Billy Collins - Respond Under This Post

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Cathedral - Respond Under This Post

In addition to your regular response, answer the following question regarding Raymond Carver's short story Cathedral.

The term "epiphany," coined by James Joyce, has been used frequently in 20th century fiction to describe moments of "revelation" in a story where "everything becomes clear" to a character. The critic Malcolm Cowley defines epiphany as "that sudden reaching out of two characters through walls of inarticulateness and misunderstanding."To what extent does "Cathedral" end in an epiphany? How do you know?

Please, do not forget to use headings:

• A Title for your response "Be Creative"
• Basic Passage
• Correlation
• Difficulties

Note: I am looking for complexity in the correlation--a surprising or new angle.

Below is a sample response with headings and separate sections--your response should look like this example:

Title: Diet Coke Is The Reason

Intro to author: We, as readers, know very little about Billy Collins from the small amount of information the book entails. Billy Collins was born in 1941 in a New York City hospital he claims William Carlos Williams worked as a pediatric resident. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of California at Riverside in which he specialized in the Romantic Period. Now, he teaches at Lehman College of the City University.

Basic Passage: “and even now as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.”

Correlation: I can definitely relate to this! I believe I am the one person out of all my friends around me who has the shortest memory. I feel like I am on the same level as my grandmother who is in the later stages of Alzheimer’s disease. No, I don’t forget my name or the names of my family and friends I see often. But as it says in the passage, I believe I forget a piece of information or a memory every time I study, learn something new, or create a new memory. I believe this “forgetfulness” of mine is related to my obsessed addiction to Diet Coke. Maybe if I start taking Gingko Biloba, it’ll counteract the Nutrasweet that leads to memory loss. But all joking aside, this poem demonstrates how valuable the present moment is. The knowledge that we will forget make "now" all that more important. We must surrender to this knowledge, this loss. This poem is bittersweet. It is about bothloss and life in the guise of forgetfulness.

Difficulties: I had no problem reading or understanding this poem.

Required questions:

Identify the cause of human suffering—Tragedy

How can the tragedy be turned into a comedy?

Identify the cause of joy or happiness—comedy

Baraka - Post One-Comment under this post

A photograph of Amiri Baraka, activist, poet, (Racist?)
and the photograph that spurred Abel Meeropol to write the poem "Strange Fruit" which was later song by Billie Holiday.



Notes on "Biography"


Another look at "Strange Fruit"
Below are the lyrics to Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, 1939, written by Abel Meeropol, New Yorker, Jewish schoolteacher, American Communist:


Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
The scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
for the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
for the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop




In Walked Bud
(Listened to CD in-Class)

Audio File of "In Walked Bud"
When you go to Salon type the title of the poem in the search window.

http://www.salon.com/ent/audiofile/index.html?item=/ent/audiofile/2005/10/31/listens/index.html

Backstory on the Theolonius Monk Piece "In walked Bud " "As the musicians were packing up their instruments after the show, the police stormed the club and went after Monk. He refused to show his identification, and was forcibly arrested. A fan barred the door and challenged the officers. They tried to push him aside, but he wouldn't budge. 'Stop,' he yelled. 'You don't know what you're doing. You're mistreating the greatest pianist in the world!' At this point a nightstick came down on his head like a lightening bolt. The young fan was Monk's best friend, Bud Powell. He was dragged along with Monk, and thrown into jail after his injury was superficially treated at the hospital. After his release Powell complained of alarming headaches. He eventually checked into Bellevue Hospital, then spent three months in Creedmore Hospital. There he was treated with various psychoactive drugs and shock therapy. His artistic career had barely started, but henceforth he would be bedeviled by psychological problems. Monk was aware that Powell's intervention had saved him from a similar fate. For his ill-starred protege, he wrote 'In Walked Bud', '52nd Street Theme', and 'Broadway Theme', otherwise simply known as 'The Theme.' The numbers were intended to be Bud's property alone, and Monk never recorded them."

KINCAID "Post One" Respond under this post.

Key Points:

• Jamaica Kincaid often writes about the longing for maternal love and a childish bewilderment with the adult world.

• She seems to hold resentment toward her mother and her homeland.

• Kincaid is outspoken.

• Girl's voice only appears twice within an enormous list of "how-to's"

What is the effect of the list?

• Some of the instructions involve social mores. One big question you might tackle is whether or not you think these mores are essential.

In addition to your own correlation, please relate/synthesize the following into a paragraph of at least 50 words:

1) Kincaid's unforgiving rage at both her mother and homeland
and
2) "Everything passes through the self"

"big two-hearted river"

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born in a small suburb of chicago in 1899. he was born to a controlling mother that he sometimes reffered to as the "bitch". he started of working as a repoter, and later on ended up working as a medic in world war 1. As an author his writing style was sharp, to the point, and deceptively simple, which can be attributed to his time as a reporter. He is most known for his novel "old man and the sea". Late in his life he became depressed, and eventually commited suicide in 1961.

passage.
"Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling. He turned and looked down the stream. It stretched away,pebbly-bottomed with shallows and big boulders and a deep pool as it curvedaway around the foot of a bluff."

Correlation
this passage is descibing a trout as it fled from a king-fisher. up to this point nick had being watching the trout as it resited the fast flow of the current. resistance being an important theme in the story, had been abandoned by the trout at the sight of the bird. this coincides with a bad feeling arising in the narrator as it brings back "all the old feeling". I can relate to this passage and the narrator. In my own desire to keep faults in the back of my mind to avoid any feelings of sadness or frustration, I attempt to stay busy to remain preoccupied. the things i do to remain busy symbolize my resistance. offcourse the slightest reminder of my faults and short-comings represent the king-fisher, and the abandonment of my resistance, which leads to the feeling of sadness and frustration.

tragedy: the past.

comedy: the river, and the way it offers an escape.

how can the tragedy be turned into a comedy? by dealing with the past if possible, and getting rid of the need to escape.