Casual Contemplation

Usually I think about what to write on my blog for a while and then find the time to sit down and put it all together. This weekend was really busy, so this is just a string of thoughts about satire. I love irony. Other figurative devices are easy to create - similes, metaphors, alliteration and the like. But creating irony takes a little more thought and effort. It could be something obvious or it could be something that you only see when you take a step back and look at the big picture. I think that's why I appreciate it so much in readings. It's not just in literature, though - it happens in real life too. Just google "irony", hit images, and try not to laugh. Since satire is often developed through irony,  I have to say I'm enjoying the pieces we've been reading so far. Discussing them in class was interesting. Especially the articles we presented from The Onion. However, analyzing satire is difficult. I think that's because often the author (sat...

When Mrs. Valentino said this is a book that doesn't make sense until the very end, she wasn't kidding. Throughout the story it constantly seems as though things cannot possibly get weirder, and yet they do. After reading chapters 12 and 13, however, it seems as though things are finally starting to come together. It's happening really fast, though, so I thought I'd recap here, to make more sense out of it all.  In chapter 12, Milkman has discovered that the song the children are singing is actually the story of his family. Solomon and Ryna were Milkman's great-grandparents. They had " twenty-one children, the last one Jake " - Jake being Milkman's grandfather, the first Macon Dead. My interpretation of the lines "[Solomon] left that baby in a white man's house ... Heddy took him to a red man's house " is that when Solomon " whirled about and touched the sun " (escaped slavery), baby Jake was left with the sl...

In class, we discussed two black stereotypes. The first was that blacks can't swim/don't like water. The other was the "Mammy" figure of a nice old (and often obese) black lady who loves taking care of white children and especially loves to cook for them; Aunt Jemima being one example. For my blog I decided to research on some more stereotypes about black people. We are all familiar with the common black stereotypes still used today in movies and other areas which often depict black people as more violent/criminal, swearing more and lacking self control. They are also portrayed as being less educated and more athletic. Less common are stereotypes about the kinds of food that black people enjoy. Fried chicken comes to mind, but blacks are also associated with being especially fond of watermelons and waffles.  But there are many archetypal stereotypes which were very widespread during the 19th and 20th century. Variations of these figures were often used as charact...

 The idea of names - of people, places and things - is a compelling one. Naming something gives it meaning, significance and individuality, and indicates that the person who assigned the name has power. Knowing this, the characters in Song of Solomon came up with their own name for what was officially Mains Avenue, and why the whites  attempted to make sure "that 'Doctor Street' was never used in any official capacity," depriving the "Southside residents" even of the small liberty of naming their own street (5). Our names are one of the most basic pieces of our identity and who we are. A person's name always has a story behind it, and holds generations of family history. My first name - Iman - means faith in Arabic. It's a very common Muslim name, with many spelling variations (all different ways of transliterating the Arabic word). My mom said she knew what she wanted to name me since the very beginning; she picked it because she loved the mean...

Earlier this week, I was reading an article about a note that recently sold for over $1 million. The note was from Albert Einstein to a Japanese mail deliverer, given in place of a tip. It consisted of two snippets of life advice, one of them being "a calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness." If only Einstein met Gatsby and put that through his head. Gatsby spent his whole life working towards one goal - Daisy. He participated in illegal activities to gain enough wealth to make himself socially acceptable for her. He threw giant parties all the time in the hopes that some day she would show up to one of them. And he purposefully selected his house "so that Daisy would be just across the bay" (78). In the end, all his efforts were fruitless; in a way, his entire life went to waste. He lived here, though.  Despite the fact that he had so much wealth, consistent with the materialistic ideals ...

Everyone is assigned an individuality at birth. Our names, our parents' names, our ancestry, our race - all these factors and more are bundled up in a permanent, unalterable package and handed to us, a package which we carry around our whole lives, whether we like its contents or not. As we walk through the journey that is life, we build another package for ourselves, adding and subtracting whatever we choose. Its contents are always changing; it's a fully customizable  set. Together, these packages make up our identity - both who we are and who we want to be.  Now let us switch gears...Once upon a time there was a man living in the 1920s. The package he was assigned at birth stated that he was James Gatz, son of "shiftless and unsuccessful farm people", and hence he was destined to be a poor man (98). He didn't like this. So he built another package for himself, in which, among other things, he added a medal from "Montenegro" for "Valour Ext...

