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ENL 3: Writer's Choice #2

Relationships:

Brainstorm:

In relation to Banias' poem, "Being With You Makes Me Think About"

We is something like a cloud. How big, how thick, its shape – ambiguous. We is moving across a magnificent sky. We see the sky all around us but also we can look down at our own hands. A cloud is a changing thing. Sometimes we are an animal smiling, clawing at something not there. Other times we spread out so thin we almost don’t exist. We are thickening just now. A sea of slow knitting. And soon it will rain, and we will be down in the grass again. A blade of grass gets thirsty; it’s nice to think we could quench that. It’s something we could really be good at. Sometimes arms get in the way, remind us we’re separate. Laying side by side and looking into another pair of eyes as if there’s a way to see into the dark pupil’s pit, some place “behind” where truth lies. Other times whose hands are whose, our mouths together the permeable entrance to the bright underworld chamber, and a rush of remembering all eyes are lit from behind, the wiring rigged back to the same source, like putting together so many small things you have a better, bigger thing. Relative to what? It doesn’t matter. There’s something to be said for individuality, multiplied. The earth is breathing out through countless eyes asking for every possible ray of light to meet every possible rainstorm. They do attract. And aloneness only keeps getting bigger. One day we will tell you all about it. At our own table. There are things we cannot see. Most things. Most of all.

- What does it mean to be in a relationship?

- There are so many different types of relationships - all different, but with the same characteristics.

- Being so close to someone and for so long, you can almost lose sight of yourself. You can tell the difference between your life and the other person's. You hold hands, and forget whose hands are whose; and after awhile, you can forget whose dreams are whose. Sometimes it can be discouraging and scary and frustrating to realize this; but in the end, it really doesn't even matter because what are we after all? If you love someone, it doesn't matter whose dreams are whose; it doesn't matter whose hands are whose or whose lips are whose. You both want the same things. You want things for each other and want to accomplish things together. So when things get tough and frustrating, it doesn't matter, because you want to build something with that person; you want to go through life with them, even if you get in the way of each other sometimes. Love is what matters in the end.

- How does it relate to the class community? As a class, we have created relationships: classmate to classmate, student to teacher, friend to friend, etc. All these different relationships have different dynamics, but in all, we are a community. These relationships combined together is what creates the dynamic in the classroom. We as a class community share thoughts, ideas, interpretations, stories, and eventually once we all get around to a discussion where people start to connect different ideas together, we forget whose idea was whose, who made the initial analysis, and whose words were whose. When we speak in class, we are taken out of our individual space and entered into this ring of minds.

Writing:

I decided to write about the Banias poem, "Being With You Makes Me Think About" because when I read it, I was extremely puzzled by it, and still am. But I thought by writing about it, that might help me better understand the poem and be able to relate it back our classroom community.

I definitely think Banias is talking about relationships throughout the poem: what relationships can do the each individual involved. Particularly, in romantic relationships, being so close to someone can take a toll on each person. If we're in a relationship with someone for long enough, we can start to forget whose things are whose: whose home is whose; whose hands are whose; whose lips are whose; whose dreams are whose; whose thoughts are whose? Our lives seem to blur together into a beautifully chaotic form.

"Sometimes arm get in the way, reminds us we're separate...Other times, whose hands are whose, our mouths together the permeable entrance to the bright underworld chamber... There's something to be said for individuality multiplied."

Sometimes it really can be discouraging and frightening to realize this. There is a certain fear of the loss of individuality - how do we escape that when we are going through life with a person? Sometimes we have no idea where we are going or who we will be and how the other person will affect us and our life choices; and that can be a very scary thing. But we choose to keep going because deep down, our hands never want to let go of each other.

"We is something like a cloud. How big, how thick its shape - ambiguous. We is moving across a magnificent sky. We see the sky all around us, but also we can look down at our hands. A cloud is a changing thing."

