What's Cooler than Being Cool? Ice Cold.

I wanted to use this post to address the poem by Gwendolyn Brooks We Real Cool -

This poem drives me absolutely crazy with how many possible meanings each line could have. 

Let's look at the beginning: Why are there seven guys playing pool? You can fit up to about four people on one table in order to have a good game of pool, so there is an odd man out - why is the odd man out even present? After listening to the reading by Brooks on poets.org, I found that there were actually seven people she passed. Also the Golden Shovel really stands out to me, as I said in class, because of the simplicity of an item like a shovel being golden, making it worth so much more than it actually is worth. 

Then there is the rest of the poem. I like the idea of the emphasis being put the other words except for 'we'. When Brooks reads her poem, the word we is almost inaudible - this gives me the idea that the boys are not so much concerned about who they are but what they do, which goes perfectly with the stereotype of the 'rebel' or 'cool' personality. These boys are "real cool" according to Brooks, who skip school and thin gin. Thinning gin is also thought provoking - are they drinking a lot of gin or are they thinning it with water in order to peddle it, perhaps sell some quick gin in order to make a few bucks to support other habits?

Jazzing June really gave me a laugh in class, because I had no idea that jazz had at one point a sexual connotation, but thinking about it now I suppose that is not much of a surprise considering the whole "jazz scene" which is very much sexually charged. 

My favourite line from the poem is definitely "We sing sin" because it reminds me for some reason of the song "Only the Good Die Young" by Billy Joel. The line that comes to mind is "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saint" following that up with "sinners have much more fun". That song contradicts the last line of the poem because "only the good die young" according to Billy, but to Brooks "We die soon" after such sinning.

THE POOL PLAYERS. 

SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL. 

We real cool. We 

Left school. We 

Lurk late. We 

Strike straight. We 

Sing sin. We 

Thin gin. We 

Jazz June. We 

Die soon. 

The reading of the poem can be found here : 

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15433

Lastly I cannot help but comment on how strikingly similar Gwendolyn Brooks is to Bill Cosby

      

Can't you see it?

Happy Wednesday! 

Cat

 

We Should All Learn What "Feminism" Means

I am going to attempt to explain some personal views that relate to the story A&P by John Updike, but I am probably going to get lost in my thoughts and contradict myself a ton so hang in there, I will make sense eventually.

My favourite kind of literature is British classics, especially Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. I am indeed a feminist in the traditional sense of believing in the economic, political, and social equality of men and women, however, I am not a "feminist" according to today's connotation of the word making a feminist a women who yells and screams about how women are treated poorly. I do not believe that women can be equal to men in many areas, just as men are not equal to women in many areas. We are two different genders, therefore we will not be equal. When it comes to human rights, sure we are equal in that we are all human, but women and men have different strengths that need to highlighted by those genders instead of trying to force the two genders to be the same. I believe in the strength of man, and the power of the female advantage. Girls can do anything that icky boys do, we just do it differently. A man can lift a heavy box on his own and carry it up to his apartment just as well as a girl can bat her eyelashes and get a man to do that for her.

I am not against feminism, okay maybe I am against the radical feminists who instead of going on about the strength of women they decide to act as though women are superior to men, that is not okay in my book. I do not believe that either sex is superior to the other, I just do not feel like women need to get all in uproar about men treating them certain ways.

Take A&P for example, when Sammy was thinking those things about Queenie as she struts her half  clothes body around the store. She deliberately went into that store in a bikini, which she knows is not proper shopping etiquette, calling attention to herself - so we should not be appalled when Sammy takes notice of her. If Sammy pressed the issue further and made Queenie uncomfortable by coming onto her unwelcome or trying to cop a feel - then by all means throw some stones at Sammy. All he did was appreciate the body that she was putting on display in the middle of a supermarket. No one is to blame, it is not a "creepy" situation, but one that happens every single day and one that tons of people will look at and act as though Sammy has committed some kind of hanous crime.

