Love and Honor

This story kind of shocked me at first. You never hear about American soldiers abusing their power in war and slaughtering a village of innocent people. In my eyes it just shows how awful the Vietnam War must have been. I feel like the American Soldiers slaughtered those innocent civilians out of pure frustration and anger over the atrocities of war and all the brothers in arms that they had seen die. You normally associate the slaughtering of civilians with the people the US is trying to fight whether it be the Nazi's or the terrorists in the middle east. I guess I would have to be pretty naive to believe that the US is never cruel to other innocent people in foreign nations. But I would like to think we try to do our best and be fair with others.

This story also reminded me a lot of the movie we watched. It dealt with Iowa's writing workshop and the intensity of writing stories. The first scene really cracks me up when it talked about the narrator cleaning up his apartment when his father arrived early. "As he moved into the kitchen, I grabbed the three quarters full bottle of Johnnie Walker form the second shelf of my bookcase and stashed it under the deask. I looked around. The desktop was gritty with cigarette ash. I threw some magazines over the roughest spots, then flipped one of them over because of it's cover bore a picture of Chairman Mao." This reminded me of when my parents came to visit me the other weekend. The night before they came I was trying to clean up the best I could, sweeping, doing dishes, taking out the 4 garbage cans full of trash and the empty adult beverage cans that seemed to be lying everywhere. You try to think to yourself that you are still their little boy slash girl but the truth is your not a little kid anymore, your pretty much an adult which is really sad, I miss being a kid and it will never happen again.

The relationship the narrator has with his father seems to be a very unfortunate one. They love each other yet they have a hate for each other as well. The father is the scarred army veteran who has seen atrocities while the son is a writer just living out his life in small town USA. Two very opposite lives and because of it they both misunderstand each other and never really get along. It even says that the narrator had not seen his father in 3 years, if that was me I wouldn't be able to make it. My dad would be in a worse case than me, I know he misses me a lot because I am ten hours away from him. He did not really like the idea of me going to a college this far away but he loves me so much that he supported my decision and is now a giant Clemson Tiger fan. I wouldn't know what I would do without the strong relationship I have with my dad, I respect him so much and he is a very good role model and I strive to be like him and make him proud of me everyday. I couldn't imagine having a bad relationship with him like the narrator does with his father. My father would never burn a piece of work that I had poured my heart and soul into for so long like the narrator's father did.

Movie Last Part

I am really glad the narrator finally found the author. It would have been an awful ending if it just left you hanging with the question of what the author was like and why he had stopped writing. It also gave me a lot of insight into what the life some authors is like. Hectic, I could not imagine being so stressed out I took jobs like a paper boy or welder even though I do enjoy welding a lot I could not take doing it for a living unless i was paid very well. Although I would imagine the satisfaction you get from writing a whole novel yourself and getting published would be worth the hardship to make it. All the authors seemed so intelligent, I feel like I could never become that intelligent or read that many books, I don't think I could get motivated enough to do that. I am more interested in other things to get focused and I do not have the attention to spend hours and hours on writing a story, I would have to have the inspiration of a lifetime or the experience of a lifetime to even think about writing a major novel or work of literature.

The author does not seem stable mentally when ever the narrator talks with him. He goes off on random rants that although they are literature related they don't seem to ever be relevant to the conversation. I watched the Shining again today and it reminded a lot of the author, maybe to not nearly that extreme, as in the author actually wrote a novel but the process had it's wear and tear on both of them in the authors case it was not to that extreme but it did drive him to pursue other careers. It is crazy to think that because of one motivated man The Stones of Summer got into mainstream literature scene again and was kind of reborn. The last thing I have to say about the movie is that I did like the soundtrack, who ever picked the song really knows his movies and the way music sets the mood of a movie.

Movie Part 2

I could not imagine being a writer. I am way to ADD to be a writer, I would start writing and get distracted or just lose interest in what I was writing about. Not to mention the whole editing process. Whenever people edit my papers and I have spent considerable time on the paper and feel like it is a good paper I always take offense to the edits people make. When my mom edits the crap out of research papers and essays I don't know why but it kind of makes me mad even though I know she is write on most of the edits and she is just trying to help. It might be the fact that I had worked on the paper for so long and now I have to make a bunch of edits. Publishing companies and editors go through so many drafts it is unfathomable to me that I would be able to write a novel especially the fact that I am use to writing five to ten page papers and being mad about having to go back and re-doing things where novels have hundreds of pages in them.

It's not surprising it could drive someone crazy trying to write a novel. They said it took the writer over four years to write The Stones of Summer and you wonder why he only wrote one! Four years ago I was a freshman in high school, that is soooo long ago I would be chilling in a psych ward to if I all I did for four years was work on a novel. Plus it is a giant gamble if you are banking on it selling to make you money because most novels make no money.

