My thoughts on what I've learned here.

I have to admit that I was already a huge fan of literature before this class. I read often whether or not I'm being instructed to for a class, but this class definitely broadened my horizons. I never really read poetry for entertainment previously, but I'm considering giving it more of a chance now. I also really enjoyed the novel we read, and I never would have thought about reading it if I hadn't been assigned it because I'd always had my concerns about the actual value of reading a translated work. In general I feel that I am a more well-rounded reader thanks to this class, and I feel that makes me a much stronger reader overall.

My thoughts on the pacing of the class.

I've already spoken about this elsewhere, but if I did have one negative thing to say about this class it would be that the pacing felt a bit too quick. There were large amounts to read every week--and that's fine, normally, but the amount of writing we had to do on top of that felt a bit much. I had trouble sometimes thinking of things to say here or in the forums--while it's nice to have the open discussion of the forums or the lit circle chats, it's a challenge to say something that no one else has said yet. I can't help but cringe when I browse down the list of posts only to see the same exact idea or point that I was going to post--it makes me feel like I'm not actually contributing much if I express the same concept, as if I'm just popping in to say "Same here."

Learning to Love America

In the lit circle group we did this week I learned something interesting about the poet who wrote "Learning to Love America". She ended up migrating to America and had a child here, which really helped add depth to the story told in the poem. The added perspective made the poem feel more alive and real, like I was peering through a window into her life. It's interesting how rarely we consider the lives of the authors who write the stories and poetry we love.

Harlem (Dream Deferred)

I thought this poem was especially strong just because of how much it said with so few words. There's only 52 words in the entire poem. That's shorter than the majority of my posts here, yet I believe it's far more profound than anything I've written here as well. Hughes wants the reader to think of dreams as real, physical, tangible things: a difficult task at times, but this way they're harder to forget about and harder to just push aside. He knew the value of having dreams.

My thoughts on "I, Too".

I felt that this was a fairly powerful poem as well. While I can't really sympathize with Hughes's position, it was very easy to see the perspective that he was coming from. It's a tale of "revenge" that manages to not be bitter or acerbic at all: it's hopeful, even! The third and fourth stanzas really tie it all together by paralleling the second: the speaker is going to make a peaceful act of defiance by sitting at the table in the dining room. He will be "beautiful" in his act of retaliation, independent like the concept of America itself. It's dramatic and stirring.

In Memoriam John Coltrane

I'm just going to start out by saying I loved this poem. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for jazz and blues music, and a poem addressed to the memory of John Coltrane seemed like it would be right up my alley. Thankfully, it was. I liked how even though the poem was "about" Coltrane it didn't burden itself with overblown praise or flowery description of the man that we already know: instead, the poet paints us a picture of a coal train moving smoothly and slowly, dark against the night, the rattling of the cars beating a rhythm against the tracks. It's still relevant to Coltrane--not only is it a pun involving his name, but it resembles his music in a way: powerful and steady and smooth. It's a clever play on the language and it works very well in this case.

Grass: Deeply Rooted Commentary

I'd also read the poem "Grass" by Carl Sandburg for this week. It's possible that I'm reading a bit far into it, but I thought it was almost nihilistic in its treatment towards the passage of time in marking human events. The wars keep going on, whether they're held in America or Europe, but the grass remains the most constant of the constants: it's always there to cover up our mistakes. The second-to-last and last stanzas really sealed that thought for me: "Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work."

No one will remember in time--and I can't even honestly say that I knew the relevance of most of these locations right off hand, either. It speaks something interesting about the impermanence of even our own inhumanities against each other.

My thoughts on Dulce et Decorum Est.

This poem really did strike me as something unique. I've always been a fan of war fiction, and while war is often held in a bad light in literature (for good reason), I felt that the poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" really took the animosity towards the pointless waste of life in most of our petty international squabbles and ran with it. No delusions of glory or happiness are found here; there's no real "moral" (as Tim O'Brien would say). War is awful. That's it. It's a burden on the working class enlisted to fight on behalf of those more fortunate, and it is neither "fitting" nor "sweet" to suffocate to death on a cloud of poison gas in the bottom of a trench covered in a raggedy uniform.

Greasy Lake

I was part of the group on Greasy Lake. Reading this story, it started out by setting the stage for the story to come. Providing the details around the time period also provided a good point for me to reflect on as I thought about how different the times are today. As discussed in our Lit. Circle, all the different things that were shared to start the story gave each of us some different perspectives but we clearly new that the different points all would come to mean something as the story progressed.

I noted in my write-up about the story how the narrator was a "bad character" but that did not mean he was actually a bad person. This was very important to me as it showed how it was almost as if he was attempting to be something he was not and that showed through with the information he shared about his life; like not being in a fight since the sixth grade.