Why does Art Spiegelman choose to represent Jews as mice? The reason for this is that Jews were literally depicted as mice, representing that they were "vermin", in many Nazi propaganda posters.  " Rats: Destroy them " The chapter title pages stem from this sort of Nazi propaganda and are heavily symbolic. The above image is Chapter 6 of volume I. On the poster, the rat is depicted as having the face of a Jew. What appears to be a crumpled piece of paper lies beside the rat, to further emphasize how unimportant and filthy the Jews were thought to be. On the cover page, two mice (Vladeck and Anja) are standing in a literal mouse trap. This is the chapter in which Vladeck and Anja are deceived by the smugglers, which is what the trap represents. While the images are very different, there are similarities. The beam of light in the background of the cover page resembles the piece of paper on the poster.  Both images' title text looks somewhat similar i...

A few weeks ago we were talking about This is Water and how “there is no experience you’ve had that you are not at the absolute center of”. We talked about how everybody experiences life from their own perspective and puts themself at the center as the protagonist. We want to talk about how an event affected us , even if we were not the ones most greatly affected. This concept reappears in the secondary storyline of Maus , about the relationship between Art and Vladeck. Throughout the story we see that both of them are greatly affected by the Holocaust, but they were both affected in drastically different ways. As much as they try, neither could ever understand how the other was affected.   Vladeck was affected directly in the obvious way - he was a victim. Actually being alive and experiencing the Holocaust firsthand is something that no one could ever sympathize with. Art was affected indirectly, with something like survivor’s guilt. He feels “ some kind of guilt about ...

I chose to analyze page 155 from Chapter 6, entitled Mouse Trap . In this scene, Vladeck is "trapped" by the Polish smugglers who betray him. The letter from Abraham, Mandelbaum's nephew, is almost like the "cheese" used to attract the mice to the trap. In the second panel, the train gives off a feeling of looming dread through the stripes, which reappear several times throughout the story.The stripes go in different directions on different parts of the train. This, along with the windows and doors depicted as black holes. make the train almost look like a prison.  The inside of the train, depicted in the third panel, looks even more like a prison. At first glance it looks like the German officers are looking into prison cells. The left side, where the Polish man is sitting, is solid white, but the right side is covered with stripes. The fourth panel appears as if it is an offshoot of the third one, as if when the officer in the third panel turned to his ...

When we think of freedom, we think of it’s literal definition, which, as defined by Google Dictionary, is “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint”. Freedom to us means being able to do what we wish and not being under the command of someone else. To David Foster Wallace, however, freedom is something else. In This is Water he describes “the really important kind of freedom” as “[involving] attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over”. According to him, “That is real freedom” (5). Wallace describes freedom as living consciously and being aware of what’s going on around us. He describes freedom as having the ability to deter from our innate self-centeredness and having a mindset of empathy.  At first, I disagreed with Wallace. I agreed that living consciously, being aware of your surroundings, sacrificing and having empathy are ...

Government is something that people are always talking about, be it the news anchors on TV or Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show or, in this case, Mr. Henry David Thoreau in his essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience . His long and dense piece can be summarized in two sentences: A) “That government is best which governs not at all” (Thoreau 1) and B) Always disregard authority and, whenever the opportunity presents itself, be a rebel.   In Thoreau’s case, what he did made sense. He refused to pay taxes because he knew that his money was being used to fight a war that he disagreed with, and consequently he went to jail for it until someone payed his taxes for him. He rebelled because he disagreed with something the government was doing. But then he wrote a 16-page essay about how the entire government system sucks and is completely unnecessary. Which I completely disagree with. Having a government is imperative. How else will a country and its citizens remain in order, and be s...

During the week, we talked a lot about memorials, and how they were effective in representing the lost. Throughout this discussion, what fascinated me was how detailed memorials are, and how every aspect of them, from location to materials used, is purposefully chosen. For instance, In Postcards from the Trenches , even the decision to have live soldiers act like statues, instead of having actual statues, was symbolic because “the guards must mimic the stony inaccessibility of the dead but not permanently...they must fluctuate, ceremonially, between life and death” (Booth 34). (I think this was the point where the intricacy and details of memorials really hit me.) To put it in one sentence: memorials are DEEP.  This really made me think - are our lives like that too? Isn't everything like that too? Is every detail of our lives, every occurrence, for a reason, to complete the complicated puzzle of life? Whenever something bad happens in our life, we are frustrated and wonde...