The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter Nine

This is a very sad chapter and I can feel what the families are feeling. They are desperate. They are selling everything and for anything because something is better than nothing. They are scared and want a new start, but fear they cannot ever really start over...but that perhaps they will always be missing a part of their identity. They have not chosen this destiny, but are being forced to move only for the survival of their families. The chapter is full of tangible anxiety.

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter Eight

Summed up in one very short statement: This chapter is about warm fuzzy feelings shared between family members that you don't know how to deal with in any other fashion than awkwardness.

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter Seven, The Jesters

I come from a family of used car salesmen, and I hate to think that they are like the saleman in this chapter. However, I know things that other people do not know. As a child I was taught things about men and about people that would have otherwise taken me an entire lifetime to accumulate and analyze. I was taught to bullshit. I was taught how to play on the psychology of people. I was taught how to outsmart men while simultaneously keeping them thinking that they are the ones making all the decisions. I love my family and I hate to think of them in the light of the salesman in the chapter. What is cool is that I knew every single car he was talking about!

The Grapes of Warth, Chapter Six

There is a heafty weight of significance in chapter six, but since this is my blog I've decided to pick and chose what I will talk about:

Pigs. Eating children. Terrible image, yet real. I was sickened. Then my mind, which is currently floating around the universe, wondered if this is how pigs react to us turning their piglets into bacon. Something to think about! Later in the chapter there is a detailed description on how the men skinned the rabbit. I can take blood and guts and horrid images of just about anything until it transfers to the mouth. What's wrong with me, I don't know. My case for vegetarianism only strenthened.

Grandpa is pissy about his pillow. Aren't older people always obsessed with one single object? Hahaha this makes me laugh.

Is hominy southern? Ooops! I didn't know that!

For the second time in the novel, blood of another family is mentioned. I wonder if this is also a southern thing, the breeding of powers and tempers, because I'm constantly reminded by my grandparents of the ancestors I didn't know and how much alike we are- when I do something good, one line of blood is congratulated. When I'm in a foul mood, another is blamed. When I'm bouncing off the walls as usual, everyone gets to blaming eachother.

Casy says something I agree with: that men should talk. Getting feelings and ideas out of your mind and off your chest does not make a man less masculine. It is okay to bond with people and let them help you with coping.

Joad talks about how reading a particular type of book will drive you crazy. I love to read, but I think all books teach you to not trust the government and inspire crazy ideas. Oh well!

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter Five, Starbucks and Ethiopian Coffee Farmers

I hate this chapter. Okay, hate is a strong word. I hate this chapter for reminding me about the hearts that are wrong in this world. Perhaps I'm jumping ahead of myself in blogging about the chapter in numerical order, but I'd like to focus on, "but for your three dollar a day fifteen or twenty families can't eat at all. Nearly a hundred people have to go out and wander on the roads for your three dollars a day. Is that right?" This fills me with rage and pain. I'm reminded of a documentary titled "Black Gold" in which I learned about what corporations like Starbucks do financially to people such as the Ethiopian Coffee farmers. The best coffee in the world, the indigenous peoples' only trade, and Starbucks comes in and forces them to work for less than $0.11 a day. They are starving, cannot build schools, and are resorting to farming drug plants because they turn out much more profit and more frequently than coffee plants. Yet, do our drinks get any cheaper? No, coffee prices are on the rise. How greedy can someone be? Is it right to have an endless supply of money while a parent has fallen ill, is contemplaying suicide, all because they cannot make the $0.11 a day to buy their family bread. Just because we cannot see it doesn't mean it isn't real. It also does not mean that it isn't our problem...this is my beef with big companies that have greedy people at the top that nobody knows how to contact, or even who they are, just like the people controlling the banks in TGOW. The danger here isthat "They breathe profit (not air); they eat the interest on money (not side-meat)."

The word "iron" is in this chapter atleast eight times. It represents a "revolution" which is actually the takeover of manual labor by machienes.

There is a struggle between the warm-hearted and those that are forced to be cold. The lunch of the man driving the tractor is made up of Spam and packaged pie rather than something prepared by his wife or his mother. He does this job because he also has to feed his children.

There are sexual images of the tractor raping the land repeatedly. Steinbeck chose the words carefully and associated them with scientific terms rather than slang to suggest how mindless and thoughtless the actions are...

