A Problem of Choice

The choice project was really interesting. I thought it let me get into the heads of the characters better. Sure in my opinion Holden’s head is crazy, and Jane wouldn’t change a story if she had the original on hand to read, and Titus (from feed) just has a shortened expression of pop culture and movies to draw from. Since I had an earlier post on how fairy tales change I tried to explore this in my choice project. I wrote them as though years really had passed between telling and different cultures and different people had changed them. It was more difficult than I’d imagined getting into the heads of these characters would be.  Also after hearing everyone’s ideas I really liked all of the creativity in the class and how many different things were done with mostly the same books.

Reacting To Persepolis

I really enjoyed reading Persepolis for my college literature class. I learned things I never knew about Iran and their culture. I liked hearing this girl’s story of struggling between her past/present/future and culture/beliefs/government. I thought it was fascinating to watch her grow up in pictures from a little girl in God’s arms to a woman leaving her family.

Speaking of the artwork:

I liked that we had to read this because it was a graphic novel from the beginning. However, I wasn’t sure I liked the style of art. After reading it I’m still not sure but it has grown on me significantly. I think her simple style actually accents her story where more realistic illustrations would have overpowered the story. These, however do not, tugging the story along at just the right pace in my opinion. And some of the slides are just so detailed and lovely and meaningful in their own way. For example pg 77 the illustration of their trip to Europe has a woman dancing in the wind. Why is she there? What does she mean? Why put the leaning tower of Pisa next to a run-down apartment? None of this would have been questioned from the text on the page “Things got worse from one day to the next. In September 1980, my parents abruptly planned a vacation. I think they realized that soon such things would no longer be possible. As it happened, they were right. And so we went to Italy and Spain for three weeks… …it was wonderful.”

Wrongs and Rights of Passage

In college literature today we read an essay called Wrongs of Passage and while I agreed with many of the author’s points I have a problem with some of the others. She has the structure correct separation, transition, and incorporation—that’s how a right of passage should be conducted and if it doesn’t it isn’t really a right of passage. She focused on a few examples: sweet sixteen, turning eighteen, turning twenty-one, marriage, the Navajo Changing Woman ceremony, and the one of boys in New Guinea. The ones of America she disagreed with because they have been corrupted into meaning little and being superficial. I agree with her about them being superficial but I don’t agree that they are even rights of passage (except for marriage but I’ll mention that later). None of those first three in the list go through any of the steps, you aren’t separated from anything and nothing changes however there are many that actually are. I believe Marriage is one of these, you are separated from single life then transition into married life then settle into and incorporate marriage, yes you can get married in Vegas or get married without family or friends there but I think rights of passage are about the journey and the personal meaning rather than being there for the community. Another actual right of passage of the American people is graduation/going to college/moving out of parents’ house, I count them as the same thing because it happens at a different point for most people but it is an important part in growing up. You are separated from most of your family and friends and high school, transition by moving away and/or going to college, and incorporate into your daily life.

As I already stated I think going to college is a right of passage and it is one that I will be undertaking quite soon and it scares me as well as makes me excited for the future as a right of passage should do.

Becoming The Feed

I thought Feed was a fascinating book, however it wasn’t the plot that I found compelling as much as the setting. Feed is set in a futuristic society, a cautionary tale if you will about where our own society might be heading. In the world of Feed most of the population has a computer chip implanted in their head from a young age, it grows to take over the basic functions of the human brain. You can play games, watch shows, talk to people, it’s like TV the internet and cell phones all rolled into one and you can see it in your head, like you’re there. The environment sucks, so horribly that people live in domes to keep them safe from the radiation that still keeps them from having children naturally. Corporations brainwash people through the feed. People are less intelligent because they don’t have to know things, the feed knows them. People use more primitive language because chat speak has evolved and just become the language. I loved this book because it is a window into the apocalypse that might become our future, not because robots take over or zombies attack but because technology will allow a select few to rule us all while making us totally ok with it. The technology to do these things is coming and I ask you if an apocalypse like the feed truly occurs what would you do? For me it would mean becoming a hermit, or something of the like, hiding from society because I couldn’t be a part of one where everyone follows blindly and silently. Let voice speak out let the human mind rise to its potential of greatness; don’t take over its functions with a machine.  It would be a shame, a shame that I see as possible in the near future.