The story was very enjoyable all together, I had read it in highschool and completely forgot what it was until I looked at it in class after I read the wrong short story (instead of reading A&P, I read Kafka.. oops) for homework. Even way back in junior year of high school, I stood firmly by Sammy and his thoughts. He did nothing wrong, he is not a creep, he is just a typical person, not even a typical boy, just a person who can think whatever he wishes about whoever he wishes.

That is all, going to take a nap before I blog more about literature and such,

Cat

A Message to Humanity

I have just finished furiously reading Cathedral by Raymond Carter, although it seemed more like I was eating the text than reading it. I absolutely loved this short story about a very cynical man who befriends, to his great surprise, the blind friend of his wife. Throughout the story I could not get over just how rude the narrator was being when describing his apprehensions of having his wife's friend visit because the man is blind. I am a very accepting person who has seen just about every walk of life in my short but exciting twenty years here on earth, and sometimes cannot grasp exactly where people are coming from with their prejudices. The narrator has never met this man before and his wife, who I assume the narrator loves, has spoken so highly of this man for years and still he did not like the man solely because he was blind and apparently blind people make the narrator uncomfortable.

Having never actually MET a blind person before, he jumped to outrageous conclusions about blind people based solely on films, and the opinions of others. I did not appreciate his attitude until the climax of the story, when the two work together to blindly draw a cathedral. This story melted my heart - the image of the two very different men sitting together, stoned, drawing was not by any means expected and revived my faith for the narrator, and for people in general. The author is not very far off with how easily a perception of someone can change, and how easily we can connect if all we do is open up to one another. As Whitman talks of in Song of Myself, we are all from the same dirt, the same air and atoms and earth - why are we so quick to judge and so quick to lock out those we feel are different than us? If you keep pushing away everyone without a chance, you will end up a very lonely, bitter old maid, but that is very much my own opinion.

I would, and have already recommended this short story to anyone to read, because there is not a small audience for the message of this story. The audience in fact is all of humanity!

I am going to get back to reading now,

Cat

This is J-Term!

I have always been a very avid blogger and being assigned to write a blog for class was one of the best moments in my college career so far. The point of this blog is to comment on the reading I have done for class and to elaborate on that reading, which I hope to do successfully.

I was a little weary about J-Term over Christmas break, because this is the start of my English career and I want to start out on a great foot - this is, after all, what I wish to do for the rest of my life. I have been happily surprised with the readings so far. I am typically a very picky reader (my tastes lean towards classic British literature and I do not tend to really enjoy a lot else) but the pieces that we have read so far have being very pleasant.

I am a screen writer by trade and a poet by nature, so starting off the term by analyzing a ton of poetry is just peachy! My favourite of the poems read for Tuesdays class was hard to choose, but I must admit that the piece that stuck out the most to me was William Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" to my great surprise. I have never been a very big Wordsworth fan, yet there is something about a poem as light as this one. The images he describes are simple, but vivid - the daffodils dancing took me a moment to comprehend for my mind must have been somewhere else, with the first note I took for that line reading, "It must be pretty windy out because the daffodils keep moving". I pushed past that subjective view of the poem, as the text encouraged me so, and my mind was filled with images of daffodils dancing in their fields and how truly beautiful that must seem.

I worked in a flower store for about a year in high school, and daffodils were a very popular potted plant during the Easter season, grandmothers really got excited about buying twenty potted daffodils for every relative they could list. I had never liked the looks of those daffodils, probably because I was surrounded by them daily, but also because they are not exactly the prettiest flower of the bunch. I had not seen a daffodil in some time, so I googled them and found this image which I actually find quite pretty, and somewhat calming:



After looking at this photo, I can really see what Wordsworth was describing, and really hope that I stumble upon a field of dancing daffodils someday soon (if this snow will ever melt).

I cannot wait to read more!

Cat