Response to Course Materials: Reawakening

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern gave me little seizures of sympathy for them, and that is just about the highest praise I could grant them.

We also had some really good insights as we discussed this work in class, and I feel like I have a very solid understanding of the work as a whole. I was also very pleasantly surprised with the movie, and I'll keep the rant about 'good things happen when you let the author have some creative direction of the movie' down to that one sentence. Every now and then Stoppard would play up some things that I hadn't noticed, or thought were irrelevant. I almost felt, actually, that Rosencrantz was played to be a little bit too clown-ish, but I suppose it all went into making the emotional aspect of the play more poignant, and since I was already embroiled in the characters it felt extraneous to me.

While it's nice to be writing more closed prompts, I feel like fate is out to screw us all over. First we had a substitute teacher who was very lax with instructions, then we were interrupted by pizza box stacking underclassmen, and I don't think we've ever sat down and written one out without previous discussion and a lot (a LOT) of hand holding. The practice was great, but in past experience, the only way to feel truly secure about something hard is to throw yourself to the wolves beforehand so that the actual test doesn't feel like it's difficult. I've had that done to me for instrumental things, and in past AP's and it has worked every single time, so in its absence I'm getting kind of twitchy.

I also have a hugely bad habit in my essay writing that I am finding it impossible to shake. I tend to write a thesis, barf up my evidence, and then warrant it all in the second to last paragraph. In theory I understand the basic structural needs of an essay, but I don't think I have ever managed to fulfill them naturally on a first draft. Even with this closed prompt, when I was actively thinking about it, I got peer-scored a 5, which was a bit of a blow to my pride. Hopefully the edit will be better, although I can honestly make no promises. I think I just assume my train of thought should be clear by the evidence I provide. Or something.

It's just very hard to fix something in a timed scenario that you can't possibly notice yourself doing until you've edited it about 3 days later.

On a happier note, I'm enjoying Ceremony thus far. Truth be told I could sit and listen to Native American (or any kind of) legends all day and be perfectly content, so the context for this book was awesome to hear about, and being able to catch it immediately afterward was pretty satisfying, even if we were kind of led into it by the nose. Again, though, I suffered the problem of being-read-aloud-to and not being able to stop and think and digest in my own time.

Maybe one day I'll get tired of circling circles in the novel and the colors will wear me out, but for now I'm excited to read more of Ceremony- although good grief it's a fast turnaround to read an entire book in less than a week when 2 other huge assignments were also due in the same class.

Cough.

Response to Course Materials 4- The Revenge

I still don't like death of a salesman. I read the actual play, watched the full movie, got to discuss and break down every symbol and pattern of meaning, and the creepy incestuous relationships, and I still don't like it. Generally, I think the whole class was on board with this particular vein of thought. You are free to like it if you so choose, but I can't bring myself to do it. When we read the articles, the one I agreed with most was the one about the incestuous relationships, simply because that author was as sick as I am already of the canonization of Willy Loman as some kind of saint when really, he's a deranged and unstable man who ruined his own life and the lives of those around him. What I was surprised by is how this whole experience has changed my opinion of Miller. I fell in love with The Crucible, but as I read Miller's comments on his own work, they struck me as incomplete and just generally a bit off. He obviously has a clear definition, for example, of a tragic hero, but I personally don't think that he created one in Willy. (Also- what kind of guy writes analytical essays about his own works? Seriously).

Even our discussions of Salesman were a little bit flat, at least to me. When we talked about The American Dream it was hard to get us to shut up, but I felt that we all just ran out of things to say. The play just saps the life out of the atmosphere around it, and doesn't invite discussion so much as it does silent personal reflection on just how awful life can be sometimes.

Also, while I can appreciate the leading themes that tie all our works together in a coherent structure, from American wealth grabbing and family issues to American wealth grabbing and family and tragedy to family issues and tragedy that we've now arrived at with Hamlet, reading two commentaries on the concept of the American Dream with very similar outlooks on its effectiveness is enough to drive anyone bonkers. There's something to be said about variety as much as there is to be said about consistency.

Still, we've moved on from 1950's America and rocketed ourselves back in time to Shakespeare's very own imagined Denmark and the political swamp that it entails. The whole lesson on tragedy was excellent to gain perspective, but I'm still finding it kind of hard to absorb it all into something that I can apply right off of the bat to get a picture of what Elizabethan audiences would be expecting or feeling at any given development. Because of this, I'm grateful that Ms. Holmes is taking time out every now and again to explain the nuances, because Shakespeare really doesn't make much sense any other way. I am also pretty desperate to figure out Ophelia and her motivations.

