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.