My favorite quote from this chapter is, "We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good it's still ours. That's what makes it ours-being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it." I laugh and apply it to my loyalty to the Arkansas Razorbacks football team.

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter Four

All I can think about is that poor turtle and when he will show bvack up in the text. Luckily he crawls into this chapter and I can breathe for a moment and focus on other bullets of significance. The author goes to greath lengths to describe Jim Casy's stringy and muscular neck, protruding eyeballs, thin and sunbeated skin, and large forehead. I like when Casy relates every kid having a turtle to the Holy Spirit that he feels he can't keep forever. Maybe the turtle will come to symbolize hope, faith, and progression. It seems as if the turtle has been disrupted along his journey, but when I started thinking more about it it dawned on me that Joad had actually given the turtle a lift and thus saved him time and energy on his journey.

Steinbeck is blunt. Once you start nodding off he throws something in there to wake you and shake you. For me it started with, "He always said you got too long a pecker for a preacher." Then it followed through with the details of Uncle John eating a shoat and I was reminded why I am a vegetarian. Uncle John just took it a little too far in my opinion.

I laughed at the joke about breeding the houses together to get a whole litter of crap houses.

I know all too well about mucus in the nose drying to a crust, especially between times of high humidity and dry air.

Also, Joad's brother is named Noah and I wonder if that'll come to be representative of something else later in the novel.

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter Three

As biology is my first major, I was absolutely wrapped up in the seed dispersal in the first paragraph of chapter three. I love that Steinbeck knew how important animals, and the wind, are to the continuation of plant species. The turtle is representative of something, but I can't quite put my finger on it. He struggles, but he never gives up. The author doesn't include emotions, just actions. In a way I think the turtle parallels to the tenants traveling west to California. Some people will go out of their way to help you, like the car that dodged the creature, and some will go out of their way to harm you for a cheap thrill(perhaps the banks), like the car that clipped the turtle's shell.

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter Two

The imagery in chapter two sticks with me because I know it better than the back of my hand. Right off the bat we know that we as engaged readers are placed somewhere near central Oklahoma. To be honest, I don't know that I would have had such an easy time iwth this book had it not been placed somewhere I was nearly indigenous to- Oklahoma is close enough for me to say "I fully connect with these people because it is my homeland" yet at the same time I'm given distance when it comes to my advantage or benefit because I'm really a girl who was born in Mississippi and raised from my second year of life in the Arkansas River Valley. I can comment on how bad the drivers from Oklahoma are, and laugh, because I have the ability to disassociate. *no offense to those of you from Oklahoma!*

"And the flies buzzed excitedly about the doors and windows, butting the screens," this is a timeless occurance that seems to e. It never occured to me that people from other parts of the country may be new to this image that happens during the hottest months of the year down here in the South, although Oklahoma quickly melts into the classification of Central U.S. territory. The man is a truck driver, sitting in a diner, flirting with the waitress while washing down pie with coffee.

Joads attire is confusing, and I believe Steinbeck includes it so that he may bring closure to the reader at the end of the chapter when we learn that he was recently released from prison. Thank goodness that is cleared up because I was going a little bit crazy trying to figure out from where Joad hailed.

The waitress is fingering a lump. Is it cancerous, a zit, or neither? An inflamed lymph node? My pre-medical mind lingered on this inclusion, and if she was going to have it looked at- she probably should.

She said crossly, "Don't let the flies in. Either go out or come in." Once again, I thought this was something everyone heard as children regardless of where they lived...but now I'm beginning to have a little bit more reflection upon my childhood and her geographical specifics.

"Why, I'm thinkin' of takin' one of them correspondence school courses. Mechanical engineering. It's easy." hahahhahahah yeahhhh, what does he know?

I grew up licking my finger to find the breeze. Joad does this in chapter two.

Although I've left out much of what I had highlighted, I would like to end this post by noting that chapter two ends the same way it began by talking about the vertical exhaust pipe and its barely visible blue smoke.

