The Ending of Winesburg

Winesburg Ohio was one of those books in English that I really believed wouldn't be able to hold my attention. There were a couple stories that I highlighted in my previous blog posts that stood out to me as being interesting and intriguing but other than that I didn't feel much of a connection to the characters or the strife they were faced with during daily life in the small Ohio town. One of the major reasons why I failed to connect with the characters was that many of the themes and motifs that drove the members of the town to become grotesque beings were characteristics I have never experienced before. Thoughts like complete isolation and utter hatred for others was something alien to me and in some cases I didn't understand what led the characters to develop these feelings.
Two of the major themes that reoccurred the most during the story were the feeling of isolation and alienation. Many of the characters in the stories felt isolated because they lacked connection with the other members of the town. These connections were never formed or were broken for many different reasons, but one theme that stayed constant with why these connections were broken was a form of alienation or exclusion for some reason. This reason could either be a detestable act that happened in the past or it could have stemmed from an overall discomfort that was given off by the character. In the case of characters like Kate the schoolteacher, she felt isolated and alienated because of her physical appearance as well as her seemingly unnatural attraction to George Williard, a boy she used to teach. Anyway you look at it, the characters in Winesburg felt alone, with little to look forward to in their lives doing nothing but waiting for the sweet embrace from their future lover death to swallow them up and end their suffering.

Respectability of Man

In the two weeks it has been since my last post here, our class has continued to make headway with the book we started and that I discussed in my last post, Winesburg Ohio. In the classes since that last post we have examined and vigorously fondled the short stories about the people of the small Ohioan town and the reasons why there lives are nothing but pain, suffering and horribly grotesque truth. Similarly to Wing Biddlebaum in the story Hands, each character featured in the book has their own issue that needs to be worked through, whether it be physical, mental or social. In just about every case, however, the townspeople are unable to come to terms with the issues they wrestle with and instead continue to live their lives ailed by mental and social stigmas that they themselves are unable to solve, or sometimes even understand that they have a problem at all.

One of the stories that I have read since Hands that has stood out to me was the one titled Respectability. Respectability centers around a man named Wash Williams, the telegraph operator for the town of Winesburg. Wash is one of the more ironically named members of the town as he is described as the ugliest, fattest and dirtiest people in Winesburg. It is also well known throughout the town that Wash despises all women, going so far as to describe them as emotionally dead, deceitful creatures. It is not until Wash sits down with George Williard that we understand why he holds this animosity towards woman. When Wash was younger he had a wife that he loved very much, but later found out that she was cheating on him with multiple men while he worked. Disgusted, Wash packed up and left his wife, yet still showed signs that he cared for her by sending her money that he got from selling the house they once lived in. Months later, Wash was invited to his ex-wife's mother's house to try and patch things up. Wash arrived with almost complete intentions of reconciling with her until hes ex was sent into the room completely naked. His mother in law had decided the simplest way to get a man back was simply through sex and thought nothing of manipulating her daughter into doing this. Wash snapped and almost killed his mother in law for the reason that he believed that this act showed that not only was his wife deceitful, but that all woman were deceitful and were not to be trusted or dealt with at all. One of the more interesting parts of this story I thought was in the first paragraph, where Anderson spends time describing a dirty little monkey that lives in a cage in the center of town. Particularly, the comment that described how the women of the town spent time relating the monkey to the various men in their lives. This aspect foreshadows the misogynistic views that Wash would developed after dealing with his wife and mother in laws deception, and  also perhaps reflects how Anderson himself feels towards women in his own life, that they are indeed deceitful or untrustworthy.

The Woes of Winesburg

This week in English class we started reading a new book called Winesburg, Ohio. It was written by a man named Sherwood Anderson, a man who lived anything but an ordinary life. Anderson lived in many small Ohio towns in his lifetime before getting married and starting up his own very successful mail order business which made him pretty wealthy in early 1900's standards. However, due to a couple significant nervous breakdowns, Anderson completely dropped his current job, family and life altogether to go and become a novelist, much to the chagrin of his wife and children. He wrote Winesburg as a reflection of one of the towns in Ohio he had lived in in the past and created characters to fill the town, all of which had certain ugly truths that they wished not to be so but were. These truths were called Grotesques in literary terms and created depth within each person who called Winesburg home.

