To Blog, or Not To Blog

Well, we've started reading Hamlet. I went into Hamlet with a certain kind of dread held near and dear to my heart. I've read it once before and it wasn't the most pleasant of experiences. To be frank, I hated it. I despised it, loathed it, wanted to rip the pages out of the binding. I've never had all that great of a resume with Shakespeare in the first place, and then all of Hamlet's long monologues/soliloquies really threw me off. Let's just say I'm extremely thankful to Ms. Holmes for stopping after most scenes to explain what's going on. I actually think that I like it more now she's explaining things, It'll help to focus in on other things on the second read (although honestly, I don't know how much I'll actually be able to extract from that tangled mess of words).

I'm pretty sure the only thing we've done besides this is the blogs. I guess the blogs are going okay. I really don't like open prompts. I have trouble doing them in forty minutes, and I don't like not being able to completely develop my own opinions on a work (because you're limited to a certain idea/prompt). Also, I sometimes have problems with finding evidence without the book.

On to the Future

http://www.ericgarland.co/2012/11/09/letter-to-a-future-republican-strategist-regarding-white-people/
Letter to a future Republican strategist regarding white people

Eric Garland may be incredibly snarky in his article, "Letter to a future Republican strategist regarding white people," but he couldn't have achieved this without his extensive use of DIDLS: diction, imagery, details, language, and syntax.

Garland's most notable use of literary techniques comes through his syntax, which he uses both to emphasize his own status and then to explain why it doesn't matter. "Garland family of New England-> John Adams -> Howard Alden -> Plymouth colony ->KINGS OF MUTHAF***IN’ ENGLAND," Garland says of his family lineage. By tracing back to famous and revered groups/people and even kings, he emphasizes the family's "extraordinary" standing. It's something that merits a good exclamation of "HOLY WHITE PEOPLE, BATMAN!!!" in Garland's opinion. This is another piece of syntax that mocks society's emphasis on white people, that they have become holy, people of such significance that they are kings and superheroes. And, after revealing his outstanding credentials of intelligence, wealth, and lineage, he drops the bomb: he voted for Obama. "B-b-but, what?" Garland asks, showing the lack of confidence that according to him, Republicans should feel regarding their policies.

Because people like him should be "Low Hanging Fruit," or easy pickings, ripe and full to burst of confidence in the future--but like fruit, people like him are being eaten up, chewed up and spit out. With his diction, Garland takes things even further. Throughout the article, Garland uses phrases like "you guys" and "the Republican Party," distancing himself and his family from people he can no longer understand, but in fact holds in contempt. "You guys suck at running wars," Garland says. "That Iraq thing" isn't the only thing he expresses disillusionment over, however. Due to her profession, "...my wife watches poor WORKING people show up in emergency rooms with fourth-stage cancer because they were unable to afford primary care visits." The emphasis on working stills any arguments that if Americans weren't so lazy they could have afforded health care. The fact is, Romney's 47% are the same people Garland's wife has to watch show up in the ER, day after day. They are working people, as Garland points out, but that doesn't make them rich, doesn't guarantee them health care under the Republican system. These policies are certainly something to go "Egads" over, especially considering their childish and therefore irresponsible lack of commitment to actually cutting spending like they said they would.

Lastly, Garland uses images to bring the Republican Party into new perspective. As Garland says, "The Republican perseveration on homosexuals as any sort of threat consigns them to history’s trough of intellectual pig dung." Bringing in images of pigs, dung, and troughs forces readers to confront what Garland is getting at: that Republicans are lower than the meanest of animals, and must grub for ideas so disgusting that they're akin to pig dung.

Death of a Dreamer

1970. Choose a character from a novel or play of recognized literary merit and write an essay in which you (a) briefly describe the standards of the fictional society in which the character exists and (b) show how the character is affected by and responds to those standards. In your essay do not merely summarize the plot.