The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter One

The introductory chapter primarily functions as anchoring a setting. Steinbeck lets us know where we should be in the imagination, but he takes the opportunity to load the text with much more significant and subtle meaning. For instance, I noted in my boko that in the first paragraph of the novel there are clashing images of life flourishing and life coming to an end, or the process of dying. In the second paragraph, I lifted out the action of weeping with "the water-cut gullies the earth dusted down in dry little streams" when compliomented with "the leaves of the young corn became less stiff and erect; they ent in a curve at first, and then, as the dentral irbs of strength grew weak, each leaf tilted downward." I think the author is setting the tone of the book, probably chosen to match the reality of the emotion spectrum experienced by those living in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. A few paragraphs later I noted that the the gentle wind that pushed the clouds northward was personifing a mother who ushers her curious children along although the children want to stay and play longer. The author includes how dust found its way into everything. When I was in Korea I had a similar experience myself. Yellow dust was picked up by a jet stream originating in China and brought it down to Korea. I have never been sick with allergies, never had to wear a mask outside...although it is probably nothing in coparison to the dust bowl, I wouldn't ever want to sit through a season of yellow dust again.

Tomato Red

This short piece has some great imagery. It is about a crank addict who wants friends and so he breaks into a mansion to steal drugs after he read that the family is somewhere off in France. I would simply like to list the phrases I liked the most:
"her teeth are the siz of shoe-peg corn and look like maybe they'd taste sort of sour"
"a dry peck on the lips"
"but the bricks were the type that's nigger than house bricks, more like the shape of bread loves, which I think classes them as cobblestones of something"
"lamppost in the yard that made a hepatitis-yellow glow"
"rigamorole of jewel-theif piss elegance"
"and that glass thankfully was of a typical lower oder and flew to pieces"
"the glass shatter seemed like a sincere burst of applause"
"and friendship is this slow awkward process you've got to angle through"
"the mist felyt like a tounge I kept walking into, and my skin and clothes seemed slobbered on"
"smelled sweeter than my ex-wife's hair"
"this mansion smelled of bug achievements and handbags from Rome and unkown treats, which were better scents than I was used to. The walls even seemed special, kind of, as my fingertips skipped along them feeling how fine and costly they felt. My mind, I'd say, stumbled along two or three steps behind my body. More like a waiter than a chef"
"but it seemed like I'd undergone interplanetary travel"
"like a rubbernecking crowd peeking in on a private moment"
"blond wood from Oriental lands"
"Peanut butter is the prescribed unger medicine for poor folks, and there's always a scraping or so left in the bottom of the jar, somewhere way back in the cupboard"

A man who buys books because tey're pretty (part four)

I admire Bragg's brutal honesty about not knowing if he responded to a dying man's cry for attention or just wanted the present. I have also had anger about men in my life and what they have done to my mother and my family. Bragg drops in Hardee's parking lot fights to remind the reader of the setting of the story. He goes on to say that if his "daddy" had a favorite it must have been him. I've also felt this way. The more you display actions, thoughts, and manners that your relatives have taught you first hand, the more they like you. They want something to be proud of...I think the following sentence speaks worlds of truth: When you see that person's life red on their lips and know that you will never see them beyond this day, you lisetn close, even if what you want most of all is to run away. Bragg could have taken the opportunity to unload on his father but what was the point? "Life had kicked his ass pretty good." As he is writing about the last few hours with his father he says something I identify with all too well, "For the next few hours-unless I was mistaken, having never had one before-he tried to be my father." It is a strange feeling not to know what to do with a figure that is traditionally supposed to be there, all your friends have one, but that you've grown accustomed to not having. I suppose it is much like being born without a big toe! You would understand how one works if you had one. He goes on to say that his heart should have broken when his father gave him books, and maybe it did a little bit. He is still trapped somewhere between his hatred and what might have been forgiveness. It wasn't until the last moments that he had insight to his father and I feel emotional reading about such a topic. All in all, I enjoyed this passage!

A man who buys books because they're pretty (part three)