As for the movie I am on the edge of my seat to actually see this author, I hope he does eventually find him just for closure even if the author has to wear a straight jacket to see him. The teacher the author dedicated the book to really makes me laugh, he seems pretty eccentric and the ways he would say things was pretty fun. But he does seem like a brilliant man who really knows what he is talking about when he talks about the process of making a novel and literature in general.

Movie Part 1

I really wish I was a bigger reader, I don't know what it is about my personality that holds me back. In high school and grade school whenever I would get motivated to read for pleasure I would always read a bunch of chapters then stop for months then whenever I would go back to reading the book I would forget everything that happened that I had already read so I would just give up on reading the book. I think the problem is the fact that I do not have enough time or I don't want to devote enough time to be able to make a habit out of reading. My schedule is very hectic, I am either in class at work or in the gym all day during week days and when I am done with all of that I am doing homework and studying then when I am finally done with all that I relax and that relax time is not a lot and I usually spend it doing other things like watching television shows or sports games or just sitting around chilling on facebook while my roommates are cooking some Ramen Noodles. The weekends are where I get my real free time. Friday night and all of Saturday I refuse to do any work and usually am either sleeping or relaxing trying to do the least possible work expending no effort at all in to anything and reading seems to be to taxing of a process and could never be relaxing enough for me. I don't know why it is but whenever I do read for long periods at a time my eyes start to hurt and I get really tired even if it is the middle of the day. I asked my eye doctor about it once and she said I should be able to read fine with my 20/15 vision so I really don't know what the problem is, maybe its just all in my head.

The movie really made me sad because they seem like reading is this awesome voyage and it is a nice hobby to have and be able to talk to other people about different novels. I only knew a few of the books that they rattled off and discussed and only probably a third of the ones I recognized I had read. I feel like I am missing out on so much and just being left behind. If I could some how find enjoyment in reading I could grow so much more as a person opening up personal help books and classics that could benefit my mind, my body, and my way of life.

The way the narrator/main character's obsession with books reminds me a lot with my obsession with movies and music. I am constantly trying to find movies and music that I love and when I find something I really like I make my friends listen/watch it too and see what they think just like the guy in the movie does. Then I thought about how there are way more books then movies especially because people have been able to write books way longer than make movies. I wish I could see the movies the people of the past would make. Imagine a Shakespeare of the movie industry or a Plato of the movie industry, they would probably make Steven Speilberg look like an amateur. Not only great movies, but we would also get a huge insight into what the life and times were like in the past because a lot movies reflect how things are going at that time in history.

The Same River Twice pg 152-188

I don't know why but after reading this section I really want to experience a hurricane first hand. I really want to see the brute force that mother nature has. "A tremendous gust lifted my feet. My body tipped over the bay, held by wind to the railing, while my legs lifted behind me." As a kid I have always wanted to lean against the wind and have it hold me up, the wind Chris talks about would throw me around like a rag doll. It would be fun to hang on to a rail and just let your body flap in the wind like a flag though. After the hurricane is a very interesting part in the book too. When Chris talks about all the destruction that it wrecks on the landscape. All the wildlife trying to get back to their lives crossing the highway is very interesting because normally you would never see an alligator crossing the highway with their baby alligators. This section really kind of opens up how Chris seems to be depressed with his life and how he has tried many times unsuccessfully to ruin it for himself. He tries to let mother nature make the decision for him to end his life. He has traveled across most of the country and has not been real happy anywhere and his mantra of always going forward seems to have failed him and he has ended up in a very awful place to live and work. When he actually does go back to a place he has been to before, Boston, he finds Rita and with it stability and happiness.

The last section seems very personal to Chris, it shows his experience of the birth of his first child which is very life changing or I feel like it would be life changing for me at least. To have a child that you made, it came from you and is living and breathing and is your responsibility. Your whole life would alter in a matter of hours. When I was younger I really didn't get what the big deal was with having a baby, it was just a child I didn't see past that or why anyone would want to have one and have that responsibility, wouldn't you rather just be free and have fun your whole life. "We stared for many minutes, passing unknown information back and forth through the conduit of of his initial sight." This moment is the first moment of a father and son looking into each others eyes before a lifetime of unknown which I think is very cool and it almost takes you a step back from reality and look at life as a whole.

The other thing I got from this section is a affirmation of how glad I am to not be a woman and have to give birth. That would be absolutely awful!! Not only do you have to carry around the baby for 9 months and not have alcohol or caffeine but you have to go through the whole birth process. "For an hour she moaned, receiving ninety four stitches," 94 stitches!! are you kidding me I would DIE especially being on that part of the body, I am so glad I do not have to go through an ordeal like that.

