Dawn Raffel

   Before the reading by Dawn Raffel I didn't have very many expectations.  I was not familiar with the author and I had never been to a reading before.  I half expected that the auditorium would be filled with more people because she sounded like a very successful, well-known author.

   She read from two of her books, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division.  These were intriguing book titles so my initial interest was peaked.  But after the first reading, I was ready to fall asleep.  I thought the maturity level was much higher, so for a person at 19, I was uninterested.  Her audience was filled with much older people compared to that of younger adults, which in my mind implied that her writing was on a more mature level of understanding.

   Her style was very different.  The way she structured the dialogue was weird to me, but for others might be enjoyable.  Even the structure of her sentences seemed a little odd to me.  I couldn't tell if her stories were a little dark or if they were just deep. 

  I was most interested in the questions the audience had at the end.   One man asked if the author saw her life as a series of books.  Other questions pertained to her writing structure and rhythm.  Overall, it was not a bad experience. I would probably go to another reading for fun. 

Stone Soup Review

  In "Stone Soup", an essay written by Barbara Kingsolver, her diction was what drew me into her story!  Her overall piece was appealing personally because I am a "child of divorce".  For me, it was a new perspective I'd never seen.  Some of the phrases she uses and her ideas and arguments were all appealing as I read this essay about families. 

I love her  introduction about sitting down at a soccer game watching the little boy Andy scoring a goal and sees his family cheering wildly for him. On the bleachers next to her there's his mother and her friends, his father & stepmother, stepsister and brother and his grandparent.  And she goes on to say, "I dare anybody to call this a broken home," a mildly aggressive statement that gets you excited for what you're going to read next.

In the following paragraphs you will find her bold opinions strewn about in long paragraphs, her own personal dialogue with her friends, and her main reference to "Family of Dolls" spread throughout her essay.  She's a bit comical, adding that if after your divorce your friends will "accept you back to the ranks of the living", they'll dance at your second wedding if you're really blessed.  She uses phrases like, "once we have put ourselves Humpty-Dumpty-wise back together again" and "Prince Charming Theory of Marriage, a quest for Mr. Right" that made me enjoy her writing all the more and put a smile on my face. 

The ending paragraphs were the best part of it all.  She mentions Cinderella, and how she found a better childhood fairy tale called "Stone Soup", finally revealing why her essay is named "Stone Soup".  She states that every family is a big empty pot and every stew comes out different from the other.  She goes on to say that name calling and suspicions do not do any good and that generosity and respect for variety will help nourish a nation of children.

  "Stone Soup" by Barbara Kingsolver was a very intriguing piece to me.  She used her own experience, divorce, to convey that families are not perfect and you shouldn't judge them because who's to say what the traditional family is?  She seemed to want to make her point clear that just because she was divorced and now a single mother that her life wasn't a mess, she didn't have a problem.  She had many good points to proving that we should let go of this "fairy tale" idea of families and embrace each other in our communities.

Research Plan

My group's general research topic is the Aleut people.  Some of the questions we came upon were, "how do they build their houses?", "what do they eat?", and "where do they live?".  These questions are important to me because as a little girl I lived on the Aleutian Islands and met many Aleut natives and had Aleut friends.  I would like to know more about their people because I was too young to understand when I lived there.  I imagine my audience could be an array of people like those who are considering moving to the Aleutians, or other students who are doing research on the same group. 

Within our team, we have split up different topics to each person, such as art, culture/technology, clothing, and traditions.  My topic is traditions.  I would like to find information on Aleut dancing the most because I participated in these dances when I was small. I remember we wore leather dresses and had head dresses too.  My dad is a leather man and he made my dress and he made me an amazing head dress. The girls spent a great deal of time making their outfits look nice, using small beads and different types of animal fur.  I recall standing in the bathroom putting on make up before we went out to the audience. I was too young to understand what the stories were that we were telling, I could barely pronounce the words we chanted.  There was a boy drummer and the rest of us were girls.  We stood in a circle facing each other and we had arm movements and we all chanted at the same time.  It was fun for me as a little kid, but now that I'm older I'm much more interested in the stories that were being told and what the words meant.

