Sexy - Jhumpa Lahiri

"Sexy" by Jhumpa Lahiri was a phenomenally powerful tale of how people deal with a spouse's infidelity, and the other member of the relationship looking for the same feeling outside of the original relationship.

The character of Mir

anda struggles with the fact that her husband followed a woman off of the plane that he was on when he was supposed to be heading home, leaving Miranda alone with herself. She meets a man named Devajit (Dev) and begins a new and exciting relationship with. She and Dev go from the thrill of the newness, the bickering and mediocrity and the begin of the decline of such a relationship, all the way to finding out that it isn't working out at all.

The central theme of the story as I see it though, is identity. Miranda hadn't identified herself as sexy since she had gotten married and felt even worse after her husband left her for a stranger on an airplane. When Dev began to call h

er sexy, she felt loved, beautiful, new, all over again. She was identified once again as something special. Sexy.

Dev, on the other hand is only identifying her as sexy because he knows he can get her to do anything when he says that. He never truly means what he tells Miranda, but she believes it. He identifies her as a mistress. Miranda does her best to keep her relationship with Dev, but it deteriorates because of Dev's waning interest in Miranda. A relationship is impossible to keep from falling apart if both parties are in it for different reasons. Along with the relationship as a whole, those identities also tend to decay, leaving people as single, and often incomplete. Miranda doesn't let that happen to her. Her relationship with Dev proved to her that men still find her attractive and to be a woman of great beauty, and she is able to tell herself once again that SHE is sexy.

Persimmons - Li-Young Lee

To Lee when he is young, persimmons and precision are simply two words he mixes up, but as he ages, persimmons are synonymous with precision.

"How to choose

persimmons. This is precision.

Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.

Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one

will be fragrant. How to eat:

put the knife away, lay down newspaper.

Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.

Chew the skin, suck it,

and swallow. Now, eat

the meat of the fruit,

so sweet,

all of it, to the heart."

Realizing that the selection of a persimmon is the essence of precision, he sees that words that are given specific, individual meaning when we are young are sometimes things we associate with one another when we're older. He does this with other words: Fight and flight, wren and yarn. Their meanings then are far more concrete than the meanings we give them now.

The world of the memory is what Lee is examining in "Persimmons". He is showing how things can change as we age and as we remember them. Things we give meaning to in our memories can often change the way we see them in the time we find ourselves in now. Finding this balance of past and present is what keeps those memories alive and so important to us as who we are. We can't let the things that change the way we think disappear from our memories. Persimmons are precision. Memories can be the defining moments that shape what we believe if we let them.

Lady Lazarus - Sylvia Plath

Plath's romanticizing suicide is part of what made her so famous, but why did she write about it so much? It is widely known that she attempted suicide numerous times in her life, the final attempt being successful, but what made her so volatile?

Experts say that a lot of her behaviour is rooted in her distain for her father's untimely death. She was only 8 years old when he passed and she was left with feelings of abandonment and she took his death personally, as if he meant for her to feel pain from his passing.

She often makes reference to her German heritage (from her father's side), much of the references being right in the middle of Lady Lazarus.

"A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot  A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen..."

Plath feels that she is being somehow persecuted by her father (who is of German decent), seeing him as a German officer and her as a Jewish person, his victim.  In a sense she is rejecting him as relative to her, saying in a way, that she is not a part of him, except for how he hurt her.

A large part of her desire to die came from feelings of a

bandonment, and her wonder with the world of killing one's self is demonstrated in "Lady Lazarus" as much as her reasons for her attempts.  The saddest part of all of this is that a few short months after she wrote this poem, she finally succeeded on her fourth attempt to take her own life at the young age of 30.

kitchenette building -- Gwendolyn Brooks

When reading the poem "kitchenette building" by Gwendolyn Brooks, the images that are portrayed are stunning. The pictures of things like the "white and violet fight" between fried potatoes and onions and the fifth person getting out of the bathroom and hoping only to get lukewarm water to bathe in are so vivid that you feel like you are stepping into that world. I have a deep appreciation for writers who can make you see their mental images, even more so toward poets who can do this, because it's always a challenge to show someone something in (typically) fewer words, and often, fragments.

