A collection of thoughts

Margaret Atwood has quickly become my favorite author in a way that I've never expressed toward an author before. She captures my beliefs toward the world in each one of her works. She puts a voice to my thoughts in a beautifully tragic way. The best authors are relatable with something meaningful hidden inside themselves. Margaret Atwood stands for women and works to uplift them through the telling of their true existence. A woman does not live through luxury and fragility, but must endure the hardships that men cast aside. They must pick up the pieces that are considered to be "beneath" men, meaning most of the struggles of life. 

As shown in her work The Blind Assassin, the Chase sisters live lives of extreme wealth and privilege. They are mocked by their neighbors for their selfishness and ego, despite being sheltered children.   As they grow, their family name holds less and less power and their financial situation quickly becomes unstable. Laura is too young to be burdened by the struggles of adults, so the responsibility falls on Iris. She must essentially sell herself away to her father's friend in order to keep her own family business thriving and provide for her family. 

Iris must be happy and beautiful while missing the death of her father, losing touch with her sister and abandoning the woman that raised her. Through all of this, her husband ignores, belittles and torments her. She is presented in the tabloids to have a life with no room for imperfection, but in reality, this situation is a prison, not her escape. Throughout the novel, with the use of a frame story, Iris tells of how happy she is that her husband died young and she was capable of escaping this situation. Before the reader has met Richard, Iris has told us that he is not a man that she wanted in her life and she was willing to sacrifice to rid herself of him.

It matters how people feel in the situation that they are in. It matters how women feel when all of their actions are dictated for them. As a society, we often overlook these decisions and look at the overall standings. In the middle of the #MeToo movement, this novel is eye-opening. A life spent with everything likely came from years of suffering from others' demanding opinions and decisions. We rarely choose a life for ourselves. When others have everything it is likely because they have nothing keeping them together. When we project outwards, how are we supposed to care for what's inside?

Lazy River Writing Prompt Response

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/the-lazy-river

Prompt: Analyze “The Lazy River” and how Zadie Smith uses the metaphor of a lazy river to create the mood of the short story.

The concept of a lazy river is quite interesting. It's a bunch of people going around and around in water. Most people use floaties in order to just lay on the water and relax. You are simply and literally going with the flow. You don't play games or swim around with your friends, it's family friendly and there's no real effort into getting into this circular water path. There is a constant current that isn't too strong, but it is just enough to keep you moving at a constant speed. Zadie Smith compares real world attitudes and life to a lazy river. In order to set up for the rest of “The Lazy River” she opens the story by explaining how we as human beings relate to those who vacation to places and enjoy a lazy river.
The beginning of this story is written in the second person to show the reader that they too are a part of the story and they can place themselves in the shoes of the characters. She says that as a human being just try to float along and rarely take risks in order to better themselves or make life challenge. The story starts off with “We’re submerged, all of us. You, me, the children, our friends, their children, everybody else. Sometimes we get out: for lunch, to read or to tan, never for very long. Then we all climb back into the metaphor” which creates the negative tone about how we deal with the same things without much challenge or new experience because the lazy river is our place of comfort. As Zadie Smith tells a story about how a family goes on vacation she goes into this metaphor. During vacation it is all about new experiences and excitement. By the family being in their phones constantly, they aren't enjoying new experiences because they stuck in what they are always stuck in.
Zadie Smith wants the reader to feel despair and shame as they read this story. The adults in the story use their phones to entertain them when they are no longer in the river. These families are on vacation, a time in which people get away from day to day life and enjoy the new surroundings. Zadie Smith is criticizing social media and electronic devices. When the two girls are taking photos Smith writes “this business of photographs is a form of labor that fills each day to its limit, just as the Lazy River fills ours. It is an accounting of life that takes as long as life itself” criticizing the point of taking photos because it is just another way of filling and wasting our time. As I read this I started to think about how photos are useless. We take time in the present to hopefully recreate the memories for the future when we could just enjoy the feeling in the moment because all that really matters is the moment we are in. The point of life is to enjoy new things and not to get stuck in this “lazy river” called life because that's when you end up at the end regretting everything.

