Blog Holiday

Blog #9

Use of The Speaker in Nikki Giovanni's "All Eyez on U"

The speaker of this poem is a person in mourning soon after the death of Tupac Shakur. The speaker is distraught over how Tupac, like so many of the black community's "brightest", were "cut down". The poem is written in the first person with frequent references to "I", but, though it is possible, the reader should no automatically assume this is Nikki Giovanni herself directly speaking. I see it as Nikki speaking on behalf of a community that feels many of it important members have been unfairly killed before there time. She gives voice to all those who feel Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Emmit Till and Tupac were killed before they were given the opportunity to complete the work they had been sent here to do. She even breaks this into a generational divide saying, "This generation mourns Tupac as my generation mourned Till as we all mourn Malcolm". In this line, Giovanni seperates herself from the group mourning for Tupac, so it could be argued that she is representing the younger generation through her poem. This would make the younger generation the speaker.

There is also a greater political message in the poem that shows the speaker spans and supercedes any generation. In the more political lines, the speaker stands for the collective wisdom and thoughts of oppressed non-whites throughout history. Giovanni writes, "If those who lived by the sword died by the sword there would be no white men on earth/ If those who lived on hatred died on hatred there would be no KKK". If the first line, the speaker stands up against the hippocracy of white people saying Tupac, who rapped about guns and murder, got what he deserved, when for the last thousand years white have conquered, pillaged and enslaved foreign cultures across the globe. This speaker, with knowledge of world history and American history (with the reference to the KKK), is not simply representing the generation of Tupac fans. The speaker speaks for all oppressed people who have seen injustice that they cannot change.

Blog Post #7 - Paper Proposal

I would like to write about about the stigma of homosexuality in heterosexual male bonding. This is different vastly different than the other topics I had been debating writing about. I have a few ideas about Sedaris' work that I have already formed into a fairly clear argument in my head, but the possibility of doing research and writing about one of these topics does not excite me. I think the reason I chose to write about this new topic is because it is something I do not fully understand yet, and therefore, can do research to help educate myself and expand on my ideas. If I chose one of the topics that I have a more clear argument for I would simply be looking for other sources to back up what I was saying. I fear this would not be a very beneficial process for me because I would not learn anything knew. I have chosen this topic because I think it is challenging and culturally relevant.

I have been following the news about the repeal of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Though, maybe, repeal isn't the right word because while a judge has ruled the policy unconstitutional, the military is yet to actually stop using the policy. This speaks to the two topics I want to focus my paper on. Firstly, how does the presence of a gay man affect the way straight men interact, and how does a gay man break through cultural stigmas to become "one of the guys"? Though, perhaps even this line of questioning is biased because, just as we discussed how the role of a woman in a the military may not to be become "one of the guys", who's to say the object of a gay man should be to become "one of the guys". The military provides a very interesting microcosm for how gay man affect other men around them, but I am also interested in how this relates to society as a whole. I think Sedaris' stories about growing up and, in particular, his relationship with his father and brother will provide insight into this topic.

I realize at this point my argument may not be as fleshed out as it should be. I have really posed a question to myself that I do not know currently how to answer. I could have taken the easy way out and chosen a topic I could more easily write about, but out of some new academic bravado, I have decided challenge myself. Writing this paper will force me to question many of my own preconceived ideas about gay culture, and I hope make me a better, more tolerant person. I apologize if my proposal is not up to the standards it should be, but I feel the line of questioning I am currently thinking about will lead me a stronger final paper than if I just wrote about a topic I feel I already have a handle on.