Overall, I liked the story and the opportunity it gave me to really use my imagination as I went through the story. The symbolism that was used was good and offered to me that these kids had some sort of an idea that they must use certain things to fit in. They seemed as though they were headed in a direction no matter what and as one boy did something, another would do something more.

Cathedral: An Unusual Approach Towards A Common Tale

It's interesting how a new perspective can change your opinion of things, isn't it? That seems to be the main theme of Cathedral, the short story by Raymond Carver. Yeah, it's a story with certain tropes that Hollywood has overdone to death (the husband who begrudgingly spends time with someone he doesn't like for the sake of his wife; the strange man with a disability and/or troubled past who really isn't all that bad), but the new perspective on it helps make the story seem all the more vibrant. Since it was told in the first person, it's easy to get inside the narrator's head and find out what he's thinking as he grows from feeling awkward about his wife's friend from feeling totally connected. I really did enjoy this story.

Living in the Shadow of the Gulag

Gulag. That one word is enough to bring terrible, horrific images to mind for those aware of its meaning. It's interesting that even today the word is synonymous with "the most awful kind of prison imaginable", and even modern-day examples such as our own Guantanamo Bay get compared to the conditions of the harsh Gulag prisons. It's easy to slip into the thinking that we're far beyond this now, that we've become too "civilized" to enact such atrocities, but it does still happen. Solzhenitsyn's novel really had me asking myself one big question in particular: have we really come all that far? Is it truly okay to impose unthinkable prison conditions on other humans simply because they believe something other than what we do?

Of course not. We're civilized now.

Active Reading - Chapter 29

We'd read a passage in our Backpack Literature textbook on active reading, and while it was admittedly dry (it is a textbook, after all), I feel like it was somewhat informative. I've already been doing a lot of these procedures and I often feel like digging too far into something can tend to strip the soul and meaning out of the art. I'm not saying we shouldn't analyze what we read at all, but I also don't necessarily believe that every thought or character in a story needs to be a symbol for something.

Brash Interlopers: My Thoughts on Dead Men's Path

When I really sat down and thought about it, I started to realie that the short story Dead Men's Path could be applied to our current socio-political climate. I feel like the villagers represent the general populace, happy to go about their own business and do as they please without harming others. they're just passing through the schoolyard to go about paying respects to their dead. The headmaster is the stand-in for legislators who are out of touch with their constituents: forcing change through labor instead of logic. Mr. Obi simply sets his goals and demands that they must be so without first consulting the villagers (or even his colleagues!) as to whether or not it was a good idea to construct his gardens where he did. Obi's influence inadvertently corrupts the lives of the villagers, and he ends up paying the price for it when the villagers decide they've had enough.

A Little Too Ironic: How The Gift of the Magi Relates To My Life

It's interesting how well literature can apply to our lives sometimes. I'd already read O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi prior to this class, but re-reading it reminded me of just how often that well-intentioned gifts for others can backfire due to the cruelty of random chance. I found the story of the Youngs to be similar to another that I'd had: I had purchased a movie for a friend as a graduation gift in high school, one that he'd been talking about wanting to watch for a while, and as it turns out he didn't have a way to watch it--he was moving out of his parents' house the next week and he wouldn't have a TV to bring with him! It really made me think about how strange the idea of buying a gift for someone can really be: you don't have any way of knowing if the recipient will even need what you're getting them because you can't talk to them about the gift or it will spoil the surprise. It's one of life's biggest Catch-22s.

A&P: Life in a Supermarket

As I read the story A&P by John Updike, I was reminded constantly of how similar Updike's supermarket is to our lives. It seems like a rather broad generalization, but the idea is far too prominent to be unintentional. The protagonist, Sammy, represents the younger generation: willing to bend the rules in their own best interests. The "witch" represents the kind of person most of us know: the one who wants the rules enforced when they pertain to themselves. The supermarket's shoppers, the "pigs" and "houseslaves", represent the kind of citizen who is complacent and drawn into their own lives--they wouldn't notice if a "stick of dynamite" went off nearby. The "manager" represents the typical authoritarian figure: he's got plenty of power and he has no problem using it, regardless of the circumstances.

My thoughts on Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Lecture.

I must admit that while I do consider myself to be fairly well-read, I've never paid much attention to the literature of the world. I rationalized it to myself with the thinking that much of the stories' important details would be lost in translation, in addition to the knowledge that I can barely read all the books written by Americans that I want to in a given year. Solzhenitsyn's lecture has caused me to re-evaluate this line of thinking. Upon reading the lecture, I was startled at how clear the ideas behind it were. I didn't feel like there was anything I'd be missing if I hadn't heard it in its original Russian, and perhaps more importantly it made sense. I'm excited to read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the coming weeks.

Here is my blog of Eng 200. Ready to learn some new things about blogs.