I plan on finding information from books at the library to look up Aleut traditions first.  I would like to have a good grasp on a few ideas before I try to dive into just one and later find out that there's not much information on it. If I can find information on dancing I will roll along with that topic. So far, I have found my old friends from King Cove (located on the Aleutians) and I plan on asking them questions (one of them has experience dancing too), like possible natives that I could interview. 

The hardest challenge is going to be keeping myself on track with the due dates.  I haven't figured out a schedule yet!  I would like to sit down with my group and discuss with them what we should have done by what dates. 

Overheard Conversation

    Desperate to finish this assignment on time, and having procrastinated enough, I went to the Moore Hall lobby to grab my piece of conversation.  Luckily, when I came down from the steps (for I only live 6 floors up in Moore) I had a friend sitting there.  I was thinking, "Thank gosh!  I really did not want to sit down here alone looking like a creeper,eavesdropping on others conversations".  I sat there for maybe ten minutes listening to everyone, and I realized, I can't just sit here and wait for a good conversation to happen, so I chose the next thing that was said.  The other kids around were slouching in the couches, feet propped up on the table, just like me, cell phones in hand.  No one was talking about anything interesting, anything funny or anything serious.

  "I've never not seen anyone in there." One girl said after shoving a small Hostess do-nut into her mouth.  Everyone had agreed, it was quite odd that no one was hanging out in the lounge.  I was curious as to why, for I do not "chill" in the lounge anymore.  I got up from my comfortable spot on the couch next to my buddy, Donald, and walked over to the lounge doors.  Immediately everyone in the lobby was gasping!  Donald yelled out, "Ruby, what are you doing? Don't open those doors!"  I turned around real fast with my eyebrow raised, "Why can't I go in there?"  No one would answer me, not right away at least.  "What's going on in there you guys?"  With a look of perplexity, Donald looked around the room, and realized he was the one who would have to spill the news to me.  "Someone was killed in there last night," Donald blurted out; straight to the point. 

I know from sitting in the lobby that this person was just simply stating that she was surprised no one was in the lounge, (which is of course quite odd).  I suppose this assignment was kind of hard for me because I wasn't really overhearing the conversation, I was taking part IN the conversation...I do believe it would have been a lot more challenging and interesting to just overhear someone's conversation at a coffee shop and I also would have understood the concept of context much more because of the way it can be misconstrued.  If you overheard somebody say angrily, "I'm gonna hurt that girl!", you have no idea in what context that person is speaking.  Context is important for a reader so they know what is going on and the message can be communicated more efficiently.

Salvation

     In the beginning of Langston Hughes short story, "Salvation", he uses a lot of choppy sentences.  I liked this because it was straight forward and he cuts to the chase.  "I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen.  But not really saved.  It happened like this." It seems a bit juvenile, like an elementary student would write this, but he began his story this way for a reason.

    In the second paragraph, Hughes sets up the story by telling us how his Aunt made it sound like being saved by Christ was so exciting. He uses a couple of exclamation marks to emphasize this and I believe he uses foreshadow in the sentence, "I believed her." Later to not believe that Christ exists at all. 

   Hughes conveys a lot of irony in his story which might also be the theme.  Young Hughes went to church with the mission to be saved and he came out not even believing in God any more, which came as a shock to me.  He had the entire church there praying for him, and he lied in front of all of them because he didn't "see" Jesus.  It was hot and crowded in the church, much like it would be in hell.  Seeing that God hadn't punished Westley, the boy sitting next to Hughes, for lying about being saved, he went ahead and lied too; later to feel guilty about his decision.

    I find his story comical in a way, for it seems so typical for that little boy next to Hughes to say, "God damn! I'm tired o' sitting here.  Let's get up and be saved." I think that's what any twelve year old boy would do.  From my own experience, I feel like I've done this before too.  When I was smaller and went to a Catholic church, I had no idea what I was doing but I didn't want to be singled out so I just followed along.

    Hughes was simply being pushed to conform to all the other "lambs", or kids.  With the pressures his Aunt had placed on his shoulders, poor Hughes didn't want to disappoint anyone.  This sounds really familiar.  Everyday people give in to conformity: the way we dress, the things we buy, & sometimes the music we listen to.  When others step out of that box, they're judged instantly, even criticized.  Hughes was probably afraid of being criticized had he not gone up to be "saved". 