I'm not sure how pleased I am that we're reading it aloud, though. No offense meant to any of you reading this, of course- it's just that none of us are professional actors and Shakespeare is hard. And if it's read wrong, it doesn't make any sense. And if I have to keep looking down at footnotes and trying to follow along to someone else's pace, or fumbling my own lines whenever I talk, it just makes it very hard to conceptualize what's actually happening, and I'm fairly sure I'd get a better idea of Hamlet if we all just watched it and read along, but ah well. Participation is still fun.

Response to Course Materials 3- The Reckoning

Going by the state of my notes, a lot of these past couple of weeks has been a lot of talking.

I have to say, though, the in-class discussions we had over The American Dream were some of the best I've had in my entire life. Nothing is worse than a discussion that is more awkward silence than it is talking, and nothing is better than one where everyone chips in a bit. I always find that it's easier to figure out what the heck an author is talking about if you can bounce ideas off of people, and it's nice to have so many people to bounce ideas off of. Truthfully, we came to some mind blowing conclusions (The leaking johnny is their dead kid! Mommy's hitting on her adopted son! Daddy doesn't realize Mrs. Barker exists! &c). I'm still reeling. I'm still not sure, though, that I would call The American Dream a comedy, though. It might have comic elements, but they're not trying to make anyone laugh.

Then we did a lot with the "objective" half of the AP test, as opposed to the essaying half. I can't say that they're any easier for me than an essay will be. Sure, the essay prompts might be completely impenetrable and layered with triple meanings, but subjective tone questions and pick definitions, it seems, will always come back to bite me in the butt. Looking at how the test is scored, however, was a bit of a relief. Regardless of the few questions I consistently get wrong, with a good enough essay grade, I can still safely get a 4 or a 5. Writing our own questions was a bit of an experience--as hard as it is to answer someone else's bizarrely crafted question, trying to come up with one yourself that still has a clear answer about a poem that (while it was incredibly good) you aren't entirely clear on, is just as hard, if not worse. I can't even blame the other group for getting questions wrong, because our group didn't even agree on the answer that we should make correct.

I still disagree with the sheer existence of an objective literary test, but at least now I can sympathize a little with the poor jerks who have to write the questions for it.

Death of a Salesman came next, and then I went to Stratford, and then I stayed home a day, and then I saw the end. It made discussion on Wednesday just a little bit difficult. Somehow, I ended up with the impression that Willy had sold his soul to Ben, and died to give his family what he thought they needed. I watched the movie on Thursday, and, to tell the truth, I really disliked it. I've read Arthur Miller before, and I've seen two different versions of The Crucible. I love The Crucible. I love John Proctor and I love Abigail and Mary and I love the story and I love how angry it makes me. I don't understand how the same man could write such diametrically different sets of characters. What makes The Crucible for me are the characters, and how real they feel. Death of a Salesman is totally lacking in that. I don't like anyone in it, and I don't think they have any redeeming qualities. There are a few things in them that pull out bits of sympathy, but I also think that most of the suffering they all go through was brought about by their own hands, so I can't feel anything but disdain and a vague pity. To be fair, this is my opinion before we discuss it in class. Maybe I'll discover hidden depths to Biff or to Willy or to someone that will make me appreciate their character, but as-is, no one in the play has redeemed themselves.

Interestingly enough, this play is going to be harder to analyze, I think, than The American Dream. While none of the dialogue of American Dream makes sense in and of itself, it's much easier to sense narrative patterns when one doesn't have to consider what the playwright is doing to make their characters believable. Absurdism might look difficult from afar, but really what it does is strip down a piece to its basic components, without believability getting in the way. Death of a Salesman, on the other hand, is not only trying to prove points and be literary, but to create a family and characters and a world that audience members feel is real and genuine. Now, personally, I don't think it does a terribly good job of it, but it's still trying, which adds a whole new layer to any given analysis.

Course Materials 2- Electric Bogaloo

A lot of what I remember from the days after the last course materials response is a blur of handouts that were frantically annotated and bickered over. I'm not sure mine were even legible, but I constantly found myself moving out of DIDLS and instead going towards conclusions, or I'd find something notable that I wasn't sure where to place. Where did alliteration go, exactly, or the other poetic devices in the DIDLS frame? How about color symbolism- details, maybe? DIDLS themselves are clear enough, but there are things that work beyond and outside the frame of diction-imagery-details-language-syntax that I'm not sure what to do with. I know they're relevant and I have comments to make on them. Regardless of that particular headache, I found myself with fascinating insights into different works. Two of them I had read and one that I haven't but now want to. I know for a fact that, had I not tried to purge my mind of past influences, I never would have thought that Alice was dying as she fell down the tunnel, but think about it. "Light at the end of the tunnel" sound familiar? I found that dialogue was harder to pull apart than narration, because it's too easy to imagine it simply as part of a character or as a forwarder of the action and completely gloss over it, which made Little Women patently difficult. It was unfortunate, though, that I missed the day we covered syntax, because I have a feeling it would have been difficult for me anyways. On the long, long list of things I don't pay attention to when I read, sentence structure is right at the top, and I have no reference for what it means to a work that it is 'subject verb object' or vice versa or some oddball combination of the three. I suppose I'll just have to feel it through based on what feels odd or noticeable. In general, if I could just read text excerpts and bicker about their meaning for the rest of the year, I'd be completely happy.