The Same River Twice pg 110-152

"I hope for a son who is not like me," pg 112 I think speaks volumes. I feel like everyone has doubts about themselves as people, they feel like they are inadequate and would want more for their children then their own life. I feel like Chris is putting responsibility on himself for how his child turns out and if the child's life is bad it will be because of his bad genes and all his fault. If I ever have a child I hope he or she is most like my mother and father because I respect them a great deal, as for being like me I am really not sure yet I have not proven my worth to anything yet, I am still in college "finding myself."

The advice shadrack gives the narrator on page 117 ending with "never ever yank your rod" really cracks me up. Other than it being an innuendo it reminds me of all the guys trying to give one of my old high school friend advice on women since he had never really had a girlfriend or anything through high school and he was going up to college and he wanted advise on women. I feel like most guys think they know a lot about women. Every guy has his own theories and philosophies but most of the time they really do not know much about the opposite sex to be honest.

"To protect myself I wore a scarred leather jacket and a permanent scowl. While walking home one night, I watched a couple cross the street to avoid me, and half a block later cross back. It was one of the better moments of my urban life. I felt vindicated for the general apprehension I carried in the street." pg 134 This whole section where Chris describes about his ghetto apartment and neighborhood really reminds me of Washington D.C. and my families condo. Although the condo is not directly in the ghetto it is not a few blocks away from a really bad part of town. I remember a few times when you could see helicopters fly over and police cars zoom by all at the same time. Another part of this section that I find interesting is the fact that it shows how people are very judge-mental of others. Just because Chris is wearing a leather jacket that is beaten up does not mean he is some biker thug criminal. I guess people do it instinctively just to be cautious but if I would have been the couple i would not have crossed the street again right away that seems pretty low ball even if they were scared of Chris.

Same River Twice pg 9-53

I find the narrator in the story to be very naive and innocent. He lived a shelter life, he wasn't exposed to the rest of the world in Kentucky. He even says he never crossed his own county line. I think one of the funniest parts of the section was when he couldn't tell the difference between Hispanics and African Americans in a laundromat he confused Spanish to be Ebonics or a African American dialect of English. I knew those two differences by at least first grade and the narrator is 18-19 in that section. He is learning about the real world, experiencing it for the first time making mistakes and learning from them.

I see the narrator being very human too. He is deathly scared of having a baby with Rita. He is afraid of change, of growing old. He feels like if he has a kid that some switch will flip and he will become an old man and change forever. Which is true, having a child does change a person. I draw some similarity with my transition to college. Senior year everything was stable i knew the routine of high school and sports and family living with my parents, college posed a big change, different class styles harder classes, living away from home away from my family and friends. I feel like I have changed as well being released to the rest of the world seeing and learning new things everyday.

I think it would be cool to throw caution to the wind and just live where ever I want doing what ever I want like the narrator does. Get a job make friends, if I get tired of it just move on to the next city, job, and friends. It might seem lonely at times but the freedom seems very enticing to try and make it out on your own where ever you want. It is sort of like the American dream, to go out into the cold dark world and make it by yourself, make a living have fun and do whatever you want.

A few parts I was really taken a back by. When he mistakes a hermaphrodite to be a hooker, that part really caught me off guard and I had to cringe about how awful that experience had to be. The horse riding part also was pretty crazy and the fact that Jahi was crazy enough to want to have sex after such a traumatic event. I really am sketched out by the fact that the narrator was willing to go do things with random people like the hermaphrodite and Jahi, for all he knows they could have been walking std factories. I guess his sheltering was why he did it, the fact that he most likely did not know about STD's. Was why he didn't double take at any chances to have relations with random strangers.

Go Yield Stop

Go-
What I like most about your class is the discussions. Even though you are the one who talks the most the discussions always make me think about life and other things deeper even if I did not get around to reading the 60 pages of Lolita that was assigned most of the time I can come away with something from the class. When I do read the section for the day I always like to put my two sense into it if I feel comfortable enough to do it. Blogging is also nice because I like to get my ideas out on paper or should I say blog. Most of the assigned readings are enjoyable, however some I did not quite get like Howl and parts of Lolita were confusing.

Yield-
What I find that you should be aware of and not let get out of hand is would be participation in class. I feel like if more people participated I think I would feel more comfortable participating and the class as a whole would participate more often. I also think it would be good to continue to ask discussion questions and not questions that are kind of hard to tell what kind of response we are suppose to give on.

