Maps To Anywhere pt. 2

    The second half of this book was just as interesting as the first half. It followed the same theme as the first half, with Brenard explaining more of his life through short stories. It was kind of sad, the things I took from these chapters. They themed around the people that we get close to in our every day lives and it made me think a bit.
    As much as I enjoyed the imagery and the feelings I got when I read the second half of Maps To Anywhere, I couldn't help but to think to myself about who I am actually close to in my own life. As I read about his life in the book, and how he felt distant from his own blood, I needed to do some self evaluation to find out if I was the same way. In some ways, I do believe that I am closer to some of my friends and coworkers than I am my own family. However, I also feel like I am going through that odd phase in life where I just want to be away from my family as much as possible. I watched my older sister go through it and now, at 22, she has come closer to our parents again, while I, at 18, just want to stay in my room as much as possible to be away from everything and everyone. I still hold the same mindset that family is everything and means the most. However, I find more comfort in my friends at this moment in time than I do my family.

Maps To Anywhere Response

    Maps To Anywhere, by Bernard Cooper was a very interesting read. It brought up a lot of views and ideas that I found fun to read and that grabbed me in as a reader, most of which I have experienced in my childhood. Being that Cooper is writing about his childhood, his stories were pretty relatable.
    When the story starts out, Cooper is explaining prank phone calls and the wonders about names. The simplicity of taking us back to the pranking days and then the complexity of the name is quite a mash up. I found that the humor really drew me into the story and then I was more interested in the wonders of the name. I, myself have pondered that wonder many times. "What if I wasn't named Derek?" "What if the people I knew had different names?" I feel like my life would be a whole lot different and I enjoyed that I wasn't the only one who thought like this. There is a lot that goes with a name; who you hang out with, who you talk to, your personality, etc.
    One of my favorite stories was "On the Air" because it talked about the futuristic thoughts we all had as a child. We all thought that there would be flying cars, holograms, all this technology that made our lives virtually pointless, except to be an object in space. While we may have been wrong about most of those things, we weren't too far off. Technology has made our lives extremely easy and, while we may not have flying cars, we do have electric cars and solar powered cars. So, we dreamed big when we used to think of futuristic architecture and life itself; however, things really do change and, maybe, one day we will have flying cars. The dreamers and imaginations of our time will be the ones that make it all possible.

Essay Packet 1

   These essay stories kind of irritated me to read. I keep doing these blogs and, although I may not be completely wrong, I seem to only read the surface of the story. There always seems to be more to read and I never see it. Such as the story, Red: an Invocation, the whole story is about a fox. However, I can't help but to feel like there is more to read.

    The whole story is centered around this fox and the unusual color of it's fur. I don't know if it's meant to be a metaphor for racism in the world or something else, but it seemed peculiar that there was so much thought around the fox. I basically felt the same way with all the other stories in this packet, varying the subject that the story was based on. More, I felt that most of the stories had simple topics or interests, but that there was more to it. After all, that has been the case for most of the semester in this class; there is always more to be read than just the surface.

Fiction Packet #3 Response

    These stories were pretty fun to read. One stood out a lot to me.. basically jumped right off the page and drew me in. The Falling Girl by Dino Buzzati. I have lost two friends to suicide and I got kind of a different perspective in this story. I noticed it was much more than suicide though. Themes like superiority and peer pressure stress came up as well in the story. 

    The different floors of the skyscraper showed the superiority issue in the story and in the world we live in today. Marta was 19 years old and she was at the top of the skyscraper to begin with. My understanding was that she worked her way up to the top, but she was not the best looking one there, especially among the girls. She wore cheaper clothes than the other girls and she didn't feel like she fit in. The pressure of trying to fit in to the higher powered groups was too much. I feel like that is why she jumped. 

    I noticed another issue in this story; the fact that no one really cares until it's too late. It wasn't until Marta jumped that all these groups she was trying to fit into reached out to her, literally. She was already doomed and decided her own fate and that's when all these people tried to get to know her, help her, ask her what was wrong. 

    Once she got to the lower levels though, I felt like they didn't care as much. I think it was because they knew she had worked her way up to the top and once you get to the top, it's fate that your ending will not be pleasant. They seemed to just say, "Yeah, the pretty ones always fall." 

    I think that today's society was well represented in this story. There is too much concern about looks and popularity and it puts people under way too much pressure. That's what I think the deeper meaning of the story was and I found it extremely interesting.

