True Stories vs. Fairy Tales

Margaret Atwood and Anne Sexton lived lives that were at odds with one another, and it is easily seen when examining their poetry. True Stories is a piece stating that a fairy tale or false story is worth more than any truth could be, there is more truth to any falsehood than there could be in any reality. "The true story is vicious / and multiple and untrue / after all." Atwood has a fondness for fairy tales, speculative fiction, and even science fiction, thus she never writes the real truth since writing tall tales can be just as influential over a society as any non-fictional story.

Anne Sexton has a different take on poetry from Atwood in that she suffered from bipolar disorder, mania, and depression. Eventually she took her own life via carbon monoxide poisoning. Sexton wrote in a sarcastic/ mocking voice throughout her poetry, and this can be seen prominently in Cinderella. This retelling of the classic Grimm Brothers' fairy tale stays true to the story, but strips it bare and allows the reader to look at the story the jaunted eye that Sexton must have used. In contrast to Atwood, Sexton did not enjoy the false lives led by those in the world of fairy tales. "She slept on the sooty hearth each night / and walked around looking like Al Jolson." This line shows no sympathy for the protagonist of the story. Her sarcastic comments come across during the scene where Cinderella is sitting in front of her tree and wishing to go to the ball when suddenly a bird drops down a dress and gold slippers, "Rather a large package for a bird."

"Cinderella and the prince / lived they say, happily ever after, / like two dolls in a museum case / never bothered by diapers or dust, / never arguing over the timing of an egg, / never telling the same story twice, / never getting a middle-aged spread, / their darling smiles pasted on for eternity." This final stanza allows the reader to really feel the sarcasm dripping off of her words, and is implying that fairy tales are nothing more than childish rubbish.

Remember or Forget Me

Christina Rossetti's poem Song is simultaneously beautiful and grim. The beauty rests within her imagery and haunting words while death is a rather grim topic to address. Nevertheless, Rossetti does a wonderful job of it.

The poem opens with the line:
"When I am dead, my dearest
        Sing no sad songs for me;"
and from that moment forward it is obvious that she is not afraid of death. Rossetti's religious background would leave her at peace with her eventual demise while many others would wish to never be forgotten once they are gone.

"And if thou wilt, remember,
        And if thou wilt, forget." Means that if you decide to think on me when I am gone then you may, but you are welcome to forget me as well. It's so strange to see someone as content with dying as Rossetti, especially when most poetry about death is about the narrator wishing to defy the inevitable.

The Death of an Era

Dover Beach begins with the depiction of a calm sea, something that I would normally associate with serenity, but this is not the same for Matthew Arnold. While reading this selection I did a bit of research on the time period, and what I found changed the meaning from a gentle relaxed vision of waves caressing the shore to a cynical piece about the loss of traditions. During the time of 1865 the Industrial Revolution ruled London, and with this brought about a drastic change from centuries of simple country living to that of harsh living in the big city. With this change from the country to the city many of the past traditions are being forgotten and replaced for new ones, and among those are religious beliefs.

Fading

When first looking at the name of James Joyce's The Dead I expected more of a Gothic novel rather than dinner party. The tone was decidedly somber, and made me feel rather nostalgic.

There is some talk about the fading away of not only traditions and ideas, but people as well. Everyone and everything in the world changes, and as things begin to change our society begins to lose certain aspects of its culture and replace them with new ideas. Gabriel talks about how the new generation is starting to fall away from the Three Graces, but with each generation something will inevitably be lost. Cursive writing is being lost, because essays and assignments no longer have to be handwritten.

Can you find it?

I am always irked when I hear someone talking about the 'hidden meaning' in a piece of literature. The idea that a writer would want someone to take their work and pull it into small pieces to be analyze makes me shake my head in disgust. If someone were to come up to me and ask me what the hidden meaning behind a piece of my own writing was I would just laugh in their faces and refuse to justify them with an answer.