Stop-
The thing I find hardest about your class is the amount of reading for the novels. A lot of times it will be thirty plus pages and with my computer science major work load and slow reading speed I have a hard time reading more than twenty five pages and then after all that reading write a couple paragraph blog about it. It would be a lot easier if the readings were only 2-3 chapters worth nothing longer than thirty pages and there would be a few discussion questions that could be blogged about. You would not have to blog about the questions but they would help get the wheels turning for blogging. A lot of times I sit down to write a blog and I am not sure how to start it or what to write about exactly and I feel like I am just talking out of my butt to make things up that sound smart or something. If i kind of have some sort of idea or blueprint it would help me a lot in writing I think to be more meaningful blogs.

Glengarry Glen Ross Part 2

I could definitely not be a salesperson, that is way to much pressure on me. I also could not keep badgering someone who does not want to close. When someone does not want something i feel terrible continuing to try and get them to buy it. I guess that's why i some times have a hard time with fund raisers. Roma would not accept no as an answer from Lingk until Williamson lied and said the checks had been cashed and Lingk literally walked out the door.

The rhetoric and talking strategies of the salesmen really remind me of the movie Thank You for Smoking, "Roma: Where are you going...? This is me... This is Ricky, Jim. Jim, anything you want, you want it you have it. You understand? This is me. Something upset you. Sit down, now sit down. You tell me what it is. (Pause.) Am I going to help you fix it? You're goddamn right I am. Sit down. Tell you something...? Sometimes we need someone from outside. It's...no, sit down....Now talk to me." Roma seems to be side tracking the conversation from the deal to a personal level to make Lingk more easily persuaded later on to make the deal. Other sly talking like his description of how the check was not cashed yet also reminded me of Thank You for Not Smoking and quotes like this, "Kid #3: My Mommy says smoking kills.
Nick Naylor: Oh, is your Mommy a doctor?
Kid #3: No.
Nick Naylor: A scientific researcher of some kind?
Kid #3: No.
Nick Naylor: Well, then she's hardly a credible expert, is she?" is a perfect quote from Thank You for Smoking showing the rhetoric and the sly way both salespeople/representatives will gloss over things that could possibly be negative for themselves.

In the end it kind of sums up that a lot of sales people themselves don't even like their job Roma heads to the restaurant (a break from work) right as Aaronow pronounces that he hates his job.

River of Names and The Cathedral

River of Names is a very sad story. It reminds me a lot of Law and Order SVU where there are a bunch of different stories that you can't even imagine being true. Different ways people die and are abused. Also the girl telling the story seems like she is exactly like the victims in SVU. She doesn't wanna talk about her horrific past. It also reminds me of all the stereotypes of what people call rednecks. People that abuse their children physically and sexually, steal everything, drink and do drugs, live off welfare, and have many children but the family in the story take it to the next level. I don't see how more of them weren't in jail for the terrible things they did. The part that really made my mouth drop is the part about Butch. Butch seems to be a fun loving gentle boy and is murdered by his own family. "Butch could hang on, put his hand down into the tank and pukk up a cupped palm of gas, breathe deep and laugh. He would climb down roughly, swinging down from the door handle, laughing, staggering, and stinking of gasoline. Someone caught him at it. Someone threw a match. 'ill teach you.' Just like that, gone before you understand." It is crazy to me that a little kid who anyone would consider innocent was getting high off of gasoline. Then he is murdered by his own family in a scene that is something you would be seen in a movie.

I feel like the reason the narrator never talks about her family and past with anyone because she feels like if she does she will become like them. Her sister did and she didn't want to and did anyway when she almost hit her baby because it was crying. I think that may be why the narrator is a lesbian, because she feels like if she has a husband or anything close to kids she will turn into the fate or curse of her family and abuse her children and steal and have all those bad things happen except she is the one doing them. Being a lesbian in her mind seems to separate her from her family, she isn't like them. She has to have some sort of post traumatic stress disorder with all of that perversion and violence she experienced as a child. Evidence of this could be seen when she wakes up violently and asks Jesse to just hold her.

In the Cathedral I really see a correlation between that story and two of my favorite movies, American History X and Crash. At the beginning the narrator seems to bare a prejudice towards someone or a group of people but then through experience sees things through there eyes and understands them better and is no longer prejudice towards them. At first the narrator seems to hold some disdain for the blind man because he doesn't see the connection he has with his wife, in American History X the main character has become a brain washed skin head who hates black people and people who are in general different then himself. In the Cathedral the narrator makes a connection with the blind man when they draw a cathedral together. He even closes his eyes to finish the drawing and really starts to get the impression of how it might be to be blind and that's when the connection and the understanding is really met. "But I had my eyes closed. I thought I'd keep them like that way for a little longer." In American History X the main character's realization of his ignorance comes a little harsher. He goes to jail for murdering a African American for trying to steal his car. In jail he realizes how hypocritical his fellow white people could be and realized his beliefs had no truth to them. When he shuns the white people his only friend is a black man he works with in jail. He is then raped and beaten by his so called white friends for having a black friend. This was the enlightening moment for him, he saw how narrow minded his philosophy on life was and saw what it was like to be a black person, which was almost the same as a white man and is the reason it was so dumb to be prejudice against them because they were so similar.