Juice Response

    I enjoyed Juice, by Renee Gladman, for the most part. The story was very short but it was interesting. I appreciated the futuristic aspect and point of view from which the story was told. I found that the chapter about the meaning behind Juice, Proportion Surviving, was my favorite. I found that it helped me understand the story more and I found that I related to it.
    The story is about these people in a town that was hit by many plagues and the people in the story are the survivors. They were split up into these tribe-like groups where they travel around looking for resources and things to help them remember the past. In Proportion Surviving, the subject of juice is brought up. The simplicity of something we all take for granted adds to the emotion we get from feeling the pain and agony of these characters. At the beginning of the chapter, there is talk about how many people dream of the daytime and morning, how everyone is excited for the sun to come up. My theory behind the fact that everyone loves the morning and that there is so much talk about the juice we all drink in the morning is that these people are hoping that, in the morning, they will wake up from this terrible dream, or what they hope to be a dream. Usually, the morning symbolizes a new day, a new beginning. For these people, that is all they want; a new beginning. On page 24, the main character says, "I was in my juice" after explaining a certain type of happiness. I felt that that directed toward using juice as another way of meaning morning, and a fresh start.

Fiction Packet Response

    I enjoyed reading this fiction packet a lot more than the poetry packets. I felt like I didn't have to read deeply into the stories to find a hidden meaning or anything. The stories were more straight forward. Although I say this, I did find a few of them to be slightly confusing. However, I still enjoyed quite a few of them, like "The Colonel" and "Misdemeanors", for a couple examples.
    The Colonel story interested me because I kind of grew a sudden hate for the characters right from the start. I don't know if anyone else felt this way toward the family. Just the way they carried their lives, in such a pompous way, like they're better than everyone else. They even had a golden bell to call the maid, so they didn't have to get up and trouble themselves. People like that just irritate me, so I read this story with some envy and hate. I liked that this story did that to me though because I usually just enjoy a story for it's simplicity, or how I can relate to it. On the contrary, I read this one with envy and not being able to relate; however, I still enjoyed it just as much as I would have if it was reversed.
    The Misdemeanors story was funny, I thought and I like funny things, they appeal to me. The story took a not so serious scenario and made it into a serious one, while, at the end, making it funny and not serious again. The fact that the man went to jail for robbing a bowling alley, but tells everyone he's an ex-con is funny in itself because he is trying to act tough and make it seem like he didn't go to jail for something extremely stupid and idiotic. Maybe if he had stolen more money, he would own up to his actions. But, he only got away with pockets full of pennies. I actually laughed out loud when I read, "So here come the police and they find the Old Man barefoot, with his socks on his hands like gloves, and his pants hanging down to his knees because his pockets are full of pennies." I just painted the picture in my mind and couldn't help but to laugh, which I did not do very much while reading the poetry packets.

Response to City Eclogue

    It took me a while to get into this book, City Eclogue by Ed Roberson. A lot of the material did not make much sense to me. In fact, it took about half of the book to really understand, at least what I think is understanding, what this book is all about. The bad grammar threw me through a lot of loops and it made for a more difficult read for something that should be quick and simple. I found myself going back and rereading a lot of the pages because something either didn't seem right or I just read over it too quickly to the point that the ending made no sense at all. So, for a while, it was a pretty difficult read just because of misunderstanding. It wasn't until page 52 that I thought I got my first glimpse of what this book was about.

    For me, page 52 stood out to me because it was written more like every other book I have read, no weird spaces in between words, no jumping all over the place, just straight forward, left to right. Well, there were some weird spaces; however, they didn't throw me off like they had been throughout the rest of the book. It was really from page 52 to page 56 that I felt like I was inside the head of someone for once in this book. I read it from a POV that wasn't my own. I think when it starts off with, "I'm awakened..." I get a whole new sense of the story. It's almost like a new beginning. Maybe that's why I felt like I understood the few pages more than the rest of the book. The use of the N-word in these pages was what really put it into perspective for me. I got the feeling that this book was about a black man, or black people in Africa back when slavery was more popular. 

    Coming off my new mindset for the book, I found another interesting example that basically jumped off the page at me while I was reading. On page 88, Open/Back Up (breadth of field), a whole stanza stands out, "...Black people get stopped regularly to show they have university I.D...." It is very clear now that this book is about racism and the struggle of black people during and before the Civil Rights movement. This one example really hit me hard though because I feel that black people still face a similar kind of struggle in today's world and it makes me question, why? If we've come so far from the beginning of this book to where we are now, in today's world, why do people still struggle like this? It opened my eyes to racism a bit more and really made me question some of the actions in the world we live in.