Last Class Post

Ah, it is the end of the year.  We have gotten to the ultra modern post 9/11 world, and maybe the most interesting part of class. There are a lot of people in this school that have experienced extreme prejudice.  I have only had one of these experiences; when I went to Israel the Tel Aviv airport is considered the safest in the world, but I tend to think it is just the biggest pain in the butt. And they are really suspicious of Americans.  They pull you over, and ask all these questions and if you can speak Hebrew it is usually fine, and I can but I was really nervous because I think security makes a lot of people nervous, so I couldn't do it (which probably means I need to speak it more) so they went through all my bags and asked me a bunch of security questions and I probably looked terrified but I didn't have anything with me so they let me go.  It scared me half to death, and this was just once.  Some people of certain descent in the US go through this every time they fly.  I am not sure how I would handle that.  It is so sad and I would feel so unsafe all the time.  I hope it gets better eventually, and I try to help, but there is only so much I can do.

The Rabbit Hole of Analysis

I read a lot of graphic novels, or I used to, anyway I really like them, and I think their authors are so talented.  What I think is the most interesting about them is how the compare to other books, if you read a book for class there is really only so much you can read into it without falling down the rabbit hole, but with a graphic novel so much thought goes into ever picture and word, because the dialog and writing have to be snappy to fit in a comic style layout, and you can really tell from the pictures the background and focus of the author.  There is so much perspective to uncover in a graphic novel or a comic book (if you want to go down that road please check out the article Superheros on my other blog).  It is so important to have both imagery and words to explain to us a situation, that is why we give children picture books, to explain to them things they do not have the experience to understand.  That is why Maus is so great, it makes us feel a part of something that we could not previously understand.  Not that we could understand the experience of being in the Holocaust, or being the child of two survivors in two short books (even if they are amazing), but at least we can get closer to understanding, and that is what art and writing are all about.

Tenuous Connections

Alright, at first I really did not like The Glass Menagerie.  I read the first chapter and basically thought "nope, this is awful. I can't do this."  I almost thought about cliff notes, but then I learned we were reading it in class so I thought okay I can deal with this, and it turned out, to my surprise, I am actually really liking it now.  I feel as if I am a kindred spirit to Tom in The Glass Menagerie, not only because I have a tenancy to narrate my life and am often pushed towards intense sarcasm, but also because of how he feels about his dreams.  For a long time I very much wanted to be a screenwriter, like Tom, and I felt the same way about it.  I suppose what I mean is when Tom expresses, or rather it was implied, that he feels embarrassed and foolish about his dreams.  Lets face it, that profession is not considered respectable.  Saying "I am a writer"  is in a completely different court in social standing than "I am a doctor"  or "I am a lawyer".  However, judging by the fact that Tom is the narrator and supposedly the "author" of the play he realized that doesn't matter.  Excuse my bluntness, but people who judge artistic professions suck.  I am not usually the inspirational poster type, but really following your dreams and what you want to do is a million times more important than what people think of you.  And if it is that important to you use an alias or something, because trying to spend your life doing something you are not passionate about isn't good for anyone.  You will hate it, you won't work hard at it, and you will never reach your full potential, so what is the point?

The renaissance, it is no longer just a period of time in history,  it is a description of a creative artistic golden age.  One of the most famous of these goes by the name The Harlem Renaissance.  This period of time is characterized by the movement of African American people northward to large urban areas of the United States during World War I, where jobs in factories, such as automobile factories, had opened up and employers were more eager to hire minority groups due to the draft of the white meb originally employed there.  As minority communities grew larger and closer knit they pushed out the upper middle class white people who had originally lived there.  This causes a boom in artistic creation in these areas.  what we must do when looking back is concider the implications of calling this a renaissance,  was it really a golden age of creation,  or was it simply when America got over its racism enough to realize there was creation going on and acknowledge it?

Immigration

This week in class I saw an interesting comparison.  In American Literature we see in The Great Gatsby an amazing and extravagant life in New York, full of parties and money.  However in American Studies we talked about immigration at the turn of the century, we talked about sweatshops and the tenements and the lower class right off the boat.  Of course these two situations are twenty years away from each other, but the did coincide. More often than not I find myself thinking of New York in the 1920s, and even now, as the romanticism that is Gatsby's New York (at least in the beginning of the book), and not the horror that was and is still tormenting the lower class.  This is even more strange to me because that is what I come from, Southeastern European Jewish immigrants who came through New York, worked in sweatshops, lived in the tenements and then the projects before they got out and moved south and west.  What's even weirder is that I want to go back, and so do my cousins, we all want to go back to college there, where our parents and grandparents grew up.  I think that means all these immigrants established a community.  They did something important.  Because now we can go back and be accepted and feel at home and intertwined with our history.  But I can't help but wonder if it is fair that, after all the work our previous generations did to get out of there, we would go back and undo some of their hard work.  No one from previous generations of my family live there anymore, just my generation.  And their parents don't like to visit.  But maybe it is a testament to them that we can live in Manhattan, we can get a good education and a good job, and we can make a living.  That we can make it in such a place.

Billy Budd and The Bible?

I just finished Billy Budd, and I have a bit to say about it.  First of all I have never really been able to get into any of Melville books.  Usually when I say that people respond "oh you probably don't understand it yet"  but I keep going back to them and I realized...  I do understand them.  They are no more complicated than Shakespeare and I love Hamlet, I just don't really like them.  This is surprising to me because I like very literary books.  Regardless I was required to read Billy Budd, and throughout the book there were countless biblical metaphors and similes, the majority to the old testament male lead roles.  Billy is compared to characters like Moses and Joseph.  He is an innocent, and possibly over trusting.  I personally think he is the most like Joseph and the shipmates are his brothers, Jacobs other sons.  Claggart reminds me a bit of Laban, a less known biblical character,  I see similarities in their moral compass and arguable narcissism.  It was mentioned in class that captain Vere could be a metaphor for God, but I don't think so.  I would argue that he would be Abraham, devoted to what he was set on earth to do and perhaps there are parallels in the hanging of Billy and the near sacrifice of Issac.  Of course I am just spit-balling here, I could be completely off the mark, especially because I only have knowledge of the old testament, but it helps me to analyze the characters.

The Importance of History

I will start out by saying I am a history geek.  History may be my favorite subject, and possibly the most important for the future.  I truly do believe that if humanity was not to study it history would be doomed to repeat.  The first thing I thought of when we wrote journals on our opinions on history repeating itself was a saying in Hebrew: "לדור ודור לעולם לא " (pronounced L'Dor V'Dor Laolam Lo).  A rough translation of this phrase is "From generation to generation never again".  The reason I bring this up is because maybe it is the job of those oppressed or their ancestors to make sure people continues to remember mistakes.  Many who have more fortunate and oppressive ancestors would prefer to not talk about these issues because of the guilt and blame they feel regarding them.  So maybe it is the job of the formerly oppressed to not make others feel guilt, but continue to share first hand stories and accounts and insure that history is not forgotten.  We don't need just classes, though.  We need remembrance days that are actually observed.  We have Martin Luther King Day, but there are certainly other important historical happenings that we barley ever think about, other than when we focus on them for a day in history class.