Final Grades!

I got my grades in for the spring semester!  Spoiler alert: I passed.

So my averaged GPA for freshman year was a 3.342, which sounds pretty good to me. And now, please do excuse me whilst I go on hiatus for the summer.

				Cultural Anthropology		B
				Episodes in Western Art		A-
				Introduction to the Short Story		B
				Ithaca College Sinfonietta		A
				Introduction to the Essay		A-
				Introduction to Creative Writing		A-

Dear Mr. Bartleby, Scrivener

The last part of my Intro to the Short Story was to write a letter to an author of a story we had read, or a character from one of those stories.  I picked Bartleby the Scrivener, and you can read the whole story if you click here.  Enjoy!

 

 

Dear Mr. Bartleby, Scrivener,

            What on earth is your problem?  There is no need at all for you to be such a stubborn little fool.  The way of the world isn’t always your way, but does that mean you ought to just stop?  Of course not!  What kind of man are you?

            You don’t just keel over into an apathetic lump whenever you feel like it! 

            Perhaps you ought to seek ought help—from a psychiatrist.  After all, anhedonia is a symptom of depression (which is one of the only plausible explanations for your ridiculous behavior).  Anhedonia, being, of course, loss of interest in things you formerly found pleasurable, like copying down text or, well, living. 

            You clearly are suicidal at the end of the story, Mr. Bartleby, and for that, I recommend some time in an in-patient psychiatric ward.  Perhaps some group therapy.  There are numerous institutions at which to receive such services—though, perhaps, not in your time, but you have lingered on most irritatingly into the modern age, where help is available.

            I advise you, as a concerned and frustrated reader, to please seek out the help of a medical professional.  Lord knows it would be simply dreadful to lose such a vibrant and stimulating character from the bowels of literature.

            Perhaps you ought to reevaluate your life choices.  Stop squatting in your workplace after hours and buy a real house.  Find a job that isn’t so infernally dull, find a wife (if you can), or a pet.  Many people with boring lives invest in cats—many cats.  Fill your new house with cats, sir.

            After you have sought medical, or feline help for your instability, Mr. Bartleby, I advise you to contact your author, Mr. Melville, and have him write you into another story that isn’t quite as infuriating for readers.  I imagine a happy ending for you, sir, not some miserable starved suicide after a story that was as uneventful as brushing my teeth in the morning.  Perhaps Mr. Melville ought to put you in touch with Captain Ahab, as I understand his life is astronomically more exciting than yours.  Some adventure would do you good, Mr. Scrivener—it would get you out of that dreadful and congested city.  Fresh air, Mr. Bartleby!

            And a healthy dose of Zoloft.

            Or a smack in the face.  Since you are, after all, a character, you don’t really have an excuse to be so frustratingly dull and depressed.  You’re supposed to be interesting—if you aren’t then what on earth is the point of reading about you?

            Come to your senses, sir!  You have a duty to Mr. Melville and to your readership to be entertaining! 

 

Fondest Regards,

A Faithful Reader.

Short Stories are Fun (and so are pictures)

This is part of my final for Intro to the Short Story.  We had to respond to one of a number of prompts. and I picked “Like, short stories.  Wow!”. 

            I think I like short stories better than I like novels.  Maybe.  Well, at least I prefer to write short stories rather than novels.  It’s truly incredible the amount of depth that can be woven into only a few pages.  It’s a much tighter style, and takes a certain kind of skill.

            I’d be interested in reading the shortest story ever—one that still makes sense and is entertaining.  How much can a narrative be condensed so that it is still interesting and unique?

            I think short stories are good for the modern attention span—that being shorter than in previous eras—because does anyone really have time to sit down and read a whole novel? 

 haha, okay, that was funny

It becomes fragmented if we read a few pages every night as a means of falling asleep.  It’s also hard for one to contemplate what one’s just read if one is asleep. 

            I don’t really understand how people can just read a few pages every night, unless it was a really dull book (but then what’s the point of reading it in the first place?).  I can’t start and stop and start and stop a story I’m reading—I forget things and it’s irritating.  I prefer to sail straight through a book and then sit and think about it for a while. 

            There’s a wealth of short stories out in the world, and I think they’re quite fun.  You can encounter more of them because they’re shorter and leave you more time to read other ones.  It’s a good way to get exposure to lots of different authors, reading their short stories.  Good for a student with ADD.  They’re like novels on crack—getting everything done in an infinitesimal amount of time.

kind of!

            On the flipside, of authorship versus readership, short stories are enormously less time consuming to write, and can serve as good exercises.  For example, writing a few pages in the style of this author, or trying to nail down a certain aesthetic.  They’re good practice.

