Self Eval

I believe that the texts that had the most relevance to me were American Born Chinese and Blankets. Both were enjoyable both visually and with their stories. In both texts I wanted to continue to read and find out where the story would take me. The impact that the literature that we read in this class has had on me is that all of our books had an important story to tell. I think that is very important when it comes to reading and discussing books, there isn't a point to read a book that isn't trying to make one.
I've been reading comics and graphic novels, mostly mangas, since I was about 12 so I am a fan. One of my classes back in highschool also experimented with non-traditional texts and the use of them with literature. Well I have read graphic novels like V for Vendetta and Watchmen I didn't really know about some of the other more serious stories out there and this class helped me to see them.
I am an art minor and I have been studying it for quite some time so I feel I was able to interpret pictures and the visual parts of theses stories fairly well before I came to this class. I don't think that anything that we did in this class made it stronger, but that could just be me. The hardest piece of literature for me to get through was The Bluest Eyes mainly because of its content and the writing style it was in. I worked through it by just plowing through it and using sparknotes to be honest. I didn't really have any assumptions about non-traditional text being used in a class, I've had it before in highschool.

AMSND

Ahh! It's good to be posting again! It has been far too long. I did enjoy this telling of a different story. I could follow it and it was intriguing but the plot was ether not there or very hard to find. You couldn't tell from what we got, what the true meaning of the story was. He brings the characters for who the play is made after and he makes them sit and watch it without knowing what they are in for. It's very interesting the way he plays with this, and the Dream Lord. The performers are the company of Shakesphere, well up until Puck joins the group. The ones that watch are Titania, The Dream Lord, Peaseblossom, a few trolls, Puck, and Theseus. He brought the world of the fantasy realm into the real word, or the world as we know it. It was very clevar and it was very intersting to see how they reacted to the play. The troll, Peaseblossom, and goat-headed nymph interaction was funny cute and cleaver. Shakespeare's personal life was shown in the play with his 'son' actually being in the play. He has the same name as the boy in the play who is taken by Titania. The panels that I thought were the most interesting were on page 85 of the story. They show the real Puck going away into the dark. Visually this was the most interesting I believe.

Intro to Faith

If faith is forced on a child, taking them to Church every week, making them read the Bible, or sending them to religious school without giving them a choice, they will grow up rejecting that religion. I found in my research that there are many people who grew up with parents forcing religion down their throats don’t want to be a part of the religion now that they have a choice to be or not. I grew up in a very Catholic family and every week we went to Church. My mom sent me to Bible School and Bible Study during the summer. As I started to get older I found that going to Church twice a week for Bible School and Church was a burden and that I would much rather be at home. I could recite for anyone the Our Father, Hail Mary, Gloria, Nicene Creed, and about fifty Church songs. With all this knowledge stuffed in my head from about sixteen years of Church-going I feel like it is just taking up space at this point. I started to make excuses to got go to Church, even volunteering at our local Petsmart with my neighbor to clean cat’s cages. Right before I was confirmed I told my mom that I didn’t believe in God anymore. She didn’t freak out but she did still make me get Confirmed, I did it for her but I found it to be very hypocritical. Ever since my mom has only really made me go on Christmas and Easter, though she still goes every week. I believe that if my mother hadn’t made me go to Church

This first quote I found on a University’s website on how to raise children~

“Sometimes—because we truly want what’s best for our kids—we begin to demand that a child or teen go to church or participate in church activities. Often these demands seem to alienate children even further from religious activity.” –A report out of Brigham Young University

The second quote is from a blog at radicalleft.net. The writer grew up Christian and was conformed to hate it soon after his 16^th birthday.

“Think sex and drugs destroy America?
Try naive chastity. Oh, and "Purity Balls"
You should probably fall to your knees right
this minute and thank a merciful
and lubricious and happily polymorphous sex God
that you don't know what they are

At some point the daughter stands up,
her pale arms wrapped around her daddy,
and reads aloud a formal pledge that she will
remain forever pure and virginal and sex-free
until she is handed over, by her dad
(who is actually called the "high priest" of the home),
like some sort of sad hymenic gift,
to her husband, who will receive her like
the sanitized and overprotected and
libidinously inept servant she so very much is
Praise!” –Max Blunt

This isn’t something that has started just recently. This passage is a blog of a former altar boy who discusses why he is no longer with the faith.

http://www.norcalblogs.com/outsidebox/2007/07/on_growing_up_catholic.html

Here is a fun video of a radical Christan woman who also is one of 'God's Warrior's'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjl54v1irbs

Close read of a poem

Now poetry is one of the things I find the hardest to review, so here we go. Commings:

The whole poem is in one line with no breaks, meaning no breaths. It seems as if it is being said by some drunk and rambling about something to his empty glass. He speaks of America in almost a sarcastic way but seems patriotic about it. He talks of the heroic happy dead being rushed to the slaughter. He may be talking about solders being rushed away to war. In the end he asks should the voice of Liberty be mute because of this? I think he's talking about how the people don't have a true say in what goes on in this case.

Part of my project, I just wanted to get it down so I have it on here, enjoy!

Evolution

I sit feet dangling with bows in my hair,
my best skirt and pink blouse on.
He is everywhere for me.
The tomato and cucumber told me so.
Everyday he is all around me and I feel him there.

There are 23 panels above my bowl cut hair.
Someone's voice calls me back to the front of the class.
A disruption to my day is all this is
and I begin to doodle on the desk.
Now twice a week I am aware of his presence.

A bribe, out to lunch a a trip downtown
gets me into the car.
My eyes grow heavy with the weight of the
early morning when I get a sharp elbow to the side.
To to get on my knees for nothing but my mother's smile.

The time is long passed when my eyes open
to the white roof of my room.
The car is gone and I am completely alone.
Now I feel like I know who I am,
nothing is there and it won't be forever.

MAUS

1. A specific theme or idea or question that propelled you through the text.
I had two questions that I focused on well reading the text. One, What is this story going to teach me about the Holocaust that I don't already know? Two, Why did the author chose animals in the place of people?

2. A specific Panel or set of panels that support this theme/idea/question
Well one of the things I didn't know about the Holocaust was how the richer Jewish people could use their influence and money to delay going to a internment camp. I also learned that many people used their family connections to stay as free as they could be for as long as they could get. This is shown on page 92 when they went to a registration for their passports to work or not. They went to a table where their cousin was working and he stamped their passports with a good stamp, as sown in the last panel on the page.
I found that Spiegelman's idea of using animals instead of people was a cleaver one. This made it much easier to determine race and religion of the characters by just looking at them. On page 66 you can see that Vladek puts on a pig mask to seem to be a Pole. in the second pannel on the page. This shows perhaps how easy it was for the Jewish people to do th is. You can clearly see the string and the differece between his skin and the mask.

So maybe I'm not on the right page but I want to work on the theme of 'Corruption'. I will focus on American Born Chinese and Blankets for our readings in class. I think I'm going to do a multi -media project. I'll pull from outside sources such as V for Vendetta and other Graphic novels that deal with this theme. Maybe I should go with the idea of temptation. I think that would fit with everything better.