Blog 1

The short story "Trifles" by Susan Gaspell was very intriging. The beginning began with a man entering Mrs. Wright's him in hopes to speak to her husband, John. When asked where John was, Mrs. Wright answerers that he is dead upstairs with a rope around his neck. The reading had no indicator as to how Mrs. Wright said this response, some felt she said it in a very casual way, almost making her seem crazy, while others read it in a very cold and emotionless tone, as she is extremely distraught by the death of her husband. I read it with an emotionless tone, because how I see it, when someone suffers a loss or in this case commits a murder, he or she is in shock and rather out of touch with the situation. Another debate about this story was the bird with the broken neck. I viewed it as a sign that Mrs. Wright was slowly losing her mind and killing the bird was just a stepping stone to her killing her husband. Whereas others in my class thought that Mrs. Wright killed her hu...

"Bartleby, The Scrivener was a short story written in 1853 by American writer Herman Melville. Essentially the entire story took place in a small copying office on Wall Street. The plot began with the unnamed owner of the law-copyist business. He had two employees that appeared to feed off one another in their fields. But he recently hired a new copier, Bartleby, a man of few words who at first, was the most diligent and perfect copier the boss had ever seen. But as time went on, Bartleby grew resentful towards his boss, and would simply reply to each request "I would prefer not to."Each day the boss grew more and more frustrated, but had a soft spot towards him for a reason he could not explain. After the bosses long dispute with himself on whether he should fire Bartleby or not, he finally followed through with the decision after several attempts. However, Bartleby had refused to leave for so long that the boss himself had to change the location of his office. After ...

Throughout the past week in class, we watched a 1954 Aflred Hitchcock filmed called Rear Window. For such a simple plot, the film was very engaging. It began with L.B. Jeffries, a photographer who is wheelchair bound due to a broken leg. Throughout his recovery, he sat himself facing a window and observed his neighborhood, nicknaming each neighbor and learning their routines. One night he heard a woman scream "Don't!" and noticed that Mrs. Thorwald seemed to have disappeared. Her husband, Mr. Thorwald was acting extremely suspicious after the event, and Jeff could not keep his eyes off of his window, especially at night. His caretaker and mistress, Lisa, initially deemed Jeff so be obsessive, and told him to stay away from the window because he was looking far too much into the situation. However, as the film went on, the two women grew extremely involved in Jeff's self-produced investigation. Lisa became extremely brave throughout this film, and began to break the vi...

"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...