Then, at least according to my notes, we moved on to literary theory, which I found absolutely fascinating because I am a geek. By and large I walked out of it with a bit of a crush on Aristotle, and from there it was largely a rehash of things we'd gone over in Brit Lit previously, and AP World before that (at least with regards to the Dark Ages, Renaissance  and the age of reason (although we didn't go very far into that)). I hope I wont' be called upon to name specific authors from each period, though, because boy howdy are there a lot of them. I can pick out the notable ones, ranging from Beowulf's nameless author to Dante to Shakespeare to Blake and on and on and on. Funnily enough, the stuff about the earliest theory (Plato) and the newest postmodern stuff was really the only new information. None of my lit classes previously ever talked about a simulacrum idea of the world, or about Plato's cave, which I found fascinating, if a little harsh to authors. Thus, the crush on Aristotle. I found myself agreeing with a lot of Postmodernist thought, which is hardly surprising, considering we're living within it- although I am skeptical of a generation's ability to name the period they're living in. Let my great-great-grandkids decide whether postmodernism even exists; history written as it happens is hardly accurate and unbiased.

Critical lenses, by and large, were a review. Since I took both Am Lit and Brit Lit, I had already been drilled into the ideas, although I can definitely say that this particular mode of information transport was definitely new, but not necessarily in a bad way. Seeing the lenses actually applied to the same subject (even if it was just a urinal) was very helpful in comparing them and seeing what the real differences were between them. The two new ones were very closely related- postcolonial and Literary Darwinism. Thank god for last minute crash courses, because I had Literary Darwinism totally backwards from what it actually is- rather than the culture with the strongest literature being the ones remembered, I thought it was the dominant culture's affect on the literature- which is actually postcolonialism! Confusing stuff! I think it would have been better to go over these in class, but I understand that time was of the essence.

Speaking of massive time-sinks, the allusions presentations were absolutely bafflingly long. Luckily, they were all engaging. As a child, I had a big yellow book of greek myths that I read until the cover fell off, so a lot of the stories were review- but a lot of them weren't. And yes, sometimes it hurt me to have things confused or fumbled or mixed up, but I learned a lot of stories that I hadn't had the full background to- especially the backstory to the Trojan War. Who knew it all started because of a cranky goddess? That's what I truly love about Greek myths- there's an overarching story of a war in Troy, but there are a million other stories that all happen concurrently. Odysseus  Philoctetes, Circe, all work within that story, but they each have a story of their own. Greek myths are an immense stretching entity that weaves itself over history so cleverly that I can't help but appreciate it. The Bible had a lot more new territory- although more of it was familiar than I thought originally. Also, please please please know that the people of God are the IsraelITES not the IsraelIS. One is correct now, one is correct biblically. I know that giving my presentation was fun, although I always forget how nervewracking presentations are until I'm up there and no one is giving any feedback because everyone is taking notes at the speed of sound.

I have to admit to being that guilty good kid who dishonored her family when we didn't have enough copies of The American Dream to start reading on time. I also have to admit to kind of loathing the beginning, as I suspected I would dislike the Theater of the Absurd when we read the article about it claiming that previous literary movements had somehow had aspects of the Absurd as opposed to the other way around. All that aside, the first part of it is awkward to read through, seemingly empty, and essentially perfectly in keeping with the style of Theater of the Absurd. It was only after we moved on from that, as the article we read afterwards suggested, that the play got really good. While I'd contest him on Mommy being 'eager to get rid of grandma' or 'vicious and emptyheaded' (at least, not entirely) the author of the article had a lot of solid, salient points- most of which I had already picked up on, at least in part. What I'm wondering now, and what I was wondering as I read it, is what other meanings are to be found beyond the obvious and apparent. That's always where the real analytical gold is; hiding behind the overarching obvious point. There are subtle little things hiding in there, and I hope we get to them in class, because otherwise we're doing ourselves an intellectual disservice.

100% Reason to Remember Whatever it Was we Did this Week

It is truly astonishing to consider how much I've done in this class, considering it's only the first week of school. Of course, to really do that, one would have to count the mass of summer homework I managed to complete during crunch time, but regardless of the exact date that I started absorbing course material, I've certainly sucked in a lot.