Bragg's mother is jaded by his father. There is something in the wrapping of the telephone cord around her hands that carries sadness in a time before cordless phones. He mentions that he lived in a house with his fammily on behalf of his aunt Nita and uncle Ed...doesn't every Southerner have a wealthy aunt and uncle? Bragg's description of his father reminds me of my grandfather, my Bobo, although he would never beat a man up in front of a little girl. However, a common phrase that comes out of his mouth is "son of a bitch." Those words, when spoken, paint me a picture of where I think that person is from, how they vote, and their general opinion on everything. He also comes from a time when to be afraid was to be shameful. I've had personal experiences with the young alcoholic familiy memeber who is drinking themselves to death and has no other treatment but The Cross. My favorite passage from this chapter is, "I guess it is what you do if you grow up with warnings of damnation ringing from every church door and radio station and family reunion, in a place where total strangers will walk up to you at the Piggly Wiggly and ask if you are Saved. Even if you deny that faith, rebuke it, you still carry it around with you like some half-forgotten Indian head penny you keep in your pocket for luck. I wonder sometimes if I will be the same, if when I see my life coming to and end I will drop to my knees and search my soul for old sins and my memory for forgotten prayers. I reckon so." Wow. This is an on-going voice in the back of young Bible-belters' heads. He says that his second-hand motorcycle and his first real kiss ranked above his father in terms of relevance and importance. I felt guilt when I read it because as loving as a person as I think myself to be, I have felt the same way with my own biological father. Like Bragg's brother, I sometimes feel as if I was hatched, by my mother alone, into this world.

A man who buys bookss because they're pretty, part two

"It was as if God made them pay for the loveliness of their scenery by demanding everything else." I couldn't have said it better myself. In one paragraph he talks about the church scene, babies, mothers, potato salad, sweet tea, bbq, and the gospel and mirrors it with talks of bars, strip clubs, lost love, and betrayal. He then goes on to say that it was the backdrop and sound track of his life. This strikes a chord with me because as a child I felt as if I lived in a picture perfect Southern, Christian family by day and in a world of secrets by night. Bragg witnessed the takeover of the countryside by corporate America, and I too feel as if I have been living in the same time, although one can never really escape the ties with the country. He goes on to say "while I was never ashamed to be a Southerned there was always a feeling, a need, to explain myself." Everywhere I go, but especially in cities like Boston, I feel a need to prove myself educated and cultured, that people from the south are different from how they are characterized in the cinema and television. He also says that Southerness has become a fashion and I agree 100%. Men and women wear camouflage as if they have just stepped out of the woods. Girls bump their hair to great heights. Yet, I remember my grandfather as Bragg does, in clean overalls and a spotless white shirt buttoned to the neck...but when do you see people wearing that at the mall? He states that only religion held. He is in part correct, although God has evolved with the times. Bragg highlights an interesting point when mentioning that Baptists now beat drums and the Church of Christ allows coed swimming. Piano players started going to school for the skill, much different than in the old days when they simply learned at home. My ex boyfriend of six years is now in his final year as a composition major at Berklee College of Music.

A man who buys books because they're pretty (part 1)

I absolutely adore Rick Braggs writing style. Perhaps it is because I can relate all too well with his subject matter. His passage from "All Over But The Shouting" was a nice break from the rather dry, yet interesting, material from last week. Within the first few lines I was overwhelmed with emotions of excitement and anxiety for I knew what Bragg was going to say...and I knew the romance would be sickeningly interrupted. Sometimes I don't want to be reminded about the dark side of my roots (and I'm not talking about my "white trash" blond hair with weedish dark roots!) The author is a talented writer who taps deep into imagery and the senses to drive his piece home. The first paragraph lays out an undeniable country setting: hounds, the color green, possums, overalls, domestic women, peaches, biscuits, religion, piano, Buicks, whiskey, clay roads, hog hunting, panthers, violent children, cotton, and wagons. In the second paragraph he does something typical of someone from a small Southern town by listing how many miles the town was from the nearest better-known urban communities with an airport (120 miles west of Atlanta, 100 miles east of Birmingham). He uses phrases in the Southern lexicon such as "mean as a damn snake." He transitions into a darker story by stating that this town was a million miles away from the Old South known for images and smells of jasmine-scented verandas (an exaggeration obviously, but what's more important is that he listed exact distances to the nearest cities but wanted the reader to know he was nowhere near what we think of as the romantic Old South.) Catholics are given Christian names, but ironically Bragg's ancestors drank to the point of forgetting those names. Here things begin to get interesting. The third paragraph is a stark contrast to the first. Life is gloomy, full of hardship, and lacking laughter. People work for pennies, lose limbs doing dangerous jobs, grow crops in unsatisfactory soil, tornados splinter homes, women work themselves to death, children die...but every Sunday they are reminded that the soul of man never dies. In the fourth paragraph he mentions something that I still encounter every day of my life. My family and others brought up in what I consider a liberal Southern family feel like they owe some generations-old debt to their black neighbors because their great-great-grandfather owned their great-great-grandfather. What is even more upsetting is that I still find people of color who feel as if they are owed. Afterwards, Bragg alludes to the KKK and how they had some twisted interpretation of the Bible, and kicked the living shit out of anyone who thought it should be different. As a Southerner, I am not proud of this.