7 AP Style M/C Questions

Meet the PresidentBy Zadie Smith

“What you got there, then?”
The boy didn’t hear the question. He stood at the end of a ruined pier, believing himself quite alone. But now he registered the presence at his back, and turned.
“What you got there?”
A very old person, a woman, stood before him, gripping the narrow shoulder of a girl child. Both of them local, typically stunted, dim: they stared up at him stupidly. The boy turned again to the sea. All week long he had been hoping for a clear day to try out the new technology—not new to the world, but new to the boy—and now at last here was a break in the rain. Gray sky met gray sea. Not ideal, but sufficient. Ideally he would be standing on a cairn in Scotland or some other tropical spot, experiencing backlit clarity. Ideally he would be—
“Is it one of them what you see through?”
A hand, lousy with blue veins, reached out for the light encircling the boy’s head, as if it were a substantial thing, to be grasped like the handle of a mug.
“Ooh, look at the green, Aggie. That shows you it’s on.”
The boy was ready to play. He touched the node on his finger to the node at his temple, raising the volume.
“Course, he’d have to be somebody, Aggs, cos they don’t give ’em to nobody”—the boy felt the shocking touch of a hand on his own flesh. “Are you somebody, then?”
She had shuffled around until she stood square in front of him, unavoidable. Hair as white as paper. A long, shapeless black dress, made of some kind of cloth, and what appeared to be a pair of actual glasses. Forty-nine years old, type O, a likelihood of ovarian cancer, some ancient debt infraction—nothing more. A blank, more or less. Same went for the girl: never left the country, eighty-five-per-cent chance of macular degeneration, an uncle on the database, long ago located, eliminated. She would be nine in two days. Melinda Durham and Agatha Hanwell. They shared no more DNA than strangers.
“Can you see us?” The old woman let go of her charge and waved her hands wildly. The tips of her fingers barely reached the top of the boy’s head. “Are we in it? What are we?”
The boy, unused to proximity, took a single step forward. Farther he could not go. Beyond was the ocean; above, a mess of weather, clouds closing in on blue wherever blue tried to assert itself. A dozen or so craft darted up and down, diving low like seabirds after a fish, and no bigger than seabirds, skimming the dirty foam, then returning to the heavens, directed by unseen hands. On his first day here the boy had trailed his father on an inspection tour to meet those hands: intent young men at their monitors, over whose shoulders the boy’s father leaned, as he sometimes leaned over the boy to insure he ate breakfast.
“What d’you call one of them there?”
The boy tucked his shirt in all round: “AG 12.”
The old woman snorted as a mark of satisfaction, but did not leave.
He tried looking the females directly in their dull brown eyes. It was what his mother would have done, a kindly woman with a great mass of waist-length flame-colored hair, famed for her patience with locals. But his mother was long dead, he had never known her, he was losing what little light the day afforded. He blinked twice, said, “Hand to hand.” Then, having a change of heart: “Weaponry.” He looked down at his torso, to which he now attached a quantity of guns.
“You carry on, lad,” the old woman said. “We won’t get in your way. He can see it all, duck,” she told the girl, who paid her no mind. “Got something in his hands—or thinks he does.”
She took a packet of tobacco from a deep pocket in the front of her garment and began to roll a cigarette, using the girl as a shield from the wind.
“Them clouds, dark as bulls. Racing, racing. They always win.” To illustrate, she tried turning Aggie’s eyes to the sky, lifting the child’s chin with a finger, but the girl would only gawk stubbornly at the woman’s elbow. “They’ll dump on us before we even get there. If you didn’t have to, I wouldn’t go, Aggie, no chance, not in this. It’s for you I do it. I’ve been wet and wet and wet. All my life. And I bet he’s looking at blazing suns and people in their what-have-yous and all-togethers! Int yer? Course you are! And who’d blame you?” She laughed so loud the boy heard her. And then the child—who did not laugh, whose pale face, with its triangle chin and enormous, fair-lashed eyes, seemed capable only of astonishment—pulled at his actual leg, forcing him to mute for a moment and listen to her question.
“Well, I’m Bill Peek,” he replied, and felt very silly, like somebody in an old movie.

