Reflection

I think one of the major effects of knowing that my blog was going to be read by a lot of people definitely changed what I wrote. First of all, I always feel like I might say something stupid and embarrass myself. It isn’t that I feel like I can’t contribute something, but I do worry that I will sound stupid compared to other things people might say. I have always been bad at classroom discussion and when I read other people’s blog entries, it made me feel stupider. I also feel like I couldn’t share any personal connections because I was worried that someone I know might have read it and been offended. Usually when I write papers, I put in personal connections that often enhance what I am writing about. However, when it came to the blog posts, I had trouble doing that without feeling guilty. I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of my friends or family members that might have come across it someday. It made me hold back on making my posts more interesting. I also had a little bit of trouble writing more than the minimum because I felt like it wasn’t really being graded. I also fear this might have made me look a bit dull in the eyes of my classmates. Most people had some great posts that were really insightful, but I felt like mine were boring and repetitive. This only enhanced the trouble I had with writing the posts because I always ended up comparing myself to everyone else. I felt soft of guilty making people read my post when I hadn’t said much of anything in it.

However, it wasn’t as if using the blog was a terrible experience. Most people say to start with the bad and end with the good, which is something I try to do whenever possible. One of the nice things about having a blog having to not deal with paper or printers – especially since I ran out of ink in the last week of class. There was also the ease of organization. I sometimes have trouble staying organized and will lose papers. The nice thing was that I didn’t have that type of trouble with the blog because all my posts were right there on the blog. It saved me because in the middle of the quarter my laptop crashed and I lost everything. With the blog, I didn’t lose anything important for this class. I also liked how easy it was to use. I didn’t have to worry about losing all my work if my laptop froze because it auto-saved drafts if you paused for more than a few seconds. Since my laptop crashed, it has frozen every few moments. I may have lost a few paragraphs on my papers, but not with my blog. It was a nice little convenient touch considering that during the week I was often really stressed about writing papers since I would often lose my progress. I also liked the fact that I could read the comments of my classmates and it made me think a lot about the stories and what I had written. It also helped me remember a few details for the test we would take after reading the blogs.

All in all, I really liked the use of the blogs. I might have had trouble writing posts, but it did make me feel like people were interested in what I had to say about the stories. I think it is a good idea for an English class and I completely encourage people to use blogs for classes so that they don’t lose their progress and so they can get an idea of what their classmates have to say.

Rough Draft

Before I post this, I want everyone to know that this is a VERY rough draft. This is more to show the bare bones form of the paper. I promise the final product will not be anything like this, save for the structure. I'm aware that this paper has no real introduction and a very small conclusion, but I promise it will be fleshed out by the time I turn it in.

Without realizing it or not, Jackson Squared (the narrator) of What You Pawn I Will Redeem is motivated almost completely by his heritage.

First of all, one of the biggest telltale signs of his motivation by heritage is how he acts in a physical sense. Jackson’s actions show that he is more concerned with his past then he wants the reader to believe. His main motivation (if one does not dig deeper) throughout the story is that he wants to gain his grandmother’s headdress. However, if he did not care about his family, he would not have even bothered to try to get it back. In the end of the story, he dances while wrapped up in the aforementioned headdress – a clear sign that he is connected with his heritage. Another physical sign is the company that Jackson keeps. In the beginning, his original friends are Rose of Sharon and Junior, both of whom are Indians. As the story progresses, he meets two other Indians in a bar and gets drunk with them, perhaps playing to a stereotype.

Another sign of Jackson’s motivation is in the way he talks and describes people. First of all, he often shows these signs in his thoughts. When Jackson looks at someone, he will often bring up what tribe that person is from as if to say that it is important to him. Why would he do this if he was not concerned with the pasts of these people? He will also blame some of his mess-ups on being Indian or try to play up to stereotypes. His words also betray how concerned he is with his heritage and the pasts of the people who surround him. Jackson uses humor more than once as if to try to make people comfortable with the fact that he is a homeless Indian – something seen rather frequently in the West. He also makes a point in the beginning of the story talking about where he is from and what tribe he is from.

