The Finale

It was:
Good.
Just good?
Yes, just good.
It wasn't awful but it wasn't spectacular either.
It was fun, but it was also incredibly hard.
It was full of laughter, but it was also full of many tears.
Memories were made, but others were repressed.
It was a time of growth, not just physically, but also mentally, and it was a time in which we began to truly find ourselves.

I don't know what the future will hold but I can only imagine it will be great.
It will be full of life and adventure.
Full of new opportunities and experiences.
It will also be full of conflict, and closing doors.
It will be unpredictable, and its up to us to make it something great.

Whitman's Notes

1. First couple of pages appear to be dates and times of meetings with different people. Page 3 talks about a brochure with two character. One appears to be Abraham Lincoln and he describes it using the words "lessons for a president elect." These ideas were never published, even in verse form Wrote notes about Greek culture and philosophy. Notes on religion, specifically Christianity and Christ, were Whitman's attempts to reconcile two different religious platforms Rough drafts of poems such as the one about the ship and how everybody can sail. Next page has a rough draft of a poem about the mad, raging wind. Switch in tones from page to page. Pages 11-12 have freehand drawings of a man, one is just of the man's head and the other has the same head on a disproportionate body, which appears to be in an awkward gesture. Sketches continus to pages 13-14, but the man slowly starts to resemble Abraham Lincoln, especially on page 14 where he drew said man with a tall black hat on. He has a sketch of a title called "The Bohemian." (apparently he appropriated the term He has ideas for different poems, such as The Hall of Brooklyn, and it looks as if he started writing for that poem but didn't finish. The sketch on the last page is quite interesting. It has a skeleton with a heart body who has a sword piercing his body. The background looks as if it could represent the beach and the overall picture could be depicting a war. This picture is said to represent America in  Some of the names included were people who fought during the Civil war, which could mean that Whitman had intentions of interviewing them for their personal accounts of the war. Ideas often start out as dark and pessimistic, but later change into ideas of hope, particularly for the Union.

Throughout Whitman's journal I noticed  a lot of things that had been crossed out and a lot of incomplete thoughts. I think that this is significant because it gives us insight to his creative process. Whitman suffered from manic depression (bipolar disorder) and there have been several creative geniuses who have also suffered from manic depression, and it has shown itself in their creative processes and in some of their work. While majority of the words I could not make out, the ones that I understood enough to piece together some of the ideas in his journal like the ideas about the lessons for the president elect, or the poem idea about the wind hand how his tone shifts from one page to the other when writing about the wind and sailing. In my opinion the sketches in his journal reflect himself at first and later develop into the character he is trying to develop, in this case, Abraham Lincoln. I think this journal reveals that Whitman liked to challenge the ideas of his time and used poetry to express his opinions, which would explain why his poetry was not popular when he first wrote it.
2. After looking at the  notes on Whitman's journal, I understood a lot more of what he was writing about. He had strong beliefs about what was right and wrong according to topics like slavery and immigration, and shared the same position as Abraham Lincoln, who inspired many of the entries in Whitman's journal, like the brochure for the lessons for an elect president, and the verse entry that was about the ship, where he compared Lincoln's presidency to a sailing ship experiencing raging winds. The notes also revealed that Whitman frequently had incomplete thoughts, which I consider a normal aspect of a journal, especially for someone who had so many creative thoughts that may have rapidly occurred, or one thought may have lead into another totally unrelated idea.

The American Dream

I would describe the American Dream as people having opportunities to create a better life for themselves and become self- sustainable. Back when the idea of the American Dream first developed, people had this idea that America was the place to be if you wanted to have great wealth and have a good life. It was right after WWI, which is crucial because America had stepped in to help the Allies, and helped them successfully end the war. Countries destroyed by the war saw America as a saving grace and as a possible way to escape the conditions they were currently living in. This is why I said the American dream was people having opportunities to create a better life for themselves.

Based on today's society and the society presented in both The Great Gatsby and The Wasteland, I think the definition of wealth would fall along the lines of material possessions that generally cause a person to become significantly happier with their life until something greater comes along. Especially in today's society, material wealth has overtaken out lives. There is no longer an emphasis on the quantity of the life you live and the impact you make, but there is an emphasis on who can have the latest and greatest the quickest. When looking forward and thinking about what career I might want to pursue, I really looked at doing something I would enjoy doing everyday and something that would have an impact on other peoples lives.