Willy Loman may have died the death of a salesman, but he also died the death of a dreamer. In Death of a Salesman, Willy, who originally would've liked nothing more than to work with his own two hands, is instead thrown into the dreams of others by societal standards. 

As his son, Biff, comments, there was more of Willy in the front stoop than in anything Willy ever sold. In this, Biff reveals that Willy's passion is truly in carpentry. Willy is constantly fixing the roof, the chairs, the porch, etc. He's never happier than when he's outside working, like Biff. However, society's influence comes in the form of Willy's brother Ben and in the vault of apartment that trap the Lomans in the city. Ben started out like Willy: he went away chasing a dream. But unlike Willy, Ben "came out rich." Suddenly, Ben is the New American ideal: rich and very materialistic. Willy, who regrets not having gone with Ben, attempts to follow in his footsteps by becoming rich. Through the city and the dreams or apartments that surround him, Willy conceives that social connections are the key to success rather than hard work. It's an idea reaffirmed by the old, pajama-clad salesman that stands as the symbol of Willy's ideal and society's dream. The apartments are like others' dreams; they crowd out Willy's own and overshadow the garden of opportunity, preventing it from growing. While Willy attempts to save and cultivate it, it simply will not grow. Willy, like his house, is crumbling under the weight of societal values, and has turned to materialism: the salesman.

Willy shares his old dream with Biff, who likewise dreams of working on a farm in the West, the real garden of opportunity. But as society has shaped Willy, he has grown more and more opposed to Biff working out West. He has gone from asserting Biff's need to "find himself" to asserting Biff's need to settle, get a job, and most importantly, make money. There it is: society has changed Willy from a strong worker with a hands-on dream to a materialistic, money-loving prisoner of society. Perhaps Willy's opposition to Biff is simply that Biff is too old to be finding himself, as Willy points out in the novel. But maybe it's simply that Willy, who ultimately is unable to accept any form of reality, can't stand seeing Biff head down the path that Willy never got the chance to go down himself.

The society Willy Loman lives in is one of uncompromising fortitude. It kills the slightest ray of sunshine, shadows the smallest bud of green. He has been trapped into societal standards and forced into others' ideals and dreams, crumbling under the weight of it all. And unlike his son, Biff, or Biff's friend Bernard, who both in their own ways continued to chase individual happiness, Willy has relented to it. He continues to travel, reminding himself of what could have been, and what isn't. The fact is, the problem isn't that Willy isn't "well-liked." It's that Willy, like the rest of society, is too busy with the money and the material and the denied dreaming that they don't realize what's right in front of them: the opportunity to accomplish that dream, and to die, not a dreamer, but a fighter.

Bam. Horrifico.

It seems to me that we do course responses a lot. Probably because it's supposed to be the best way to learn. Hmm... hum hum. Well, today was the retake of the terms test. It's a weird thing, really, when you go into a test having done what you're supposed to to study, feeling confident, take the test, feel reasonably good... BAM!!! HORRIFICO GRADO! Okay, I realize that my Spanish is a bit lacking, but really, honestly, that test was just not exactly fantastico. It wasn't even "bad" like someone might say bemoaning their B-. It was really bad. Well, moving on...

The third (second?) open prompt. I'll be really up front here: I did not try as hard with this one as I did with the others. It's not that I didn't try, just that I got into an idea more than the essay or the prompt. It didn't turn out great, needless to say.

Enough of me talking about things that went wrong. What have I learned, what has gone well? I may take this back when I see my grade, but I think the close readings are going pretty well. I actually kind of enjoy looking through them, finding pieces of diction and such that give meaning. I don't think the author went through every word and made sure it had a triple meaning that fit with the theme--it's a news article!--but it's interesting nevertheless.

The summary and analysis was interesting. I had a lot of ideas, but I'm not sure many of them actually worked well for basic things like tone, point of view, or any of the other stuff the rubric required. Even tweaked it was (or wasn't?) interesting but scatterbrained.

I actually have no idea what we've done besides the blogs and the test. So I guess this is it..