My Thoughts On Literary Interpretation

I think this class has helped me grow as a writer. I've learned more clearly what is and is not appropriate and when it is appropriate. i have also had to go back and clean the dust off of some old English/grammar mechanical skills which is always nice. i mean writing isn't bad but unless you are doing it for a class it is kinda pointless i mean no one is ever going to read it so... anyways the text i liked the most was by far Blankets i loved this book and hit close to home for me this and one other book are the only 2 i wont be selling at the book buyback. the other is understanding comics cause i think my brother will really enjoy reading it. now texts i struggled with The Bluest Eye and Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.now i don't have anything against novels it is just A) these two shouldn't be one after another in my opinion. B) they didn't really draw me in, they weren't my style, and i couldn't relate to them at all. I am not black i did not live in the 40s and my knowledge of religion is just enough to know that people are retarded when it comes to it most times. i read oranges and the first half of the book i was pissed cause i think that the mom needed to get shot in the head. Also a big problem i had was getting lost in the bluest eye they leave the main story quite frequently to go down little streams of history for each of the characters, not really a big deal but it kinda bugged me. now as for the graphic novels i never knew they were this popular/widespread/deep i think i will have to look into them more i always liked comics but they were short and usually shallow and nowadays most of the comics i read as a kid are Saturday morning cartoons. was i challenged? no? impressed? yes. but i have to say the whole graphic novel bit would suck without reading McCloud's book first. but think of it this way you have opened my eyes to a new genre of reading that i really enjoy.
I LOVED our in class discussions/debates when people actually talked it was alot of fun, maybe i just like arguing but.. also the idea of blogs friggin awesome. on a side note i would reserve less class time for both of these cause people write crap blogs and surf the Internet also it might be a good idea to have a backup plan in case the class is less than talkative on a given day but i think publishing our blogs saves you a bunch of time and yet makes us feel like they are worthwhile to write because people are still reading them. i think i am more ready to take on some literary challenges.. throwing in some shakespeare helped shake things up a little and make it feel like we were in a normal lit class but other than that i didnt really expect more out of this class but i think you expected more out of us >.> o yea and i already said this but -gaiman +manga if the manga is anything like i think it is as in it actually retells the story and doest go off in some crazy sidenote of the story that would be really cool. also sometime in this class is felt almost impossible to get all the reading done. i think this is a good and bad thing. i think it is good cause maybe the slackers will drop it and thats always positive for the class but the negative is on the mon-wed gap heavy reading is a killer with other homework. i think it would be better to assign more weekend reading and less weekday reading so that kids can sacrfice their weekends instead of sacrificing other school work.

A Midsummer in dream country

so the text in both a Midsummer Night Dream and Dream Country are very similar and very different. Dream country still has the olden day feel to it but its language is much easier to understand. It modernizes Shakespeare and for this particular piece i think it works much better than a "script" pretending to be a book. I mean it is a play but you don't "see" it in novel form. Basically the only thing that lets you know it is a play is someone entering or exiting other than that you have no clue what is visually happening the way this book is wrote the actors come out on a stage stand right in the middle say their lines and walk off. no i know there are a few parts that give us more than that but not many. So now i look at this graphic text and i get to see someones interpretation of a hobgoblin and it show more of what people look like which is good since there are alot of characters for such a short novel. and when we see a character we remember them more so for how they look than for their name just like in real life when you see someone and you recognize them you just cant quite think up their name.Overall i think the graphic text is more appealing because it is in simpler text that i Can understand and i think it helps understand what is going on in this classic

Helena/Demetrius

So there is this guy Demetrius and a girl Helena. Now she likes him but he doesn't like her. So with just a little magic we go from "I'll run from thee and hide me in the brakes and leave thee to the mercy of wild beasts" to "Helen, Goddess, Nymph, perfect, divine!" no what happened to freedom of choice here he doesn't love her so he is forced into it i mean come on talk about crap but this relationship oversimplifies real life and i think it makes the story seem a little shallow and more of a fairy tale. i nkow with magic and fairies and all but i don't really know how to place the book and to be truthful without the "cheater" version with notes on one side and the play on the other i would have had no clue what was going on in this book but, anyways i guess we will rip it apart n class tomorrow.

Explanation of previous post

So i tried this whole multi genre thing and it was a lot harder than i thought so that post is a very weak multi genre and i think i'm probably just going to hand it in as a regular paper but i posted it anyways cause i think the links are funny >.>

This is how not to do the multi genre piece

Kyle Falkenstein

Eng 1110

Shannon Mortimore

11/7/2008

Actual Life

Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green and white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat? It goes meow- meow. Come and play. Come play with Jane. The kitten will not play. See Mother. Mother is very nice. Mother, will you play with Jane? Mother laughs. Laugh, Mother, laugh. See Father. He is big and strong. Father will you play with Jane? Father is smiling. Smile, Father, smile. See the dog. Bowwow goes the dog. Do you want to play with Jane? See the dog run. Run, dog, run. Look, look. Here comes a friend. The friend will play with Jane. They will play a good game. Play, Jane, play.