Jane Eyre

1. If you were in Jane's (very plain) shoes, would you decide to stay with Rochester or would you leave? Why?

If I were in Jane’s shoes I would have stayed with him. Granted I live in a different time and have very different morals than Jane. I unlike Jane don’t care about what society thinks nor am I as religious as she was.

2. What were your final reactions to the novel? What did you like or not like about it? What worked and didn't work?

I really liked Jane Eyre, it may not be the easiest to read but the prose was beautiful which I really enjoyed. I didn’t like the large areas where the plot didn’t seem to move forward much. But overall I thought it was a great book and a good love story.

3. Should this book be taught in College Literature? Justify your response, and try to look beyond your personal thoughts on the book to the larger goals of the class.

I think Jane Eyre is a good book to teach; however, I think that whenever you teach it there will be a large number of students who don’t read it, a larger percentage than usual. If people do read it though I think it has merit both as a piece of literature and an entry into what we might have to read in college.

Bluebeard and Fitcher’s Bird

So the other day in College Literature our teacher brought up an allusion that most of the class, including myself, did not catch in Jane Eyre. This allusion was to the story of Bluebeard (pp. 112), a French folk tale written by Charles Perrault, since none of us knew it we looked it up.

Here is a short summary – Bluebeard was an ugly aristocrat who had been married several times, each time his wife disappeared. He went to one of his neighbors looking for another girl to marry him and persuades the youngest daughter to marry him. After they are married she goes to live with him but he says he must leave awhile and he gives her the keys to all the rooms in the castle but stresses that she must not go through one door. Eventually her curiosity gets the better of her and she opens the door and finds the murdered former wives hanging from the walls. Their blood will not wash off the key so she runs to her sister. Bluebeard seeing the key and realizing what she had seen from the key is furious but her brothers arrive and in the end Bluebeard dies and the last wife inherits his fortune and goes to live a good life. Read it in full HERE or a fuller summary HERE.

This reminded me of one of the Grimm Brother’s Fairy Tales that I had read so I looked it up. The story is called “Fitcher’s Bird” and it follows very similar lines. Trade Bluebeard for a wizard who took the form of a begging poor man, the youngest daughter for the oldest, three daughters for two, set it instead just before the wedding (rather than after), and add and egg and you pretty much have the same story.  Read it in full HERE or a summary HERE. (Side note both are really short stories, only a couple of pages long so I’d recommend reading the full stories they are interesting.)

The story of Bluebeard; however, is dated much earlier than “Fitcher’s Bird” so I wonder if what if the differences we see are the warping of time (about 115 years) and French to German culture or If the two stories never came in contact with each other at all. The first is probably more likely but I think it would be all the more fascinating if the two cultures came up with the same story separately.

Where is “out here”

As a final conclusion to The Catcher in the Rye as its own topic on this blog I want to go straight back to the beginning of the book, page 1 in fact, to this quote: “I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.” Now that the class has read the book and found out what Holden’s “madman stuff that happened” is (which in my opinion wasn’t that crazy) I’m wondering were exactly is “out here.” We know that geographically “out here” is in California, that’s not what I’m wondering. What is he doing taking it easy in California? I have a theory and I’d like to hear yours if you have any, but anyway here it is…I think Holden goes to a sanatorium in California after the story ends. For those of you that don’t know a sanatorium is an insane asylum, a Looney bin (and lots of other nasty names but I think you get the picture). There are a couple reasons I think this. First of all I think the things Holden says and does suggest it. Holden is always calling himself a “madman” and especially near the end of the book he seems to be losing is more and more to the point that he is literally talking to his dead brother scared out of his mind (literally) of disappearing. That’s at least a little crazy. Not to mention he considers suicide and often declares himself depressed, people have ended up in sanatoriums for short periods for that alone. Now I’m assuming his parents find out about some of this and they obviously have the money and the stuck up desire to get him the best help possible, so he goes to a psychiatrist at least one. This line in particular all the way at the end on page 213 makes me think that they went farther than sending him to a psychiatrist and sent him to a sanatorium, “especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here.” First of all it says one guy like there are more than one and then “they have here” that means where ever he went they have psychiatrists (or as he calls them psychoanalysts) and probably more than one. The most probable place I can think of with more than one psychoanalyst is a sanatorium. It’s just what I got from the text and it was my theory from the beginning so unless someone comes up with something better I’m sticking to it. Tell me what you think, could I be right? Where is “out here”? Is Holden crazy?

