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.