Writing About Plays

Being someone who comes from a theater background, this chapter was very interesting to me. Chapter 7 takes me back to an experience my sophomore year of highschool where my theater director told us we would be writing our own one-act play for competition. (Insert my freak out here)

The elements, "plot, character, and theme" (page 111), were what we first started with. We had to pick an idea, just as the Gardner book says you have to do when writing about a play.
On page 113, it is said that "drama is a livin art," I completely agree and I believe the best way to read about a play is to play it out in your head as you go along. Give some life to the words.

STAGE DIRECTIONS. A huge thing in theater and according to page 114, a huge thing in play analysis. "What kind of physical movement, blocking, or choreography would you see on stage?"

Overall, this is one of my favorite chapters and makes it clear that I'm writing my research paper on the right topic.

Cinderella and True Stories (but really just Cinderella)

I chose to write on Cinderella, it was the one that stuck out to me most and it wasn't a poem I enjoyed, regardless of the extra detailed misfortunes.

• Within the first couple stanzas, this seems to be a poem speaking of all types of Cinderella stories; "from toilets to riches (line4)," "from diapers to Dior (line 10), "from homogenized to martinis at lunch (line 16), "from mops to Bonwit Teller (Line 20)." I've heard about other forms of the story Cinderella and many other fairy tales that were originally nothing like the glamorous Disney versions. I guess I just didn't expect such drastic details such as the step sisters cutting off parts of their feet to fit the shoe (Lines 81-83 & 88) or the dove pecking their eyes out (Lines 97-99)

Flee from Song, Villanelle

Wyatt, They Flee from me
Rossetti, Song
Hacker, Villanelle

• They Flee from me

Okay, so my first thought from stanza one was birds. Then as I continued to read on I realized Wyatt was speaking of women, or one woman in particular.
From the footnotes, it seems as though Wyatt is toying with this woman and that his gestures are not sincere, which is a reason, I believe that they would "flee" from him.

• Song

This poem, to me, seems like a letter written to the loved one of Rossetti while she is on her death bed. It seems as though she is telling her predecessors not to dwell on her passing or to mourn her, but to forget her and live happily because she isn't going to feel the earthly things they do for her. "Haply I may remember, And haply may forget."

• Villanelle

Insanely confused by this one, I literally just felt like I was reading words on a page. I'm looking forward to talking about this one in class.

Dover Beach or the beach from Twilight or the beach from Icarus.

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
p. 89-90

My sophomore year in high school, we wrote our own play based on the story of Icarus, called Icarus Flies, the second stanza in this poem, other than the fact that it's night time, reminds me of the shoreline that Icarus sees as he temporarily flies.

The entire description of the beach in the first stanza reminds me of the honeymoon beach in Twilight (sorry for my continuous parallels to Twilight)


Overall, I really enjoyed Arnold's way of describing the setting and the shoreline, it reminds me of a quote I once heard, "because there's nothing beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it is sent away," by Sarah Kay.

Feminists Unite

The Dead, James Joyce.
Feminist Criticism, pg. 175-208

The argument on page 182 caught my attention as soon as I got to it and it's a question i'd like to extend to you all, "Does feminism weaken or fortify itself by emphasizing its separateness?"

You could compare it to the Plessy v. Ferguson court case, seperate but equal, right?
We all know that seperate wasn't exactly equal at the time and it doesn't seem to be for feminism either. A good point for this arguement would be the amount of success from novels written openly by women and the amount of success from novels the public did not know were written by women. I think just as in the case mentioned above, separateness is strengthening feminism in the long run.

The [Walking?] Dead

The Dead, 3-59.

I could start talking about how I slightly expected this to be about zombies, but then I'd be giving nothing on how I felt about this section of the book.