1. What is the theme of this passage?
• A. Nationalism
• B. Self Discipline
• C. Friendship
• D. Motivation
2. What is the tone?
• A. Hopelessness
• B. Benevolent
• C. Nostalgic
• D. Bitter
3. What does the setting symbolize?
• A. Imagination
• B. Creativity
• C. Death
• D. Mental Health
4. What literary device is being used in the line "A hand, lousy with blue veins, reached out for the light encircling the boy’s head, as if it were a substantial thing, to be grasped like the handle of a mug?"
• A. Imagery
• B. Simile
• C. Metaphor
• D. Illusion
5. What is the purpose of the title?
• A. Explain what is happening in the passage
• B. Name the Characters in the passage
• C. Separate the experiences of the narrator and the reader
• D. Develop tone
6. The phrase "Them clouds, dark as bulls. Racing, racing. They always win." (line 47) means:
• A. The Storm
• B. Hopelessness
• C. Reality
• D.Negativity
7. What is the setting of this passage?
• A. A meeting between adults
• B. A virtual world
• C. A child's imagination
• D. The Oval Office

Knowing Zadie Smith

Analyzing and criticizing someone's work is a strangely intimate action. It requires the reader to understand the workings of another person's mind. They must understand how a stranger's mind came to produce the artwork that they did. It's necessary to understand the author's experiences and circumstance.  The same words or sentences can have vastly different meanings depending on who wrote them and the context of their life. Understanding Zadie Smith and her experience through life is crucial to being able to understand her work and ideas. With such a unique background, this comes with more difficulty than a more average writer. 

Zadie Smith was born in London, but her parents were American and Jamacain. On October 25, 1975, Smith was born to two immigrants as Sadie. Later this was changed to "Zadie" when she was 14. Her parents divorced when she was young and remarried. Her siblings and she grew up surrounded by the arts. Her two brothers became popular rap artists, while she wanted to pursue journalism. 

She was given the oppurtunity to study English literature at Cambridge. She was noticed for her short stories published in The Mays Anthology. By twenty-one, Zadie was given a six-figure advance for two books she was writing while continuing her studies in Cambridge. Critics took notice of this prodigy and were met with amazing results. On this advance, she published White Teeth in 2000, winning numerous awards and sold over a million copies. She was an instant success and impressed critics and audiences. At such a young age she was able to get two books published and popularized to become wildly successful. 

Smith remains constantly critical of her work. One of the main complaints about her own books is that she does not stray from the ordinary third person, past tense that is so common in writing. Her most recent novel NW uses present tense for a portion of the novel. The end consists of Smith's attempts to manipulate the language. She modifies the font for different media and changes the placement of words to represents the objects she is writing about. The chapters are shortened to only a few words in places. She tries to break from the traditional style of writing which came with a list of rules that were considered unbreakable. Her books become visual pieces of art as well as the literary masterpiece she has produced.

Zadie Smith has lived a less than average lifestyle. Being the child of divorced immigrants puts the world in a unique perspective. Her early success and the amount of it creates a divide between her and her peers. Her background is not relatable, but gives her reader's insight into who she is and how she views the world around her. Her stories gain perspective and insight. She has built an amazing life with the talents and experiences she was given. The details of her path to success are almost more important than her present situation. These things bring light to her ideas and give even more meaning to her work.

Coming Together

After finishing my most recent novel last week, I began Blind Assasin by Margaret Atwood over the weekend. I have anticipated this novel all year. Since reading the Handmaid's Tale I have read Ms. Atwood's poetry and placed many of her novels on my "to-read" list. With the community reads event quickly approaching, I moved this novel to the beginning of my list and immersed myself in the beautiful literature that Margaret Atwood produces.

The beginning of the book begins with a suicide. It opened with the main character experiencing the death of her sister, Laura. There was little thought from the character about losing a loved one or what her sister's intentions were in this suspicious scenario. Instead, both the character's thoughts and Atwood's selection of detail revolve around the unnamed main character's reputation and suspicions. The only information the reader is given about this character is her ties to her deceased sister. Despite this being our only link to the character, they purposely avoid the subject, focusing on the character's extravagant lifestyle. She references her husband to warn him to write a "statement of grief". 

