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Megablunders Practice

my.milton.edu/grammar/lessons.aspx

Ghost Word -- Dord

I found this video on the Merriam-Webster Dictionary Website while I was looking up a word a few days ago. It is about a word that was mistakenly added to the dictionary for more than a decade. This is really cool! http://www.merriam-webster.com/video/0027-ghostword.htm

Evidence of Everything Exploding

What was that? I honestly have no idea what I just experienced. This was the strangest thing that has ever happened in my 19 years of existence. What was the strange message the author was trying to make? I was unable to figure out the point of the game other than going through the maze. Why does the guy make a story about matches? Or a song about office supplies? I am so confused. I beat all 10 levels after struggling to get the strategy down. I was trying to keep up with the text but it was too hard to pay attention to. I am now going to have a hard time going to sleep right now (at 1:46am). I am stuck comprehending how to cope with the images and text I just visualized.

Edit: (1:53am)- I just read the story behind the game. That is the creepiest discovery ever made. It is so strange to think about how that box got there. I am going to have nightmares now.

Applying the principles of Understanding Comics to Maus

Although I have not enjoyed reading Understanding Comics so far (McCloud tries to refine comic book art into something scientific, and it sort of diminishes the power of comics if there are these underlying laws and principles), I do see that some of his ideas help to be able to analyze parts of Maus. The reading of Maus (or any comic in general, really) requires a very large amount of active reading. McCloud introduces the concept of closure. Our eyes only see what is on each individual frame. But a lot of action is lost in between each frame. We must create these transitions in our brains in order for each frame to flow seamlessly from one to the next. Page 28 of Maus is a good example of this. One frame Anja receives a call informing her that the police were on to her, and she had to hide her Communist documents. The next frame shows her hiding the documents with her friend the seamstress. The next frame shows the seamstress getting arrested by the police for holding the documents. We lose a lot of information in those transitions between frames, but our brain assumes that each independent frame flows plotwise into the next frame. The comic could not possibly contain every little action, this isn't intended to model a film.

Also when thinking about why Speigelman chose to represent his characters as animals, I think about what McCloud says about amplification through simplification. "By stripping down an image to its essential meaning, an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can't". I think this thought can be used to explain why the Jews in Maus are mice, and why the Nazis are cats. He is simplify the human characters so we focus more on the plot, and less on what the characters look like.

Pages 86, and 87 of Maus

Reading Maus has really changed the way I think about the Holocaust. Written from such a unique perspective, and written (and drawn) in an even uniquer way, the Holocaust is seen in a different way than I saw it when reading books like Night and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

Pages 86, and 87 really stuck me while reading them. To summarize what happened: The Germans gave notice that they were rounding up all Jews over the age of 70 and would be taking them to a "community better prepared to take care of the elderly". Anja's grandparents were at least 90, and were terribly worried about being split up from the rest of the family. So they made her grandparents a bunker to hide in. The Jewish police came to collect them, but were told they didn't live here anymore. After demanding the grandparents show up to be collected, under threat of taking the rest of the family as well, they gave up the grandparents, who were directly transported to Auschwitz and the gas chambers.

After reading this page, I sat there motionless for a few minutes. Tears welled up in my eyes. The illustration of Anja's grandparents hiding in the bunker was devastating to look at. These two people, who had done nothing wrong their entire life, were now being removed from their family and killed just because another group of people felt the world would be better without them. It was gut wrenching to see the frame when they left and said goodbye for the final time. Presenting this in a graphic novel allows for more emotions to be portrayed than just on paper. The illustrations served to say a lot about the situation. Art does a masterful job of showing his family's story on the pages of this graphic novel. So many families have these same stories. This form of writing will make the horrors of the holocaust accessible to all people, and will remind us of the great atrocities the Nazis committed, and it serves as a reminder to never let this happen again.

Understanding Comics PDF

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&ved=0CDUQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2Fopen%3Fid%3D0B0vtKqkt0q-bNTk1MzlhMmYtMmMyNS00Yzc3LTgzMDEtMjEzNDI3ZmZjMzAx&ei=osYUU6KeJIHj0gHyjYCYBw&usg=AFQjCNG18Vt34UOXLj9b3S2P9VXCRGxNtA&bvm=bv.61965928,d.dmQ

Maus as a Graphic Novel

After reading the first 80 pages of Maus, I am very excited to read the second half of the text. While reading, it made sense to me that the best form for this story was a graphic novel. Maus isn't just the story about Valdek in Poland, it is also about Arthur connecting with his father to get details about life during Hitler. Those two stories flow into one another quite well. Each visit with his father, he gets a different part of his story. It transitions smoothly from the story the father is telling, and the interactions between Arthur and Valdek in present time. I do not see that the two parts of Maus could be told in a book form. It would be strange going back and forth between the two parts in a book. I see that the graphic novel shows the important connection between the story itself, and Arthur's present relations with his father. In a book form, the author may have decided only to retell his father's story, and leave out the part where he collected to stories. It seems more personal to present the story in a graphic novel.

