Folk Tales--Evolutions

When I was younger, one of my favorite activities was swapping ghost stories with friends.  The goal was to scare the most people with a single story.  The one that freaked me out the most was the story of the stolen bone, though I've heard it in different ways.  Anyway, a young man is starving and finds a bone with a large amount of meat on it one day in a field.  He goes home, cooks it, and eats the meat.  That night, the corpse that had lost whatever limb the man ate, comes back to reclaim it. And, in true horror story fashion, the man is never seen or heard of again.  

Freaky, right?  This one bothered me because I like steak and I don't necessarily know where my steak comes from, but that is beside the point.  When reading Diop's The Bone, I felt like that ghost story from my childhood could be The Bone II: Curse of Good Meat or something ridiculous.  In both stories, the bone and choice meat are the main character's downfall.  They are driven by a similar motive, hunger, however there is a different lesson from both.  Diop seems to be telling his audience to avoid being selfish, and the story I knew was more of a be careful with strange meat, both of which are good life lessons.  

Now, that was totally off the wall, but it is what The Bone reminded me of. 

...the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo

I love this poem by Eliot.  I feel like it easily transfers to the current time period.  The speaker and whoever they are travelling with discover the dive bars and seedy hotels.  Now, in 2011, it's like he's going hipster hunting.  "Hey, let's go check out all the ironically cool places that are cool because they are not mainstream" is how I feel this would translate.  

Anywho, I love this poem. I feel that it's ok even though it rhymes.  Rhyming to me is something that is rather elementary. Elementary in the sense that very often that is what people get caught up on when writing poetry at a young age. I care more about the rhythm of a phrase and how it is read aloud.  However, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock rolls off the tongue naturally.  The phrasing isn't difficult; the lines are long enough that they aren't choppy, but not so long that it is hard to get them out in one breath.  I'm hung up on how well it flows.

The language is not extravagant or hard to read.  It is simple, but I feel like there's something I'm missing.  This doesn't come across as a traditional love song.  I feel like there's something that would make it an obvious thing about love, but I'm just not seeing it.

There is a disjointed feeling in this poem.  The beginning stanzas are all about running and living life to the fullest; experiencing everything they can.  by the time you hit the stanzas after the second couplet the speaker begins to question whether it is appropriate to go out of his standard path and explore the dive bars he would normally avoid.  A sense of hopelessness settles over the poem until the very end when he shows a more flippant attitude.

This poem fascinates me.

Things Fall Apart

So I wrote an entire paper on this novel.  I guess it just interested me.

This time however, I'm going to talk about the daughter.  She prefers to act as a boy; She sits like a boy, talks like a boy, and wants to do male tasks.  Now, the question is why does she do this?

There is the first option that tends to feel that it's because she is just programmed that way.  Genetically, she may have a predisposition towards acting as a male child.  At some point, there is the possibility that there was something in her brain that made it easier for her to act as a male.  She could be, in theory, a male in a female body.  However, her actions do not come across as that far off of a rebellious female.  She is able to conform, she just doesn't want to.

The second option would be that she is a child of her environment.  She wants her father's love and support and doesn't get it from him. She knows her brother does and she begins to crave that.  the difference between her and her brother is the fact he is male.  When a child wants something and knows that it is possible if something is added to them, they start to do that.  In this case, the girl has penis envy, according to Freud.

When it comes down to it, it's a nature/nurture question.  In this case however, I feel that the evidence points mostly to the second option which is a nurture issue.  There may be a part of her that is less agreeable which would be genetic, but again, the bigger part of it is the upbringing.

Snow Country

This story, if you have an imagination, is beautiful. The last scene in particular, grabs my attention.  I feel like I get what Shimamura was trying to get across.

You know that watching her fall is horrible and sad.  But, if you focus solely on the fact that she's falling out of a building, that, to me, is too much fear and sorrow to deal with.  You've got to pull out and not focus on the fact that she's not dead yet and will die when she hits the ground.  Instead, to pull the scene out and paint a picture, a static image, takes away some of the horror.  The separation and lack of emotional  connection to the death of a young woman is surprising to me.  The main character had been fascinated with her, but does not seem to be capable of feeling anything for her death.  In order to keep his composure, I feel that he had to pull out or divert his emotion.

Ok, the best example of something like this is as follows.  You know where you were when the planes hit the World Trade Center Towers in 2001.  Heck, I can tell you that the weather was gorgeous and my teacher had the windows open.  I could hear the younger kids on the playground.  I couldn't comprehend the event that I pulled out of the moment.  I feel like that's what happens.  He's so stunned by what is happening that he is pulling out for his own sanity so he can slowly start to understand.  His moment with the Milky Way is familiar to me.  I did the same thing in fourth grade.

I dunno, I understand it this way.

Super behind...whoops.

Ok, so I'm super behind. So, onward we plow.

In a discussion I was having with a friend the other day, I determined that there are not many strong female characters in literature.  I feel like this is the case in this class.  With the exception of In Camera, which is led by a strong feminist, I feel that many women are definitely shown as second best. In Pedro Perama, Susanna was crucial to the plot, but she was not strong.  Her father was a little creepy and Pedro was possessive. In The Rooftop Dwellers, the main character allowed the family that she leased her room from to walk all over her.  The geishas from Snow Country were passive and rather wishy washy.  Joyce's women were not the focus of his piece, however Mrs. Ivers did stand on her own, but in a brusque manner that is not something that most women would like to emulate.

I guess my frustration is that even in the literature of the early 20th Century women were stuck in stereotypical roles. Men were able to be rounded characters.  Joyce attempts this, I feel, by giving the wife a back story in The Dead, but we don't really know what she's thinking like we do with her husband.