The first story in the novel is called "Hands", a story told through the eyes of a young reporter and Winesburg native as he talked with and observed a man named Wing Biddlebaum. Wing had an interesting relationship with the towns people as his best known attribute was his hands, which were known for their incredible speed and precision most notably while berry picking. Wing wasn't always his name however, for before he moved to Winesburg he was known as Adolph and was a school teacher in one of the neighboring towns. Wing was wrongly persecuted by the townspeople for touching and fondling the boys he taught and was promptly run out of town. He changed his name and forsook the hands that he had once held close to him. Wing's grotesque is that, as he does not know exactly why he was run out of town, he believes that him caring for and nurturing young minds was shameful and wrong, and lived his current life so as not to offend anyone else by doing it again. I thought this story was interesting because it actually isn't the first time I've read it and I missed a lot of details the first time around that, when put together, make the story much more engaging and thought provoking than before.

When Dreams and Reality Cross Paths

This week, our English class dove into the history of psychology specifically focusing on one individual who's work and study helped make the study of the mind what it is today. That mans name was Sigmund Freud and he was an Austrian born neurologist who had a particular fascination with the brain and its many functions and intricacies.  One particular facet of the brain that fascinated Freud was the subconscious. Freud's research helped to break the mind into three parts, the Id, Ego and Superego, and analyze what each part of the mind is responsible for in how people think and act. One example of this would be that the Id is more responsible for primal instincts, like arousal or anger, while the ego is more responsible for intellectual and cognitive thinking and decision making. Freud studied the mind further, particularly focusing on defense mechanisms which are ways the human mind deals with stress or traumatic events.  Some mechanisms can be as subtle as suppressing any thoughts of the event or conflict and can be as drastic as tearing the subconscious apart and creating split personalities.

Another thing we learned about that I found particularly interesting was dreams and how one can interpret their dreams to understand how they feel on certain aspects of their life. Dreams act as sort of "wish fulfillment" as they portray what or how the person wants to deal with a traumatic event or conflict. These dreams are filled with symbolic meaning and metaphors to help avoid facing problems head on and this is the part of dreams that can be interpreted. I particularly liked when Ms. Baskin interpreted both of Anthony's dreams of focusing around phallic symbols and animosity towards his father.

Examining Modern Attributes in Inception

Today, our class finished watching Inception, a movie written and directed by Christopher Nolan who has become one of my favorite directors as of late with his Batman movies. This movie stars Leo DiCaprio and Ellen Page and is touted as one of the best written action movies in recent memories. I had actually never seen the movie before this class and had mostly ignored the hype when it had come out which helped to keep my expectations level when watching and analyzing the movie. The movie itself, in terms of acting and quality of action scenes, was stunning and made it easy for me to focus in on some of the modernist attributes I was assigned to search for within the film.

The first attribute that stood out to me almost immediately was the use of impressionism. A great part of this movie operates around the idea of shifting perspectives, finding out what other characters and even what the characters themselves think and know about certain situations, people and ideas. A great example of this would be when we are first learning about the dream world and how projections of the dreamers sub-conscious would act together with the will of that persons mind to expel outside forces, yet also to accept ideas if the dreamer can believe that they thought of the idea themselves.

Also, another modernist attribute that pops up a great deal in this movie is that of using and creating landscapes in symbolic and metaphoric ways. Usually in literature, this means that names of places are usually assigned due to metaphorical relation with the reality that is that place. In the movie, this is taken a step further as the dreamer is able to create their own world and populate it with whatever they want, and many times those places hold metaphorical meaning in relation to events and happenings in that persons real life. I found this to be expemplifed with a persons need to "lock away dark secrets" Which in reality means to keep them to yourself but in the dream means to literally lock away your ideas, like in a prison or a safe.