The graphic novel form also utilizes a lot of dialogue, something that wouldn't be possible in a book. Each frame of the graphic novel contains dialogue, and sometimes there is narrative content to set background. The book form of this story would rely less on dialogue, and it would be written in a narrative form.

Finally the illustrations in Maus are an important factor. The illustrations show certain emotions in the characters that might not be able to show in a book form. They provide small details that build on the dialogue presented. For example on page 62, the bottom left frame shows Valdek reacting to almost being show. His eyes are show bulging. It seems more powerful than that was to be translated to writing in a book.

Cool Links to Share

While writing my paper, I came across a few cool links to articles.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/20/tom-phillips-a-humument-birthday (An article celebrating the anniversary of the publishing of A Humument)

and http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2013/07/04/review-tom-phillips-humument-mass-moca/SdL3AdLChEaPnOAk4QvC9I/story.html (Article about Art Exhibit featuring pages of A Humument)

Howard Review of "Nets"

Howard gives a complicated and highly detailed review of Jen Bervin's Nets. It was hard for me to personally understand what he thought of the book. But I did manage to come away with some of his major points. He noted that the Bervin poems were arranged in a way to compliment what Shakespeare did with the original sonnets. Howard called Bervin a "co-creator" with the Bard to compose the sonnet. Howard saw the resemblance in Bervin's poems, and Shakespeare's poems. He used sonnet 15 as an example of this. A critic Howard cited in his essay said that it was like doing an etching of a gravestone. You get some of the content, but not all of it.

Near the end of the essay, Howard gives a sample of what Bervin's poems look like when stitched together. It didn't make much sense to me, but I still thought it was interesting to look at it that way. Finally, Howard criticizes Bervin for being quite limited, and could have been expanded to form a more interesting work.

Jen Bervin and Sonnet 29

I have never been a fan of Shakespeare. Not only do I find his work to be dry, and moreover I have never been able to understand the Bard. But in Jen Bervin's work Nets, she does something to intrugue me. She takes the Sonnets of Shakespeare, and finds hidden meaning in his poems by altering the texts. Most text in the sonnet has been colored lightly, but a few words from each poem are in a darker color, making them stand out. I think it is interesting for Bervin to conceive this idea. But like the Bard, I am for the most part unable to discern her reasons for highlighting the words from each poem. After reviewing the poems and not only unable to understand the poems themselves, or the poems that Bervin tried to highlight, I attempted to locate the one that I thought I could understand the most.

In Sonnet 29 the speaker is in a depressed state. He feels that he has disgraced everyone, and feels that he is an outcast. In his state of despair, his pleas to god go unanswered. He wished his life could be better. He wants to be better looking, smarter, and he wants a better opportunity. In his state of being, he catches thought of a special someone in his life. The thought of this person immediately improves his state. His spirits begin to lift, and in remembering his love with this person, he states he wouldn't trade his current life for that of a king's.

In this poem, Jen Bervin emphasized 7 words to form a poem within sonnet 29. "Outcast thoughts break to change my state". This poem could not possibly be summarizing the sonnet. Not only do I think it would be wrong to attempt to summarize what was wonderful about the Bard's writing, but those words really don't quite describe the context of the poem. Could she be trying to construct a different meaning to the poem, that what is normally accepted as interpretation of sonnet 29? The way I read her little poem is that someone had outcast thoughts, but they were then broken, changing the state of the speaker. But I don't know how this exactly relates to what was originally told in 29. So coming out of reading this sonnet and then Bervin's little poem, I am left confused, and unsure how to interpret what point she was trying to make.

Response to Sir Christopher Ricks Lecture

Distinguished literary critic Christopher Ricks was the keynote speaker of the "Why English" forum to celebrate the UMF sesquicentennial. He spoke on T.S. Eliot's work "Wasteland". Admittedly, I did not read the work before attending the presentation.As a result, most of the content of his presentation went way over my head. Regardless, I was thoroughly impressed by Ricks superior knowledge of his subject. He was an eloquent speaker, with excellent memorization of the texts he discussed.

