Blog 1

"The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket", by Yasunari Kawabata is a short story I quickly fell in love with. The story seems to be so innocent, but has an extremely deep and reflective meaning if closely looked into, or at least in the way I looked into it. The story began with a man allegedly walking through the woods to come across a group of young boys and girls searching for bugs. I used the word allegedly because I viewed the man "walking through the woods" and watching the children as the young boy in the story, and he is looking back at him, reminiscing the first time he met the girl he loved. I found it so innocent that when the little boy, Fujio, first found what he thought was a grasshopper, he offered it up to all of the kids bug hunting with him, but gave it to the girl, Kiyoko,  who did not come running and begging for it. He then fell in love with her intelligence, when as a young girl she knew the difference between a grasshopper and a bell cricket, and

"The Lady with the Dog", by Anton Chekhov; a short story I found to be eye-opening and touching. The beginning of the story of the story turned me away. A misogynistic, cheating man who only saw women as someone he can use until he gets bored is not exactly someone I wanted to read about. However, as the story went on, I began to see a different side of Gurov. It seemed as though they moment he laid eyes on Anna Sergeyevna, he knew he wanted to be with her, but in a different way than he had previously with other women. Anna Sergeyevna, a married woman, enjoyed the attention Gurov gave her. One thing led to another and the two of the spent a significant amount of rime together, and eventually kissed. The moment this happened Anna was full of regret but couldn't stay away, until her husband called her back to home when he grew sick. As time went on, the two of them longed to see one another and went years without communication until Gurov set off to find her. The two of th

"Rock-a-bye Baby" appears to be a simple nursery rhyme your parents would sing to you as a child. However, several nursery rhymes such as "Ring around the Rosey" can have relatively dark connotations. My classmates and I dissected the potential meanings of "Rock-a-bye Baby" and each group seemed to interpret it differently. My group and I had an unusual interpretation of the nursery rhyme, comparing it to something of a dispute of power, while others took the song literally. My group compared the baby to someone with a large amount of power, and the wind to the society wanting a change in power. The bough that the baby was resting on was associated with its supporters  , and when the supporters leave, the baby will fall to the rebelling civilians and a shift in power will occur. Most people would just view the nursery rhyme as a calming song for a young child, but everything seems to have several different meanings if looked into enough.

Recently, I had read the poem "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks. At first read of the tired I was unsure of what to expect, and after reading the first stanza, I was even more unsure. After reading the entire poem as a whole I had a far better understanding, but the first stanza still left me confused an unsure of how to interpret it. I viewed the remainder of the poem as essentially the "cool" kids were the ones who skipped class, stay out late, and drink gin. In High School that most often is the case. The "rebels" were always the gossip of the school that kids wanted to be, but were never "brave" enough to do so. Something that caught my attention was the final line of the poem; "Die soon." This could mean several things, such as everyone dies eventually, or the fact that people who live fast and dangerously die sooner. I enjoyed this line because it left the readers to interpret the poem themselves. After rereading the poem I was a