            And hellooo, you can write more of them over a certain span of time, because they’re shorter!  I can also write them faster, because I don’t get quite so bored with the story while I’m writing it.  Writing short stories doesn’t quite suck my soul dry like working on my novel does (pun intended—it’s a vampire-themed novel). 

 haha!

            Short stories are more in line with my current attention span and general personality.  I skip around from idea to idea and that is torturous if I intend to turn each idea into a novel. 

            It’s more satisfying for me to be able to finish pieces than it is to work on one really big one.  I suppose it’s lots of smaller accomplishments as opposed to one big one—that’s fine.  It means I’m feeling accomplished more often.     That makes for a healthier mental environment to work in (I don’t feel like poo because I’m not finishing any pieces).  A finished story also prompts me to then write another one, it’s a confidence booster.

            Well, it’s the same thing for reading them, I suppose.  I don’t have a titanic amount of pages to get through before the end.  Reading a story is like a little success too.

            Like, wow!  It’s like the whole genre was tailor-made to fit me!

The Use of Force, William Carlos Williams

 This is for my Intro to the Short Story class.  Hopefully this essay will be a better grade than my last one about the "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" did!  I tried to explain things more and I feel like I did better on this paper.  Well, anyways, this is my intellectual property etc., etc., etc.  Steal upon pain of death and so forth.  Enjoy!

“The Use of Force” by William Carlos Williams, is about a doctor trying to look at the throat of a hysterically resistant young girl.  The doctor becomes infuriated, but eventually succeeds in getting to see the girl’s throat.  The story is saying that sometimes it is necessary to be forceful and that force is sometimes an outcome of simply being human.

            Most noticeably is the use of force on the part of the doctor; he orders the girl’s father to restrain her and when he manages to get a “wooden tongue depressor” into her mouth, she bites it to splinters and her mouth bleeds, at the end the doctor sees that she has been hiding symptoms of diphtheria: “both tonsils covered with membrane” (1385-6).  It’s not expressly mentioned in the story that the membrane is a symptom of diphtheria, but according to the New York Health Department’s webpage on the disease “a grayish colored membrane may form over the nose, throat, and tonsils”, so it’s clear that she actually does have the disease (New York State Department).

            In addition to the physical force used by the doctor, he also mentions his rage at the girl—anger being a sort of emotional force.  He describes the struggle as a “battle”, and the father’s failure to properly hold down the girl infuriates the doctor “till I wanted to kill him”, “I could have torn the child apart in my own fury and enjoyed it.  It was a pleasure to attack her” he says (1385-6). 

            The reason for his violence against the child is “a blind fury, an adult shame, bred of the longing for muscular release” (1386).  It sounds simple enough—he is just angry and it’s easy to use his strength as an adult male to satisfy his anger by forcing the girl’s mouth open.  But the phrase “an adult shame” lends itself to deeper meaning (1386). 

            An “adult shame”—a shame that is unique to adults, something that a child doesn’t have to feel.  A child’s bad behavior is excused because they are young and still learning manners and societal customs, but very few excuses exist for improper behavior in adults.  The rage the narrator feels is childlike—disproportionate to his provocation, irrational, and uncalled for in magnitude.  Since the narrator is an adult and a doctor it is therefore shameful for him to be so swayed by his anger that he is “longing for muscular release” (1386).  He shouldn’t want to do violence to the child, and yet he still wants it.

            The fact that this is shameful to the narrator gives us an insight into what William Carlos Williams has to say about the use of force.  By choosing to refer to it as a “shame”, he shows readers that he is not in favor of it.

            Williams also describes the scene in a very graphic fashion, using phrases like “she shrieked terrifyingly, hysterically”, “her tongue was cut and she was screaming in wild, hysterical shrieks”, and finally “tears of defeat blinded her eyes” (1385-6).  It is no secret that this experience is traumatizing for the young girl. This of course begs the question of why the doctor would continue to treat the girl so harshly. 

            The narrator admits that he knows his methods are wrong; “perhaps I should have desisted and come back in an hour or more.  No doubt it would have been better” (1385).  Why then would he persist? 

            The doctor has become emotionally invested in this patient; he is enraged, but also trying to save her life.  Diphtheria is a serious disease, and “I have seen at least two young children lying dead in a bed of neglect in such cases” (1386).  He is so furious with her not because she is spurning his instructions, but because she is endangering her own life by hiding the disease. 

            By mentioning the two other deaths, the narrator reveals that before he even encountered the Olson family and their daughter he had an attachment to the diphtheria case.  The doctor describes the children as “lying dead in a bed of neglect” (1386).  “Neglect” meaning, of course, a failure to care for the children.  As a medical professional, it was his duty to care for and to heal the children, but they died anyway.  This implies that the doctor feels guilty about the deaths even though there may be no cause for him to feel so—perhaps they were beyond help.

