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.