What I did understand from his talk, were the connections to Emily Dickinson. Eliot's Wasteland is a highly revised piece of work. His wife compiled his manuscript, and there are many pieces of evidence that this work has been highly revised. There may have been a preface to his poem, but may have been deleted by Eliot himself. His poem probably saw many additional revision before the version we see today. As was the case with Dickinson, Eliot probably had very specific ideas as to how his works were intended to be presented.

Near the end of the lecture, Ricks said that the revision process turns "terrific talent" into "genius". This is very true of most any piece of work. There can never be enough revision to a piece of work. The process of refinement can be more tedious than the first writing, but some of the best pieces of a work can come from the revision process.

"Dickinson's Aesthetics and Fascicle 21" Reading Response

In this section of Heginbotham's exploration into Dickinson's fascicles, she looks into two poems of one fascicle and tries to draw connections between them. "They shut me up in Prose", and "This was a Poet" are facing one another in fascicle 21. Trying to find alternate meaning within the words that Dickinson chose to use was what Heginbotham attempted to do. She sees puns on words in each of the poems, and makes her arguement as to why the poems are facing one another. This chapter also includes a discussion about the discovery and the naming of the fascicles. Other critics thoughts and opinions about the fascicles seem to be wide ranging, each one giving unique reasons as to why the poems are grouped the way they are.

I think that Heginbotham's evidence for her thesis about the connectivity of these two poems is suspect. The reasons seem highly constructed, and in a way cherry picked. It's like she was forcing some obscure anomalies together to make her point. It often seems easy to make a convincing argument on a subject, crafting each piece of evidence to fit your point perfectly. It is funny to see how each author has their own thoughts on the organization of the fascicles. Each one uses compelling arguments to make their point. But, I really felt like there should be some sort of general theme to each argument. Furthermore, these are all mere speculations. Dickinson never provided any context to the organization of her poems. It is even possible that she never wanted to see these creations, and they were merely for her own personal usage.

"Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson" Introduction Reading Response

Heginbotham is fascinated by the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson. She notes in the introduction that there is much more to the individual poem when they are grouped together as they are in the fascicles. Publishers destroyed the original state of Dickinson's work, now having each poem work as a stand alone. It is easy to see the intricacies of each poem, but grouped together in the 40 volumes the poems gain even more value. As the Dickinson manuscript is returned to its (relatively) original state, Heginbotham is interested in discovering the reasons for why the poems are grouped the way they are. She says she is most interested in "...the canny, intriguing, and... intentional artistry [Dickinson] used to compile these books" (ix).

Dickinson had the task of organizing her works into the 40 volumes of over 900 poems. Not only did she have to worry about the composition of each individual poem, she had to pay attention to how each poem fit next to the other poems in the hand-sewed volumes. Heginbotham consulted poets to understand the strategies they use to organize their works. It was evident that this task is more complex than one would believe.

What scholars have been trying to do is find an answer to why Dickinson organized the poems the way she did. But the fact is, Emily never provided any reasons for why the poems are organized in the way they are. The scholars thoughts are pure speculation based on what they can only imagine Dickinson had in mind when organizing the poems.

Heginbotham notes that some poems are repeated in fascicles. She believes she can use these repeats to see why they were placed surrounding the poems in the fascicles, and thus uncover the reason Dickinson arranged her poems in this way. It was truly a cool moment reading her hypothesis. It is surprising that Heginbotham is the first to discover these repeats and possibly see the significance of that fact.

---

The fact that each poem is organized in in a fascicle is truly fascinating. It must make a significant difference reading the fascicle from cover to cover than reading each poem individually. I can easily relate this in terms of music. One can see meaning in one individual song. But, when all the songs of an album are listened to from start to finish a whole new meaning and appreciation for the songs can be discovered.

#Dickinson #Heginbotham #Fascicles

"They Shut Me Up In Prose" Reading Response

The speaker in this poem is telling of her experiences of being silenced from her free thinking, open minded self. First as a child, then as an author. When the speaker was young, she was full of energy, and voice. As a result, she was placed in the closet, as girls at the time were expected to be “still”. As a writer, her thoughts are stifled by being contained to prose, and not poetry, where ideas could flow freely. The speaker is trapped within the confides of the closet, and the lines of prose. Unable to openly express the thoughts she has, she is stripped of her individuality. Her thoughts and the way she expressed herself are confined to what was expected of women at the time. At the time women were better seen, and not heard. Their voices oppressed, or severely limited.

#EmilyDickinson #Poem #ENG100

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