Considering this is my fourth blog entry, as opposed to about my third time having a sustained conversation in class, I feel that the best place to start is fittingly the first day of school, when Ms. Holmes said something along the lines of "I've come to know you as writers, and as people, but I cannot attach names to faces just yet." It really got me thinking that our lit teachers, whether we like it or not, probably know the most about us as people. There's really no way to avoid giving away your personality when you write- it's in every word and every space that you put on a page. That is especially apparent in this class, with this summer homework, where we were seen only online. All we had to offer in terms of personality were blog posts and forum comments. It kind of makes me wish I'd thought through what I posed a bit more, to be honest. Heh.

On the topic of things hiding in writing, I feel it is only fair to mention how frequently the Foster presentation blew my mind. While reading the book, Foster made pretty reasonable parallels to classic works, things in the public eye that had been there for a while (spoiling the ends of many in the process, I add to my dismay). It was a whole 'nother kettle of fish for me to try and apply it to the things I love and experience without: a) leaning too heavily on one particular show or movie, b) not using examples that Foster had already given, and c) falling back on Jane Eyre or Shakespeare or other old things that I read and love but aren't considered 'pop culture.' Much time was spent staring hopelessly at my bookshelf. Certainly my most memorable victory was working on the chapter involving politics. Never in my life had I ever tried to put a political angle on anything I'd ever read, ever, but as luck might have it, I was doing AP Gov homework concurrently. Something put the Turner Thesis in my head, and suddenly I had a massive realization that Star Trek was continuing to encourage rugged individualism in the modern age. Even the phrase "Space: the final frontier" had never hit that particular switch in my head, and I definitely never would have made the connection without Foster pointing out that political writing can be nonspecific. It isn't necessarily 'vote democrat' so much as it is 'dictatorships fail and communism is bad' (Animal Farm) or 'if you overextend power it is inherently unstable' (Yertle the Turtle). It legitimately blew my mind.

The forums were not my strongest suit, but they were certainly an interesting exercise in my inability to pick up on color symbolism. Or any other kind of symbolism. Every time I think my analytical ability has improved, I'm met with a massive wall of other things I failed to notice, or things that I haven't yet been taught about. My biggest challenge was not so much finding things to talk about as it was finding a way to express my idea without simply parroting my peers. I recall looking in the forum for example posts, and seeing one that said almost verbatim what I meant, and a friend of mine looking at mine later on and having the exact same experience. Complete agreement makes commenting difficult as well- it strikes me that true analysis doesn't always question, per se, more that it builds off of what it has been given, and takes it in a new direction, or further along the path it was already travelling. It also strikes me that with the ability to pick out things in poems that usually escape me will come the ability to pick things out of people's statements to examine and dissect.

As I seem to be going from my strengths to my weaknesses, I feel 'The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing' fits the next to last slot perfectly. While I found the book immensely frustrating at times, when Harvey would make edits 'due to context' without providing the context for us, it had several useful tips and tools that I know I should make use of. His book brought up many of my bad little writing habits. However, his writing instructions seemed to me to be for a very specific type of writing. Such strict commands always make me want to set an author down with a mug of their beverage of choice and an e e cummings collection to wean them from their drug of choice. However, there is a place for everything, and Harvey's writing tips are tight as a battleship. Whether they were applicable to the Sedaris essay we had to apply them to was another story, but I couldn't help trying to apply Harvey's tips to his own book. Editing a book on grammar must be a royal pain, because any mistake is going to be that much more glaring in the face of the small folio you just published on fixing people's grammar. I know for a fact it made me self conscious as I was writing about it- which may in fact have been Harvey's point. Even if you don't absorb everything on the first read through, you begin questioning yourself. "Is this as succinct as it could be?" you ask, staring at a run on sentence, "am I using the passive voice?" Questioning my own ability is doubtless the first step to improving it.

And finally, the mother of all depressing things, the terms test. For someone who 'started making flashcards in the last week of August' I feel I did fairly well. Not good, certainly, but not enough to warrant dismay. It all comes down to practice, which is why it kind of chafes me that I can't see the mistakes I've made. I understand it in this context- same exact test, wouldn't want to give out the answers, but the way I learn best is by constant trial and error. Certainly, there are a few practice sections online, but not enough to provide practice that doesn't quickly become memorization. If I know myself at all, though, I'll start asking myself 'is this a caesura? what is this supposed to symbolize?' when I'm reading something for pleasure, and I'll know that the claws of analysis have dug into my brain.

If I had to give this first week of school a purpose, it's purpose would be to tell me 'you are not as good at all of this as you thought you were, now sit down and think about it. Hard.' It's been a week of basic run downs that will take time to drill their way into my head. Each class comes with its own set of rhetoric, its own rules on essays, and its own testing quirks and thought processes that are most helpful. All of the AP Lit rules were just tossed into my arms- now it's my job to sort them out. We've had a run down of the basics on essay writing in terms of grammar, essay writing in terms of rhetoric, essay writing in terms of argumentative structure, and what parts to pick out to prove your point when you write an essay. It's certainly enough to think about for now.