Blog #6 - Blog Audit

I notice that all my blogs either mention the use of humor or contain my attempts to be funny. I've certainly written and talked about humor more in this class than any other English class I've had before. This is partly related to the use of dark humor in many of the texts we've read, but I think it has more to do with the composition of students in our class and the freedom we are given to write about what we want. I always notice and appreciate the use of humor in literature, but it doesn't seem to be discussed much in most classes. I read Huckleberry Finn in an English that will go unnamed last semester. Through two weeks of discussion, no one mentioned how Mark Twain's sense of humor and irony contributed to the story. During the latter part of Twain's life, he was widely considered the funniest man in America, and today, I would argue, his legacy lives on as much for his clever witticisms as it does for his contribution to American Literature. I say this knowing many people will disagree. For some reason, humor is never looked at seriously in literature, like being funny is beneath some intellectuals. I will never understand this. To me, humor and laughter are two of the most essential traits of being human. Certainly, there are many things that seperate us from the other creatures on this earth, but I think it is worth noting we are the only animal that can recognize irony. If an infinite number fo monkeys sat behind an infinite number of typewriters and typed for an infinite amount of time, they would eventually type Huckleberry Finn in its entirety without errors, but they would not recognize it was funny. I don't really know where I 'm going with that, but I do like to picture rows of monkeys (like this guy https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie4sudNlWILgTrQ7dh7b2nhTuy9Svnt5nZCFwLjvc_fr-Anc78Sv-mPcMmHW5qNUPfsxHfiWr-Wt1-w6h5ZMZj-KfaatD1PYm5A2WzFvKCRF5ukNk8KyEpbzs0MmxwdSpeOm4oWRxzFzPZ/?imgmax=800) pounding away on typewriters as one supervisor monkey patrols the area, making sure everyone is typing.

Blog # 5: David Sedaris - The Ship Shape

My favorite character from Sedaris' essays is his younger brother, Paul. Paul does not feature heavily in any of the essays early in the book. If you just started the book and are reading the essays in order, I highly recommend skipping to the middle for a minute to read "Rooster at the Hitching Post." It is about Paul's wedding and is my favorite of all Sedaris' essays. But since most of you probably haven't read that far yet, I'll focus on "The Ship Shape" for my post today.

I think Sedaris does a very good job of displaying some of the more selfish parts of our nature that most of us are afraid to admit we have. He's great at describing that little-voice inside of you that wants to be better than everyone else, wants to flaunt what you have and generally wants to take pleasure in feeling superior to those around you. Like on page 24 when he was "drunk on the power of new home" and asked the waitress for another Coke without saying please. I think we all feel "drunk with power" at certain points of our lives, even though generally the power we actually have is not that great. So it manifests itself in little ways, like being able to "demand" a Coke from a waitress "without saying please."

At this point in the post I realize I have not yet included the two literary terms that are required. I now need to use these terms fairly quickly and this low-pressure writing situation is suddenly feeling more highly-pressured.  My pulse is rapidly rising. The room is spinning. I feel faint. What two literary terms could I ever use to discuss David Sedaris!?

Antihero - Sedaris is generally the protagonist of his own pieces. He uses many of his essays to point out his own foibles. Whether his is discussing his speech impediment, shallowness, greed or laziness, Sedaris constantly points out all his personal qualities that clash with what the typical nature of a hero is supposed to be.

Symbol - In "The Ship Shape," the new home his parents are considering purchasing becomes a symbol to show young Sedaris' shallowness and greed. He feels the new house will make him a better person. He says, with the new house "my classmates would court me, hoping I might invite them over for the weekend". The house becomes a symbol for the powerful, popular person Sedaris wants to be.  

Blog Post #4

"...figurative, cartoonish idiom may be the most powerful means of representing modern atrocity."

I enjoyed Fineman's insights into Botero's work in the slideshow, but this last sentence has to be a joke, right? I have read it over a number of times, and it makes absolutely no sense to me. I respect what Botero is trying to with his paintings, but nothing can more powerfully represent the atrocities of Abu Ghraib than the actual photos of the atrocities Abu Ghraib . Do you guys remember when they came out? It was a one of the finest examples of truth being stranger than fiction. No painting, poem, movie, song, etc. of what happened can be more powerful than showing what actually happened.

The real pictures are so disturbing that looking at them (or even recalling them years later) makes me sick to stomach. They're so repulsive that most people do not want to look at them. Maybe Botero's pudgy, cartoonish figures make the pictures easier to look at. You can study them and take time to comtemplate what happened. This might be beneficial, but there are some things that we run the risk of being too intellectual about.

