June 27

I am so lost with this book, I am having a hard time really understanding what is going on. It seems to be jumping from one thing to the next, and it's hard to keep track of what's going on. I was hoping to find some sort of summary, or study guide to maybe guide my reading.

Mortality: Sleeping and Death

The poem that really caught my attention was Richard Cory.
Here is this man that everyone reveres, and wishes to be, and then one night he just decides to put a bullet into his head. What part of the story are we missing. How was this poor man really feeling? On the outside he was everything that everyone wanted to be, but was he someone he really wanted to be? What was so horrible that he would take his own life. I felt really shocked and confused when I read this poem. I almost wish there was a poem from his side to see how things really were, instead of having to speculate why he did what he did.
As for the connection for sleeping and death: How nice it would be when the time comes to just go to sleep and not wake up. I think authors write this way to give a kind of acceptance to death. However you've got my thought process on the other hand.
Death doesn't really phase me. It's irreversible, and it's a part of life, so to speak. However, it's the process of getting to death that really rattles my cage. What if I end up with some terminal illness or get into a serious accident, and end up dying slowly spending my last moments in agony.
I don't know, just a thought.

Mortality

I don't really know how to respond to why the authors write about killing, each story has a very morbid ending, and it makes you wonder where authors come up with the ideas for these stories.
Perhaps it's because they're trying to explore all aspects of human nature, and express how they see that part, or maybe its perhaps it is some sick psychological problem they need to work out on paper to refrain from acting upon it themselves.
Either way I don't really know.

An Invasion

I'm not sure what I would do if my home were invaded. From what it seems the town was invaded slowly. I would hope that I would be observant enough to notice the little changes, and fight the little battles one at a time. I am a very free independent person, and I don't like being under the thumb of anyone. I really would like to think that I would fight back, if not for my own sake, but for my families sake, or at least I would die trying. Now it all reality, I don't know if I would really fight back, but I definitely would not go quietly into the night.

Monday, June 6, 2011

I know this entry wasn't supposed to be very long, however, I wasn't sure where to start or what to write, so I just had at it, and this was the outcome:

Well, let's start with the story Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I really didn't enjoy this story, it seemed very long winded, and the story felt like it dragged on FOREVER!

From what I understood, the story is about a young man and wife who live in what would seem to be a morally corrupt town for the time period, they're taken off to the woods to be initiated into the cult that engulfs the towns people, and the main character loses faith in his wife, and the townspeople he lives with, and ends up second guessing all the people he comes into contact with. 

I'm having a difficult time tying the guided questions in with the story. I suppose if the main character had given in to his wife's request to stay home, the events wouldn't have happened and he wouldn't have spent the rest of his life living in moral turmoil.

The next is What You Pawn I Will Redeem by Sherman Alexie. The story was written really well. It's about a homeless man's quest during twenty-four hours to raise nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars to buy his grandmother’s stolen powwow regalia back from a pawnshop that he came across. However the money he finds, earns, or is given is spent on himself or on the people who come in and out of his life. The story almost seems like a lesson in Karma, what goes around comes around.

I am not really a fan of poetry. I like stories, and books that are well written and filled with great imagery, but I really dislike that most poetry has to be picked apart and deciphered like hieroglyphics, because there is always some sort of symbolism or deeper meaning. So starting with The World is Too Much With Us by William Wadsworth. I didn't get much out of it other than his feeling of disconnectedness and discontent with the world.

The last of our reading assignment was Plus Shipping by Bob Hicok. From what I got it's about how our world has become so commercial and industrialized.