Response to course materials 2

(Creative title, yes? Now to see if my failing memory can dredge up any of what we've done… By the way, I love parenthetical phrases and I will abuse them mercilessly.)

Reading The American Dream was an unexpected treat, and I'll be dwelling on it for a long time in this reflection. Not unexpected because I somehow didn't expect us to read a book we were required to buy; rather, I'm afraid I had rather low expectations for the books we were going to read. In general I've found High School literature to be boring and flavorless, classics chosen by a committee that I feel must be made up of old, doddering men that won't touch that "new writing". In some cases that committee has managed to add in a real treasure, but most often I've come out of literature classes disappointed.

This play was not a disappointment. From the beginning I found myself enjoying every line, even when the frustrating and talkative Mommy was taking the stage. It had me in a constant state of confusion and wonder until the last few pages, when a wonderful feeling of enlightenment settled across me. As I was finishing the play in Computational Physics (clearly the best place to read the Absurd), I couldn't stop myself from grinning hugely as everything fell into place. It was a bit like a Firefly episode where the very first scene is of desolation and death; the entire episode leads you to believe that every character you've learned to love is dead and gone, and only in the end, bit by agonizing bit, do you slowly realize that you've been tricked, that it all makes sense after all. I get the biggest thrill out of those stories, my brain scrambling to try and find some sort of meaning early on, only to get casually obliterated by the revelations that come with the end. (I then went on to read The Zoo Story, which while different and harder to understand, was equally brain-splattering. I just need to read it a few more times to figure out what my brain is desperately trying to grasp. I read the quote "Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly" about four times and I still can't quite wrap my mind around it.)

Moving on. Much of our class time not spent reading the play was spent on reading further information about DIDLS, specifically syntax (This is not including the past week, in which I apparently died for four days.). Syntax was never something I ever claimed to understand. Other literature teachers always mentioned it off-hand, like something we must already know, or perhaps like something they didn't really feel like explaining (and subsequently dealing with many confused questions). Now that I've learned more about it, and stopped feeling like a scrub, I can officially say that I love syntax. Clever use of syntax is one of those things that makes the classics chosen by the old-white-man-committee really worth reading (some of them, anyway). Syntax is what makes some poems go from plain to fascinating.  I don't write as much as I wish I did (if I say to myself that I write, does that make me a writer?) but in the rare times that I do, I'm all about syntax. It's fascinating to me that the way I put the same few words together in a sentence can completely change what people get from it.

I have to admit, the closed readings we did to identify syntax, as well as other parts of the now-legendary DIDLS, were not nearly as entertaining as trying to apply sentence structures in our own writing. I'm sure the practice will be very useful when we go on to annotate what we've read, but for now, I've found that I often need to force myself to find examples of language or detail. It doesn't help, however, that we were reading fragments of stories, which left me feeling disconnected from the real meanings. I like it when I can find a detail that subtly hints back to the rest of the story, or gives a brief idea of what the future will hold; short segments of stories deny me of the knowledge I'd need to figure out those connections, so I'm left to annotating text that to me means little. That's probably something I need to get past if I want to get the most possible meaning out of literature, especially when it comes to the AP test.

Reaching further back… The powerpoints. I'm not afraid to admit that my memory is so bad, I have a hard time even remembering some of the stuff we talked about. Lenses, I know. And… Urinals. No, what makes a urinal art. Right, multiple meanings and interpretations, which lead into lenses. I find critical lenses to be interesting in theory. In practice, probably due to the simplified way they were applied, I found them restrictive and boring. An entire lens just to look at economic impacts? While I can understand the interest in looking at that sort of thing, the way lenses have been presented have always made it seem like there are followers of each lens that never stray into enemy lens territory, lest they *gasp* mingle or combine. I've never been told if that's true or not, and it's given me a very critical (hah, hah) view of critical lenses.

There's clearly more we've done in class, but my brain is a little overworked right now, and it's refusing to accept the existence of any such things. Therefore, I now draw this reflection to an end, so maybe I can start slowly chiseling away at my other mountains of homework.