So even through all the fear, frustration, and unknowns, we are moving through life with this person - we won't know where we will be in the future until we get there. It's just something that we will have to walk through almost blindly and accept the fact that things are always changing. But if love is there, this ever changing cloud that we've created can morph to overcome any obstacle we are faced with. Nothing matters when we have each other. In the end, the unknown doesn't even matter because we have someone to love who loves us, and anywhere we go will be great. That is the beauty of the unknown, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

Although our classroom is not necessarily synonymous with a romantic relationship, we can still relate it to this poem in a way. We are a community dedicated to sharing thoughts, ideas, interpretations, and stories. We are always working towards a common goal - whether if it's to decipher a text, or help each other with our writing, or to simply provide the community with new ideas about things beyond a text or our writing. We are constantly having discussion, exchanging all these things, and we can tend forget whose ideas were whose. Who made the connection first? Who started the conversation and who ended it? It really doesn't matter because we are working together to lift each other up. And sometimes it's hard to find our own individual ideas when everyone starts to make the same connections and throwing out related ideas. How do we maintain our own voice and how are we able to let it come through? Our writing helps us do that. Our individual personalities are what creates this unique dynamic in the classroom that allows us to have the discussions we have. And we never know where our conversations could lead to, but that is what makes being in a classroom community like this so special. We just never know where our collective minds could take us, and that's an awesome thing to be apart of.

#enl3writerschoice

ENL 3 Revised Adaptation: Goldberg's "Fighting the Tofu"

Adaptation of “Fighting the Tofu”

Writing is hard. It definitely does not always come naturally to me. It takes time to really figure out a thing that you yourself want to write about that also doesn't make you feel overwhelmed and scared of the project you are deciding to tackle. I constantly find myself thinking the same things in my mind every time I try to get started with writing a piece:

"I have way, way, way too many ideas in my head! How can I go about them and address them without overwhelming myself and my readers?"

"How do I want to get started?"

"Okay, I'm going to start writing right now... Okay, I'm going to start writing in five minutes... [ten minutes later]... Okay, I'm going to start writing in a half an hour."

"What the heck should I even write about?"

Meanwhile I have yet to make any progress on how to go about writing down any of my ideas on the page. I learned this term; it's called "fighting the tofu." (Goldberg, "Fighting The Tofu"). Natalie Goldberg describes tofu as "dense, bland, and white. It is fruitless to wrestle with; you get nowhere" (Goldberg, "Fighting the Tofu," paragraph 1). And this is not necessarily the way we want to go about the writing process or how we want our writing to be described.

We have to fight to not take the easy road - to just write what seems comfortable and easy, but neither thought provoking nor original. So we all need to find ways to keep us fighting - whatever it takes. Some need to go to a quiet peaceful place like a park or their own room alone; and others need to be in a place like a coffee shop or other places with constant blank noise in order to tune everything out to keep focus. Some people need to get into a groove in order to start writing something they feel is worthy of what they want to actually produce and maybe allow the outside world to see. Others need to do little bits of writing here and there to make a final product. Whatever way helps you write best, stick to it, and let yourself go there anytime you feel like you want to write. In order to write something that's maybe out of our comfort zone, we need to allow ourselves a little comfort blanket; and that blanket is us giving ourselves our favorite space or state of mind we like to be in when we write. By giving ourselves a safe space to write, we can now venture out into the strange world of our mind and really explore what new thoughts and ideas are living inside.

But sometimes we don't really know what we want that will help us start writing. Sometimes, we just need to sit down and force ourselves to write. We need to stop whatever we are doing and write. We have to act like robots - no decisions, no questions, no thought - just sit down and write. Once we are there, we can just let our hands do the work. Whether it's at a computer or with a pen and paper, just let your hand go and let it write whatever it wants to write. So here are some things that I have discovered help me get to that point - to where I have sat down, and I've let my hands start doing the work, and to where I can just watch and see what happens:

1. If I feel like I need to be in a particular state of mind when writing something, whether it's an analytical piece for school, creative writing, or even just in my journal, I sometimes put on some 'mood music' to help me enter whatever state of mind I want to be in for that piece. Something not too distracting that still enters my brain to get my neurons firing and feeling the way I want to feel in order to write what I want to write.

2. If I feel like I am stuck with way too many ideas in my head that all want to come out on the page but have no idea how to tie them all together in one writing piece, I like to free-write for a bit. Just start writing whatever (and I mean anything and everything) that pops into my head pertaining to my writing subject of interest. Sometimes I need to give myself a time limit as to how long I can free-write, or else I end up making a two page essay of gibberish. But once I've done a free-write, I can go back, pick out the ideas I like, and can start to make sense of all the madness that I've written down into cohesive ideas.