Catching an Opinion on The Catcher in the Rye

We were asked what we thought of The Catcher in the Rye and I honestly had a hard time forming an opinion. I finished it and I just didn’t know what to think.

I couldn’t decide if I liked the writing style or not, I mean it was easy to read but written in such a scattered non-linear way. As much as I didn’t like the tangents that he went off on I totally understood why it was done that way so I can’t bring myself to be too mad about it. Holden isn’t a character who holds in what his mind wanders to unlike most people and if Holden wrote a book he wouldn’t edit out his random thoughts (it’s not his style) he would just write whatever came up. Holden writes like my mind thinks sometimes—flipping from one subject to another like sorting a set of cards into numerical order by suit as fast as you possibly can not looking at one card too long unless you make yourself. The problem is I see Holden as someone who thinks like this all the time not just sometimes like me.

Next is the issue of Holden himself. He is a slacker and he smokes and he drinks and he is depressed and simply makes bad choices without thinking things through. The thing is I kind of LIKE Holden he reminds me of an old friend of mine, makes stupid choices but he’s a good person under all of the bullcrap. Actually, now that I think about it he’s almost exactly like that old friend of mine (no wonder I like and hate Holden so much). While that may cloud my judgment of Holden a bit he frustrates me at the same time, he does and says thing that just make you shake your head and think “you’ve got to be kidding me, he didn’t just say that” and he never DOES anything he says he wants to or should do it’s aggravating.  I feel like such a hypocrite saying that though because I never really DO anything either, probably another reason I like him. So again, mixed feelings.

Before I finish I’m just going to mention that I don’t know why THIS story, of all the things Salinger could have written about Holden’s fake life why this uneventful whine fest? I have a theory about that but I’ll leave that for another post. But it doesn’t change the fact that it really isn’t the most exciting story in the world, kind of boring actually. Sure he gets kicked out of school, beat up by a pimp, and gets drunk. What’s so special about that? Not to mention the ending left us hanging, I prefer a little more wrapping up in my stories just saying “that’s all I’m going to tell about” is SO not sufficient in my book. Yes, if they do leave it open you can draw your own conclusions and I have, but I prefer to not be forced to guess so completely.

Like Holden at the end of The Catcher in the Rye “that’s all I’m going to tell about” and I still haven’t decided how much I like the book but I think I can at least say that—I liked The Catcher in the Rye, not my favorite, not the worst, either way I guess I enjoyed it somewhat.

Mothers According To Me And Holden

“I gave her a good look. She didn’t look like any dope to me. She looked like she might have a pretty damn good idea what a bastard she was the mother of. But you can’t always tell—with somebody’s mother, I mean. Mothers are all slightly insane. The thing is, though I liked old Morrow’s mother. She was all right.” (Excerpt from pp. 55, The Catcher in the Rye)

This is from the scene in The Catcher in the Rye where Holden is on the train to New York and is talking to the mother of one of his classmates (or ex-classmates since he will officially be expelled in a few days). He is throwing a load of crap at her about her son being wonderful and popular even though he thinks the exact opposite. The thing is as far as Holden can tell she believes all of his lies. I think that this paragraph in particular hits on a relatively common and very interesting part of parenthood—that many parents are willing to believe the best of there children to the point that some will ONLY believe the good stuff and ignore all of the bad. I’ve met parents, mothers especially, that even blame every bad thing their child does on the kid’s friends even when I know that their child was doing the “bad things” willingly or even was the instigator, pressuring his or her friend into it.  I think Salinger was taking a little “time-out” (so to speak) and telling the parents that might read this that they need to open their eyes to what their children really are, and are doing.

