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...

Religion Strikes Again

Sooo Persopolis was a book that hit me kind of deep to think that the autor is roughly the same age as my mother and hearing some of the things she had to go through was pretty amazing to me i thought nothing like this had been going on for 50 years or better but reading this book i almost felt like they were talking about the 40's or something. I had never really thought people lived this strictly in the 80s. The part to me that is so stupid is the family in the book obviously hates what is going on in their country and apparently they have enough money to leave but they refuse too.. i mean i guess it would detract from the story if on page 3 they said "and they just moved to the united states" but whatever it made me look at my life in a different way. a little bit...

hmm i should have a title, no?

Starting on page 150 the pastor is up at his podium preaching. He says something to the effect of anyone who drinketh the drink eateth the bread unworthily shall be heating and drinking damnation onto himself and will become weak and sickly, then bam Craig is practically dying in like a page. This leads me into believing the book wants us to think that the reason he is sick is because he drank damnation... It just so conveniently happens that it is also the middle of winter and they had previously shown in the book that this family was rather poor and didn't like to turn on the heater. Which leads me to my second topic Craig's fascination with heaters on both pages 86 and 127  Craig  has some interaction with a heater in the first one he merely hears it but in the second one it is described and seems to be a miracle or something. The book talks about how back when Craig was younger temperature was a big problem it was either to hot or to cold and there really wasn't anything they could do about it. now he almost takes heat as a blessing. i mean looking at the vegetarian kid you soon realize he moderately resembles an Ethiopian but i have never really thought about heat like i am sure this kid has. i guess my last topic is that his 5th grade teacher is a Big time pain in the ass. i don't even think its legal to be a teacher and be that much of a never mind...thinking of words not appropriate anyways she is way outta line every time you see her so far. the way she humiliates Craig and all that is ridiculous but anyways her and all her "Holyness" should go somewhere where they don't ever have to see people again. :)

The bluest eye

so i am focusing sort of on the foreword or something like that. not that crazy repetitive/annoying thing but the part that sets up the whole story right before it says atumn ok in this little part they refer to marigolds not blooming and they think it is localized they think that just their marigolds arent blooming cause Pecola is having her fathers baby. Sidenote: This hasn't come up since. anyways later they say 'it was a long time before my sister and i admitted there would be no green from our seeds" so is that basically sayin they are infertile? maybe thats the wrong word so ill just go with normal talk to me that makes me think their eggs aint dropping or something and then nthey talk about they "planted them to far into the earth", "it never occured that the earth might be unyeilding"? so maybe she cant carry deformed woumb or osmething then they say that they dropped their seeds intheir own plot of black dirt just as pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own black dirt this text says something about seeds and fertility

My working thesis for a paper I will one day write!

OK so a thesis being as i am one of the few people in here that isn't some sort of English or education major my definition of a thesis might be totally wrong but Shannon said the answer to the question we will be asking in our paper that we haven't wrote yet, anyway my question is probably going to be something about the Jin Jang/ Danny Whiteboy identity crisis so the answer would be i guess to show the audience the trouble CHIN-KEE causes Danny and maybe correlate that to an internal rather than an external struggle as it was in the book (i know i am get no points for creativity at this point but i don't know what else to write about) anyway this is supposed to be a close reading so i don't really know how i would explain all of this in a few brief panels i think it develops over most of the book there fore i think i may have to change anyways input from the class on whether they like it or should scrap it would be beneficial and don't worry you can be honest i wont hunt you down or something... >.>

To be yourself is all that you can be....

Lyrics taken from Audioslave's "Be Yourself". Plays right into this the song says basicaly you can do whatever you want but to be truly happy being yourself is the only way. Now in American Born Chinese several people would have been better off if they would have thought about this a little. There are several big examples that i know everyone is going to bring up. The monkey had he just realized he was an already extremely gifted monkey would have saved himself 500 years had he just wanted to be the best monkey. Jin/Danny would have been alot better off had he just been true to himself and not tried so hard to be something he wasn't. and the more i think about it Chin-Kee was not really put in this book to be derogatory to asian he was just trying to remind jin that he was still in fact chinese... In the end of the book Jin can't even read chinese anymore, not only did he forget where he came from he forgot everything chinese. Wei Chen.. now this one is a little more far fetched but even he was given the transformer that changed froma monkey to a human to remind him what he really was but he ended up forgeting what he was a being a human to enjoy all human vices when he wasn't supposed to partake in any of them.and probablly the one who could have learned the most from all of this was Greg (the blonde kid) f he would have just left everyoone alone then things would have never gone so bad in the first place. The worst thing possible is not when you change yourself but when someone else is telling what you have to change. Jin had a much better chance of staying on course had he not ever had the coversation with Greg. Here is where i think of Emerson's "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." instead everyone gets caught up in conformity from Greg and Amelia not wanting to hang out with an asian to Jin changing his whole look to become "american"... when really the moral of the whole story is, To be yourself is all the you can be....