Brooks' portrayal of a poor family in Bronzeville is nothing short of precise and the first stanza is phenomenally relevant to this very day.

"We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,

"Grayed in, and gray. "Dream" makes a giddy sound, not strong

"Like "rent," "feeding a wife," "satisfying a man."

Living in a world where money is something that is little seen, but the impact of its absence is detrimental, dreaming is frivolous or giddy. The idea of paying what bills you can and feeding your family and doing everything in your power to provide for them is really all you have on your mind. The entire thing contradicts the "American Dream" as it were, but sadly proves that the "American Dream" is close to being nothing more than a myth. It is only those rare few from the lowest parts of society who manage to rise up to the same ranks of the bourgeois upper-class who keep this myth alive. The truth is, dealing with life in the real world can leave you penniless in the end. This poem manages to perfectly demonstrate this truth in its opening.

The world of being poor isn't something that is easily risen from. Poverty is about keeping your head above the water, hoping you never fall below and drown in the hard work that barely gets you by.

"For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred." --John Gardner

The Negro Speaks of Rivers -- Langston Hughes

The image of a river brings about thoughts of crashing waves, ships being tossed about, and water being breathed onto the shoreline. This poem by Langston Hughes brought about a different image of a river: the human spirit.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

"I've known rivers:

"I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

"My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

"I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

"I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

"I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

"I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

"went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its

"muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset

"I've known rivers:

"Ancient, dusky rivers.

"My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

The human spirit flows, as does this poem, with rich history. Every human is tied to their ancestry, and in reading this poem and many of his others, I feel that Hughes feels a very tight bond to his ancestors and his history. It paints a beautiful picture of the perception of man with his past and being a part of it through knowing history. If a man knows where he came from, he can better know where he is going.

"In this bright future you can't forget your past."

--Bob Marley

"The future influences the present just as much as the past"

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Oread -- H.D.

"Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir."

As far as Hilda Doolittle's work goes, Oread was a personal favourite of mine when I read it. Being that much of H.D.'s work is based off of Greek mythology, felt that in reading it (before doing any research whatsoever) I felt that it had a great connection to the nymphs and their tales. After doing said research, I found that I was correct in my thinking. I discovered that an Oread (being the title of the piece) is a mountain nymph, a nymph itself being a minor goddess that inhabits either woodlands or seas.

H.D.'s work is an outcry of feminine strength from women whose names are written in history, but whose words were few. H.D. felt that her job was to be the voice of these women and say the things that they weren't able to. Of course, whether or not the women she wrote of were fictional had no bearing on the power behind her writing. She was a voice of even the product of mythos, who in turn were the voice of women as a whole for the past, present, and future.

The nymphs, being considered a minor goddess, seem at first glance to not get much of a word from H.D., but after further reading, one takes note that there is more force in what the nymphs are able to say in these six lines than many people can say in an entire novel. They are given the power of the forest they reign over, washing the masses over with evergreen and woodland fern. In these few words, they are given the power to knock down even the seemingly more powerful hunter and huntress who would be within the confines of their trees. With this power seems to read the chaos of the seas being utilized by the serene woods.

Hard to Concentrate

Sorry I've failed to update my blog for a while. My father has been in the Intensive Care Unit at OSF and I've spent most of my time there. It's hard to concentrate on much of anything when you're in a place so filled with mourning and fear...

Raven

Mending Wall -- Robert Frost

"Good fences make good neighbors."

--mid 17th century proverb

In this poem, Frost and his neighbor are working their yearly task of mending a stone wall between their properties. It had been ruffed up and broken by hunters during the winter months, leaving it in dire need of repair.

The question to the reader remains: What is his neighbor's real meaning behind the phrase "Good fences make good neighbors"?

