Monday, May 17, 2010

Three Literary Pieces

No matter what literary piece you select you will always be able to compare and contrast situations. The Fiction story “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”, the poem “the road not Taken”, and the other poem “If the World Was Crazy” are three different pieces that reflect life in different ways.

On “The Road not Taken”, you can feel a different perspective than on the fiction story. In this poem you can perceive the confrontation, challenge, and confusion of getting to a decision. You came to a world where there are several ways to follow, but you can only choose one of those in order to start your own path.

“TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both...”

Their is only one life and you can experience just one thing at a time so you need to decide where to look at and keep on going forward. This a is a the beginning of life, is a challenge and a way to build the base of your goal.

I would say that after having the base, the craziness comes in. “If the World Was Crazy”, is just having fun in the path of life you decide to have; experience all the opportunities you may have, have a desire to live, and just enjoy doing the craziest things that pops on you head. You need to enjoy life because death will come when you never expect it.

“If the world was crazy, you know what I'd wear?
A chocolate suit and a tie of eclair,
Some marshmallow earmuffs, some licorice shoes,
And I'd read a paper of peppermint news.
I'd call the boys "Suzy" and I'd call the girls "Harry,"
I'd talk through my ears, and I would always carry
A paper umbrella for when it grew hazy
To keep in the rain, if the world was crazy.”

Enjoy life and experience as you go never stopping of what you think. Follow your heart and live the present.

Finally in “A Clean Well- Lighted Place”, we can see how the perspective of life changes depending the age you have. Years pass and as you get old you believe that there is no meaning to this world, there is no God you are alone in the middle of nothingness. “I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe...With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night...” The old man of this story wants to remain in the cafe during the night because for him spending that time is like having a escape in his life. He is at the point where he describes life as nothing, he is having insomnia and all he has to do is think about the years left in that emptiness. “It is probably only insomnia. many must have it”. There is no reason to believe that each of his days would be less empty than the ones in the past.

I think that each of those three literary pieces had their own uniqueness and showed the way life is planed for all human beings. How each creature in this world acts and reacts against situations. No matter where you are, who you are and what you want you will always be one of a whole, such as a literary piece, and would always have to go through a path.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Reflexion

POEMS, ohhh.....God I loved the experience of being as a speaker and as an audience. I thought I was a very unique and different experience. Be able to express your self and also capture others attention is just wonderful. I got impressed with others work, and I also learned to realize that when you see a person you do not really know how the person is in the real world; you have no idea of how the soul of a person can be. Pro. Bonaparte I would say it was an amazing activity and I would do it again, not only to hear others but to challenge myself and think a little more deeper about me, and write down my thoughts. Inspiration helps you motivate and reach goals, and this is what I thought about this project.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010


Shel Silverstein -If the World Was Crazy-

1) What emotions/feelings do you have after reading the poem?

Joy, desire to live and experience all you can in life. Taste, laugh, smile, scream, eat, cry are feelings you need to experience before dying.

2) How does your chosen image reflect the emotions conjured by the poem? The poem talks about a crazy world, where you can do all what you want, and for me a roller coaster is a way to feel a lot of emotions mixed together. You can feel emotion, anxiety, you can also laugh, scream and experience seconds of death. When you ride a roller coaster you are actually tracking a path in several minutes, and this is what I feel while reading the poem. Is like is the author is giving us several minutes to enjoy life because death is coming.

Robert Frost - The Road Not Taken


1) What emotions/feelings do you have after reading the poem?

Confrontation, challenge, and confusion are the feelings I felt while reading the poem. It is a situation where you get worried and confused because you need to make a decision soon and that decision might mark your life.

2) How does your chosen image reflect the emotions conjured by the poem?

I interpret the poem as if someone has to take a path in life; his or her mind is picturing two roads and one is the one that is going to take him or her to a end. Which one??, that's the question with no answer.... The picture shows a human looking down because he is confused with the two paths that look the same in front but he is still confronting his feelings and thoughts.


Emily Dickinson – I felt a Funeral, in my Brain


1) What emotions/feelings do you have after reading the poem?

