Severe Writer's Block

When you are writing a story, or a novel, or any other type of text that is for you then writer’s block is not that bad. I’m not saying that it doesn’t make my head hurt or that it is not an annoying thing. However, you can just power off the computer and wait until another moment where your hands are not fast enough to type all your brain thinks. When I have to write to comply with a deadline (as is the case with blog entries) and I have writer’s block, there is where I want to connect a machine to my brain to get me out it. I have been sitting in front of a white page for about an hour, just staring at it blankly and writing several starts to blogs about the fourth part of Gulliver’s Travels. They all sounded something like this, “In the fourth part of Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift Gulliver reaches a new place because the men in his ship hold a mutiny and throw him off the boat. Here he gets to the land of the Houyhnhnms where he meets new characters. These are horses, but they are not normal horses, the horses here are like the people in England. In this part of the book Swift describes the new creatures…” and on and on in a repetitive fashion that says nothing of importance. Why have I entered into this state of writer’s block? Who knows? I don’t know why it happens, and even worse, I don’t know how to get out of it and how to write a worthwhile response. I guess I first have to know what I’m trying to say. As I think about that, though, I get this weird feeling that I want to say nothing at all. Maybe what happens is not that I have writer’s block but that I have nothing to say about the first two chapters. I thought that maybe I could talk about the description of the horses or the yahoo but I really don’t have much to say about that. I did think it was cool how Swift managed to make the reader understand that the Houyhnhnms are a smart people that not only think but have the ability to communicate on a complex level with each other. This is something that for us, humans, is only seen in mankind and what we say is the difference between men and “brutes.” To say that I find more in these chapters would be lying because I see no satirical pieces or any part worth mentioning. Is my mind malfunctioning today? Yes, it probably is. Whatever the reason I cannot possibly say more about this except retell the events of the second chapter which are basically descriptions of foods and the way he relates to the horses and the yahoos, but again nothing that I found very interesting. I will leave this post at this, because whatever more I say will be redundant and useless, but I will try to examine this part again and see if maybe I can find any other comments to make.

Chuck Close At The Gallery

I went to the art gallery to see Chuck Close's work, and based on the images of some og his pieces that we had seen in class I was not sure I was going to like his work very much. However, when i got there i really liked the mirror pictures. These were a small rectangle of material like mirror that actrually had a daguerrotype of people on it. The images, though, were not seen unless you stood right infornt of them and gave them color. I thought that not only were these very interesting because of how they worked but also because of the menaning that I found on them. As I thought back to them i think that the pieces were trying to tell us that stories and people only exist when we "look" at them. It seemed like they were not there until i stood right infornt of them and foucsed my attention on them and for some reason this metaphor with life, where people's stories don't really exist until you know about them, was very impacting. I thought that it was very nice to go and look at art and although I sometimes go to galleries it is something that I enjoy and I should do more often.

Irony And Sarcasm With Swift

It seems in chapter VI as if there was no end to the mockery. Swift criticizes many aspects of life in this chapter and he also makes fun of things that we don’t even give consideration to.

“…but their manner of writing is very peculiar, being neither from the left to the right, like the Europeans, nor from the right to the left, like the Arabians, nor from up to down, like the Chinese, but aslant, from one corner of the paper to the other…” (Swift, 32) here I think that Swift is using lists as a way to show the magnitude of language variations and how none of the many different ways we have worked. I think it might be a way to make fun of the lack of effectiveness of humans and at how we just cannot come to an agreement and all decide on one manner to do things but rather have a million different ways to do each thing.

“They bury their dead with their heads directly downward…the earth (which they conceive to be flat) will turn upside down, and by this means they shall, at their resurrection, be found ready
standing on their feet.” (Swift, 33) This sounds funny as you read it because logic tells us first that the world is not flat and second that even if it was it would still not have flipped around. It seems a little silly to believe in this, but I think the point that the author is trying to make is that we have the seem ideas that to others might seem weird and even pathetic based just on faith and tradition.

“There are some laws and customs in this empire very peculiar; and if they were not so directly contrary to those of my own dear country, I should be tempted to say a little in their justification.” (Swift, 33) Following Swift describes things that, in the case that the world was just and honest, should be very important to us. However our society thinks opposite of many of these ideals, although we proclaim that we don’t, and this is the point that Swift is trying to get across to the reader.

“...they will never allow that a child is under any obligation to his father for begetting him, or to his mother for bringing him into the world; which, considering the miseries of human life, was neither a benefit in itself, nor intended so by his parents, whose thoughts, in their love encounters, were otherwise employed.” (Swift, 35) This passage is damp with irony and sarcasm, presenting the option of children not wanting to be in the world because of the bad place it is and saying that bringing children into the world is not something that they should thank their parents for but rather hate them for. This option is something that most people don’t consider and that is why it seems like a crazy idea.