3. If I already have an idea of what I want to talk about and what things I want to emphasize, I write a detailed outline for each individual paragraph. This especially helps when I am trying to write more analytical work: I like to make outlines of exactly how I want my essay to proceed. I say what topic I want to talk about for each paragraph, accompanied with evidence I plan on using and a brief description of how it adds to my paragraph and my argument for the whole essay. It almost becomes an abstract for each paragraph so when I start writing, I just have to add in my own writing style and make sure it all works cohesively together as one fluid paper.

So these are just some things that I've found that help me. But if you know what helps you, stick to them. The less you have to focus on finding a good space to write or just trying to get to the point of sitting down and writing, the more you can focus on the actual content of what you're writing about. And always let yourself write when you want to write. You never know what will come out of it. Natalie Goldberg says, "When it is your time to write, write."

#enl3 #enl3adaptations #adaptationrevision #englishanew

ENL 3: Analysis Review Unfortunately, I have yet to do the analyses, but I will do my best to review my modes of analysis when I write in general and the analyses I have made in class.

Observations:

1. I sometimes do analysis without providing sufficient evidence. That was something that was noted for my analytical paragraph that was for the in-class workshop, for example, with these sentences: "Prospero makes a point of calling Caliban harsh dehumanizing names, and manipulating Ariel with guilt in order to coerce him into doing his bidding once again. Prospero uses Sycorax, Caliban’s mother and Ariel’s previous master, to lower Caliban and Ariel’s statuses in order to manipulate and take command over them." I should have added in a quote from the text to show the exact places where Prospero uses degrading and threatening language towards Caliban and Ariel in order to manipulate them. A revised version of this sentence could be something like: Prospero uses Sycorax, Caliban's mother and Ariel's previous master, to degrade Caliban, "Thou poisonous slave, got by the Devil/ himself/ Upon thy wicked dam, come forth!" (1.2.320-322) and Ariel, " Dost thou forget/ From what a torment I did free thee?...Thou liest malignant thing! Has thou forgot/ The foul witch Sycorax who with age and envy/ Was grown into a hoop?" (1.2.251-259) in order to manipulate and keep control of them. I need to work on being able to integrate quotes while still maintaining fluidity with my argument and throughout my writing in order to keep my reader from being confused and/or unconvinced.

2. I definitely notice that I tend to make broad statements that I fail to go into deeper analysis with. For instance, this sentence from my first draft of my analytical workshop paragraph I wrote: "Prospero does not differ so much from his servants as we once thought, and he does not differ so much from Sycorax either." This was the last sentence of my paragraph, which should have been more towards the beginning of my paragraph. It was the main argument I was making for my analysis and I failed to address it entirely. I just left the reader hanging in the paragraph. I think that is one of the things that I have struggled the most with in my writing is making sure that every argument or claim that I make, I analyze it to its full capacity with added evidence to really solidify it and make it a complete analytical piece. I feel like I make these statements as filler sentences because I sometimes can't think of what else to say. I am learning that a good writer loads each word and sentence carefully with specific meaning. No extraneous filler words.

#englishanew #analysisreview #enl3

perrygaga

My goal is to use music as a way to bring all sorts of communities of people together, to blur the lights and to say that music has no politics, no religion, no color or sexual orientation. Music is free.

okaymad

if you’re ever sad look at this

or this

instead of being mad at someone watch stitch cuddle with a pillow

shhhh don’t cry look at stitch !!!

NO SADNESS !!! NO NO !! STITCH !!

stitch doesn’t want u to be sad !!

pls don’t be sad

PLS

stitch loves you stay safe

ENL Notes 3: The Tempest/Sparknotes

After reading The Tempest, I noticed that although the relationships between Ariel and Caliban and Prospero seem to represent nothing but the servant vs. master dynamic on the surface, Ariel and Prospero's as well as Caliban and Prospero's relationship go much beyond that. At the beginning of the play, we are aware of the function of Prospero's relationship with Ariel and Caliban: Caliban and Ariel are the servants, and Prospero is the master, and that separation is clear. Prospero makes a point of calling Caliban harsh dehumanizing names, and manipulating Ariel with guilt in order to coerce him into doing his bidding once again. Prospero uses Sycorax, Caliban's mother and Ariel's previous master, to lower Caliban and Ariel's statuses in order to manipulate and take command over them. Even though we are led to believe on the surface that the statuses of Prospero and his servants are clearly defined, if we look deeper into the text, we see that Prospero does not differ so much from his servants as we once thought, and he does not differ so much from Sycorax either.