Desperation, stress, desire to quit, anxiety, noise was what it popped to my head once I start reading the poem and as that explosion in my head continued I finally felt silence, everything was over. Everything turned into peace and silence.

2) How does your chosen image reflect the emotions conjured by the poem?

I relate all those feelings with a clock alarm. You want to sleep, but at the same time you need yo start your day. You have so many things in mind that you want to stop TIME for a moment. Everything was calm and all of a sudden an explosion of feelings captures your mind until it explodes and shut up, and there is where you relax.


Gwendolyn Brooks – We Real Cool

1) What emotions/feelings do you have after reading the poem?

Music, noise, happiness, special memories, and smiles came to my mind.

2) How does your chosen image reflect the emotions conjured by the poem?

This image is representing live. We are born as babies, grown and become children, then into adults, but at the end of those stages you will always keep memories that will help you revive special moments. I choose the image because as I read the poem I imagine a woman sitting down remembering all the fun and unique moments she lived.



Dylan Thomas – Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night


1) What emotions/feelings do you have after reading the poem?
Once I read it I got submerge in a dark image that produced me terror, depression, and a feeling of death. But in the middle of that death a light, showing that in the middle of that darkness there was still hope, desire, and fierce; or maybe a constant fight between life and death.
2) How does your chosen image reflect the emotions conjured by the poem? A man is passing through a situation where life and death are against, he is more or less walking in the middle of the darkness from one light (life) to another (heaven or hell). The circle in this image as he walks is making him realize and get confused to take a decision. The 4 lines can represent the paths he has to choose. A light in the middle of Darkness.


Thursday, April 8, 2010

POETRY



Poetry is a literary form to express feelings and thoughts through out a rythmic written tone.


What determines what is a poem or not a poem is basically the way its written and expressed to the reader. Poems are written in verses which seek to express the emotions or impressions of the world for the author; where it is common to use rhyme and other tools of language. They usually express or evoke emotions, use symbolism, irony, metaphors to let you perceive a meaning. Poems sometimes used assonance, alliteration, and rhythm to achieve musical effects. They are lyrical expressions which hold a stylized narration through writing and this is what it makes them so unique and distingue among stories, books, articles etc.


PABLO NERUDA

(1904-1973) was perhaps the greatest Spanish poet of the 20th century. The poet known as Pablo Neruda was named NeftalĂ­ Ricardo Reyes Basoalto at his birth in 1904. He changed his name because his father disapproved of the son's poetic interests. Neruda grew up in southern Chile and in 1921 moved to Santiago and enrolled in college with the intention of preparing himself for a career as an instructor of French. He was first published in 1923. He was universally considered the finest surrealist poetry in Spanish and he always insisted that he was specifically a Latin American Poet. Neruda was awarded the International Peace Prize in 1950, the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, a Doctorate in Literature from Oxford in 1965, and the Nobel Prize in 1971. He was a diplomat for several years and always involved in politics. Neruda was clearly a prolific writer; He cannot be categorized by a single poetic style. No sooner had he mastered one poetic form or mood than he moved to another. From the sensual and erotic to the hermetic, surrealist, political and the epical. The least that can be said of Neruda is that he was the greatest Spanish poet of the century.

Always by Pablo Neruda

I am not jealous

of what came before me.


Come with a man

on your shoulders,

come with a hundred men in your hair,

come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,

come like a river

full of drowned men

which flows down to the wild sea,

to the eternal surf, to Time!


Bring them all

to where I am waiting for you;

we shall always be alone,

we shall always be you and I

alone on earth,

to start our life!


ROBERT PENN WARREN

(1905-1989), American man of letters, was dedicated to art as a way of exploring the meaning of contemporary existence.Writer and poet Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) was born in Guthrie, Kentucky on April 24, 1905. He twice received the Pulitzer Prize: one for fiction in 1947 and another for poetry in 1958. He was among the most persuasive and reasonable defenses of the South's cultural and social heritage to that date.Robert went to school until he achieved his doctorate in 1930 when his first published. Warren's fiction, usually historically based, considers the implications of man's initiation into awareness of the potential evil in himself and the world. His later verse was more romantic and transcendental, reflecting the influence of American writers. Warren himself appears as the seeker of some solution to universal moral.Warren died of cancer September 15, 1989, in Stratton, Vermont. During his long and respected career, he was the recipient of many awards.

