Final Blog Entry April 17, 2009

My mystory project will be based around the Apollo 11 shuttle launch. I plan to give the subjective experience of one of the crew members, and portray how they felt leading up to the launch, during, and after. Space has always been something that really interests me and I feel this would be a great approach for me personally to take. I will use an approach that incorporates the crew members family, and how he feels about them being back home without him.

This has been a pretty good semester, and I can honestly say I’ve learned a lot. Being forced to think outside the grid has enhanced my critical thinking ability.

Slaughterhouse 5 April 10, 2009

Slaughterhouse 5 introduces a form of poetics that we haven’t yet seen. Vonnegut uses a lot of jumping around, and going from place to place, time to time, to illustrate his plot. This can be somewhat confusing, but it is also effective in its way. You have to readjust yourself each time he jumps around so that you can fully comprehend what he is talking about. This is effective because it requires you to be playing close attention the whole time in order to keep up with whats going on.

I feel that Billy Pilgrim is a bit off his rocker, but I also feel that in one way or another sometimes we can possibly relate to him. We all sometimes feel lost or like we aren’t really sure what is going on. I mean I have never thought that I was being abducted by aliens or anything, but sometimes I get so caught up with everything going on that I forget what it is i’m doing.

Proposal April 3, 2009

1) I plan to take the approach of an identity

2) I plan to take up the identity of a nurse or doctor during the cold war days (haven’t picked a specific event thus far). this is relevant to me personally because being a nurse is my goal in life, and medicine/ caring for sick people is what I feel  very strongly about. I will express the role of a nurse and what she goes through during this tiem

3) My issue within the doxa: The conventional thinking of this may be that the doctors and nurses were swamped with a lot of sick and dying patients, especially after world war 2, but I plan to help the readers look more into their lives than just seeing the surface.

4) The attitude of this experience is one of dispair, worry, constant stress. I haven’t decided whether or not my character is for or against the war.

5) I forsee this piece being very emotional and physically exhausting on the character, but this won’t be clearly evident through my words, or at least that is my goal.

6) The recipe that i see working the best with my piece will be the use of fragmented thoughts, unfiltered thoughts, anecdotes and personal accounts. This is what has interested me most in our readings, so I see it would be useful to incorporate these modes of writing into my project.

7) A potential figure i may  employ is of a nurse from around this time. When i think about the chaos of what they must have endured, I think of the movie Pearl Harbor and the scenes of the hospitals and the scene on the boat where there were thousands of dying soldiers that couldn’t all be saved, and the nurses and doctors that were desperately trying to save them and devastated when they couldn’t. This is what I picture, and I hope to capture something along these lines for my project.

Rainy Mountain April 3, 2009

This week I have noticed most of the works we have been reading were about culture. The poetics involved in these pieces was very well thought out and attention grabbing, because it was unfiltered. I find this very interesting, and I am much more intrigued by these pieces. Anzaldua’s including Spanish and slang is a teqhnique that I think would work very well.

In Rainy Mountain, we see the decline and eventual disappearance of the Kiowa tribe, and this is sad to me. This culture completely disappeared and for these people to not know their ancestry is tragic. I can’t imagine not knowing my background and where I came from and the traditions that my family before me held. Lullaby was centered around the Navajo indian culture, and it was equally as interesting to me. The struggles of this family were different, they didn’t lose thier culture per say, but they didn’t fit in where they were because they were stuck in an area far away from their people. Both of these pieces remind me of how thankful I am to know my background, and where my family came from. I will never forget where I came from, and I never take for granted this right that I have.

Everyday Use March 27, 2009

In the short story Everyday Use, Dee or as she preferred to be called, Wangero, went from hating where she came from to a facade of appreciation of her heritage. If she really appreciated her background she wouldn’t have changed her name. She was attempting to show gratitude and acknowledgement of her heritage because that was the current ‘style’. She wanted to hang up the quilt rather than allow it to be used for what it was made for. The heritage behind the quilt is what it took to make it. Maggie got first hand heritage and memories from her grandmother, whereas Wangero is simply trying to use the quilt as her memory. Dee accuses her mother and sister of not appreciating their heritage, when her own appreciation was far from genuine. I come from a small town that most people would be eager to get away from and forget. I may not want to move back there after college, but I am proud of where I came from and believe it had a huge part in forming the person that I am today. You can never forget where you came from. This is one of the problems I see with a lot of celebrities, they forget their upbringing and what it took for them to get to the top, and thats when they lose a lot of fans and respect.