I think that Americans tend to have a hypocritical attitude towards wealth and poverty. People always want to be wealthy and well-off and dream of being able to afford anything they want in life but at the same time they criticize people who have a lot of wealth. Americans also want to be wealthy but don't always want to put in the work. In The Great Gatsby, all Daisy had to do was marry Tom and she became wealthy. She did absolutely nothing and still ended up wealthy. Americans also take a similar attitude towards poverty. Americans sympathize and often times pity people who live in poverty but at the same time will quickly  judge people and determine that they did this to themselves and that they will be able to get themselves out of this situation.

I think that wealth has more to do than just material things. While having things in life is great, there are also non-material things that are equally as important or more important. One of those things is knowledge. Knowledge is a very powerful thing and can get you in and out of many situations. In most cases, knowledge goes much farther than any material possession and is much more powerful. I think that my attitude towards poverty is a sympathetic one. I feel bad for people who live in poverty all around the world, not just the ones in countries in Africa or the veterans who fought for our country. everyone should be able to live a healthy sustainable life and not have to worry about having those basic necessities that everyone needs.

Practice IOC

Practice IOC

Criterion A: 4- some of the things that I said were very basic and I couldn't exactly remember where my passage came from.

Criterion B: 4- I mention the literary features used in the passage, but I don't really fully explain them or the effect they had on the reader

Criterion C: 2- Very repetitive at times, doesn't really "flow"

Criterion D: 2- I have a lot of incomplete thoughts

Cover Analysis

Similarities and Differences:
Each cover focuses on elements of the story that play a significant role. The top left cover portrays a girl sitting by herself, so the reader will probably assume that the girl is the main character of the story. The top right cover also appears to portray a girl who could be the main character. However the top left portrays an older girl in a sulking manner and the top right cover has a little girl on it as if the author wants the reader to realize that the characters childhood plays a large role in the storyline. These two covers are different from the top two because instead of portraying humans on the cover, which humans and humanistic qualities are important features of the story, they portray object that have a significant meaning to the plot of the story. The boat on the bottom left presents the idea of loneliness and not letting go of the things or people who mean something in your life. This is seen in the story with Kathy missing Tommy and Ruth after they both completed. The bottom right directly portrays one of the most important ideas in the story, the idea that when Kathy and her friends reach middle to older adulthood, they will go through a series of donations where they will lose their vital organs and ultimately die. This cover is most effective to me because it focuses on the part of the story that impacts the reader significantly once they discover the purpose of the donations and what Kathy and her friends really are.

 
When I first glance at the first cover, I automatically think about flashbacks and how much they contribute to the storyline and how Kathy uses them to not only narrate the story but also characterize her friends and establish the relationship she has with her friends throughout the novel. When I look at the other cover I think of donations and how important they are in the story. The donations are important because they let the reader know that Kathy and her friends are different than everybody else and that they have a specific purpose that requires them to sacrifice something that means so much to them. If I had seen the first cover without any prior knowledge of the novel, I would have thought that the story was about a young girl who had lost her family or something important in her life that changed the way she viewed the world as an adult. If I had seen the second cover I probably thought that the novel would be about someone who was sick and their family struggling to come to terms that they are going to lose them in the end (like My Sister's Keeper).  Now that I have read the novel however, I see that both of these images strategically focus on elements of the story that greatly affect Kathy's life. The first image alludes to how meaningful her child hood was and the second gives the reader insight on the process of donations and what they actually mean. From looking at the first cover it seems that the little girl on the front makes it look as if Kathy is portrayed because she uses flashbacks to tell her story so it makes sense that a little girl would be portrayed on the cover because the audience is seeing all of these event unfold through Kathy's perspective. The second cover doesn't show a specific person but reinforces the idea of donations and how important they are to the idea that Kathy and the students at Hailsham are different than everyone else and that their purpose in life has already been determined for them. This is the viewpoint of the reader because we do not have any idea of who we are looking at, and by the end of the novel the reader will view the donation process as it is presented on the second cover, that its just a process of losing all major organs. The second cover suggests that this book was constructed to portray a controversial topic, and knowing that cloning was a hot topic in the science field at this time, Ishiguro is able to portray this controversial topic knowing that people would have mixed feelings about cloning and him concluding that the cloning that was happening then would lead to the cloning of humans. Based on the first cover the people who would read this book would be people who realize that when you get older you realize that certain aspects of your childhood shaped the way you view the world today and the relationships you have with other people. The target audience of the second book would be people interested in science an maybe even interested in the controversy that can arise from the introduction of new theories or topics.

