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.