Short Stories and my thoughts

Reading the short stories was fun and interesting especially since they crossed so many different ideas.  A short story that I really enjoyed reading was “Walking the baby to the liquor store”.  The story is about a father taking his baby to a nearby liquor store and just enjoying each other’s company.  “The baby adores going to the liquor store” is a line in the story and gives the feeling of bonding and development in life.  As you’re reading the story, you read a line saying, “Believe me, I wouldn’t miss these excursions for the world.”  This line by itself just helps to picture the love a father has for his baby and the bond they have together.  This short story did a great job in taking an ordinary event and using it to describe the relationship of a parent and child. 

Though I have had no experience with combat and going off to fight a war, reading the short story “The Colonel” helped to describe the pain a person has coming back from war.  The story paints a picture of an evening meal of a family and a guest who is new to the scene.  In the beginning, the guest describes the awkward family dinner and does this by describing everything around him like, “the moon swung bare on its black cord over the house.  On the television was a cop show.”  Just reading the first paragraph made you want to walk away because it was so awkward and uncomfortable.  Then the story starts to incorporate the family members and finally the Colonel.  A disturbing image was the scene with the Colonel and the ears, “the Colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home.  He spilled many human ears on the table.  They were like dried peach halves.”  This scene just helped to further describe the relationship between the family members toward the Colonel especially with, “My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing.” 

The funniest short story was “Wallet” and how it described a father and son getting into trouble, but in a good way.  Starting off, the story describes the boy’s father planning to trick pickpocketers into stealing a fake wallet filled with useless junk.  “It hangs out fat with desire.  “All oyster,” he says to me, “no pearl.” This line did a great job in expressing the silliness of the father, in his attempt to be a trickster.  At the mall the father tries to bait someone into stealing his wallet by “trying to act feeble and childlike”.  When you read this story, you’re thinking to yourself how you hope they succeed at catching a criminal.  At the end of the story when the salesclerk returns the wallet, after someone tried to steal it, and all the junk “floats to the floor”, you can’t help but laugh.  The ending to the story is great and hilarious when the father runs to the car shouting “drive fast, drive fast”.  Overall I enjoyed this story immensely.

Response to poem and Writing

Escape Training: Instructor’s Flying Rappel (pg.121)

I jump backwards off the cliff

To show how it’s done:

One two footsteps taps on the face

Of the rock and then I rest

In the blink of an eye I’m at the bottom

Sounds of music that the rope makes

Whistling as the rope flows through the hand

One to stop the other to flow

Feelings of joy how does one express

To those who I teach

In dire situations is this movement useful

But done right it’ll sound like a melody

Measuring out the line is important

All lines eventually end just like a song

Down the rope I fly but as the rope ends

I look down with just a little to go

                                                The flames

Instead of rescue

This task is able to be done without the use of rope

I complete in silence the maneuver

I jump off the burning floors.

In class last week, the class went through the end part of “City Eclogue” and wrote a response.  This was a difficult task at least for me since I’m not sure how Ed Roberson wrote these poems.  When the professor asked us to write the response I read the poems and thought about which one jumped out.  After reading the poem, I thought about how Ed Robinson styled the poem and what message he was trying to convey.  Since I lack experience writing poetry I tried to look for patterns and spaces.  After writing the response we went around the class and talked about the poems we chose and read our response.  Hearing the different interpretations helped me to understand the writing style better.  I also enjoyed hearing how people thought about the various poems. 

The response for this week’s blog is on the poem Escape training.  Reading the poem jumped out at me because of my own experience rappelling down towers.  Ed Roberson did a great job in describing the experience of rappelling and the excitement it brings.  Feeling the rope whistling through my hands and tapping off the face are two things that I can picture while reading the poem.  The only part I had difficulty visualizing was the end of the poem since I’m not sure what situation would require you to rappel off the side of a burning building.  I’m thinking that either the poem is about his experience or if it’s through the experience of someone else.  While writing the poem I tried to convey my own experiences rappelling and also Ed Robinson’s feeling of the burning building. 

After reading the Poems, we talked about what we read in “Bird by Bird”.  The author does a great job in describing the highs and lows of writing.  In the beginning of the book, the author talks about her own experience with her father and how he inspired her to write.  A classmate talked about how talking about how “real” her father was is a brave act and I would have to agree with that.  Writing about one’s father is generally done in a manner that exaggerates or draws one’s father in the best of light.  Anne instead writes about how her father wrote about her neighborhood in a negative light, which caused difficulties for her.  Also Anne talks about interacting with her students and how difficult writing can be.  “I don’t even know where to start,’ one will wail” is how I used to act towards my writing teacher in high school and when I read that part of the book I laughed.  Anne does a great job to encourage writing with “Remember that you own what happened to you.”  Reading this really put into perspective how easy writing can be.  I’m really looking forward to reading more of this book and learning the ins and outs of writing.