Storytelling

George Takei: Why I love a country that once betrayed me

     The argument of this talk is that although our lives may have a predetermined fate, it is up to us to change it. George than discusses the fact that many Japanese Americans felt betrayed by their government because they placed them in internment camps, despite them being citizens. He says that he didn't understand why they were doing this especially because these same citizens were signing up for the draft to put their lives at risk to stand up for a country that saw them as non- alienable enemies. Takei also discussed the fact that because he was so young when his family was in the internment camp, after they got out, he thought of the camp as home. This was mainly because his family struggled to get back on their feet.
     The purpose of Takei's talk is to show how fear can explain the duality of human nature in times of distress. The main way he gets his point across is through his use of anecdotes to allow the audience to feel what he was going through during WWII. Through this Takei hopes to further peoples understandings of internment camps and understand that despite the fact that their own country treated them as if they were enemies. The ethos seen within this talk comes primarily from the fact that George Takei starred in Star Trek as Hikaru Sulu. He is a well credited actor with many achievements and that encourages the audience to perceive what he has to say as important. He also is Japanese American so his view on the internment camps and Pearl Harbor is different from that of other American citizens at that time and uses that to convey his purpose to the audience. The evidence that Takei uses in his speech is very personal for the most part. At the end he discusses the success the 442nd had against the Germans, but the rest of his speech contains a lot of personal experiences that are very valuable to Takei but might not help further the logistics of his argument. This also means that there is a substantial amount of bias in his speech, because this is something that directly effected him. There is a lot of emotion used by Takei to further his purpose. Every personal story that he tells helps the audience connect and better understand what George and his family went through. In this case Takei uses emotion as an effective way to help further his purpose. Any personal experience definitely causes the audience to feel sympathetic for the speaker and Takei uses that to his advantage. When he talks about the day the soldiers came to his house and ordered his family out he says that he mother had his sister in one arm, "a huge duffel bag in the other and tears were streaming down both her cheeks." He then says he will never be able to forget that moment because it has been burned in his memory forever.
     I chose this talk because  I enjoy learning about WWII and really like learning about the ways in which different races were affected by it. This talk also parallels with my extended essays because I look at how African Americans were affected by the war and the struggled they had to endure before during and after the war. I think that this talk also illustrates the recurring theme of duality of human nature and more specifically how we change the way we view certain events or people out of fear. Japanese American citizens were placed in interment camps because the US government acted out of fear. It also covers the theme of known vs. unknown because the US was afraid of what was to come after the attacks so they did what they believed would be best for everyone's protection.

Blog Post #8 Double Indemnity

2.  Within Double Indemnity there are several stylistic features that contribute to the Film Noir mood that has been frequently associated with the film. The way the characters are portrayed, the setting of the film, and the overall story line of the film contribute to the Film Noir mood that is created. The portrayal of the main characters is dark and full of mystery. Walter Neff, the insurance salesman, appears to be very mysterious, and always seems as if he is thinking about the guilty things he has done. This is seen more frequently throughout the film, especially after he murders Mr. Dietrichson. The way he looks at other people is another thing I picked up on that helps his characterization contribute to the Film Noir mood. Neff always looks at others with a sense of suspicion, whether he is suspicious of himself or that person, which plays well with fact that Neff is guilty of murder and was around people who were suspicious of him, such as his boss. The other main character, Phyllis Dietrichson also was characterized to further emphasize the darkness of the film. She does not follow typical gender roles as she wants to kill her husband for the insurance money. Typically people who think like that are very dark in nature and during this time a person like this, most likely would not be a woman.  She also is very sneaky and was bale to easily manipulate everyone into thinking that she was so upset about the lost of her husband. This characterization alludes to the darkness of the film in terms of darkness being evil, and bad.

The setting of the film also impacts the dark depressing nature of the film. Double Indemnity opens with Neff talking to a recording device about the events that have recently happened. He is alone and does this at night, when no one else can see or hear him. All of the major events that occur in the film also occur at night, such as the murder, which is a key event. The important parts that do occur in the day are typically seen being done in secrecy or involve the characters to talk to one another without being face to face or using code words. The use of lighting to show the amount of expression on the characters faces also helps to portray the darkness of the film.

The storyline in Double Indemnity also has hey features that contribute to the dark and depressing nature of the film. First, the plot revolves around a murder, something that will always be dark and depressing. The plot also has other features that are dark such as the fact that Neff and Dietrichson are trying to cover up the murder in order to get something out of it. The film also uses first person voice over narration to help the audience better get into the corrupted mind of Neff and this is most commonly seen right after Neff has just done something controversial, such as murdering a man. This is important because it allows the audience to hear what the character is thinking without them having a dialogue, and contributes to the mystery within the film.