Week 2, Daisy

Daisy has her own set of problems, but I am not sure what’s going on inside her head. Does she feel like she married the wrong man? Does she cry during the clothing scene because she is happy or because she is taking pity on Gatsby? Does she even want to leave her husband? Not all women of the upper class are like Daisy, but she is quite passive. Could this be the difference between marrying into money and inheriting it?

Week 2, Tom Buchanan

Tom has a serious problem with infidelity. It comes across to me as if he has always had everything he has wanted. Tom has never been told “no” by anyone. In university he was an athlete. Although he married Nick’s second cousin, Tom and Nick were not plans in their university days. Tom is the classic case of a person who hops from affair to affair to keep up the excitement in his or her life. What else will he do all day? Moreover, does he have a power complex? He does not have relations with women with greater edges like Daisy, but with the lower classes in which there is a material domination that he leads. He only seems concerned about Daisy and Gatsby because it creates exciting drama for him. Also, I doubt that he has ever felt threatened by other men in the face of women, especially his own wife.

Week 2, Myrtle Wilson

This week we have delved into The Great Gatsby. I’ve formulated new opinions of the characters. To begin, Myrtle Wilson is striking in her class climbing. She cannot share a child with Tom so she demands a puppy that she probably will neglect. At the party the guests pass around the puppy like it is a baby. When she’s complimented on her attire she scoffs and lacks the grace of accepting the compliment. She speaks of the garment as if it is only slightly better than rags. When speaking about her husband, Myrtle claims that she is the victim for she thought he was a man of higher wealth. She’s a case for a psychological study. Mrs. Wilson talks about the first time she saw Tom, that she knew he was a “real” gentleman because of the way he is dressed. She obviously thinks of class as only defined by monetary status. Like a woman of the lower to middle class, she is outspoken and cannot hold her liquor. Like a broken record she repeats the name “Daisy” and it indicates that she has no sense and/or filter of appropriateness.I cannot blame Myrtle, but I lack just as much respect for her as I do Tom because of where her true intentions seem to lay.

Week One, Part Two

Our first piece to tackle in Dr. Sublette’s course is The Great Gatsby. Although I’ve read it many times before there are things, as always, that I didn’t pick up the last time I visited the novel. To round out the rest of this first week’s blog, I would like to discuss Nick. I’m not sure about this guy. I think he wants to be a person who doesn’t pass judgment on people because he thinks it sounds good, but I don’t honestly believe he is 100% whole wheat in regard to his composition. Perhaps his father meant well in instilling core values in his son, but is it possible that even if one is not spoilt, it is impossible to be honest and genuine when one has not personally endured hardship? Within the first few pages he is already using terms that hint to his real state-of-mind. He name drops the town in which he attended a prestigious university as if blaze about accidentally touting his own horn. Throughout the novel Nick acts like an invisible bystander whose only purpose is to record the happenings of the elite pool in which he is swimming. However, just like an ice cream taste tester, it is hard for me to believe that he is unbiased and separated from the situation and is only there to do work, not enjoy himself.

Week One, 20th Century American Literature

I'm behind on publishing my posts, but here's an attempt to catch up! This is the first week of school and I'm the utmost excited about this semester in particular. When I'm fit to be tied with my biology courses I walk into an English class. When I've had it up to my neck in thinking and reflection, you know the whole artsy aspect of my education, I sit down in a science course and bullet facts for a few hours. One of the best decisions I've made in my recent life was to double major in Biology and English. What I have created is a get-credit-by-default-when-distracted system. Genetics, physics, and ecology are all wonderful courses that hold my attention, but I need to discuss "white trash" and Shakespeare a few hours a day. School doesn't feel so much like school as it does fun...and that's how I know I'm right where I am meant to be positioned. I'm heavily anticipating the tidal wave of school work, RA duties, Greek life responsibilities, and the reduction of my social life. In order to prevent a catastrophic storm such as this nightmare, I'm most certainly set on working well ahead of time. I plan on completing all papers and projects before mid-term if possible. So far so good! I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and I'm finally starting to really enjoy my time at college as I've learned the tricks of the trade.