My attention was immediately caught by the quote on page 16 and 17, so I decided to pause my reading and write about this. The quote by Joyce in his discussion of genre in Portrait begins on page 16 with "Art" and ends on page 17 with "human imagination". This quote stuck out to me because of my experience with the arts and I was able to relate to all three parts mentioned; lyrical, dramatic, and the epical form. The quote says that the lyrical form is the "form wherein he artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself", the epical form is the "form wherein he represents his image in mediate relation to himself and to others", and the dramatic form is the "form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to others." Reading all of the descriptions, my first thought is of monologues and the ones I performed or saw others perform while involved in theatre in high school. The lyrical monologue reminds me of a monologue from the play The Fifth Sun that a boy named Preston did acting as a priest, speaking to himself but portraying his character to the audience. I did a monologue in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, that was both speaking to myself and also addressed the audience, as spoken of in the epical monologue. The dramatic monologue most reminds me of the improvisation shows my high school used to put on where the audience was directly spoken to.

To be or to not be a good reader, that is the question

Reading and Writing About Literature, Ch. 2

• Okay let me be "lame" and go ahead and talk about how I read and re-read all of the Twilight books four times each, except for the last one (I wasn't a big fan).

One of the first sections in chapter 2 talks about the power of re reading and I CAN ABSOLUTELY RELATE TO THIS. When reading the Twilight books again after the first time, I caught on to so much foreshadowing to the events that were later going to take place that I felt dumb that I was ever surprised by the plot. I cannot stress enough how beneficial re reading is. I especially like how the book states on page six that re reading allows you to "understand a truth". When you reread something, you don't just get the surface materials, you understand character development vs. just understanding the plot.

• I write for memorization therefore note taking is the bomb dot com in my case.

In my literacy narrative I talked about how writing things helps me learn and remember, so when I'm reading for class I like to keep an index card next to me with notes for the reading on it. This helps me remember important details of what I read and it also gives me something to look back on, just as it says in the book on page 11, "You might want to use the same notebook [in my case index cards] that you keep with you in class so that you can make reference to your class notes while reading at home[my situation is just flip flopped]."

Man, I wish I could still read sheet music

Gleick. 310-323. 373-412.

310-323.

• Okay, when I think meme I think of Saracastic Willy Wonka or Kevin Hart pictures with big white words written across them (included below for your amusement).
  
  
  
  

When I think of memes, I do not think of chain letters. I was very intrigued to find out the history behind the first chain letters and that I wasn't the only person in the 7th grade being fooled by them. The description of the chain letter on pg. 320 says "a meme motivating its human carriers with promises and threats" and if you turn back a page to 319, it is mentioned how chain letters were sent in ways such as written letters, photo copies, email, typewritten letters, and through the use of carbonic paper. This highly fascinates me because I feel like if it would've taken any more effort than a copy and paste, then I wouldn't have participated. I remember always getting chain letters talking about things like "If you don't send this to 12 or more people..."

• you'll die in X hours/days
• illness will come to your mother
• you'll lose a large sum of money
• instagram will shut down your account
• you won't get into heaven

Or things like "If you DO send this to 12 or more people..."

• you'll live forever
• your wish will come true
• you'll win the lottery
• you'll be the most popular kid in school
• your crush will like you back
• you won't die

In all honesty, up until sometime during highschool, I continued to resend these chain letters. It wasn't necessarily that I believed what they said was going to happen, but you know... better send it around just in case.

373-412.

I feel like I rambled a little bit up there (but that's the beauty of a blog, sometimes it's nice to get a glimpse into someones ramblings and into how their brain works) so i'll shorten this up a bit and finish off with a little text to text comparison.

• On page 378, the Lighthouse of Alexandria and all it's wonderful texts are being talked about and then it's mentioned that the library itself burned down. The text says that there is no way of knowing how it burned down, but it is likely that it was an act of power. I think it's interesting how this is the second time, in two different books (see Manguel), that burning books as an act of power is mentioned. This just goes to show that books are in fact knowledge and knowledge is in fact power. Multiple examples of authoritative figures burning books are given-
• The Romans burning the books of the Jews, Christians, and the Pagans
• The Christians burnt the books of the Pagans and the Jews
• The Qin Dynasty burned he books of China "in order to erase previous history"

And it kind of drives me nut to think about where the book mentions how we only have less than a tenth of Sophocles' plays, second or third hand works by Aristotle, but I also regain a little bit of my sanity when page 379 talks about the work people did to retrieve what they could of those texts from all over the world, it's peaceful to know that books are something important to people.