Prospero argues that Sycorax was an evil witch who held Ariel prisoner, and he was the once to rescue and relieve Ariel of being confined in that horrible prison. And although he does not necessarily use physical force to make Ariel do his bidding, he uses guilt trips to manipulate Ariel and keep his from being relieved from his service. Prospero uses Sycorax again as a way do demean Caliban's inherent integrity in order to remind him that he is only a servant and nothing more as a way to again keep control over his 'subjects'. Yet, it seemed to me that Prospero exemplifies the same characteristics of a manipulative dictator as Syorax once did. And yet, he has also bore the trials of being a castaway and someone who was taken advantage of, the same as Ariel and Caliban, and feels the need to be in control because of the fact he was stripped of his freedom and entitlements.

I compared my analyses to that on Sparknotes for act I scene ii, and they seemed to be getting at almost the same thing. The website notes "Prospero alone seems to understand that controlling history enables one to control the present—that is, that one can control others by controlling how they understand the past. Prospero thus tells his story with a highly rhetorical emphasis on his own good deeds, the bad deeds of others toward him, and the ingratitude of those he has protected from the evils of others." Prospero manages to keep control over Ariel and Caliban by reminding them of their pasts and convincing them that the present could be much worse. They relate it more to Prospero being more like Sycorax in the way he controls every being around him, but they do not necessarily relate it back to him being similar to Caliban and Ariel. They do not go much deeper into why Prospero does the things he does. He needs to be in control and to manipulate others, but why?

#englishanew #enl3notes #notes3

nickscreencaps

maddyd4204-blog

Devin, this literally looks like you!

#ahhmypocketsquares

ENL3 Notes 2

In Frankenstein, there is a quote on page 82 that references the editorial Political Justice 2: 502-04; VIII.viii.appendix that talk about the scientist's need for society. Victor talks about how he knew his father would not necessarily approve of his endeavors to create human life, but he knew that he would not be able to satiate this vision he had until was completed and he is feeling some guilt about not being able to do what his father truly desires of him. "I knew well therefore my father's feelings; but I could not tear my thoughts from my employment...I wished as it were to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed" (pg. 82). It seems as though Victor feels as if he is letting his father and the rest of his family down for going out on his mission to create life, which seems impossible, yet it is something that he must do - this insatiable need to create life from something completely dead. Relating this to the editorial, Godwin talks about how although a scientist is someone who goes out and makes discoveries and tends to go against the grain of what society says are true about life, they still have a need to be part of a society, because without that, what motivation do they have to go and find out new things about the world and prove people right or wrong? I think this also ties into Victor's need to be accepted by his family - especially his father. His father's disapproval of reading science books as well his professor laughing at him for reading Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus, subconsciously fueled Victor's fire to go out and do something so close to impossible just to finally gain some approval once he succeeded.

#enl3notes2 #enl3notes #englsihanew #Frakensteineditorial

ENL3 Writing Genre Adaptation (1/12)

Adaptation of "Fighting the Tofu"

In Natalie Goldberg's guide to creative writing, Writing Down the Bones, she has a paragraph called "Fighting the Tofu", with the intent of guiding us out of writer's block and the anxiety we all tend to face when we want to write, but feel inadequate or uninspired. She offers us with some of her personal tips of how to get over our anxiety about writing something 'good' and just getting the pen on the paper.

She provides six tips for how to inspire ourselves to write: 1. Calling up a writing buddy: we have to write something in order to have something to share when we meet up; 2. Teaching writing to others: things can often be learned best when we teach it to others; 3. Make a set time to start writing make a set time to start writing - no exceptions; 4. Wake up and just write - don't do anything else; 5. Provide a reward for writing: write for awhile and have a reward at the end; and 6. Try to fill a notebook every month: if we write less one day, we have to make up for it another day. All these tips are designed to give us some method to get us to write; whether we have to force ourselves us with time limits or just allowing ourselves to be clear of all other worries and distractions or rewarding ourselves after writing to motivate us, it get's us writing, and that is the goal here. It doesn't have to be good; it doesn't have to be anything; it just has to be our own writing, and if we write enough, we will get to where we want to be with our writing.

Reflection: After reading this passage, it made me think of my own personal list of tips that I use to get myself to write:

1. Try listening to music that matches the mood of what you think you might want to write or that will inspire you the most.

2. Free-write until you come across any ideas that catch your attention.

3. Write an outline for each paragraph- can be as detailed as you want. This can be used more or analytical writing.

#enl3adaptations #englsihanew #fightingthetofu