This is the first passage of the book The Bluest Eye. It shows the way the world “should’ be the way we all want it to be. But that’s not how life works. Pecola Breedlove wants a family like that. In The Bluest Eye though Morrison shows us what real life is all about and how not many get to live in these perfect fairy tales.

We all know The Brady Bunch and how perfect their life was but in all reality life isn’t that simple the tests we go through in our lives are usually much more difficult than they are portrayed on television so if we assume that the Brady Bunch is an accurate depiction of the dick and Jane story then, The Inbreedy Bunch is much more along the lines of Pecola’s story.

This is more effectively shown when you break down the chapters in the book. Each chapter starts with its own piece of the Dick and Jane piece.

The first place we get to do this is page 33 which starts the second section. The title to this section is:

HEREISTHEHOUSEITISGREENANDWH

ITEITHASAREDDOORITISVERYPRETT

YITISVERYPRETTYPRETTYPRETTYP

Without knowing what is being said here by referencing it to the inserted piece earlier you wouldn’t even know what this said but with that we know that it is talking about the “pretty house” so Morrison jumps right into discussing the house of the Breedloves and it is anything but ”pretty”.

There is an abandoned store on the southeast corner of Broadway and Thirty-fifth street… it does not recede into its background of leaden sky…it foists itself on the eye of the passerby in a manner that is both irritating and melancholy

This occurs in several other places that were pointed out by Rachel Blumenthal she writes in The Explicator, ”"SEEFATHERHEISBIGANDSTRONG” ”Cholly, too, is anything but big and strong-at least, his strength turns to weakness when he succumbs to the "tenderness" that "well[s] up in him" as he rapes Pecola (162).”(Blumenthal). Here they are saying fathers are supposed to be the strong part of the family. Well, sometimes they aren’t. In this case Cholly was not the strong man he needed to be but by constantly trying to be it shows his weakness more and more. A man with almost any strength can resist the urge to violate his daughter.

There are many other places that show how the Dick and Jane story and the Pecola story are different and I mean very different there is “Who will play with Jane? See the cat? It goes meow- meow. Come and play. Come play with Jane. The kitten will not play.” in the first story but when it comes Pecola’s turn to interact with a cat it is a much different scenario. Morrison writes

She (Pecola) grabbed the arm that was swinging the cat…Junior let go of the cat, which…was thrown full force against the window... Except for a few shudders, it was still. There was only the slightest smell of singed fur.

Not exactly the fairy tale way of your experience with a cat. She is then blamed for the death of the cat because she is wearing second hand clothes and is a little black girl which just helps destroy her ego a little more.

I think there is a much bigger picture to all of this. It has to do with society and the impossible standards that it sets for the people. This is shown through Pecola by her trying to live up to “American” standards. She dreams of having blue eyes and being a beautiful white girl when she is anything but white and her eyes are not blue. But in the eyes of a child those two traits are enough to make anyone beautiful. The same applies for America today. We are constantly trying to live up to standards that we will never meet. I found an article in The Boston Globe “Unlike the hourglass-shaped ''Get Real Barbie" with her 39-18-34 figure, the typical woman probably has measurements closer to the 36-28-38” toys like this that girls try to live up to. Pecola was constantly trying to compare herself to Shirley Temple and Mary Jane. This type of mass brainwashing can lead to several things as in the case with Pecola it leads to the eventual degradation of her whole life and most importantly her mind.

LOOKLOOKHERECOMESAFRIENDTHE

FRIENDWILLPLAYWITHJANETHEYWI

LLPLAYAGOODGAMEPLAYJANEPLAY

The sad part about this part is that the friend that Pecola finds is not actually a friend per say. She loses contact with reality and her friend is more of a mental entity rather than a physical one. By that I mean her friend is not actually a friend at all it is something she made up her in mind. In short she turns schizophrenic. Her loss of sanity is directly correlated with her crazy fixation with trying to be beautiful by “American” standards.