Margaret Atwood does something unique with the format of her writing. The book opens with a narrative focused on this unnamed character. In the second chapter, the form changes to that of a  newspaper. It is a report on Laura's death, referencing her famous sister. The report itself focuses on Laura's sister without using her name. The main character is referred to as "Mrs. Richard E Griffen", using her husband's name instead of giving her a name. This character overwhelmingly holds the attention of the reader, but Atwood does everything in her power to keep the reader from knowing the identity of the focus of her novel.

The chapter following this introduces the "blind assassin". The chapter is labeled "The Blind Assassin: The hard-boiled egg. It is the dramatic telling of a story within a story that takes place outside of our galaxy. There is a battle for land that is claimed to be sacred by five different tribes. Each claims the land that an ancient battle took place and killed all that were in it. There is a pile of stones, but no lasting memory of what took place or what was before. No tribe knows the origin of the stones or who won the war, but each takes responsibility for holding it sacred and continuing traditions to honor who died there. The story continues in other forms of writing from there, each from different viewpoints and forms of media.

This story telling is a way of not revealing details too quickly. The reader becomes immersed in the feelings of a story and the author is able to withhold detail without boring the reader. The connections are difficult to find, but become clearer as the story continues. The main character is dealing with grief and finding solace inside herself to cope. She cannot focus on the death of her sister or how to grieve because she is forced to focus on her appearance and hide her true feelings. Even the reader is left in the dark of her own identity.

Gatsby: A Character Study

Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby is a man that carries mystery and poise as he moves from one asdaventure to the next. He is above the ordinary, but not quite unreachable. Rumors circle about him and no one is quite sure of his standing in relation to the rest of the world. He is respected and praised for the man he has built himself to be, but there is no way to pin the work that he has done as no one has a clear picture of the beginning. Gatsby presents himself as a man of prestige and value, but has built this life simply to impress a woman who has already lived a fulfilled life without him.
Gatsby is a rich, educated man that spends his days throwing lavish parties and having more guests than he has the oppurtunity to meet. He presents his accomplishments to hundreds of strangers every night on the offchance that one particualr woman will venture out of her small. comfortable corner of the world to come see him, a man she has forgotten existed. Gatsby displays his success for the world rather than focusing on bettering himself and propelling himself forward.
Gatsby is stunted by his love for Daisy. He uses the feelings he has created for her as an excuse to not move forward in life. He ignores advances from women at his parties and denies oppurtunities to keep himself safe in order to save himself for Daisy. He wants to stay near her and be available when she inevitabley calls upon him.This thinking grounds Gatsby directly where he is, keeping him from doing the things that will propell him into his future.
 This stagnant behavior adds to the rumors surrounding Gatsby's name. The question of why Gatsby chose to stay in West Egg and continue to live in this area even once he has outgrown his surrounding breeds rumors and lies about Gatsby's intentions. There must be something grounding him to this specific shore and it is impossible to tell what without the use of fiction.
Gatsby has made a man out of himself without the help of others. He abandons his parents in an act of rebellion and refuses to return home to ask for favors. He becomes a decorated soldier without taking orders from a general and builds a career from nothing but the clothes on his back. He becomes a wealthy man with money to give and spend, but all of this success leaves Gatsby depressed and lonely as he is still chasing and brooding in his biggest failure, the loss of the woman he fell in love with. All of his accomplishments amount to nothing when placed next to his true desires in life, the affection of the woman he gave himself to and devoted his life to. She has married a man she approves of and loves and moved from Gatsby to pursue a life of comfort, while Gatsby lives lavishly and lonely without Daisy to accompany him.
The best moments of Gatsby's life are spent ruining Daisy's. He disrupts her family, including the small child she has birthed and raised. He attempts to displace her from the comfortable lifestyle she has always known to move her into his life and home. He expects her to drop everything to give herself to him. Daisy has built her own life based around Tom and the family she wanted to create with him. Her instability is what appeals to Gatsby. The act of moving her from everything she has known excites Gatsby and propels his pursuit in her. Daisy must lose everything in order to grant Gatsby happiness.

