Category: Reflections

I really like this poem by williams, I think it was written at a time (1989) where people were so unaware of the disease and they treated anyone who had it with such descrimination.  Just like the lines “Thinking of friends afraid to shake your hand”  And you’re so tired by the reaction it that you (the person who has aides) just don’t say anything back.  And the ones that really loves you “kissed you, partly to persuade both you and us” So even they were sort of afraid.  The tone of the poem is so informing.  And if you pay attention to the form, you see six stanza going something like this aba, cdc, efe, ghg, so on and so forth.  I loved how the first two lines are so profoundly stated “We did not know the first thing about how blood surrenders to even the smallest threat”  and then it moves from the unattached to the sorrowful bond, and losing someone you love and not knowing how to react towards a person dying of such disease.  “Stopping, though, to set our smiles at the door.  We didn’t know what look would hurt you least.

Sylvia Plath’s poem Daddy was quite confusing for me. I had mixed feelings throughout on whether or not she loved or hated her father. Plath makes a reference about being scared of him in line 5 “Barely daring to breathe or achoo”, and then says outright in line 41“I was always sacred of you”. However, then Plath writes “At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you”, and seemed to be remorseful when she wrote about being ten and watching her father being buried. But Plath ends her poem with “you bastard, I’m through”. I understand that her relationship with her father was strained in some way, but beyond that I couldn’t tell her actual feelings for him.

I thought the criticism by George Steiner would clear the poem up for me, but it didn’t help. To the best of Steiner’s knowledge, Plath was in no way involved with concentration camps, yet she is able to write about it so graphically. Her father was of German decent, and I kind of felt like she was accusing him of being a Nazi, or blaming him for the War in some of her lines (line 29: I thought every German was you), even though her family lived in Massachusetts at the time. The connections she makes throughout the poem with her and her father’s relationship and the War seem farfetched to me, and then finding out that she was no where near a concentration camp made it even more confusing. I think if I knew more about her life and her relationship with her father, this poem may make more sense to me.

I really liked 123rd Street by Willie Perdomo. To be honest, it was the only one of the assigned poems that I actually liked. I am not a big fan of poetry and I often have trouble interpreting poems. This poem, however, was different. It didn’t read like a poem, but rather someone trying to freestyle in a rap face-off on MTV or something. I liked how the poem had rhythm and rhyme. It made the lines flow smooth and sound like music as I was reading it out loud.
I also liked the poem because it painted a mental image of the speaker’s neighborhood for me. The speaker is a man who we know has financial problems. He lives in a lower class neighborhood full of children running about and playing with one another. Somewhere in the background the sound of church bells is also heard. I also understood that his neighborhood is not very safe from the lines mentioning bullets bouncing off stoop steps in the neighborhood and “drug posses” looking to start fights. As a poor man living in a poor neighborhood, he probably has to steal to make a living-“money that aint mine”(15). The speaker seems to be stuck in a hole. He wakes up to the same thing every day with no hopes of a better future. He is a poor man, living in a poor neighborhood, stealing to make a living. His life is routine for him, and he knows exactly what the next day will bring before it comes.         

   

I really enjoyed ‘123rd Street Rap’ by Willie Perdomo. The poem is appealing in many ways. First, it’s easy to read. It flows well, like any rap should. I found myself reading it aloud, attempting to rap it (though I don’t do it very well). It also appeals to the senses. It gives imagery, “Baby men growing on/all the corners” and you can hear the poem, “Church bells bong for/ drunken mourners”. I can listen to Perdomo read the poem on the CD, and I feel like I’m sitting in the middle of the street, watching the action happen in front of me. I like this poem so much because it is a beautiful description of a place that lacks beauty.

Perdomo’s use of alliteration appeals to the senses, and brings about the imagery. In line 6, “bullets bounce” off “Stoop steps”. And in line 10, “bells bong”. The repetition of the same sound makes the poem flow better, and lets us know that there is importance in the lines. Those lines help us hear the poem, instead of just reading it. Lines 16-21 tell us about the visual aspects of the setting. “Sun that/ don’t shine/ Trees that/ don’t grow/ Wind that/ won’t blow”. These lines paint a picture of the poem, and elicit the dark, dreary emotions that come from a place such as 123rd Street.

Perdomo does an excellent job of appealing to the senses and making the situation believeable as well as depressing. Any thoughts?