Casual v. Serious

There are many differences between the three feature articles that we read, The Cost Cunundrum, Heeeer’s…Conan!, and JA, but the thing that struck me as the most different was the tone in which each of the articles was written. The Cost Cunundrum was an article that talked about health care in the United States and used facts and numbers to prove a point. Heeeer’s…Conan! Talked related the last moments of The Late Show and how the transition to The Tonight Show was taking place. JA was a piece that retold the life and experiences of a graffiti artist named JA. The first had a serious and punctual tone, the second had a nostalgic and sentimental tone, and the last one had a casual and factual tone. However, while each of these articles told a very different story in very different ways they were all clearly informative articles that were telling a story. I thought that it was very interesting to see how three different topics that can be as varied as you can get all registered as news in my brain regardless of the fact that none of them had anything in common. I think that reading these articles helped me notice that the point of a feature article is that it states something that people don’t know and that it manages to capture people’s attention while it does it. If I were to write a feature article now I would feel that I had a lot more freedom in regards to what subject I was covering and to the style that I was using to write the news because know I know that not all news have to be serious. A piece can be written casually and be understood as well as if it was written in a serious tone. Another thing that I saw is that each piece comes from a different place. I usually look at the same site for all my news, but I noticed that it might be really good to switch it up a bit and look at new sources or at a big list of them so I can get news on all areas and also in all styles s that reading does not become stale.

MacBeth Festival

I have always said that I like the classes where we do morew than only read and write, those where we get to use our creativity to learn. I think that having a MacBeth festival where we acted out the most importnat scenes of the play was a great way to do this. I really appriciated the opportunity to do something different and to apply what we had learned about composition to our plays. I only got to act and could not see any of the other plays, but still I imagine that it was very interesting to see how each group interpretated their characters. It was very nice to see that some people saw Lady MacBeth as an evil, power thirsty person while others saw her as a loving wife who felt remorse for what she was doing. I hope that we get to do more activities such as these and that as we have been doing through the year we make posters, presentation, etc. to keep the class interesting. I did not see the scenes as i mentiones before, but I am sure that they were all very good because people had been focusing on practicing the play and learning the lines to make it a good scene.

The Search For Satire

As I read Gulliver’s Travels I started to get worried about something, which, in all honesty, makes me doubt whether or not I am good with literature. Do I understand satire? Does parody make any sense to me? I would love to think that it does because that makes me feel like a cultured person. However I had the same feeling that I have now as I read Inferno, part of The Divine Comedy. I cannot lie by saying that it inspired laughter in me. I did not see almost any comedic sense on this work. With the present book I have laughed and I have seen parody, but some times pages keep on going on and I find nothing that could be a parody. This makes me doubt if the problem lies with me because I am sure that other people find something that makes fun of something else every two minutes. I felt compelled, thus, to share some of the things that I found funny in hopes of being corrected if I am wrong and learning more about satire and close reading.

The first obvious irony can be seen when the six inch Lilliput’s imprison the six foot Gulliver. One thing that I found very funny was the description of a watch that was made by the two Lilliputian officers in the inventory to the King. Here they say that they think that it is the object of his worship because “he seldom did any Thing without consulting it…he said that it pointed out the time for every action of his life.” (Swift, 14) I thought that this was funny because if you have never heard of a watch and someone tells you that this is what it is for, then you would probably get the impression that they are talking about a God because it seems so important. However we know that they are describing an apparatus that tells time, and I think that the parody is at society that pays more attention to time and lets that rule our life rather than to a God. We are, in a way, giving more importance to a material object than to a deity which is a little absurd, or at least it was in the time were the church was the center of life or had been recently. Another thing that I thought was a parody was the way the people of court got their jobs and their positions, by dancing on ropes and playing a game that sounded like how low can you go. I think this was mocking the nepotistic system that is applied at courts and how the King would chose whomever he liked for jobs that should be chosen by a meticulous process. Then another part that I liked and laughed was where he described how Gulliver had to swear loyalty, “hold my right foot in my left hand, to place the middle finger of my right hand on the crown of my head, and my thumb on the tip of my right ear.” (Swift, 20) Here the pure absurdity of the way we use gestures and movements, such as the locking of pinkies, to seal a deal is shown to us because we think upon reading the description that the are crazy but it is really no different to what we do. The other very direct mock is when he describes the fact that the small island might go to war with their neighbor, Blefuscu, and the cause is explained. It all started because one island likes to break their eggs form the large side while the other does it from the small side. Do eggs even have a smaller side? It is foolish to go to war over such a silly subject and what Swift is doing is mocking the silly reasons and excuses that countries use to go to war with each other and showing that they sound just like this unreasonable cause. As I go on I will try to analyze more of the satire, and I hope by the end of the book I will have found many, many more.

Gulliver Park And Misconceptions

The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear of Gulliver is the children's book that I read when I was about 7 about this character. The next thing is my visit to Gulliver Park in Valencia, Spain, where my family and I spent almost half a day running up and down Gulliver. I also remember that while I had lots of fun scrambling up his lags and sliding down his arms, there was something scary about the fact that there was a giant tied to the floor. On top of that, there was something that scared me a little about the facial expression and the way his body was contorted. Why are these things important? I think that I just felt that having a previous idea of what the story would tell made me start reading with some sort of prejudice towards it. I felt like we were going to dwell on a story made for little kids, which although I found interesting I really didn't understand very well. Now, however, I noticed that this perception I had about the story being made for kids was completely erroneous because there is so much in the book that only people who understand literature could catch, I don't even think I understand half of what is there, that it makes it a book for literates.