I think this is a dramatization of what everyone goes through at least one time in their life. In my opinion almost every time you turn on the television you are exposed to impossibly high standards. Even in super popular movies coming out like “High School Musical 3” the standards portrayed. The way people in movies act just aren’t practical. In the movie there is a part where they get the attention of a whole division 5A school so one of the characters can ask a girl to prom. That’s not entirely practical and when people cannot do these things it makes their lives seem bland and they are almost let down. Other things like soap operas display a world filled with so much drama that just isn’t possible in a regular human life. People long for this type of excitement, and it just isn’t practical. This leads to “Drama queens” but that is not exactly the point. The main point is that society is an extreme pressure on us and for some people it is too much to take. For Pecola it was too much to take. It happens to normal people every day and even if it isn’t as dramatic as Pecola’s case but some people have low self-esteem or other problems due to this lack of ability to live up to the standards of society.

Basically the media is taking over this country. Another example is my roommate swears up and down that “reality” television on MTV is not at all scripted. I personally find this very hard to believe and other people also believe similarly. At the Tree Climber Coalition web site they talk about just how “real” some of his favorite shows are. Albeit I am not saying this is the most reliable source other shows such as The Hills claim to be real but are in fact shot over and over and over again until they get things “right”.

In my mind we should never have to question what is real and what is fake on television. Just like books there should be fiction and non-fiction and nothing in between. I think that this “guessing” what is real and fake in the media is ridiculous and shouldn’t be practiced. All it does is muddy the water and leaves people once again thinking that their life is all drab and boring because these other people have such exciting lives. This type of crap takes America and super stupefies us. At least if you are watching something like Transformers where you know something is real or reading The Chronicles of Narnia you know these are fiction.

The media and the expectations change everyone’s lives. I got a roommate that thinks one day he will be the next man-whore of the hills. Then we got Pecola who has much more dramatic problems than something like that. So now you say well isn’t The Bluest Eye a fiction novel. It is but I think it is a fiction novel portraying a real life situation just more dramatized which is the point of fiction we know that these things are not real and therefore we immerse ourselves in this “different world” to escape our own problems and get away from the stress of our lives and it is over dramatized so that we think about real life situations and maybe think about our lives a little more than just our everyday routine. Personally I don’t watch television, I have little use for it and maybe that’s why I am so prejudiced I wish that our media could do more for us then show us what they want us to believe is real and then act like these “real people acting as actors acting as real people” (Media Elision). Makes a lot of sense doesn’t it!

Works Cited Page

Wilder, Carol. "Media Elision." .

""Reality" TV Gets Real Trashy." Tree Climber Coalition. 9 Nov. 2008 .

"The Hills is scripted? Gasp!." The Blemish. 9 Nov. 2008 .

"Brady Bunch." YouTube. 9 Nov. 2008 .

"The InBreedy Bunch." YouTube. 9 Nov. 2008 .

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1994.

Blumenthal, Rachel. "Criticism & Reference: Full Text." LION. Lion. Lierature Online. Western Michigan University Library. 9 Nov. 2008 .

Thesis for reasearch paper

So my thesis for my last big paper was the loss of innocence of Claudia and Fredia in the bluest eye and now i think i am going to go down that same road in blankets where Craig is coming of age and losing a part of himself just as all children in their transition to adulthood lose something. we will see how that goes but also i have the fundemental GOD WARRIOR thing going i dont know how many of you have see that clip but it would be HILARIOUS for this project. Linking oranges and blankets with blankets

The Lion's Key

e.e. cummings writes in Next to of Course God America I and from line 10 to the end of the poem he hits on basically soldiers being slaughtered like cattle. Here's what he writes

why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-

itful than these heroic happy dead

who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter

Then also in Persepolis there is this same concept going on starting on page 99 it this idea of the key.  "you see this?"said the maid "it's a plastic key painted gold" said Mrs Satrapi "They gave this to my son at school. they told the boy that if they were lucky enough to die, this key would get them into heaven" and then a few pages later"thousands of young kids, promised a better life, exploded on the minefields with the keys around their necks." These pieces really seem to be portraying the same things to me basically the pointless loss of life. I think it is just mental that people would actually believe that just cause you have a little plastic toy key that you are going to heaven i mean hell that key was probably made in Taiwan for less than  a penny and unless my geography is wrong i don't think Taiwan is anywhere near heaven what i think is even MORE ludicrous is that full grown trusted RELIGIOUS adults brainwashed these kid KNOWING that they were LYING. hmm yet another reason i don't fling my self into the religious scene when people refuse to think for themselves and just do whatever a religious leader says is right... i think we have seen what happens several times throughout history. people use religion to get power. We say it happen in the "holy" roman empire and basically everywhere that believed that their leader had been sent to them by god. they just brainwash their people into think that what the ruler wants is what god wants... the biggest load of crap i have ever heard but i just cant stomach a good "enter religion here" man/woman brainwashing their youth so that they can "win" the war. i mean this isn't the first time that children have been used in war but at least when Hitler did it i don't think he was promising salvation when they took two to the chest...