I would challenge anyone to look at any of the real photos for more than 5 or 6 seconds without looking away. They are so repulsive that you instantly want to block them out. In this way, they do not lead you to meditate on the nature of evil the way one of Botero's paintings might, but aren't there some things that do not need to be meditated upon? Aren't some things so clearly evil and amoral that in snap we can form an opinion on the topic? This is the way the Abu Ghraib photos are to me.

Certainly, I am not one for typically making rash judgments, but in this case it applies. We are all English majors. We like to engage our brains and think philosophically, but sometimes, you have to trust your gut. To quote Woody Allen, "The brain is the most overrated of all organs...Everything really valuable has to enter you through a different opening, if you'll forgive the disgusting imagery."

An overload of stimulus continually at our fingertips has given us a tendency to over-intellectualize. How else could someone think "...figurative, cartoonish idiom may be the most powerful means of representing modern atrocity"?

Blog Post #3

I was flipping through The Atlantic on Wednesday. There was an article with the sub-heading “The Case Against Jonathan Franzen.” I have never read any of Franzen’s books, but I saw him on the cover of Time recently. I didn’t read the article about him, but I did see his picture with the caption “Great American Novelist.” Based on those three words alone, none of which were written by Franzen, I decided to like this Jonathan Franzen character. Who could have a case against him? I decided to read the article.

After a few paragraphs I decided it was really pointless to read a review of a book that I have never read by an author I really knew nothing about. But I scanned ahead a few paragraphs and found something interesting. Something that relates to class. Something about…Don DeLillo.

But if Freedom (Franzen’s new book) is middlebrow, it is so in the sacrosanct Don DeLillo tradition, which our critical establishment considers central to literature today. The apparent logic is that the novel can lure Americans away from their media and entertainment buffet only by becoming more “social,” broader in scope, more up-to-date in focus. This may be the reason we get such boring characters. Instead of portraying an interesting individual or two, and trusting in realism to embed their story naturally in contemporary life, the Social Writer thinks of all the relevant issues he has to stuff in, then conceives a family “typical” enough to hold everything together. The more aspects of our society he can fit between the book’s covers, the more ambitious he is considered to be.


Every big fat new effort to “develop” the DeLillo model is thus hailed as important even before it is read, as happened with Franzen’s last novel, The Corrections (2001). No doubt the rave reviews for Freedom will evince the same reluctance to quote from the text that we saw then. Reviewers gave that book maximum points for sweep and sprawl while subtracting none for its slovenly prose, the short-windedness of each of its thousand “themes,” and the failure of the main story line to generate any momentum. (These flaws, too, were in the great DeLillo tradition.)
-From Smaller than Life by B.R. Myers, printed in The Atlantic Oct. 2010
(follow the link here for the full article http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/10/smaller-than-life/8212/)

I particularly like the part about critics giving a novel “points for…sprawl.” I think a fair number of the students in our class would subtract points for sprawl. In fact in almost any work of storytelling “sprawl” isn’t something that is desired. No one ever leaves a movie and says, “Wow, that plot really just meandered around. Terrific! Half the characters served no purpose. I only wish there had been a few more meaningless scenes placed between the important ones.”
In truth, though, it is not really fair to compare a novel to a movie. Movies are meant to be viewed in one sitting, and, therefore, cannot sprawl. There’s no time for it. Of course there are exceptions—particularly the movies of P.T. Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will be Blood) and Robert Altman (Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Shortcuts). But, by and large, audiences will not sit through sprawling movies. The stories must be concise and told quickly. Movies have become so interwoven with modern society that this very plot/action based storytelling has become the norm. I think Myers strikes this nail on the head when he writes, “the novel can lure Americans away from the entertainment buffet by becoming…broader in scope.”

Myers views this as a negative though, thinking that modern novelists should still be able to tell exciting stories with exciting characters. But, with all apologies to hardcore literature fans, movies will always be more exciting, at least to the general public. And for modern novelists to be able to make a living, they must appeal to the general public. Franzen and DeLillo have keyed in on this sprawling style because it something that is more effective in literature than movies or TV. It is a way for them to stand out from the “entertainment buffet.” Don’t we all want to stand out? Isn’t that something a writer must do to make a living? Like B.R. Myers writing a negative review of Franzen when all the others have been positive?