A Way to Love God
by Robert Penn Warren

Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true. And the line where the incoming swell from the sunset Pacific First leans and staggers to break will tell all you need to know About submarine geography, and your father's death rattle Provides all biographical data required for the Who's Who of the dead.  I cannot recall what I started to tell you, but at least I can say how night-long I have lain under the stars and  Heard mountains moan in their sleep.  By daylight, They remember nothing, and go about their lawful occasions Of not going anywhere except in slow disintegration.  At night They remember, however, that there is something they cannot remember. So moan.  Theirs is the perfected pain of conscience that Of forgetting the crime, and I hope you have not suffered it.  I have.  I do not recall what had burdened my tongue, but urge you To think on the slug's white belly, how sick-slick and soft, On the hairiness of stars, silver, silver, while the silence Blows like wind by, and on the sea's virgin bosom unveiled To give suck to the wavering serpent of the moon; and,  In the distance, in plaza, piazza, place, platz, and square, Boot heels, like history being born, on cobbles bang.  Everything seems an echo of something else.  And when, by the hair, the headsman held up the head Of Mary of Scots, the lips kept on moving, But without sound.  The lips, They were trying to say something very important.  But I had forgotten to mention an upland Of wind-tortured stone white in darkness, and tall, but when No wind, mist gathers, and once on the Sarré at midnight, I watched the sheep huddling.  Their eyes Stared into nothingness.  In that mist-diffused light their eyes Were stupid and round like the eyes of fat fish in muddy water, Or of a scholar who has lost faith in his calling.  Their jaws did not move.  Shreds Of dry grass, gray in the gray mist-light, hung From the side of a jaw, unmoving.  You would think that nothing would ever again happen.  That may be a way to love God.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place


This story is set in a small unnamed town somewhere located in Spain between 1930’s and 50’s. The entire scene is taking place in a cafe and a street . “It was very late and everybody had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference”. What makes it interesting is that no matter where the place is, what matters is that is a good place to be on a dark windy lonely night. “This is a clean and pleasant cafe. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves.” You can find comfort and a way to escape from trouble in the middle of silence. Hemingway in “The clean, well-lighted cafe” story suggested that light chases away the dark, it was the place where this old man feel relax and could take a breath from the life he was living.

In this story characters are name less because Hemingway through out the story is trying to show that there is no meaning in life; everything is nothing, that nothing matters, there is no good no bad, no right no wrong. You can see it clearly when the older waiter expresses while describing the awful nothingness of life “nada y pues nada y pues nada”, nothing can offer him comfort, and he is being overwhelmed by the spiritual emptiness. Life is nothing but each character is different , with a unique identity acting in the middle of nothing.

The connection between the old man and the old waiter is that both got to the point where insomnia has capture them, they just hate sleeping and for them life has become a no meaning segment which humans have to pass through.

PLOT

Conflict: Between man and time, each character has a different vision of the meaning of time. (youngest ones value time and older man is just passing the time until he dies).

Rising Action: When the waiter gives more drinks to the older man trying to make him go home.

Complications:Comparison between the older waiter and the younger waiter and also the connection between the old man and the old waiter. Ex. When the young waiter wants to close the cafe early, while the older waiter wants to remain open because the old man is still there. It reflects the difference between the young attitude of impatience toward the old man. “I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe...With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night...”

Climax: When the older waiter is describing Nihilism (believe that nothing exists).

Falling action: When the older waiter continues their conversation in his mind, considering the nature of life, only emptiness. Then he goes to a bodega to drink alone at the bar, which he finds very unsatisfactory, and finally he finds out that he would lie in the bed and with the daylight, he would go to sleep. “It is probably only insomnia. many must have it”. There is no reason to believe that each of his days would be less empty than the ones in the past.


