The class twitter expierment

Wednesday's experiment on using twitter and Goggle plus as a way to conduct an online literature class was interesting, but not very effective.  Twitter's system of short messages that aren't delivered quite in real time isn't conducive to discussion.  However, something like an instant messenger, available in gmail, would work better.  Whereas Twitter needed to be constantly refreshed to display the most recent messages, an instant messenger would do it automatically.  First, this would allow the students for focus more on what to say, than finding out what had been said.  The discussions would flow much easier, and without the need to #tag, the comments could be updated faster.  The problem with any kind of text-based chat would still be the multiple conversations that inevitably come up, where some people have moved on to a new topic while others are still stuck on the topic from an hour ago.  The idea that all of our generation can multitask like a supercomputer is false, and some if not most members of the class would become lost with the many different conversations flying back and forth.

Goggle Plus, on the other hand, showed great potential as a surrogate for classroom discussion.  Everyone can see each other, pick up on facial cues and voice tones, and not talk over each other.  The discussions could more easily be regulated by the professor, and if someone needs to ask a question, the conversation wouldn't be twenty pages ahead by the time that question gets answered.  Any kind of face-to face interaction is far superior to text based interaction when it comes to simulating a classroom environment.

Jason Compson, the ultimate villain of American literature?

Jason Compson, from Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, certainly is the villain of the story.  Growing up, he told on his siblings at every chance for no better reason than to spite them, and as an adult he was a horror.  He was going to whip his niece for ditching school with his belt, and was going to whip Dilsey for trying to stop him.  He only decide to not whip them after he heard his mother coming down the stairs to see what the noise was about.  Calling Jason a villain is no real stretch of the imagination, but is he an arch-villain, the most sinister character in all of American Literature?  I won't go so far as to say that. 

There are few characters deserving the foul language required to describe Jason, but I cannot see him as the absolute worst.  Count Olaf from the Series of Unfortunate Events is more monstrous in his deeds than Jason's.  It is true that Jason blackmails Caddy for guardianship of Quentin in order to pocket the child support money for himself, a similar tactic to the infamous Count, but Jason wasn't intending to kill Quentin after he got what he wanted.

Jason stands on the villain scale close to Curley from Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck.  Both characters are abusive to the people under them whenever they can get away with it, liking to physically beat anyone who makes them angry or gets in their way.  Both are also favorites of the character in authority, Curley to his father the superintendent of the ranch, and Jason to his mother.  They may be grade A bastards, but they do have a check on their power.  For Jason, that is his mother.  Jason doesn't want to upset her, for fear of weakening her health or perhaps for fear of being turned away from the role as her favorite.  He is only stopped from whipping Dilsey and Quentin by his the sound of his mother coming down the stairs, especially after she had told him to not lose his temper with Quentin.

Jason is a villain, one of the most despicable ever written, but because he is not as cruel as some and because he has a potent foil of his mother, he is not the ultimate villain of American literature.

Huckleberry Finn saving Jim

Huck’s decision to rescue the captive Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a significant development in Huck’s character.  Throughout the book Huck had been wrestling with the morals he had grown up with.  He knew he had been helping Jim escape slavery since they first decided to travel together, and Huck believed that it was wrong to help Jim.  Since Huck had been taught that slaves like Jim were property, he was essentially stealing Jim from his Miss Watson.  Huck had been ignoring his morals until Jim was turned in by the King and the Duke.  Huck was torn between his newly developed friendship with Jim and doing what his society said was right, letting Miss Watson know where Jim was.  After a while, Huck made the decision to rescue Jim, saying “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” (p. 223).  Huck made the decision to go fully against his moral sensibilities.

Due to the difference in culture between me and Huck, I didn’t like Huck’s earlier comments on Jim, since he didn’t see him as a human being.  Huck acts very racist and that put me off even though I understood that he was from a different culture.  As the story progressed, Huck’s uneasiness with helping Jim escape still left me unsympathetic for him.  When Huck finally came to the realization that Jim deserved freedom, I began to really connect with Huck for the first time.  As the escape progressed, I became proud of Huck for doing what was right with a real will.  When he, Tom and Jim came were shot at during the escape, I nearly applauded.  Huck really grew as a character, and this was his finest moment.

Robert Frost's poetry: Simply deceptive or deceptively simple?

Robert Frost, the classic American poet, wrote many poems about all kinds of things.  He wrote about building stone fences, choosing a path in a wood, or stopping to watch the snow fall.  But, are his poems just descriptions of scenes, or are they more?  Would it be too much to look at his poems metaphorically?  To put it another way, are Frost's poems simply deceptive or deceptively simple?

You could argue the point either way, but I feel that Frosts poems are deceptive; they have a deeper meaning to them.  The Road not Taken could just be a tale of a walk through the woods one day, but his wording implies that it is a metaphor about life and decisions in general.  In on point, Frost says "yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back".  If he was going for a actual walk, why wouldn't he ever come back to that fork in the trail.

Another example is Mending Wall.  There Frost recounts a seasonal task of repairing a stone fence with his neighbor.  Frost questions as to why there needs to be a fence, and his neighbor just responds: "good fences make good neighbors".  Frost is making a commentary about the barriers people create between each other in their lives.  He asks if such barriers that keep us all separate are necessary.  The general, unspoken response is that such barriers, like the separation between classes and ethnic backgrounds, are necessary to keep the peace.  "Good fences make good neighbors".

Many of Frost's poems have hidden meanings just below the surface.  You don't have to dig for them like you do in some other poet's work, but they are there and are worth noticing. 

In the fashion of Stein

Brown streaks silver line, pipe in all but name and function.  Char rim, homeless forest.  Sunshine and columbines.  Night and flight, a pale moon over the plains.  Joy, bliss, love, kiss, sadness and pain, lost.  Marks beyond meaning, decoration, disguise, deceit. 

The poem "Cape Hatteras" by Hart Crane in the collection "The Bridge" stood out to me as the poet trying to come to grips with several large changes in his society.  The main change mentioned was the invention of the airplane.  Crane's poem serves as a bridge between the idealized past and the present.  He seems almost resentful of the Wright brothers success, asking the then dead writer Walt Whitman "if infinity be still the same as when you walked the beach" (lines 48-49).  The implication is that inventions such as the airplane are destroying the wonder and grandeur of the world by making it easier to travel.  He longs for the older idea of the world, that the heavens are infinite.  On line 32 he writes "But that star-glistered salver of infinity, The circle, blind crucible of endless space, Is sluiced by motion,-subjugated never".  He notes how machinery has subjugated the rest of the world, mentioning dynamos humming, belts on spool feeding machines slapping, flywheels in motion, and other machines that he refers to as "steely gizzards" (line 75).  As the poem progresses, he offers another complaint of technology, particularly the airplane, that it would be used in war. 
He writes  "Hell's belt springs wider into heaven's plumed side" (line 96), suggesting that the airplane was corrupted for its role as a weapon of war.  Later, to make it a bit more clear, he says "Tellurian wind-sleuths on dawn patrol, Each plane a hurtling javelin of winged ordnance, Bristle the heights above a screeching gale to hover" (lines 107-109).  Crane stands on a bridge between past and present, far preferring to be of the side of the past rather than the present. 

This blog is part of an assignment for my American Literature class.

The title for my blog is derived from my Nom de Plume and the household room were literature can be most comfortably discussed, preferably with a mug of hot coco and a companion of the canine and/or feline varieties.