Emi's English Blog

Kindred ’s a book you don’t have to put down. It reads like a movie; it holds your attention. Octavia Butler does a splendid job of teaching readers about the past through an excitement-packed story. However there were times when the characters felt unreal. At times I could not believe a person would respond to a situation in the way the characters did. There is an inevitable shortcoming to all stories that exist outside of an author’s realm of experience. I know this book was focused on the historical aspects—what happened to people, the terrible treatment and corrupting influence of an environment. The story was meant to expose the intricacies of the tragedy that is often glazed over in history books—it forces us to acknowledge the first hand injustice of splitting up families and dehumanizing people, raising children with no hope of their own future. The book’s probably not about what an environment like that can do to a person. However, I wish it was. I had high hopes for whe

There were two moments in Slaughterhouse-Five in which Billy Pilgrim felt strong emotion--or any emotion. The first was at his anniversary party during the performance of the quartet, and the second was when he saw the condition of the horses pulling the green hearse wagon. There may have been more, but I don’t remember them so I’m pretending there were only two. Point is, any instance of emotion from Billy is rare. There’s a good reason for this—Billy has seen all the events of his life and a good deal more of the realm of time than just the span of his life (Adam and Eve???) so he knows that nothing matters. Excitement, anger, and grief are all so temporary and irrelevant. They are experienced and then mostly forgotten. There’s no point in caring about something to the point where it can cause those strong emotions in you because everything comes to an end, and Billy Pilgrim has seen those ends. We don’t know how or when something will end. I suppose our ignorance is bliss because

Before I get into how I feel dumb, is it just me or are there a lot of references to Ragtime in Mumbo Jumbo ? Maybe we talked about this in class and I missed it for some reason, but I keep reading something in MJ that reminds me of Ragtime. There was the old guy at the end who said he was actually 29, similar to Tateh, and the foreshadowing of a guy drowning aboard the titanic, like Father with the Lusitania, and at some point I saw something about a Ford car. There were a couple others but I didn’t write them down. If these references are on purpose, which I think they are, then it’s funny because Ragtime was published after Mumbo Jumbo . So…either Ishmael Reed is clairvoyant, which I wouldn’t rule out, or Ragtime is referencing Mumbo Jumbo but only in obscure ways that make it seem like Mumbo Jumbo is actually referencing it………………. Anyway, please tell me I’m not the only one who finished Mumbo Jumbo feeling like I only absorbed about 10% of the words. I got the gist of the st

The hot topic of History as Fiction seems to be….history and fiction. What is the difference between them? On the first day of class, I was like, what kind of question is that? Obviously, history happened and fiction is made up. Then I realized we were talking about historical accounts and fiction. That’s a little more complicated. The prominent arguments are as follows: Historians all have their own perspectives on an event and only selective information about what occurred. For many years, historians (mainly rich and white and male) firmly believed their records were pure fact. They tried to astrict their work to what actually happened. However, even people who viewed the event firsthand only know what they saw. Every writer has their own biases, experiences, and senses. Perhaps then it is impossible to find a historical account that is unquestionably accurate and captures the whole story. Does that make the works of historians fiction ? Where falls the line? Ragtime is a n

From what I can tell, Ragtime is one long use of symbolism. Every moment is referencing something, be it human nature, society shifting, social constructions, another part of the book, or something else, and if you stare at the page long enough you’ll find the connection. Even though the symbolism is sometimes blatant, it’s always creative and quite striking. The events of the book, such as Houdini crashing into a lamppost, seem at times unlikely, but they’re well thought out and convey something in their unlikeliness, such as the assertion that the writer has omnipotent power over his novel world. Doctorow always makes the effort to write something we wouldn’t expect but can appreciate, unlike Ralph Ellison who uses symbolism somewhat gratuitously (Don’t get me wrong, Invisible Man is genius, all I’m saying is we gEt it everything has racial undertones you don’t have to say that his socks were black and his shoelaces were white and his lungs were slowly blackening from the white

We’ve been watching videos in World Since 1945 about nuclear bombs and the effects they have, from explosion to fallout. It’s pretty gruesome and scary, so reading about how Gunnar wants the A-bomb to drop on them is like really? But I guess the point is they just want to die, no one’s thinking about blood radiation poisoning or agricultural collapse. Gunnar really became something. At the beginning I thought he was a scrawny little kid with a resilient sense of humor who just wanted to make friends. He worked so hard to fit in. By the end of the book, he couldn’t have cared less about fitting in. It was impossible for him to—he was above everyone else, so he had no place among them on their level. He never actually fit in in the first place. With the basketball group he immediately became the best. In the gang he did things on his own terms. In school he was so elevated that nothing could touch him. His only group is his two close friends Scoby and Psycho Loco. Eventually Yoshik