The style in which this play seems to be presented is from within the mind of Bill. He sees a girl at a table in a cafe and decides he is going to go and talk to her. Before he goes to talk to her he decides to run through all the different ways this conversation could possibly go. Every time the soft bell rings he has messed up and the conversation has ended, thus it picks back up from where he started to lead the conversation in the wrong direction and goes from there in the hope to eventually have some sort of connection with Betty. But as I read on I see that this may not be the case, and what may be happening instead is completely different scenarios over and over again, as was mentioned in the first post for this week about it being like the movie ground hogs day. Either way I think that Ives is tying to make a point more than just tell a story. When I read this it makes me think that Ives is poking fun at how petty people really are when it comes to social interaction, and specifically when it involves some form of courtship. For example, we like to just assume things about people or blow them off once they disinterest us. The point where this stood out to me the most is right after the 14th bell rings and we have Betty accusing him of just wanting to take her home with him and sleep with her. She than proceeds to make up some story about how he will neglect her and then tell her about his girlfriend, only for her in the end to say that she wouldn’t care. Now this is a farcical situation, but I think that some people think this way and it definitely may have crossed some women’s mind in a situation like this before. It seems to me that Ives is just trying to make the point that we assume people are completely different than us based on one response. Where as just as easily as they could by happenstance say the correct thing and have you eating out of their hand. What his ultimate point is I can’t say, but it would seem to me that he is trying to get people to look at the way we interact with one another in such a situation, and see how just by the change of one response or even one word we can immediately decide what we think of a person.

A bit of background information here…. up until college I had been acting all my life.  Commercials and what not as a child, high school plays, private theatre, the GMU forensic team my freshman year here at GMU, yadda yadda.  That being said, “Sure Thing” by David Ives is a one act that I’ve not only come into contact with (both by reading as well as watching others perform it) but also acted in myself.  I think it is safe to say that I might be a bit biased because of this but I feel that Ives has created a work that is such a true reflection of real life.  Without that truth and that brutal honesty, this play wouldn’t have nearly as much impact as it does.  (Although I will admit that the effect is that much greater when seeing it performed as opposed to simply reading it.) 
First take a look at the characters names: Betty and Bill.  Typically female and male, they are both names that people can identify with, they do not hint at a certain ethnicity, race, or other background.  This enables the reader/viewer to relate to the situation.
Also consider the situation itself.  Dating and romantic relationships (love in general) are core themes in almost every facet of life.  We read about it, watch it on tv or in the movies, experience it on our own; and we all struggle with it.  In any kind of relationship there are awkward moments, things we wish we wouldn’t have said, things we wish we had said, and times where we wish we could just pause and rewind.  Ives acknowledges that and indulges us in that fantasy of being able to undo what we just did wrong.

In that sense, Ives lets the reader/viewer live vicariously through his characters in a way.  He presents us with a common situation and lets it unfold naturally.  Not that hearing a bell ring and then letting the conversation resume to where it was before things started to go wrong is natural, but the progression of the conversation itself mirrors what we know to be typical. 
The errors and mistakes made on both parts are also humorous.  This aspect serves many functions.  First of all, both the male and female character make mistakes, cause the bell to ring, and are allowed to start over.  This shows that both males and females are equally as awkward in the same situation.  Furthermore, by filling the situation with humor it takes the focus away from what could be a potentially stressful situation.  We have all heard the expression “You’ll look back on that one day and laugh.” Ives allows us to do that as the play progresses.
Finally, it allows people to relate.  It allows for an escape from reality (as does all theatre) but still shows that people are not alone.  That everyone experiences these situations.  It allows for wishful thinking and provides the reader with an “if only…” type of reaction.
If only everything were a sure thing. 
 

 

At first I did not really get where this was going. I read the paragraph above it and I agree that seeing this play would be more entertaining than reading it. I did think it was pretty funny and you can understand the changes when the bell rings, but actually watching it and hearing it would be more effective. About half-way through I got the idea that this was maybe just in someone’s head. It happens in movies all the time where someone wants to go hit on a girl and something crazy or bad happens then you realize they were just thinking about what might happen and the scene cuts back to them still standing in the same place thinking. In real life too I have done it and other people have where they are like, “Should i go talk to them.. what if i say this then they say this?” and they debate in their head. I think Bill walks into this cafe and sees Betty and is playing out in his head all the directions the conversation could go. He’s just thinking if i said this she could say that and then it would end, or she could respond this way and it would go in a different direction. Based on that he changes the dialogue before he even goes and talks to her. By the end of the play he is finally successful in going to the movie with her. That could be what he is imagining, but I like to think that he finally goes up and talks to her and whatever path he chose from the conversations he thought about ended up with them going out.

