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