Last Lolita Blog

The end of Lolita really made me feel bad for Humbert Humbert. It made me wonder if Humbert Humbert had any real friends. He only lived with Lolita and her mom for a short period of time. The book never really talks about him having any friends. Not only do I feel like Lolita's childhood was messed up but I feel like Humbert Humbert's adulthood was messed up. All he had was Lolita his one love, I really do think he loved her, and when Lolita was taken away by Que i feel like Humbert died a little bit inside. Humbert had nothing to live for no real family, no real friends, Lolita was really the only person in his life. That is probably what drove Humbert to murder. I could not imagine living my adult life alone. I have a hard enough time being alone for a Friday or Saturday night.

Even when he shot the man who kidnapped Lolita he found no resolution. He actually felt even worse with his pedophilia and the addition to murder on his hand. All of this guilt in addition to being completely alone in the world I am surprised he did not end up killing himself. He does however do something that I have always randomly thought about doing, and that is drive on the other side of the road. I have always thought what it'd be like to swerve onto the other side of the road or into on coming traffic or off a cliff.

At the end of the story when Humbert is describing a kind of hill he is sitting on and taking in all of nature and surroundings just waiting on the police to pick him up for driving on the opposite side of the road and murder, I can really imagine this ending scene being the ending of a movie, when the protagonist has been shot and is sitting on a hill with the sunset in the background taking his last few breaths with inspirational music playing in the background that tries to bring a tear to the viewers eye. Humbert's life is over and he knows it that's why I relate it to a dying protagonist because Humbert is really dead in this season, nothing to live for guilt upon guilt upon guilt with the police only minutes away from arresting him and a trial to likely condemn him to jail for most of his life if not all of it.

The dialogue at the end i did not really retain much from unfortunately other than the fact that Humbert Humbert had a hard time publishing it, he did not have a real clear straight forward theme to his book and that a lot of readers didn't read past the sexual parts because they got bored with Humbert Humbert. Sentences like this did not help either because half the words I had no idea what they meant "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses — the baffling mirror,the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions — which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying,can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way."

Overall I did enjoy the ending of the story it had both action (the murder scene) some irony (Que's guests laughing thinking that Humbert was joking around about killing Que) and it even made you think, at the end with the scene on the hill that was a sorta look back on everything that happened in the novel and life in general moment that makes you think about not only your own life but society in general from a different perspective.

Lolita pg 236-280

In this section both Humbert and Lolita get sick and Lolita is supposively taken by Humbert's uncle. I am amazed at how Humbert can drink so much gin and function and not wreck and die in his car and just keep it cool in general. I have "heard" it is pretty tough to function when you are that drunk and stay cool. I don't get how none of the people at the hospital notice his intoxicated state. I feel like Nabokov is eluding to societies problem with getting drunk when things don't go there way. Humbert is separated from Lolita for the first time and all Humbert does is drink and get sick. I feel like Humbert is going kind of crazy with the knowledge that he could get in a lot of trouble with what he is done. He thinks people are tailing him and that Lolita has some boyfriend he doesn't know about. "At the moment I knew my love was as hopeless as ever — and I also knew the two girls were conspirators, plotting in Basque, or Zemfirian,against my hopeless love." I see this as kind of sign of hysteria that he might be getting from all the alcohol and sickness.

Humbert brings Lolita books and roses in the hospital and Lolita pays no attention to them. I feel like Nabokov is trying to say society takes the sophisticated things in the world for granted they are focused on meaningless newspapers that have gossip trivial things in. "“what gruesome funeral flowers,”she said.“Thanks all the same.But do you mind very much cutting out the French? It annoys everybody.” I just see Nabokov alluding to the American society smearing culture in the face with this line that we want nothing to do with it.

Lolita pg 109-140

In the section assigned of Lolita it talks mainly about Humbert and Lolita's life after Lolita's mother has died. It talks about Humbert traveling with Lolita and how he tries to make sure Lolita will not reveal his dark pedophile secret. Humbert also looks into other housing and into schooling for Lolita. He chooses a school that he can see the playground from his study but unfortunately for him construction is put up and he no longer and watch.

Humbert never ceases to creep me out. Just when you kind of get the feel of normality he will throw in some sick term like "For there is no other bliss on earth comparable to that of fondling a nymphet," or when he talks about getting out binoculars and watching the playground. Those two quotes stir up such disgusting realizations in my mind. To think of all the pedophiles that have binoculars and are constantly being voyeurs I really hope no one watched me when I was little that would be so creepy i do not even want to think about it. What would be even worse is for a parent to find out that their children are being watched or violated. I could see a lot of homicides as a result of parents finding out about pedophiles.

