three of these poems from Collins think deeply about various topics.
Just like with Collins', I was also fond of Li-Young Lee's poems, "Persimmons," "Eating Alone," "Eating Together," and "This Room and Everything it It." "Persimmons" gives great imagery, along with feelings of calmness and nostalgia. And as cliché as it sounds, his poems involving his father made me appreciate mine more. As my family and I are growing older day after day, the reality of death is becoming more evident to me.

April 2, 2013

Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People" breaks down to one simple expression for me: "You can't trust anyone." While this sounds like a pessimistic opinion, it is, unfortunately, slightly true. I don't not trust people to a point that I don't rely on anyone's help, or that I don't make friends with anyone and tell them secrets. I'm just extremely careful about what I say to certain people. This seems like a natural defense mechanism for humans, but I believe mine is worse, because I have a really hard time telling people things.
As lengthy and seemingly jumbled-up as Jack Kerouac's stories are in "Big Sur," I found a lot of interest in reading them. I have a sort of mythical dream of vagabonding the world, and reading "Big Sur" sparked that dream just a little more. Of course, the practice of vagabonding and traveling was much more prevalent in the mid-twentieth century.
Anne Sexton evokes feelings of nostalgia by telling her "string bean" that she's growing up too fast. This is a sadness everyone deals with in some form or fashion, whether he or she misses being a child, or he or she is seeing his or her child grow up too fast. I personally am seeing my life fly by so quickly that I have almost no time to realize what decisions I'm making. It's difficult and scary to be moving through life so quickly, but I know that it's part of life and everyone deals with it. It's simply a matter of finding the best, most patient, and most efficient way of doing it.
In the fourth chapter of Song of Solomon, in the Bible, the man speaks of his new wife and her naked body, and describes her, to her, from her hair down to the unmentionable parts of her figure. He gives a very detailed description of each of her features, relating each of them to a piece of nature. In this same way, Gary Snyder reverses the role in what seems like a comparison of nature to the body of a woman in "Beneath My Hand and Eye the Distant Hills. Your Body." I thought that that concept, of switching the traditional woman-nature comparison, was brilliant, and Snyder, being the outdoorsy mountain man that he was, executed the description well.

March 6, 2013

The song "A Rose for Emily," by The Zombies, may not be directly about Faulkner's short story, but it is definitely loosely based on the plot. A girl named Emily, seeing lovers all around her, but not one for herself. Faulkner made darkly clear the miserly attempts at love, made by a Miss Emily Grierson. In short, Miss Emily killed a man by the name of Homer Barron and left him in a bed upstairs, simply so that she could sleep next to him – quite possibly every night. While this seems outrageously crazy to current society, in all actuality, she just wanted someone to love... Homer Barron just happened to be that person, in the creepiest way possible.
Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" wasn't exactly my type of read. I love Hemingway's use of the outdoors in his stories and such, but "SoK" just simply didn't keep me entertained. However, I did enjoy the fact that Harry never told his wife Helen that he didn't love her before he died, even though he might have been rather ill-tempered and down in the dumps at the time.
When I first began to read John Cheever's "The Swimmer," I must say, I thought it was kind of silly. The unrealistic idea – not to mention pointless – that a man, Neddy Merrill, would swim across all the pools of his neighbors to get back to his house? I was rather confused. But then it clicked. He saw his life passing in this sort of dream. He realized all of the relationships that he had left unattended to, the most serious of which was with his wife, who had left the house by the time he got there.
Recently, my mother joined Facebook, and found all of her old high school friends. I also recently graduated high school, and separated from all of my high school classmates. Over the past year or so, my mom has been encouraging me to keep in touch with not only those classmates, but everyone that seems like they would prove to be beneficial (not by use, but by friendship) in my life. I didn't take her seriously, seeing as how I didn't care much for my classmates anyway. Plus, it's difficult to keep up with so many people all the time. It requires extra time and energy out of your day. However, this short story, "The Swimmer," put the importance of mending relationships and keeping in touch with old friends into perspective for me. It made me realize that not only is it important to keep those friends, but life will pass seemingly too quick to ever get back in touch with them, as difficult as it would be years down the road.

February 21, 2013

     There were four poet/authors' works that we read for this blog entry: Robert Frost, Susan Glaspell, Zora Neal Hurston, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. As I looked back over the readings to refresh my memory, there was one topic that kept popping into my head... humanistic qualities. The importance of decisions, the strength of emotions, and the truth-induced cringe of reality are all much more apparent in this general time period of literature than they are before it.
     Robert Frost has an affinity for the outdoors; specifically the New England area. That's probably the setting and sensation that his readers are so fond of and what they day dream about. He takes that sensation and adds to it the appeal of human emotion, to heavily relate to the readers, and make them feel more at one with nature and freer, away from their busy lives. The poem of his that we read that really portrays that feeling best is "Birches," in which the narrator speaks of leaving (no pun intended) the earth -- to simply get away from the busyness of life -- and coming back later. He dreams of swaying, at the top of the birch trees, which represents the (for lack of a better phrase) mood swings of life.
     Susan Glaspell portrays realistic human qualities in her play "Trifles" by having the two women -- who are accompanying a sheriff, attorney, and a man that was a neighbor, on a search around a house in which a controlling husband had been killed, presumably by his wife -- be the deductive and reasoning "detectives" in the case. It is understood that the women are better about finding clues to the murder because they are women who think like other women (i.e. the wife). Although the women know that the wife hanged her husband, they hide the evidence that leads them to that conclusion, knowing why the wife killed her husband, and agreeing with her motives.
     Zora Neal Hurston decided to actually improve the typical outlook on human actions by having a black husband show mercy on his adulterous, pregnant wife -- something that was totally unexpected given the circumstances and the time period.
     F. Scott Fitzgerald is more or less pessimistic in his short stories and novels, which are loosely based on his own life. The concept of becoming extremely wealthy, whether through hard work over time or by inheritance immediately, and suddenly going into debt strikes the reader as a common reality that makes the glistening happiness of wealth look futile.