Frost states that the wall is unnecessary by saying: "There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him."

Does this neighbor have a quiet dislike for Frost as a neighbor? If this reads true, then there is a possibility that "Good fences make good neighbors," means the fence is the neighbor rather than Frost. Or that keeping your fellow man at a distance somehow forces him to be disciplined or leave you alone.

Growing up, I lived next door to a family who had a split-rail fence between their yard and ours. I would watch the man who lived there and my father work together to fix the fence constantly. The man and my father were friendly acquaintances, but were never actually friends. Eventually, the family moved away and another family took

their place. These people didn't like my family as much as the last. In fact, the man disliked my family quite a bit, but would still have a civil conversation with my father. I noticed that when these people moved in, they made the fence taller and more solid. They too moved out a few years after, and an older couple with no children moved in. This man had a terrible dislike for my father from the onset of their meeting. My father tried his best to be friendly, but the man could not be swayed. He disliked him passionately and made rude comments and did anything he could to hurt my father's feelings and sense of pride about the land he owned. This man pulled the chest-high fence the family before him had built and put trees in its place.

Do you notice a pattern in the previous story? As the dislike from the new families next door grew, so did the height of the fence.

There is a bit of truth to the idea that good fences make good neighbors, but it seems it doesn't mean what one would initially think it would. I believe that if a man puts a tall fence to divide his property, he wants no good neighbor but the fence itself.

This rule goes for countries, states, cities, et-cetera as well. A place that builds a wall around itself wants nothing more than to separate from its surroundings. Tearing down walls leads to community and knowing one another, however putting these barriers up leads to an almost ignorant quality between the two parties.

Answer this for yourself: DO good fences make good neighbors?

The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In beginning to read this short story, I felt as if the author was going to show us the actuality of how the house she was to stay in was haunted. Instead, the reader is shown a symbol, the wallpaper in the nursery, and the narrator slowly slips into insanity due to it. Personally, I became captivated by the tale of the narrator and her struggle with finding the woman trapped within the confines of the wallpaper, and at some points was reminded of myself as a child, looking for faces in the inanimate objects around me. Children begin finding faces in inanimate objects at infancy because of the region on the human brain that develops early for facial perception and recognition, our narrator even hints at this.

"I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend . . . I could always

hop into that chair and feel safe"

Even though the entire story reads to her insanity, I believe it reads to all women of the time period that Gilman lived in. All of female-kind was suppressed and oppressed. I feel that the woman in the wallpaper that the narrator saw, and in the end, identified as herself, represented all of the women in the late 1800s and early 1900s. ""I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane! And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"" They were trapped in a world of decaying, but sickly elegance that locked them, never to let them out. If a women escaped from it, even through insanity, she struggled as much as she could to stay as far away from that world as she could.

The Victorian Era, or as some call it, the Guilded Age, was a very new age for women due to women's rights activism being openly started in the late 1840s. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a huge advocate for the rights of women. She was quoted saying things such as: "Until 'mothers' earn their livings, 'women' will not," and "There is no 'fe

male mind." The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a 'female liver."

The story itself is filled with hints of her silence as

a female.

"There comes John, and I must put this away, --he hates to have me write a word."

"...I take pains to control myself--before him at least, and that makes me very tired."

"I do not know why I should write this. I don't want to. I don't feel able. And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way--it is such a relief!"

The story even implies that she is kept in a more secluded and secure area by her husband against her will. As the architecture of the

house goes up in height, the security level does so as well. The text says that the windows are barred and the room that she stays in is an old childrens' nursery. John seems to lock his wife away in a prison for children. He also treats her as a child. When she says that she feels a ghostly chill about the house, "...but he said what I felt is a draught, and [he] shut the window."

I believe that in many ways, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was attempting to show the world, not only how dangerous rest treatment can be for humankind, but also how women suffer at the hands of men who believe they are above their wives.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story and personally, I strongly believe it is essential to the reading list for this class.