Even though Nabokov can be very sketchy with his creepy pedophile subject he is a very amazing writer I really like this quote for example, "as he barbered some late garden blooms or watered his car, or, at a later date, defrosted his driveway (I don’t mind if these verbs are all wrong)," I would never have thought of that myself to write things like he was cutting some flowers to put in his house as "as he barbered some late garden blooms," that sounds a million times better than my phrase. I guess that's why I am a college freshman and Nabokov is a famous writer.

Near the end of the section Humbert is starting to get a little paranoid that someone will find out his secret. He talks about all his neighbors and which ones he is worried about most and which do what in relation to Lolita but this quote sums up his fear best I feel, "I often felt we lived in a lighted house of glass, and any moment some thin-lipped parchment face would peer through a carelessly unshaded window to obtain a free glimpse of things that the most jaded voyeur would have paid a small fortune to watch." I wonder if Humbert will not try and move Himself and Lolita to a more isolated place and whether that will spark Lolita to come forward about Humbert and how this whole story will come to an end.

America/Baggage Room

In Ginsberg's work called America I see him being fed up with the United States. He is tired of their war monguring he can't take it how we blow stuff up. "America when will we end our human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb." "America when will you send your eggs to India?" When Ginsberg talks about eggs I think he is referring to bombs. Ginsberg is also tired of all the things he feels that are imposed on him by America so he rebels. "I'd better consider my national resources. My national resources consists of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twenty five thousand mental institutions. In this work I feel like Ginsberg is venting about all the things he does not like about America and how it is bias against him.

In Ginsberg's Baggage Room he is in a Greyhound terminal and starts thinking philosophically he sees people as their baggage and not as the actual humans themselves and the Spade as the angel or other worldly force guiding everyone. "Yet Spade reminded me of Angel," "pushing with his belly a huge tin horse piled high with black baggage," "holding high on his arm an iron shepherds crook." The iron Shepherd's crook gives me the impression of someone leading others and the bags I see as people. The narrator then talks about all the different packages and where they are going, I see this symbolizing as him thinking about all the different places and lives the people live in this world. I do the same thing when I am at an airport I start thinking about all the different intricate lives that each person must have as they walk by. I make up short little biographies of people as they pass by and why they might look and act the way they do. At the end I see Ginsberg trying to use symbolism as to the Greyhound bus being kind of like purgatory, the place in between life and death.

Howl

In the first section I feel like Ginsberg is talking about a select group in society who were intelligent and sophisticated but are doing other things to compromise there gifts. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed," pg 1 line 1 "dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn," pg 1 line 3 He talks about all the different ways they are losing themselves and ruining themselves with different drugs and other things of that nature. I feel like society as a whole has improved itself away from drugs. There are way more ad campaigns to stop the use of drugs, rehab is always improving and doctors know how to treat addicts. People are told early on about the dangers of drugs and that they will not survive in society as a successful individual by doing drugs so more people are aware of them and are less likely to do them.

In the second section I think Ginsberg is talking about the city when he says Moloch. "they broke their backs lifting Moloch to heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons, lifting the city to heaven." I was not sure if I was correct so I looked the word up. According to wikipedia Moloch means "In modern English usage, "Moloch" can refer derivatively to any person or thing which demands or requires costly sacrifices." So it would fit that Ginsberg meant the city because during the whole section two he talks about how bad it is and slams it.

In the third section Ginsberg seems to be talking with Carl Solomon about his staying in a crazy house. "I'm with you in Rockland where you are madder than I am." He talks about the things they might be doing to him and how awful it must be. I do not know why Ginsberg would right about this it seems kind of pointless. Maybe it is to make people aware of some cruelty going on in insane asylums.

Footnote to Howl seems to make the point that in his world back in the fifties everything is made out to be holy by different people, I feel like he is making fun of the church and people's own personal philosophies making out non holy things to be very holy. A supermarket in California seems like a dream to me Ginsberg talks about seeing Walt Whitman in a supermarket and just walking with him and doing outlandish things that would not be acceptable in a supermarket. Ginsberg's writing seems to be beyond me maybe because I am not living in the 1950's and don't know about current issues or I am not a strong reader I just do not get why he put such writing in this order.