Souls On Ice by Mark Doty

    
     "Our metaphors go on ahead of us, they know before we do.  And thank goodness for that, for if I were dependent on other ways of coming to knowledge I think I'd be a very slow study."  Mark Doty was stating that metaphors help us learn & they help us understand.  He was stopped in a grocery store by these "glistening" mackerel and it made him think about the meaning of individuality.  All of these fish were lying there; all of them the same.  I love Doty's line: "Think abalone, the wildly rainbowed mirror of a soapbubble sphere, think sun on gasoline."  It took me a couple times to read and also hear this poem being read to finally catch that imagery he was writing.  It's such great imagery!  "Sun on gasoline,"! I love it!

    Doty talks about how the fish resemble nothing of individuality, and he even questions if "you", the reader, would want to be yourself only.  Although not completely apparent in the poem, in his writing he states "that our glory is not our individuality but our commonness,".  The mackerel are a perfect metaphor for this statement.  They are all the same, just as we humans are.  We all lose our loved ones, as Doty did. 

   This is a pretty deep subject to be discussing!  One line that helps me understand Doty's piece a little more is, "What did it mean to be a self, when that self would be lost?"  He's asking, what does individuality mean when in the end, we just die?  I think he likes to believe in the "togetherness" of our world.  The way I think of it is that we are all a piece of something (humanity), and when we die, that piece still exists without us. 

   I don't quite understand the "heaven" and "soul" in this poem.  Doty does say that he was moving into the "realm of theology" but he doesn't really go any further like I hoped he would.  If he would have made this a more Christian based poem it probably would have lost it's whole purpose.  I'm still trying to wrap my head around the line, "each a perfect fulfillment of heaven's template, mackerel essence,"  because I don't understand what this line means exactly. 


  Overall, I liked this piece by Doty a lot.  Honestly, when death of a loved one is connected to the writing, it seems all the more meaningful and has more power behind it.  I enjoyed the poem because of the previous writing (the explanations from Doty).  He wrote this poem to make himself feel better.  The fish comforted him, and I hope someday when I'm walking through the grocery store that I'll see a pile of mackerel on ice and remember the commonness in life; that we're all the same because we all lose somebody we love. 

Museum Response

 

Ruth Sorenson

Untitled (Cloudscape) 2003

(This picture is NOT the exact one from the Museum

but it almost looks the exact same)

    It didn't take me long to chose the art piece that I would be writing 500 words on.  I wandered downstairs (as if this painting was a magnet, and I was drawn to it) to this beautiful oil painting of these clouds caught my eye and I knew I could look no further.   As I sat there in a chair taking my notes, it was easy to tell that the focal point was one large, fluffy white cloud, lighter than all the others and painted right in the middle of the canvas.  In the background, there were darker clouds that framed this one brighter cloud.  There were no vibrant colors that popped out, just calm, relaxing shades of greens from the grass below, and shades of blue and gray from above.  I let my eyes search the entire painting, not knowing if in the middle was a path or a muddy stream of water. The shading in the clouds make me believe that it might be time for rain. 

   I believe the artist wanted to create an effect with her audience that would be emotional.  When I had first looked at this painting I thought about when I was very little and lived on the Aleutian Islands.  The places we lived looked very much like this scene in this painting.  It took me back to standing there at the playground in Nikolski (nih-COAL-skee), there was nothing surrounding us besides a few buildings.  I remember the grass was mostly yellow, never a lively green.  In the picture you can tell that there's a breeze by looking at how the grass is bent, which reminded me of how windy it always was in Nikolski.  My family would borrow one of the Native's four wheelers and we would ride across to the other side of the island.  It seemed like every thing there was dead.  Dead wood on the beach, dead grass, bland, dead colors.  The only thing that was poignant and alive was the smell of the salt water and the sounds coming from the seagulls.     

Red & Yellow Dot is where Nikolski is located

  

    The feeling that I get from this picture is a feeling that I also get when I'm at the Delta River.  It's so easy to stand there and marvel at the world, listen to it's sounds, and wonder about the one that created it all.  Either basking in the sun or having the wind blow on my face and through my hair, these places make me feel so much more alive than anywhere else.  These places make me feel connected to them.  There's a special bond.  Even just looking at this painting, I've never stood there, I don't even know where it's at or if it was just made up from the artists' imagination...but I still feel a connection to it.