American Born Chinese

So American born Chinese coming into this book i had a few guesses and i was partly right but i never expected it to be this type of a story. as far as the reading goes i am pretty interested and i think it flows well. i think it was very important that the author tells you that all 3 stories are interconnected or otherwise it feels like you are reading 3 different books... not to say that is a bad thing because at this point all three of them are very entertaining and keep you from getting bored with one scenario. By far my favorite chapter was the last one we were required to read where the monkey king / the great sage equal to that of the gods... when he meets his "creator" and tries to get away from him then is in total shock and awe when "he" holds up his freshly peed on hand. but all the way from the kid with the Chinese cousin which is named Chin-kee. now to me that looks like a derogatory term for Chinese people which seems odd because the author is Chinese. Anyways so there are two of the scenarios the High school kid Danny that has major problems with his Chinese cousin that comes to visit every year , and the monkey king. the last scenario is that of a little boy Jin that is fresh of the boat from china learning how to deal with life in America he is alone... until he meets Wei-Chen. One more thing to note on Danny's story is he says that his cousin always embarrasses him at school so much they have to move...so why keep letting his cousin go to school with him? it seems kinda stupid i mean how many families (excluding military) move every year in the summertime right in between school years? and the other odd thing how does the monkey king learn all this crazy crap just from meditating? but these are things i can let go in order to read an entertaining Graphic novel and not hate it like everyone else in the class probably does.

bell hooks

I thought it was very interesting when early in the first peice hooks said some like people form yale know they are going to succed and have these huge dreams about the future whereas her students in harlem were equally brilliant but just didnt have the dreams for the future, and in a mild way she corrlated that with not having daddy fat wallet behind them while they are going to school. saying that they dont have dreams because they have to work and go to school. then she goes on a totally differentet tangent and talks about women be sexually abused or raped in movies and she says that people see this to much and think it is alright... ARE YOU SERIOUS!? who in their right mind would think that stuff is acceptable...i think that is a very far stretch.. anyways.. she then goes on to say braveheart had something to do with the director's agenda and that it was made to cast light on a white person's struggle. continuing on about how white males control hollywood... which may be true but for every white male that asks a black person "hey you wanna play a thief in this movie there is a black person that says yes...

Manga Shakespeare...

So we are only going off like 4 pages but the first few pages where the author introduces everyone is colored, then the rest is black and white..interesting i thought. but in these few pages we have some very dark colored characters yelling at each other and fighting then on another page the gutter is filled black to give us a sense of the dark night and so of the mysteriousness that is there. But the one page i found the most interesting and why i really chose this piece is the last page. After all this dark and gloominess they come to the scene of a young girl she is crying and the lines on this page are so light it is a little hard to see (on a computer) so the author is showing severe distinctions between dark in light which correlates strongly with the love and anger in this classic. Also on this final page there is no gutter so everything kind of blends together as if it is all happening very smoothly and i think this kinda goes with pointy is dangerous and round is safe is that the lack of a gutter smooths the page out it is almost one big frame instead of several smaller ones.

What are "real" books?

Hmm well my first post didn't post so well so here we go again. Real books, i think real books are anything with a binding and pages in it. more importantly though i would expect to either learn from a book or go on an adventure or something. the way that this is portrayed isn't that important really i mean personal preference and all that but whether it is a book or not i don't think should be questioned just because of the presentation...

Multi-stuff

So the way i see it is Mutimodal and Multisemitoc is basically summed up in you see a rose, and think "oh that smells so pretty and looks beautiful..." when i see it i think "Damn those thorns f*ing hurt" so when people see things they all think of them differently. Like if i think that a car looks cool chance are there is someone else that doesn't it's what makes us human is our difference in tastes which is probably due to us "seeing" them differently. and on the flip side we will learn things better if it is presented to us in more ways. The world today is used to using so little brainpower in everything they do so if a teacher is just standing talking in a monotone voice guess what... we aren't going to use that much brainpower and in essence we wont learn crap but when the teacher is involved and shows the point several different ways then it is going to stick a lot more. To people today visuals mean a lot more than words, ever heard a picture is worth a thousand words? same basic concept. try writing a paper on peeling and orange... then i can read it and then peel an orange. Stand in front of me and show me how to do it and i think we will get much better or at least much faster results. So that's what i think is important about all this "muti-stuff".

What is an american?

An american is obviously someone who lives in the U.S. but more importantly americans are what make the country run the whole structure of this country wouldnt function without every person doing their part i mean someone has to work at the grocery store so that we can buy groceries right? American are the building blocks for our country, they do what needs to be done to keep everything together but American are also free something that many countries don't have in china once you reach a certain age you are told what you are going to do for the rest of your life (Communism) where here we do what we want and we do it how we want to...(to a certain legal extent). So every American has the option to do what they want to help run our country some people become doctors to treat the sick, some become teachers that educate our youth, some become McDonald's workers that keep us in the lead for most obese country but all of them have the choice and all of them play their role in keeping America running. another large part of being an American is being diversified. I mean way back when we were called the "melting pot" and that has kinda stuck with us. we have all walks of lives people from all over the world come here to live. Which has taught us racial and religious tolerance, and has also added a lot of things to our lives that we wouldn't enjoyed had we not been so diverse.

University of Michigan Football

So.. one of my interests is college football University of Michigan is my team of choice but all college football is still better than NFL in the NFL too many people are crying about contracts and money instead of just playing football because it is fun...

Two Literary Theories That I find Interesting...

The first theory that caught my eye was the Philological literary theory, now I can’t pronounce it or even spell it right, but the texts under this theory are always amazingly fascinating and are very entertaining to me. The second theory is the Biographical literary theory. I mean if you did something great enough in your life to have a book wrote about it... I mean when you read these pieces it gives you a good feeling inside and lets you now that small people can really do great things. I mean no matter what you do in your life we are all just human and the fact that another human did great things means you can too.