            Therefore, the doctor would be more determined to save the little girl, because he is not only doing it for her, but also to ease his own feeling of guilt.  This would, of course, prompt him to utilize more drastic measures to get the diagnosis.  It’s not that the narrator is a bad doctor—he has just been emotionally compromised by the case.

            William Carlos Williams is saying that sometimes forcing a patient is a necessary evil.  Even though the girl resists and resists, at the end of the story it’s revealed that she is suffering from diphtheria.  Wouldn’t it have been a greater tragedy if she was never diagnosed and was left untreated to die?  If she didn’t have the membrane covering her tonsils, the story would have a completely different meaning, but the fact that she did, and that it was the doctor’s improper behavior that discovered it lessened the wrongness of his actions.  However traumatic and upsetting for the patient, the outcome was a positive one.

            The author is also making a statement about the medical profession.  By including details in the story about the doctor’s emotions and his past, Williams is reminding readers that a doctor is in fact just a normal human being, subject to all the normal human emotions.  And that they also sometimes let their emotions sway their judgment and actions. 

            “The Use of Force” is by no means a plea for sympathy on the behalf of medical professionals or of their patients, merely a reminder that sometimes the ends justify the means, and the means are subjective to human nature.

nobody likes to get shots

  not kids.

 not grown-ups,

not even sweet old ladies!

I just thought these were apt, since the whole story was about this little girl freaking out in the presence of a doctor. 

Fancy Art Stuff

            At the Ballet

            1938

            Lithograph

            By Duncan Grant

 

            This piece was created after the works that were studied, but I believe it is very similar to the Post Impressionism that VanGogh began to turn into abstract Expressionism.  I think the piece is trying to express the artist’s feelings and the general atmosphere of being at the ballet.

            A lithograph is a form of printing, and Duncan Grant’s piece seems to be very much influenced by the technique that was used to create it.  The shading is done roughly and not at all blended or smoothed like an oil painting.  There also seem to only be a few colors at work in the piece—like he made several prints in various colors and layered them on top of each other.  The colors are not blended, which of course is “with” the material and technique that the artist is using. 

            The colors are saturated and the light is glaring on the ballerinas so that almost all of their color has been washed out and they are only described in white and gray.  Throughout the whole piece Grant uses yellow and blue, this, because they are complimentary colors, add to the incredible brightness and vivacity of the work.

            This piece clearly has a certain style about it, and it—in my opinion—is like Toulouse Lautrec

that has been inspired by Degas’ ballerinas. 

It is reminiscent of Toulouse Lautrec’s works he created as advertising posters because of the small number of colors present and also the brightness of those colors.  The Degas homage is of course, in the subject matter.

            Upon first glance, the Grant piece seemed like a work of impressionism, with the heavy emphasis on color and the “everyday” subject matter.  The lines of color in the piece—most noticeable in the background behind the ballerinas—appear to have been dashed down quickly on the plate, like a sort of ‘first impression’.  The lines are full of movement and therefore energy.  This is clearly echoing the dancing of the ballerinas onstage.

            But the date of 1938 doesn’t fit with Impressionism.  There is, however, absolutely no reason why Grant couldn’t have been inspired by impressionism. 

            Distinct lines of vibrant color are reminiscent of VanGogh’s style. 

VanGogh was interested in expressionism, and perhaps there is some of that in Grant’s work as well.  The jittery lines of complimentary colors could be indicating the artist’s own excitement about seeing the ballet.  Perhaps he is also trying to communicate the visualized version of the music that the ballerinas are dancing to. 

            The scribbles continue out into the foreground as well, implying that the audience is excited as well.  Indeed, many of them seem to be turned toward in each other as if in conversation.  One man, on the far left of the piece has turned completely around in his seat and is looking back out at the viewer.  Maybe this is a little self-portrait?  Or even someone Duncan Grant knew?

            I’m not sure why these people seem to be paying more attention to each other than to the ballet.  Perhaps the rules of etiquette were different in 1938?  Perhaps it was common to engage in conversation about the performance they were watching, while they were watching it.  Maybe the audience is just that excited, it cannot be contained. 

            The ballerinas themselves have been placed in dynamic poses—they are not simply standing onstage—they have been captured in the most dramatic poses that they can be in.  It almost looks disorganized, like the artist took different sets of people that weren’t onstage at the same time and placed them together for the piece.  It doesn’t seem quite realistic—what good choreographer would want so many equally interesting things happening at the same time?  There is so much energy that it can’t be conveyed in a single dance scene.

            The vibrancy and energy of the piece are bursting out of it, and clearly express excitement and spectacle.  By using complimentary colors juxtaposed right next to each other and tightly spaced scribbly lines throughout the piece, Duncan Grant successfully shows his audience what it feels—and maybe even sounds like—to be at the ballet.