When I first began reading the play Sure Thing by David Ives, I thought it was mistyped after having reading the same few lines twice. Then I noticed a few subtle differences in what the characters were saying. Before reading the textbook’s explanation of the story, I tried to make sense of it myself in relation to other forms of plays and movies. For example, in the movie Groundhog Day, the main character is forced to re-live the day each morning when he wakes up. Throughout the movie, he encompasses everything that can go wrong in a single day by attempting to act like different people or do things he had never done before. The main character can do this because there is no threat of legal or personal reprisal as when the next day draws near, he will have a fresh start once again. I drew a parallel between that movie and this text in that each situation only involved the two characters, Betty and Bill. Where, in each scene, a different attempt is taken by Betty and Bill while communicating to one another. Before I thought of the story as multiple “takes” on each scene, I was not sure what to make of what was going on. After reading the play through, one can deduce what the story is about. It is about the two main characters, Betty and Bill who experience problems while in the dating scene. Ives depicts all the ways people mess up when trying to date one another incorporates them into the play. Instead of starting from the beginning with the two characters meeting each time, Ives writes three or four takes per each scene throughout the play. The bell seems to go off or represent every time there is a goof or slip-up, in which case the scene is then re-run with a different spin or approach. Overall, one can view this story as “What if…?” as it depicts what occurs when each of the characters say almost everything imaginable. Reading through the play was somewhat fun because the reader is unaware which character will make the next blunder and how bad it will be. In the end however, the longest portion of conversation occurs without a [Bell.], this signifies that a connection was made between the two characters as they have finally both agreed to go to the movies together.

The article on deconstruction in “The Dead” really sparked my interest, especially with the ideas of repetition and chiasmus. I hadn’t noticed all the little details of wording before, so it was good to go back and see all these passages that related to one another in ways I hadn’t previously thought of.

One thing this article made me think about in particular was how the beginning and the ending of the story relate to each other. “The Dead” is both the title of the story as well as the final line, so in a way the story ends in the same place that it started. Furthermore, from the beginning until the end, outwardly nothing has changed. The party went on as it always does, and afterwards everything returns to the way it was before. The only change is on the inside, because Gabriel now knows about Michael Furey, which he didn’t before. Also, Gabriel is a character that is “presented as literally alive in the story but who can be said to be figuratively dead” (223). Thus, his being figuratively dead yet literally alive at the end of the story also relates back to the beginning, where “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet” (21), in which case the terms “literally” and “figuratively” seemed to be interchanged to add emphasis to the phrase—the same way one might say that Gabriel is “literally” dead in some way, to emphasize his figurative death.

If this is really the case, and the end of “The Dead” is circular and brings us right back to the beginning, then what exactly could we say has happened? Has Gabriel, or any of the characters, evolved or changed in some way, or are they all exactly the same as they were before the party, the same as they were before last year’s party, and the one before that, and the very first one thirty years ago? As is the case with deconstruction, the text can support both views. Gabriel’s character, from beginning to end, makes everything about himself, even something that has nothing to do with him, such as in this statement towards the end: “He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love” (59). Thus, even at the end, we could say that he hadn’t really changed at all from the beginning. However, in the same paragraph there is also evidence that his attitude might be changing: “His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world” (59). Is this really Gabriel seeing beyond his own identity, or is it merely him once again applying his identity to everything that is outside himself?

The final sentence, also, can be used as evidence for both cases. Gabriel himself and the universe—and everyone else in that universe, living and dead—are juxtaposed in the very last line, so either interpretation—or perhaps both—could well be right. “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (59).

 

Relationships in “The Dead”- I may be wrong, but has anyone noticed that the only married couple in the story that is present, are Gabriel and Gretta? It may be reading too much into it, but I’m thinking there is some significance in that, but I can’t think of any right now. I feel a lot of empathy for Aunt Julia, especially after seeing the film clips. Its like, all these women seem to have is hanging onto the false praises–its like their lives are so empty.  Snow in “The Dead”- I noticed that snow has some significance in the story. In the musical, (I think it was Gretta, but I could be wrong), looks out the window and says, “There’s something so…forgiving about snow.” My guess would be that the snow represents in itself, purity, beauty, covering all things-so that even the most unsightly thing, or flaw, is covered in whiteness. Was the snow supposed to be “forgiving” for Gretta, because of what happened to Michael Furey?