One of my favorite book series is Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling, and there are a ton of different things she wants to get across to people, but many of the readers are not happy with finding the same meaning as everyone else. I have heard theories that the stories are about a mentally ill child, that Harry is only dreaming, etc. The fact that they are trying so hard to pump a meaning out of a story about a normal turned wizard is beyond irritating. The meaning in something is whatever the reader takes away from it, and everyone will connect to something different from a piece.

What makes me even more angry than the people who strip a work bare looking for a meaning is teachers who insist that a piece only contains one meaning. I have been in classrooms where the teacher made the class agonize over what meaning was the correct one. It was like trying to find a secret message and made me less likely to turn in my homework since I didn't want to disect someone's work just to find a meaning that would not be there.

A pox on the person who coined the idea of the 'hidden meaning'.

Are We All A Meme?

Part of being human is being able to cope with the reality we are forced to face every day, thus we like to pretend that before this moment in time nothing truly happened. All the little things that we give almost no thought to today had to come from somewhere, but very few people care to actually trace the history of things like memes.

Memes are things that are now acknowledged as strange little clichés derived from pop culture, but I had never really thought about God, Religion, or Love containing memes before reading Gleick's book. If memes are categorized as anything that has been repeated enough to become part of normalcy then there is very little about the world that is not a meme. Even down to the emotions we have put names to... perhaps happy became the word that acknowledges what may have once been described as 'in a good mood and having a bright outlook on life'.

We are all a product of memes, and maybe we are nothing but memes ourselves. Maybe we are just something generated enough times that everything we are down to our names are nothing more than a meme to which our parents were drawn. That being said, what we find unique about ourselves may not be unique at all. We could be drawn to things that already fit the meme of who we are.

Something to think about right?

I Can Hear The Drums....

James Gleick brings forth rather interesting information in the chapter "Drums That Talk" that even I, as a musician, had never thought about in much detail. The idea that a drum, a very singular instrument when we think about the way that they are not very prized unless being added to vocals and various other instruments, can be the cornerstone of language for certain people brings out a new appreciation to what sort of impact drum beats have on our culture today. When we listen to a song on the radio and actually concentrate on the drum beat then it is very easy to hear that the drum has a lot to do with how upbeat or slow something really can be. The same song can be played with a very fast drum beat and seem upbeat and something you would listen to driving down the highway while if the drum beat were to be slow and somber the song would be equally as somber sounding.

Morose Code developed from the idea of the drum beat that were once use to relay messages from far distances. Drums have the ability to make a set of words come to life, and as Gleick mentions in his book even though the African tribes could speak very broken English their drums could speak in clear sentences and get across points that they lacked the ability to express. People take for granted the things that have become common place such as an instrument that to most people only makes a bunch of loud noises all at once behind a set of lyrics or a great guitar riff.

The Silent Reader

The part of this reading that interested me the most was that of the Silent Reader. When we think about reading from a text it is always assumed that it will be read silently to one's self, but apparently that was not always the way of it.

I was always very annoyed during the years of K-12 when we would have to read aloud, because I would never be able to get all of what the text was saying. It is very difficult to study the meaning of a text when one  is forced to listen to the fumbled attempts at pronounciation for classmates that result in having to reread the text later to fully grasp what it is saying.

This section did help me understand something about myself, and that is why I was put into support classes for reading when I transitioned from Elementary School to Middle School. When I was about 11 my fifth grade class was informed that we would be evaluated on how well we could read for placement in our middle school reading classes. At first I was very excited about this as I was already reading on an advanced level, but what the teachers failed to mention to us was that the evaluation was to be on reading aloud to a person you had never before met in your life. I was a very introverted child and did not like speaking in normal situations let alone ones were I would be graded. Needless to say, I did not do very well. I have held a sort of grudge toward the school system up until I read the Silent Reader. Now I know that they evaluated my reading aloud, because that was how reading was intended to be. Those who were able to read aloud were the ones who it seemed had a better grasp upon what was going on within a text, or so they thought. Perhaps my grudge was unfounded...