 

From monday: In our group, we discussed Roth’s technique of using history combined with personal anecdotes. We all believe that this method is successful in drawing the attention of the readers because it makes history seem more personal.

Plot Against America March 20, 2009

The fact that this novel was written after 2001 struct my attention. I think that this novel could reference George W. Bush and all the drama that occurred during his presidency. There was so much conflct during his era, and I can see some people comparing him to Lindbergh. He also had 2 terms, like FDR, and by the time he was done people were so against him. Obama seemed to be this countries ‘saving grace’ to many people, just like Lindbergh. This of course couldn’t have had anything to do with writing the novel, as Obama wasn’t a figure of history at the time the novel was written, however its just something I noticed. Also, just as many despised Lindbergh and thought he was going to turn the country upside down, there are some that see Obama this way. There are so many similarities that it is hard to ignore.

Sylvia Plath February 27, 2009

Like Lauren mentioned in her blog, I also have never really cared for Sylvia Plath. I read her works in high school English and literature classes, and was just appalled at how graphic she was and how all her poems seemed to mention in a way that she really only desired to be dead. I haven’t necessarily changed my mind, her poetry still doesn’t really appeal to me, but I am somewhat interested in what some of her works have to say.

For instance the poem Daddy struck my attention. It is about her seemingly twisted relationship with her daddy. All of her poetry is a confessional style, and in this particular poem she was letting her feelings out by talking to her dead father. She portrayed many different emotions. At some times I thought she hated him, but other times I thought she just really missed him and hated how he had left her alone. Overall, I realized that she was merely talking to him because she needed to be able to connect with him, because at the end she said ‘dadddy you can lie back now….i’m through’.

Tradition? February 20, 2009

As I was reading Big Sur, what really hit me and interested  me was what Kerouac had to say about the passersby when he was trying to hitch hike. He talks about the man in his perfectly pressed slacks and his tourist hat, driving his station wagon. The man has beside him a ‘sneering’ woman with big glasses, who bosses him around. In the back are the screaming children that are spilling things and causing a ruckus. He talks about how the man couldn’t take the backroads and stray from the chosen path even if he wanted to, because his wife wouldn’t let him. This makes me think. Is this traditional American family being too confined by the grid? Are all the many Americans who live this ‘PTA’ life being close minded? I guess this sends me back to our first topic of the American Dream. It must be different for everyone, but that is my American dream. The vacations and road trips and screaming, spilling children, but I also hope for a bit of spontanaiety in my life so as to not be confined to the ‘grid’.

Common Myth February 13, 2009

In reading the Cold War, I, like everyone else have discovered how little I know about what really happened. I’ve gathered all my knowlege from what has been passed down from my parents. They were alive and old enough to know what was going on but I was not. My parents were’nt even alive in the beginning stages of the cold war, right after World War 2. This is when the whol ‘arms race’ seemed to begin. This is one thing about our history as far as wars goes that has always struck my attention, but then again  used to strike Pearl Harbor, our nation decided that in order to protect ourselves we needed to ‘one up’ our enemies by having a stronger armed force and more effective nuclear devices. The country people followed along with this because the consensus belief was that this was needed for our countries safety. The Soviets at one point began to slide ahead of us with their success at developing more and more weapons. Their launching of the Sputnik into space before we managed to launch our own venture into space added to the American anxiety that we may be losing the race. The American people began to blame Eisenhower and say that we were lagging and allowing the Soviets to have a surge in technology. I find reading all of this now very interesting, and it shows me how little I really did know and wish I could have had a first hand account to go by.

New world order February 6, 2009

Discussing new world order and old world order in class has really struck my attention. I’ve known for a while that things are always changing, and although I try to avoid it, sometimes change can really scare me. I guess sometimes I associate myself more with the old order as opposed to the new. I am much more old fashioned than my friends, because I’ve always accepted what I grew up believing. I’ve had beliefs passed down to my from my parents and grandparents and i’ve never questioned it. Sometimes one can get stuck in a place, in a particular good time or maybe bad, and be afraid of what a change will bring. Maybe leaving home for the first time, for example. This is a change for everyone who encounters it. Many take it as a positive step in their future, and a time to build their own beliefs. Others fall apart, without their parents constant guidance. I’ve begun, slowly but surely, to embrace the new world order and take change as it comes. Change is the only constant. It is the one thing you can always count on to happen for sure.