Scene Seven From The Glass Menagerie and The Catastrophe of Success

One of the major themes I got from The Glass Menagerie is failed dreams. The mother Amanda is living in a failed dream. She constantly is talking about how she had many gentleman callers back when she was young yet the dream of having a wealthy loving husband is gone. She is single living with her two children in St. Louis and her husband has left them on their own. Many times the best of intentions in real life are failed. There are so many marriages that have ended in divorce that it is common place. According to http://www.divorcestatistics.org/ there is a 45-50 percent divorce rate on first marriages and even higher for second or third marriages.
Laura is another example of failed dreams. She seems to live in her own little world. She has such low self esteem she cannot even go to a typing class. But when the opportunity for a husband and future arises she is crushed. Jim, the man of her dreams, dances with her and even gives her a slight kiss and Laura thinks she is going to finally have a relationship, but her dream is crushed when Jim tells her he is engaged. Everyone experiences crushed dreams especially when we are young. Constantly as youth we are told we can be anything we want to be by adults. My cousin and I were certain we were going to become professional baseball players together for the Cleveland Indians and move our whole family to Hawaii. Eventually this reality and our dream was broken and we realized that was not realistic at all. Most of the time dreams are perceptions of reality that allow us to think certain things are possible, that’s why as a child you have many outlandish dreams and perceptions of reality that change. You believe in Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy but someday you realize they are not real and for some kids that is a very sad day, their perception of reality has been truly altered. Just like Laura’s glass figurines symbolize the fragile alternate reality that Laura seems to live in and when Jim breaks her unicorn by accident it seems that Laura’s reality has been disturbed and she is jolted back into real life when Jim says she cannot have a relationship with her. She even says “ now it’s like all the other horses,” pg 86 line 8 this symbolizes to me Laura’s jolt back to reality because her reality is just like everyone else’s and her dream of marrying Jim is crushed.
I looked up the word menagerie since I had no idea what it meant and it was important since it was on the title and according to http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/menagerie menagerie means “a place where animals are kept and trained especially for exhibition.” I see the glass menagerie applying to the story because I see all the characters as different animals or “personalities” living together very fragilely and when things were shaken up with the Jim situation and all the different personalities clashed together the fragile glass holding them together shattered and Tom leaves and they are no longer live together.
The Catastrophe of Success I read as a one sided the grass is greener on the other side. Everyone wants to be successful but Tennesse Williams says success is awful. He says he became very depressed upon reaching success on page 100. In order to enjoy life there must be challenges contrary to popular belief. If you just sit around in a suite all day there is no fun in it. I agree with this because long breaks from school get very boring and sleeping in and going out at night just becomes ho hum. Although if I am at school doing lots of work just to stay slightly ahead of the curb working my butt off the weekends are amazing I like going out ten times as much and sleeping in seems all the more glorious. At the end of the writing Williams talks about how sick he is of bell hops maids and other lowly jobs just because he does not like that they are lower than him. I do not agree with him, what makes our nation so great is the Darwinism that takes place in it. The best will survive, you have to be successful, you have to work your way up and that’s motivation in itself for advancement. If everyone is the same what is going to motivate me to even get out of bed, what is the point of working when I will always be the same status as everyone else and I never work my way up in the world?

In Dreams Begin Responsibility

I feel like the movie in the story is actually not about the unnamed person's parents. I feel like he is watching a movie and applying all these different things that would apply to his parents. I think this because why would there be an actual movie made about his father? He was no actor he was a business man. The time period for the movie is 1909 there were no reality shows back in that day. I feel like the narrator is just reflecting back on his parent's lives because they have passed away and is applying it to an unnamed movie making everything fit to his own situation.

I also see it as failed dreams. The people in the movie are young just getting ready to be married they feel like they have their whole life ahead of them and it will all go perfect, they are disillusioned. The narrator knows the truth, that life isn't some cute little date on the boardwalk, he knows that everything isn't perfect cookie cutter suburban family life. He yells out right before the man in the movie asks the lady to marry him because he feels from his own history that marriages don't always work out. I feel like he was from a broken home and one or both of his parents has passed away and he is now reflecting upon it by applying it to the movie, that is why he is always crying.

The other part where i see deeper meanings is when the couple in the movie are staring at the ocean. The ocean is very beautiful but also harsh and the couple is also ignoring the sun's harsh rays and enjoying the view. I feel like this is how many people live their lives, they pretend to be enjoying their lives (the view of the ocean) they pretend that everything is alright when in reality the ocean is very rough and turbulent (their lives are rough and homes are broken and their is much arguing) the sun is beating down on them (just like their lives asking for them to do more make more the pressure to make money and payments on tax and other things.)

Alice Walker - Jamaica Kincaid

The Flowers by Alice Walker starts out very innocent and cheerful. A little girl walking around in the early morning skipping and humming a tune. She is carefree, she then starts to explore the woods looking to pick flowers. She finds lots of flowers but when she turns to go back home the mood turns dark and almost sinister. It is a glaring contrast to the start of the work. In the fifth paragraph the contrast is first evident "It seemed gloomy in the little cove in which she found herself. The air was damp, the silence close and deep." She then accidentally steps on a dead mans severed head. She is surprised when she first realizes its a corpse but then she is distracted by a pink flower that is growing right where she stepped. She picks it to add to her collection of flowers but then notices that it was growing on part of the man's nose. She then lays all her flowers down over the dead man.