Note: Given that this often happens I think I have to acknowledge that many parents are all too willing to believe that their children are delinquents whether they are or not.

To Depict A Child

We’ve read five different short stories now in college literature that all depict childhood. All of these take approach it in different ways and depict it with different meanings; although, some are more different than others. In The Sutton Pie Safe it depicts a child looking into the world of adults and not fully understanding what is happening in front of him. Every Little Hurricane shows how a child can take some big, rather nasty thing that is happening and put it into terms of what he can understand. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? depicts a teenager, Connie, instead of a child who sees herself as invincible until she meets an untimely demise at the hands of Arnold Friend. Bottle Caps was an extremely short story that reminds us all of a child’s tendency to collect things and younger sibling’s tendency to mess with an older sibling’s stuff. For Esme – with Love and Squalor was a rather strange short story about childhood, which unlike the others was told from the perspective of an adult; in the little girl Esme we find a child’s ability to adapt to adverse situations (In her case her parents dying) and grow up quickly if it is necessary. I think all of these things can be part of childhood if your circumstances are right; however, for some people they may not be a part of childhood at all.

As for something else that depicts childhood in an interesting manner I think the movie “The Goonies” might be a good example of this. This movie seems to say good things about childhood—things like children are brave, adventurous, and want to help others (in this case their friends and family). The Goonies is a story of childhood adventure, a hunt for pirate treasure. While it is depicted in the movie as being real similar things can often occur due to many children’s fantastic ability to make anything they do interesting or an adventure. I mean, seriously, who hasn’t been pretend treasure hunting? I think this story is similar to Bottle Caps because of the treasure hunting aspect although in Bottle Caps the treasure was bottle caps. And perhaps it is also similar to Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?  because of the group encountering evil bad-guys similar to Arnold Friend; however, their bad guys weren’t creepy rapists and the children in The Goonies beat their bad guy unlike Connie.

Memoirs of Childhood

When I was about eight years old my dad, who was in the navy at the time, got transferred out of South Carolina to a base in Washington (the state not D.C.). While I really liked Washington and am thinking about returning there for college at the time it was devastating. I’m sure I begged and pleaded not to go, I don’t think I realized that my dad and by extension the rest of us had no choice in the matter, he went where he was told to go by the United States Government. I remember crying looking back with my face pressed to the rear window of the car staring at my home. It was a home consisting of something greater than that gray-blue house with a big yard and a great old oak tree in the back. No, this was a home that held the whole cul-de-sac, and my best friend Rose standing in her driveway next to mine waving us off with her mother and little sister, and the neighbor boys across the street, and holiday parties that the whole street was invited too, like fireworks that went off in a spectacular display at the fourth of July or Easter egg hunts that had so many eggs we could invite every child from a mile around and couldn’t possibly find them all. As far as I was concerned I was leaving behind my life and my home and there would never be another to take its place. It was the first home I really remember well even though I lived other places. I’ve found another home and different things have filled those gaps but it was never like I remember it being there again. It forced me to grow up, move on, find new friends, and learn to adapt. Miss it though…

An Introduction

So about me…I have many interests including reading, videogames, solitaire, movies, television (I love my DVR), Doctor Who, science, magic, and other things that I will probably think of later. After high school I’ll be going to college and studying as either a biomedical or a pre-pharm major (most likely anyway). Hopefully this will take me out of Wisconsin, but as of now it is up in the air. My favorite book is impossible to name because there isn’t one since there are so many books I love so because of this I’ll say Driftwood, our school’s literary anthology, is my favorite book because it is always pretty great. I also don’t really have a favorite movie because I’ve seen A LOT of movies. So I’ll go with my oldest favorite movie which I loved since I was less than two years old…The Lion King. My favorite musician is much easier, her name is Kate Voegele and I’m pretty sure I own every one of her songs. What you see above is me condensed and abbreviated until it would take a lot of reading into each sentence to know much about me at all, but that’s how these things often seem to go.