The final modernist attribute that jumped out at me during the movie was the use of time in a more abstract sense. In modernist literature, authors began to use time differently then it had always been defined; as a constant, scalar quantity. Authors began to give time depth and meaning by allowing for time to seemingly stretch and shrink as well as allow for movement through time both backwards and forwards. Time in inception is especially important because in a dream, time moves much slower in relativity to the real world which allowed for crazy extensions of time to allow for Leo and his gang to complete the task at hand. Time is also given even greater depth with the introduction of limbo, where times relativity to the outside world is basically nonexistent.

A Novice Examines Modernist Literature

Modernist literature is not exactly high on my list of categories to browse through at the local Barnes and Noble. Perhaps it was previous experiences with English class literature that turned me sour but I was never one to read fiction that was written before the 1950's, and even then I found myself struggling to make it through such classics as To Kill A Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye. In fact, one of the only stories I have ever read in English class and gone back to reread on my own time was Hatchet which ended up becoming one of my favorite books to date. There was something about the precise descriptions and details of Brian's every action as he fought for survival that kept me enthralled through the whole story.

As I started the assigned summer reading this year I was pleasantly surprised. Unlike the extreme mundane description of average English life that last years summer reading portrayed that bored me too tears, I found books with exciting plots with dark twists and turns that really kept me interested. However, the real beauty I found in these books was the  amount of detail of the world around the characters as the story progressed, especially in Tender is the Night. Post World War 1 Europe was a dismal continent which I learned much about last year in History class, but was never fully interested in until I read this book. I don't think I really understood how much impact the  first World War had on the psyche and culture of Europe until I was reading about Dick and Nicole traveling and experiencing it. I was also very interested in how each detail in stories like the three we read can be interpreted in so many different ways. It was enthralling to think about things like whether Esther's feeling of being under a bell jar was due to being a social anomaly or whether it was because she felt everyone had their eyes on her at all time. In short, I am excited to keep reading these stories in and out of class as the year continues and seeing if this literature will have a positive effect on my learning experience.

Crossing the Atlantic: Post #3

This is the third post of four that will be published here about European immigration and the enduring understandings that dictated the roles of people, places and power within this event. The previous blog posts were very similar, the first summarizing the key terms that were found to help define just what European immigration was, who were involved and how they lived. After these posts were written, I was able to join a small group of other students and compare and contrast the key terms and enduring understanding s that each of us found to define the event of European immigration. I was astonished at how my group was able to expand on my previous knowledge and build an even stronger foundation of key terms and understandings to help guide the group on its way to the final product. One such way our helped to expand on my knowledge of the topic was to find the best enduring understandings from our group as a whole, and expand off of those understandings. I personally thought my previous understandings were a little weak, but our group was able to adapt and add stronger ones that further expanded on European immigration, such as adding the understanding that "People in power tend to be threatened by competition from outsiders, and thus take steps to limit the potential power of those underneath them." This one understanding is able to incorporate both people and power in an easy to research understanding that still applies to the world we live in today. We also had the idea to help organize and expand our knowledge of the key terms by grouping them by when those specific terms most effected immigrants and those around them. Organizing the key terms this way helped our presentation to flow more evenly and allow us seamless transition through each phase of immigration.
Once our group had optimized the research we had previously gathered, we started to put it together in a video that we had been assigned to help spread the information we had found to other students in our class. Simply put, our group was tasked with creating a photo essay, but in the format of a video, which entails a slideshow of pictures is played and each picture has a caption that is read by a member of our group. I was overall very impressed with how seamlessly my group was able to take the information we had gathered previously and compress it into short captions that were able to give large amounts of information in a small frame of time. Each group member was tasked with further research and citing of the original sources, as well as creating the short captions for the video essay. Each person had equal amounts of work to do and our group worked fluidly and there were very few hiccups in the research or writing of the script. The final product is something I feel our entire group can be proud of, it gives interesting and important information about European immigration and the conditions immigrants had to endure in a time frame of only sixty seconds. I don't feel there were any missteps during the group phase and I believe the class will be able to become well-informed on the issues that surrounded Europeans immigration to America, and what people, places and power were able to influence those issues.