Organizing Information

Assigned Reading- Information 3-50

Looking at my past blogs, I feel like the points i'm trying to make have been a little scattered (which makes sense because I scatter all of my thoughts all over the place while trying to read) so i'm going to try to organize my reading by focusing on two main points.

• "My mind wanders around, and I conceive of different things day and night. Like a science-fiction writer, i'm thinking, "What if it were like this?" Pg. 3

This reminds me of an English teacher I had my senior year, she would always talk about the different interpretations of different works of literature. Her example was always "the man with the blue house", she started by asking about what message the author meant to get across by giving the man a blue house. Classmates, myself included, gave answers such as the blue color of the man's house was a representation of things such as emotion, bad events in the man's life, the weather in the town and the teacher would always go back to the comment that maybe the man's house was blue simply because this was the color the author preferred. This experience, simple as it may be, brought my attention to the fact that one sentence in literature can be interpreted in a different way for each person that reads it.

• "When a code is not a code" Pg. 13

Opposite of the response I wrote above, this second chapter talks about how although many things in literature can be intepreted in many different ways there are still some things that can universally come up with the same meaning through context clues. In example, when the drummers on page 13 do not directly say come back home, but rather mention the movement of their feet returning to where they came from. There is another good example of this mentioned with the word "corpse" and "which lies on its back on clods of the earth" and with "don't be afraid" and "bring your heart back down out of your mouth, your heart out of your mouth, get it back down from there".

Both of these quotes, while different, represent reading well and the fact that while everyone is reading something different we are all connected by reading the same thing.

Acts of Reading. Tracks of Reading. Snacks of Reading.

"Reading means approaching something that is just coming into being." -Italo Calvino [pg. 25]
Most of you reading my blogs will begin to notice that I like lists, lists help me organize my thoughts and make sense of all of them when I finally complete a work. I've always been a visual learner from mapping out my papers to making countless shopping lists to get me through the day, because of this Manguel's comment, "Reading begins with the eyes." immediately jumped out to me.

• "Reading begins with the eyes." At first glance this seems like an obvious statement, but at a closer look it draws a lot of attention. Reading with your eyes, unlike hearing a work of literature helps you better understand the material in front of you.
• Reading with your eyes also better connects to your memory, as mentioned on page 30. Using my eyes, and re reading and re reading in order to memorize has always been very helpful to me.

When using the definition of a book used by Maguel, you can define it as an established artifact in different forms. In example,

• Music- sheet music, notes
• Dance- choreographed routine marks
• Sports- the play book
• People's faces- emotions
• The sky- weather

Reading is always written in the present tense because the story is happening as you read it, this goes back to he argument of whether the writer or he reader is master. Points in this argument could be as follows

• The reader is master because the interpretation lies in their hands
• The writer MAKES you think
• The reader CHOOSES what to think about it

My favorite and final point that stuck out to me during the reading is that of "We all read a different book". No two books are exactly the same. This, to be honest, sent me into a confusing spiral of thought. 

• Reading a stop sign vs. reading and perceiving literature (Al-Haytham, p. 33) You have no choice but to read the stop sign, to sit down and read a book, on the other hand, is optional 
• Also your brain, so used to reading, attempts to make sense of random symbols or gibberish (p. 37)

M.A.N.G.U.E.L.

English literature is something rather new to me, English composition is more my style. Although I have read countless works throughout my lifetime, I've never analyzed and thought about what i'm reading from every possible point of view. With Manguel's A History of Reading, I feel like my eyes are being open to multiple points of view so far from those who have had their right to read taken away from them. 

Some things I learned from, not only, Manguel, but also from our discussion in class were...

• Reading is knowledge and knowledge is power
• So when reading is being taken away from people, the authoritative figures taking the books away are trying to state their authority
• Censorship
• "You say it how I say it or I do not hear it at all."
• If there is a power to something, it has the potential to be taken away
• Reading vs. Writing- they are NOT the same
• "I am not alone"
• Reading brings people from all over together
• "Who should be the master? The writer or the reader?"