A Burden

New Year 

By Rachel Coye

Listen to the after-work shovels and snow brushes
on my quiet winter street. Nasal congestion. Loose boots.
The whole country is outraged and outspoken and you should be too

because if you’re not, then you’re not doing your part.
People are having a hard time. At work, patients cry
almost every day. I make sure they have tissues;

I get them a glass of water. I say, That’s terrible or That’s hard.
It is hard to be at the hospital, to live in a room that’s not yours
and have people coming to check your blood pressure all the time.

You get bad news, you have medical bills, no sleep. Your pain
exists on a scale from 0 to 10. When I saw the sac on the ultrasound screen,
I whispered, There’s nothing in there. A tiny hollow space. I have a bad habit

of saying I’m sorry when I mean to say something else and when
I cried in front of the nurse I said, I’m sorry, but
I meant to say something that I still don’t have words for.

It’s a soft pain, looking at a toilet full of blood, taking Tylenol
and calling in to work for a personal day. It’s not a special pain,
but I’ve just never felt it before. Tomorrow, I will get up

and do all the things that I’ve been meaning to do. I will put a bra
on. The houses on this street were all built by a man who
died five years after finishing this one. He didn’t have a good reputation.

I am a homeowner, it’s part of the American Dream.
This is not the worst thing that’s ever happened. The nurse
put the Kleenex box in front of me and said, It sucks, it sucks.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Illness and disease break down our body and spirit. This sickness isolates us and creates an experience that almost negates the will to continue on. A disease acts as it should in dibilitating the weak and taking over thoughts, actions and function. (ADD MORE) The speaker in New Year by Rachel Coye finds strength to continue into the new year and overcome her illness by remembering her past and her patients
The first half of this poem deatils the speaker's involvement in other's life. It narrates the pain and hardships that her patients must endure from an outside perspective. It focuses on her response to their suffering or the narrative she must create between herself and her patients to understand what they are going through and make their suffering heard. She exists to comfort these people through their illnesses.
The fourth stanza includes a shift from the person helping others to the person requiring assistance. The narrative changes from "That's terrible" to being the person apologizing. The speaker changes from narrating the repetitiveness of a hospital to discussing the disbelief of a tumor growing inside her with little transition between the two. This highlights how large of a change this is to the speaker. Her entire life changes from the boring, repetition that accompanies a day job into a patient fighting for life and battling the end. This quick, almost nonexistant transition emphasizes just how impactful this event was on their life. The focus of the poem also shifts after this stanza to discussing the speaker's life living with the described disease as the patient rather than the carer.
The timeline in this poem is unclear. The speaker spends four stanzas discussing their life as a nurse, healing others and comforting their pain, then three speaking about her battle with this pain and by the end of the poem, we see the beginnings of a recovery. The speaker is growing stronger and setting goals to mark progress and success. This represents the speaker's lifetime. A large portion of it is spent in her career, making a difference in other's lives, until the unthinkable consumes their life. The focus shift represents just how much of the speaker's life is dedicated to battling this disease. The last glimpse into this character's life is spent positively hoping for positive change and healng.
The first stanzas about her patients give light to how much the speaker has given to the sick. She has dedicated her life to caring for them and comforting them through the worst moments in their life. Her patients translate into strength when she finally much face the same fate as these patients. She recognizes how many times they have been hurting and needed her and uses this as a jumping off point to pull herself out of the disease that is taking over. She uses her hospital experience to grow from her illness rather than be consumed by it.
The juxtaposition between the speaker's disease-ridden life and her average, worry-free one is jarring, but effective in allowing the reader to feel proud of the speaker's success. In a few short lines the speaker has grown from blood-stained toilets to being capable of dressing themselves in clothes they want to wear and living in the home they dreamed of inhabiting.
This poem is about overcoming adversity and the power of others in this struggle. It is difficult to survive in this world without the help from others. The speaker's experience in this field gives them the power to overcome their own disease and struggles. Understanding the pain that will come with their illness and knowing that it is surivable is enough to motivate them to want to continue and recover.