ACTUAL Blog Post 2: Act One of MND

Well there’s not much to say about this one. It was short. But it was actually pretty amusing to read. Very lighthearted. I find it interesting that Helena and Hermia seem to have a civil relationship, considering the circumstances. Enough to the point where Hermia trusts Helena with the details of the plan she and Lysander made. Helena seems to look to Hermia with a mix of admiration and jealousy rather than hatred and jealousy…and I wonder if that’s going to change throughout the course of the play.

Blog Post 2

First of all, my editors from class were Madison Kime and Simin Wang. Both of them were really helpful on pointing out things I wouldn’t be able to realize since I generally can’t edit my own writing and see overall problems until long after it’s due.

Madison’s comments were generally on where I could improve structure. I tried to change my sentences around when she said I needed better transitions and I did keep in examples she liked. She had a few sentences she was iffy about and I’m pretty sure I played around with them.

Simin had problems pinpointing my thesis statement, so I tried to edit my essay around what I thought was my thesis statement and I also tried arranging the sentences around it to seem less thesis-statey. And of course I tried tweaking the thesis statement. She found a problem with how the essay progressed to questioning the narrator’s sanity when I initially talked about depression, so I tried to make the depression paragraphs a little more clear.

Overall, I tried to go through each sentence to my ability and try and make them seem more precise. Hopefully that worked. Probably not because everything sounds okay in my head until someone points out how terribly it was written… C’est la vie.

Blog Post One: Response to one of the poems from the reading.

America

Allen Ginsberg

( 1:20 AM - Hi. I don’t actually have a copy of the reading, so I’m literally making this placeholder post to say, yes, I am aware that I’m supposed to be writing something. I’ll edit it in as soon as I’m done with the reading and no I really didn’t forget I swear it’ll be up before class. )

2:20 AM edit - This poem really stood out to me. Wikipedia has been down all day, so I couldn’t help myself to the luxury of looking up half of the historical references the easy way. But the way it was written felt very light in a creepy way. That may have a lot to do with the fact that the poet is addressing America as if it were a person and not a country.

He asks America a ton of questions as if he was blaming it for his problems. It’s almost a stream of consciousness in which he has an idea, runs with it, finds a problem with himself, and blames America the country but in a way he would blame a person. It’s almost if he’s trying to get the reader to think he’s a little disorganized. Again, I don’t have Wikipedia, but I’m pretty sure that some of the things he admits to being or doing are taboo. Depending on when this poem was written.

Also, I’m using this website to read the poem and on the very bottom, it says that the poet has a psychiatrist. So maybe what I read as “disorganized” is what people read as “psychiatrist patient”. So that would explain line three.

But then there are the two stanzas where the poet suddenly says “I am America. / I am talking to myself again.”

I’m starting to think that yes, he is crazy, and so is America. A war is mentioned, so I think that this could be taken two different ways. This poem could be about the poet’s own feelings of chaos with the things going on in America…or it could be a reflection of a crazed and chaotic time period that leads up to war (I get that impression from the last few lines. The tone suddenly becomes serious and we have a coherent and lasting thought. The speaker seems to go from grabbing at multiple incidents and ideas to actually digesting what’s going on and deciding to do something about it, which could be a description of history and the progression towards war as events go from focused on anything and everything to that one thought; the war.)

The UK or Japan. England just seems like a place I need to go before I die because it would be nice to visit a different country that isn’t the Philippines or any of the North/South American countries. I’ve always been interested in British history and literature, so it would be my top choice.

However, I’m not going to discount Japan. I’ve spent a whole lot of time into anime and that paints a fictional image of Japan for me. It would be nice to see what is accurate and what is anime. And being into anime made me interested in a lot of certain places in Japan that would be lovely to visit as a tourist. Whereas I’d like to live in the UK (England specifically) and experience the lifestyle of a different country and compare it to the US, another English-speaking country. So there’s a different motivation for visiting Japan as opposed to the UK.