(In-Class)  The "State as Body" Aspects of Eunuch Rule (pg. 113)

To hate or love                by killing to feel

Simple sense

Interacting with people                     cutting away at my self

Sharing of blood                    what is

                       Knowing others

Losing myself in others                    inner turmoil of the mantel

Earth            Eyes on me

Looking into a mirror                             watching myself

                      Longing for self

Feeling alone                             always alone            

To avoid loneliness even if        

Companion with death 

Bird by Bird and Poetry

Last Tuesday in class I talked about a book we read called “City Eclogue”.  The book was a compilation of poems about a city, probably a city the author grew up in.  I didn’t know about what an Eclogue was, so like usual I went to Wikipedia, where I learned that Eclogue is part of Pastoral literature where topics are described in simple format.  Poems in the book would go over simple subjects like a road, the title “as it crested the hill”.  A line from the poem, “The street as it crested the hill, the buildings on each side of a moon bridge”.  The poems were also set up in an interesting way with lots of “white space” in what I thought was a way where the author wanted the reader to focus on specific concepts.  An example of this is how on page 26, the author writes “someone may want” and then the next line down continue with “to know one day how many steps we took”.  At first looking at the poem was confusing, but after talking about them in class I got a better idea of what the author was trying to get at.

After going over the eclogues, the groups went over poems we wrote.  The poems I wrote were set as a sonnet and a journey poem.  Writing out the poems was a lot harder than I originally thought.  I first had to look up for sonnets were written out and learned that Shakespearean sonnets went in a pattern of ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG.  Each section had alternating lines that rhyme and the last two summarizes.  The journey poem was based on what we listened to in class about a city in the Ukraine.  In order to not use “cliché” words used in poetry, I looked up different words from a thesaurus.  Some of the words I wasn’t sure if I was using them properly, so I needed to look up the word in the dictionary.  In our groups during class, we handed a copy to the professor and the other we passed to our group members for critique.  I’m pretty sure my poems were crap and so getting critiqued by my classmates was very helpful and informative since they have more experience writing poems than I do. 

Writing poems really helped to tie in with the book “Bird by Bird” where the author talks about just getting your thoughts on paper and the way her students asked her what to write.  In the book the author says, “You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day”.  Reading the chapters really got me to understand that writing was just a simple process.  The author provides interesting examples about how she uses her childhood experiences and just different memories being used as inspiration.  The way she talks about interacting with her students is interesting too.  Reading the book is very engaging and getting me to get interested in learning how to write.   

Poetry Packets and trying to understand

During class we went through and read a packet full of poetry.  The one thing about poetry is how it rarely makes any sense to me.  An example of just how confusing poetry can be is with the poem on page 6 of the PDF packet.  Firstly, I don’t get why the author designed the poem in that manner.  If I was to take a shot in the dark about the purpose of the poem, I would say that a singularity pulls in everything and jumbles matter up.  Maybe the author put the poem in that manner to represent ideas getting sucked into a singularity (black hole).  I do admit that there are times that poetry does make sense, especially when it’s talking about a politics and social injustice.   

Dream Boogie really drove its point in the way Dream Boogie was structured.  I figure there is a hidden meaning in the way the author chose the words like “ain’t you heard” or a “dream deferred”, but since I don’t really know anything about the author I can only make connection on my own experiences.  The author probably used the word “ain’t” to show a socio-economic background of the kid talking to his dad.  The kid in the poem is probably from a neighborhood that has seen better times.  Using the term “a dream deferred” was a really interesting combination since the term “deferred” means to postpone, but since the author later uses the word “ain’t” the use of the word “deferred” in interesting and seems to put more emphasis on how this kids dreams are postponed.  When I read this poem I wonder what dream the kid had and why is it getting “deferred”. 

Now when I read poetry, usually for a class, I imagine that not all have some political agenda but are written just for a “food for thought” manner.  Food for thought is what I got when I read the poem “And What Do You Get”.  The poem goes through and switches a bunch of words around to demonstrate how easily a words meaning can change if certain letters were removed.  For example, the author takes the word “therapist” and asks you to remove the “the” and when you look at the end result you get “rapist”.  The author even drives the point by talking about the “id”, which is the instinctual part of a person’s mind (in Freudian psychology).  When I finished reading the poem, there wasn’t any feeling of “wow that sucks or we need to change society” but instead I had the feeling of “that’s interesting or yeah I knew that”.  The reaction I had to the poem is probably what the author wanted but since I don’t know the author I’m just guessing.

During class, we talked about what is a poem and the different structure that go into making a poem.  While the class was listing off the various “things” that go into a poem, I was trying to absorb all the different ideas since my major is completely on the opposite end of writing poetry.  The reading with Goldberg though really helped to put into perspective the ideas of writing.  The author mentions “Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important.” When I read this, the pass discussions in class started to make a little more sense.  Just because poetry doesn’t make sense to everyone, including me, doesn’t make it any less important.  Writing in general is about trying to understand or even record what’s happening around us and poems like “And What Do You Get” kind of help emphasize that point.  Though in my defense, the understanding of where the various authors are coming from, when writing poetry, would help immensely.  The reason knowing about the author is important (for me) is that by knowing the history, I can then put the poem into context (or at least attempt to).   

About Me

If you're reading this then probably you are interested about myself and what this is all about.  My name is Neil and I'm an undergraduate and my major is in accounting.  Originally, I got into the field of accounting with the help of my professor, who inspired me.  Normally when someone says that they are studying accounting the first question you ask is whether they are going into auditing or Tax.  To be honest, I am interest in both auditing and Tax.  With auditing I am trying to get into fraud, so I'm going to be taking the CFE (Certified Fraud Examiner) exam.  In terms of tax, the majority of people find the topic to be distasteful but with me I'm interest in tax law.

Currently I'm studying to take the GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test), which as the test says is for getting into graduate school.  For graduate school I'm going to be studying accounting, though I'm most likely going to study auditing depending on which school I'm accepted into.