Finally, some of Jackson’s own personal details and private thoughts point to the fact that his family and tribal past are incredibly important to him. His family is something he focuses a lot during the short story. It seems that he almost wants to apologize to all the women he’s married and his children, but he cannot seem to bring himself to do it. However, the person he concentrates the most on during the story is his grandmother. She is incredibly important to him and he tells many stories, bringing her up multiple times. The reader also gets the feeling that Jackson Jackson wants to somehow make amends with certain things in his life. One realizes at the end that he does seem to make an apology to his grandmother by dancing in her headdress. Perhaps, though, the one person he makes complete peace with is himself. It seems that when he gets the headdress, he finally forgives himself for the things he has done in his life.

For some people, past is something that is hard to face. They will run from it or try to deny it, but Jackson Jackson seems to embrace it.

Essay Topic

I think I will write my essay on What You Pawn I Will Redeem. The essay was, for me, a rather interesting one that kept my attention for a long time. I can't say exactly what I will write about it, but I do know that I will probably end up analyzing the main character as well as his life. The story comes with a huge theme of redemption, so I will also write on that as well. I think, in the end, I will end up tying the story to my own life. Not in the sense that I'm a homeless drunk, but more in the sense that I often do things to try and connect with my heritage. This theme is what drew me to the story in the first place, as I can identify with the main character. Also - the humor he uses is something I have done from time to time to make my own pain seem less. I think this indentification with the main character allows me to connect with him more and will make my final essay a lot more compelling than if I were to do it on something else.

Death And Comedy - Thoughts on the essay by Zadie Smith

This essay actually really resonated with me. My grandfather used to tell a lot of jokes to us and taught me the 'finer points' of comedy. I really do understand what Smith meant when she said they were comedy snobs, because my grandfather tried to educate my family when it came to comedy. We were often made to watch comedians like Eddie Izzard, Lewis Black, and anyone he thought was 'good enough' for us (this did include Monty Python's Flying Circus). When Smith said that she regretted not seeing the body, I think she wanted to show the person she had become.

I really do relate to this as well - my grandfather passed away about two months before my high school graduation. I honestly thought he would live until I was well out of college, especially since he was such a healthy man. In a way, Smith wanted to make sure that her father was proud of her. This is something I can relate to completely, because out of everyone in my family, I also wanted to gain my grandfather's pride about anyone else's. I think that Zadie Smith regrets not seeing the body because it left her without closure.

Rick Moody's Boys

One of the first things that struck me about this short story was the flow of it. I feel like it was almost more song lyrics than a story since it has that sort of flow to it. It seems that every other story in this book I read is more like poetry than an actual story. However, that isn't to say I didn't enjoy the structure. I found it to add something to the writing, making it easier to read.

The repetition struck me as almost necessary to the structure since it gives all these ideas a common ground. Another thing that I also thought was necessary was that it didn't actually read like a story. There's a huge difference between reading "There was once a boy who entered a house and (insert the actions here)" and "Boys enter the house, (insert action here)". It makes the reader feel like they are present at the time that the action takes place - and it very well should, considering the fact that it is said in present time.

All of the actions are, in my opinion, also essential to the message as a whole. The one part that struck me as completely sad was the mention of the boys holding their sister's hand after she is diagnosed with (I'm assuming) leukemia. It's sadness seemed accentuated by the fact that most of the story itself is full of trivial things that boys do. The second part that really chewed at me was when the narrator talks about the father of the boys dying. I think the message he was trying to convey was this: the true test of manhood comes from being completely on your own without your family.

T.C. Boyle's Greasy Lake

At first, I didn't know what to think about the story. It started off innocently enough and even reminded me of my summers back home. However, things took a turn for the worse as the narrator and his two friends went to tease one of their friends by finding a car that looked like his parked in a secluded area. Instead, they found some random guy getting it on with his girlfriend (….maybe). What then follows is them knocking the guy out and almost raping the girl, only to almost be caught by police. The boys scramble and hide and the narrator finds a dead body. For me, I think the dead body had the most significance in the story. After all, here he is in danger of being killed and there’s just this dead body next to him. It struck me as some type of symbol, because the first part of the story is them basically ‘just being kids’, running around town and going out to bars to get drunk. It made me stop for a few moments and think about mortality as a whole, especially since it is revealed near the end that the dead body is actually a young guy. I guess it just went to show that we’re not as immortal as we think we are.