In this short work I see a persons life play out. At first we are carefree children walking along familiar ground at home singing tunes. Next we become teens and young adults and start venturing out into the world, past the spring but we need to eventually grow up and go out into the world on our own. In paragraph four it says how she is making her own path, "Often, in late autumn, her mother took her to gather nuts among the fallen leaves. Today she made her own path, bouncing this way and that way, vaguely keeping an eye out for snakes." We do the same when we venture out into the world on our own forging our own life paths. She goes to find flowers and other pretty things just like an adult makes money for a living. When she is returning home its sort of like the ending of someones life she is unfamiliar with it just like people are frightened and unfamiliar with death. She steps on the dead man and is surprised by it just like how some people are surprised by death. But after she picks the pink flower she realizes it wasn't right to disturb the man's resting place so she lays down all of her flowers. Just like the end of a person's life when they are accepting death. At the end of the story it says summer was over. A lot of times spring and summer are seen as a time of new life and fall and winter are associated with death with the shortening of the days and the falling of dead leaves and barren trees. That's where I see a connection with the end of the person's life.

Girl by Jamaica Kincaid is a short work about one girl or woman telling another girl or woman how to live the life of a proper lady. The whole time the older one is telling the younger one how to do different things that are important in a woman's life. Every once in a while the one being told all of this will ask some question about something the other has said. I see it as a mother teaching her daughter the proper way to live when she is not around. She seems to be telling her how to do the most important things in life correctly.

In the story it repeatedly references "benna" so I looked that word up and according to Wikipedia it means folk music which makes sense because the mother continually tells her daughter to not sing benna. For example on the eighth line "don't sing benna in Sunday school." I looked up "doukona" to get a better idea of the setting of the work and found it to mean a spicy Caribean dish from the site http://www.proz.com/kudoz/English/cooking_culinary/151233-doukona.html. I also looked up the word "dasheen" and found it to be a plant in the Caribean according to The Free Dictionary by Farlex.

Ezra Pound - Raymond Carver

Ezra Pounds poem In a Station of the Metro is very short. Which makes it hard to write a lot about it. It talks about a metro station and the many different faces that appear in it. He compares it to a branch with many different petals on it. I am sure there is some other deeper meaning that is a subtle comparison that is more controversial than this seeing how this is a famous poem and well known and something famous or well known would not be that shallow.

Carver's poem My Father in His Twenty Second Year is about a boy examining a photo of his father when he was twenty two. At first glance it looks like he is some showboating guy trying to show his manlyness with a beer in one hand and a fish in the other. His son knows the truth that he is not the mans kinda man. He is kind hearted by his limp grip on the fish and beer and the soft look in his eyes. The son knows this because he is the same as his father and can't hold his liquor either and admits to not even knowing a place to catch fish.

Some words i needed to look up to get the exact definition so i could have a better understanding of the poem are posterity, and bough I knew what bough meant but never actually had seen it spelled out. As for posterity i was not quite sure what it exactly meant but after reading the definition it made a lot of sense. Posterity accoring to Merriam Webster's dictionary means "the offspring of one progenitor to the furthest generation" and the word bough according to the same source means "a main branch." I probably will not use these in my own dictionary because there are never instances that i would have a chance to use them in.

Letter of Introduction

I have a hard time thinking back to what all I have read through high school even though I know it has been quite a bit. Some works that stick out in my mind are Animal Farm by George Orwell Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth by Shakespeare and a lot of random short stories that I can't think of right now.

The books that I have enjoyed reading even though I am not a huge book worm are the Harry Potter Series and Dan Brown novels. I have read all seven harry potter books and I have read the Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, Deception Point, and most recently the lost symbol by Dan Brown.

Things I have written consist mostly of school assignments the only thing close to personal writing that I have done is about 4 years ago a site called xanga.com which was basically a blog and one of the first kinds of social networks and status updates on facebook are always a short little personal writing that I sometimes do. School assigned writings have been about literature but most of them have been research. I have done a thesis on Hydrogen fueled cars for biology and also racism for my history class using the movies American History X and Crash along with the biography of Malcolm X which I found very interesting. Last semester in English 103 I wrote two essays about Child Soldiers in Africa. The final essay I wrote in that class was about how tragedy brings people together.

As for a poem about Clemson I will write a Haiku because it is short and to the point even though Clemson means so much more to me than a simple Haiku.

Clemson

Making my future
Clemson University
Hope it is very bright

Football in the fall
Spring flies by without a stall
Summer will not crawl