THEME

Years pass and as you get old you believe that there is no meaning to this world, there is no God you are alone in the middle of nothingness. The older waiter understands the old man. he defends him, he too seeks a place to despair the night.


Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899, Oak Park, Illinois. At the age of seventeen he started his career as a writer in a newspaper. Years later he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army and at his twenties became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris. He used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain and from then on he portrayed all his thoughts on his novels. He was a short story writer and essayist and was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for literature. He was married four times and ended his life the same way as his father, he committed suicide.

Hermingway was dealing with despair, depression and desperation for much of his life, he struggled to find a true meaning and purpose to life, he found life meaningless. He reflected himself in this story with the old man. He made the character deaf, alone, despair, alcoholic, and had insomnia which finally showed how he cut off from the rest of the world.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues"


This story takes place in New York City on the early 1950’s - 1960’s in a neighborhood in Harlem. A neighborhood plagued by poverty and crime. “We hit 110 Street and started rolling up Lenox Avenue. And I’d known this avenue all my life, but it seemed to me again, as it had seemed on the day I’d first heard about Sonny’s trouble, filled with hidden menace which was its very breath of life”(pg. 181). By this time segregation and racism was still part of this people’s life they had to take drastic measures in order to acquire equality. Families had a desire for economical and social growth in order to live happy and peaceful. This atmosphere was the one that surrounded Sonny’s mind and the one that took him to change and be different from others. Even though he looks Harlem as the place he has left behind it was still part of him. He wanted to avoid living that life and that was why he took the drug-addiction path, a way to live another life instead of confronting the real one.


“For more than two hundred years, African-Americans have participated in every conflict in United States history. They have not only fought bravely the common enemies of the United States but have also had to confront the individual and institutional racism of their countrymen”. (Lt. Col. [Ret] Michael Lee Lanning, author, "The African-American Soldier: From Crispus Attucks to Colin Powell"). Freedom was the fullest desire, they lived in a constant unfairness. Sonny tries to change his lifestyle but no matter what he does, he still has hope. Even though Sonny has anger about the life he wants to fight and be able to show him self and others that he can be different and be a free individual and that there is a meaning in tragedy. This story is showing the two sides of African American life, privileges vs isolation & pain. Sonny decides to accept the suffer, to do something, to give it a meaning instead of avoiding it or just living like everybody else. That is why he decides to search for the deep pain and wants to go to the military life; the only way to really understand and live a different life.


My man - Billie Holiday

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXzq4MVPXsk

It cost me a lot

But there's one thing that I've got

It's my man

It's my man

Cold or wet

Tired, you bet

All of this I'll soon forget

With my man

He's not much on looks
He's no hero out of books
But I love him
Yes, I love him

Two or three girls
Has he
That he likes as well as me
But I love him

I don't know why I should
He isn't true
He beats me, too
What can I do?

Oh, my man, I love him so
He'll never know
All my life is just despair
But I don't care
When he takes me in his arms
The world is bright
All right

What's the difference if I say
I'll go away
When I know I'll come back
On my knees someday

For whatever my man is
I'm his forevermore


Jazz originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities. As other types of music categories Jazz makes you relax and see life very peaceful. I would say that for Sonny this was a breath that allow him to continue living. Music for him was a way of communication a way to answer questions about society and racial relations in America. Instead of using what everybody uses “WORDS” , he expresses in a unique way, by the beep of the sound. He shows his darkness (melancholy and depression), in the darkness where he lives by making his music an affirmation of what his life is.

In this song there is hope, is a woman expressing love and admiration for a men, but with this story I interpret it as a a men that has a desire to go against everything because he has a world where he belongs, he has to defend himself and live in the real world.


Bebop is a type of Jazz but with a faster tempo and is based on improvisation. Politically and socially music represents a way to rebel, to make your thoughts be part of your life and others life. For Sonny, music is an expression that can describe or set a mood in a situation. At the end of the story, Sonny’s brother understood while Sonny played the piano the suffer he has always being carrying, “It’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness”.