Kincaid's Girl

Girl, by Jamaica Kincaid, struck me as a very interesting piece of work. For one thing, it reads more like a list of instructions about trivial things in the beginning of it, but then moves on to more abstract ideas. I can’t really make much of a comment on the story, because there is no real story to it. Instead, she tends to say something and then move on with the idea, but in an almost completely different direction. The story itself isn’t so much a story as the way a person’s thought seems to move from one idea to the next. In this sense, Girl is a piece of ‘stream of consciousness’ literature because it runs in this sense. The general idea – or what I got from it – was that it seemed like a list of things one would tell a little girl to keep her well-behaved. In fact, I identified with this a lot because I grew up playing with the neighborhood boys because there were no girls my own age in our neighborhood. So, what it meant to me was the things my parents told me as I got older and had to start ‘acting my gender’. I think that’s what Kincaid’s Girl really meant.

Blog Assignment - Catasrophe

To be completely honest, both the play and the video of the play are completely confusing to me. I usually try to look for at least a little bit of meaning in things like this, but I could not find much of anything. That said, the video of the play did help me to at least understand it better. The text of it just seems to be meaningless and at first I thought it had something to do with a corpse they were positioning (though I have no clue as to why I thought this). It was only when I viewed the video that I realized that they were actually talking about a man. I could not actually glean much of anything from either, though. It seemed to me that it was a useless play that had almost nothing to do with anything. In fact, I felt like it was a slight waste of my time. The only comparison I could see between the film and the text was that the film made it slightly clearer to me. It was a really bizarre work of both writing and art, but I cannot say I enjoyed it at all. It left me wondering exactly where the playwright was going with it.

Blog Assignment - Yusef Komunyakaa's "Facing It"

After reading “Facing It’ by Yusef Komunyakaa, I felt like I made an emotional connection to the poem. I have been to the memorial multiple times, so I understand the feelings he’s trying to convey. First of all, it seems to me that the speaker is a survivor of the Vietnam War. I can’t say this is Komunyakaa because he was just a correspondent, but it is very plausible. The memorial in itself is a symbol of the war and the people who were lost in it. The fact that he was reflecting on it means that the speaker was part of the war, evidenced by the fact that he almost expected to find his own name. There is also the part where he sees another man’s name and remembers how he died. I don’t want to say that this is an anti-war poem, but I think it forces people to look at the veterans of the war a bit differently. Even though it was an unpopular war, people still died. I feel like Komunyakaa was trying to get that feeling across when he wrote this poem. I personally feel badly for the speaker of it, because he seems to be haunted by the ghosts of his past.

Analysis of Christina Rosetti's "A Birthday"

"My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me."

First of all, I think it's fair to say that there are loads of similies in this poem. In the first stanza alone, every other sentence uses the words 'like a', comparing her heart to a bird, a tree and a shell. I also think that the speaker of the poem is a female. I can't say it is the poet, but it seems like it is about a woman who has finally found someone to make her happy. I get the feeling that it is not an outside factor that has brought all of this joy to her, but some inner peace. She never makes any mention of a man (or woman), so it's difficult to place the cause of her happiness on one thing.

Please bear with me now because I'm going to deviate a little bit and talk about symbols. To be fair, I'm really really bad at analyzing poetry. I'm also just going to ignore the first stanza because I can't find any symbols in this. The first thing to catch my attention was when she talked about fleurs-de-lys. That could be one of two things: the fleurs-de-lys is the symbol of French royalty as well as a flower itself. The flower represents female virtue and spirituality. I think with the way the poem is structured and the diction (words used) works, it's fair to say that she means the flower itself. At least, that would work for the first verse since it deals a lot with nature. The second verse does seem to deal more with rich and material things. All in all, I think the poem is really Rosetti talking about how she doesn't need anyone else to make her happy but herself. I also think it is about her loving herself. But, as I said earlier, I'm really bad at analyzing poetry on my own.

The Introduction - Thoughts

While I did read the introduction, I've found that I'm really bad at analyzing poetry. In a class setting I'm okay, but I feel really out of depth on my own. I've been in AP English all throughout high school and this was the one thing I've always had trouble with. I've tried most of the steps that the introduction mentioned before, but I still feel like I'm bad at it. I guess it comes with practice, but I feel like poetry should not always be analyzed. This does not really fit well with our class theme as a whole, but analyzing poetry kind of takes the joy out of it for me. As someone who performs poetry often I understand wanting to know the meaning behind the words, but I also like to take things for how they are. I guess that's just how I am. Hopefully this class will help me get better at analyzing.

Uhm, hi?

I guess that I'm just using this for English.