February 7, 2013

The aspect of the writings that we've read in the past couple weeks that stands out to me the most is the obvious stereotypes of the western frontier and America in the late 19th Century -- which I've known about for so long, yet have always underestimated them as actualities. Stereotypes that we read about in the works of Kate Chopin, Booker T. Washington, and Stephen Crane, and the taboo social topics that come with them such as violence, racism, and the women's movement -- which were often spoken of in euphemisms at the time -- are blatantly brought to light in all three of the authors' works, which makes me realize why the works are so timeless.
In Kate Chopin's short stories, "Desiree's Baby" and "The Story of an Hour," focus on the destructiveness of racism and female independence, both in different ways. In "Desiree's Baby," Desiree drowns herself and her baby because her husband (who we later find out actually has African American blood in him) accuses her of being the one responsible for their mixed baby. In "The Story of an Hour," Mrs. Mallard dies of a heart attack because she is detrimentally upset about the return of her husband, who she thought had died, giving her freedom as a widow. Mrs. Mallard is so ecstatic about her release from a stagnant marriage that she can't stand knowing that her husband's death was only a false alarm.
In Booker T. Washington's book "Up From Slavery," he encourages his fellow African Americans to learn a valuable and needed skill and use it to serve not only the white people, but the country as well, instead of attempting to gain social, political, and economical equality. Some people disagreed with his approach at the time, and many still disagree with it today. In the same way, many still agree(d). It's simply fascinating, though, how determined Washington was in his endeavors for advancing the African American community.
Stephen Crane's short story, "The Blue Hotel," focuses on five main characters; one of which is a Swede who professes that he will be killed the night the story takes place. His primary reason for saying so is that the new western frontier is a wild, dangerous, and violent place. He is, in a way, right about his assumption, because he dies in a separate bar after leaving the hotel. However, it was his fault he died because he provoked a gambler at the bar by grabbing his neck.
Many of these widely accepted stereotypes and legends about the Gilded Age aren't taken as seriously as they should be. The problems the people faced in the late nineteenth century became very obvious after Dr. Vince Brewton spoke of the horrific and grim occurrences that took place during this time, involving families, African Americans, and the American economy.

January 24, 2013

     The first assignment we had in English 222 contained two short stories from arguably the most prominent and influential author of the Gilded Age (he even co-coined the phrase "Gilded Age"), Mark Twain. These stories were "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," which I have read twice before in my lifetime, and "Journalism in Tennessee," which I had never even heard of. Having read a couple of Twain's more popular novels, I can say that I've always enjoyed his writing style and substance. "Jumping Frog," a tall-tale about a gambling addict seemed somewhat silly to me as I was reading it. But after Vince explained how the fictitious work emphasized the exaggerated "big fish" stories, I understood the concept of the stories of the lame horse, smart dog, and trained frog. "Journalism in Tennessee" made me chuckle a few times, because Twain made his satirical wit evident in the countless injuries that the narrator endured and reacted to as if they were mere finger-pricks.

     The second assignment we read was "The Luck of Roaring Camp," by Bret Harte. This story featured a baby that was born of a prostitute, who happened to be the only woman in the mining camp. The baby was taken care of by one man, who had had two families prior to the newborn. The baby ultimately changed the character of the camp as a whole. The men of the camp began to pay special attention to the words they said and how loud they said them; they also took the baby out to lay by the river while they worked and began to bathe regularly, being thoughtful about the baby's immune system and cleanliness. In a sense, I almost believe this could actually happen. Just as we see most obviously in Kentuck, the men in this situation would act manly and seem anti-baby, but one after another, each man would begin to create a sense of intimacy with the baby, and would begin to care more about not only the baby, but themselves, their appearance, and their character, as well.

     The third and most recent assignment we read was Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and The Devil's Dictionary. "An Occurrence..." was quite an interesting little drama short that captivated me and put me in the scene. Bierce eloquently describes the scene of the hanging on the bridge, and pulls the reader in, only to have a flashback in the second section, relieving the reader of the suspense while still leaving him or her to wonder what happened. In the third section, the hangman, Peyton Farquhar escapes and makes it home to see his wife. Then all of a sudden, you find that Bierce has taken you on a heartwarming journey only to kill the vibe by depicting Farquhar hanging by the noose, daydreaming just a second before. While this story seems like the typical movie plot, it's amazing to think that Bierce was probably one of the firsts to use this writing technique, keeping a suspenseful and dramatic essence about the story the entire time. This assigned reading was the first time I had ever heard of The Devil's Dictionary -- and what a shame, too. The Dictionary appeals to my humor, even though I don't think I'm quite as cynical as Bierce. The definitions gave these common words witty euphemisms and literal, informal meaning. I think the dictionary should be rewritten to fit today's modern language. I feel like it would give people different perspectives on themselves, others, and the world they live in.