Classy?

In The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald everyone who goes to the parties at Gatsby’s house, or is at a dinner party with Nick, seam to have unique ideas about who Mr. Gatsby is. Some people think he killed someone, which is probably true because he was in the military during WWII. We have all these rumors about who Mr. Gatsby is and it is only until a man who at one of the parties, is talking to Nick and Jordan, calls Nick “old sport” turns out to be Mr. Gatsby himself that we find out the truth about who Mr. Gatsby is. James Bond was always to me the classiest character but before meeting Mr. Gatsby I thought he would compare because of the way other characters talked about him. But after meeting him I think that he sound like an annoying friend who calls you “old sport” or “chap,” so what really makes someone classy.

I always try and find characters that are classy and James Bond is definitely classy. Before I didn’t have a definition for classy but I looked it up. I found Classy- stylish and sophisticated. James bond is defiantly classy then because he wares crisp suits the usually never get dirty. Before we meet Gatsby we see he has a big house on the long island sound and does one of the tings that make most characters classy. He slips into the shadows when Nick looks away for a second.

Then when we finally meet Gatsby we don’t know that it’s him because he seams so informal and the picture that we painted of him does not match his character at all. The way I painted him was quiet but not really shy, because he does seam to, for the rest of the week beside his weekly party, seam to live to the side of society. The picture I see when we meet him is a middle class Englishman with lamb chops. In my mind that’s not as classy as the guy with no past that isn’t very open.

Except for the last James Bond movie you never really hear about James Bonds past. I don’t know why but somehow this seams to make people classier. I think it might be just something they have in common. The other thing is that class has something to do with being wise in a way that makes people admire you, but being wise doesn’t necessarily make you classy and being admired doesn’t make you classy.

Because of this idea of “class” it made me think deeper about people social hierarchy and how people with “class” are higher up in the other peoples minds meaning the people with “class” have admiration. My definition of class is that you are wise, are stylish, and act in a certain way that makes people admire you for those reasons and you can dissaper into shadows when someone looks away for a second.

A Fair Censor

           

The book the Lorax by Dr. Seuss was put on a list of banned books when it came out in the early 70’s. This was because the book supposedly anti business and anti capitalist and because this was during the red scare, anti-capitalist was pro-communist. Now I think this is against the constitutional right to freedom of speech. I think all censorship of a product of any kind whether it is TV, news, music, or book of any kind is against the 1^st amendment if another group that did not produce this item censors it.

In the Lorax they’re two big messages that you could take out of it. One leads to the belief that Dr Seuss is communist and the other leads you to the belief that Dr. Seuss cares about the environment and want to write a book about caring for nature.

The first belief that Dr Seuss is communist and anti-business and is conspiring to make all the children who read the book anti-business and make the new generation communist and have them rebel against the U.S. I feel like the only reason the group that was in charge of censorship reacted the way they did was because the U.S. still had troops in Vietnam and the Cold War was still in full swing.     I do still believe that although they acted out of fright, they still acted un-constitutionally

The second belief is that Dr Seuss cares about the environment and nature and that he wants to teach the children of the new generation that not caring for the environment will result in our world becoming a barren waste land. The reason I think this is his intention for the child readers is that I didn’t notice that it might be anti-business and pro-communist until I had been told the time period the book was written in and that the book was being considered as a book promoting traitorous behavior and also why it was being considered. I am 13 and probably wouldn’t have noticed that had nobody told me. This makes me think that if the book was written to be anti-business, it was written for adults who will notice and under stand that it was written as an anti-business piece. But if it was written for kids then it was written for the purpose of  learning to take care of the environment.

Great

Great

             I just started the Great Gatsby which is supposed to be an “American classic,” and “one of the best books every written,” oh and when I said started, I meant 5 pages into the book. So far the book seams fine a little oldie sounding but fine. So the story is probably going to pick up. But even when it does there has to be something about it that makes it “great,”

 But what makes any book great? Is it because it sells a lot of copies? No. Is it because it was popular? No. What makes a book great is that people still like and relate to a book years after it is published. For a book to be great it has to withstand the test of being remembered thought time.

             

This is what makes anything great. There were probably other books that sold more copies when the Great Gatsby was written, but these books don’t still print today. They are not completely forgotten but they do not print copies still and are given to most collage students.

The other thing that will make a book great is if it was written about only one time period and when that time period passes; no one will buy the book. If they book has underlying messages about something that will be helpful in any future time period  then the book or song or movie will carry on and will become a great.

How Familiar, How Important

How Familiar, How Important

"Am I Blue?" by Bruce Coville

I grow up in an environment that is much more accepting of gays than say my mom who grew up in Santa Monica, California. Both neighbors on either side of myself are lesbian families. One of my best friends at sleep away camp is openly gay. The bar around the corner is what some people would say a “gay bar”, or others would just say it was a bar that attracted homosexuals. I can go into Central Park and see men kissing on a park bench.

When my mom grew up none of her neighbors were openly gay. The two people that she knew were gay were two girls at her school and they were teased. She also told me that it didn’t seem mean then and that after remembered this she cringed with guilt at the fact that she had been part of the name-calling.

I think this shows me that because my mom was sheltered from gays she only heard bad things about gays and therefore that’s all she knew.

In “Am I Blue” a story about a teenager named Vincent, who is, with the help of a fairy godfather named Melvin, is trying to decide his sexual identity. Melvin is actually killed because he was gay and the people who beat him to death tried to ”teach him a lesson” and never explain what that lesson is. Where as in Vincent’s case the guy who beat him up turns out to be gay. I think the authors message is that just because you are a certain sexuality your self doesn’t mean you should try to change other peoples sexualities.

I think this could show us what time period the story took place and also where. The farther back in time, the less gays are generally accepted. “Where” also matters because different places are more or less accepting of gays. I think it is fair to say this is around 2005 in an average American town where high school is everything. This would make sense because in the story Vincent is thinking about is it going to make the situation any worse by walking with Melvin “with Butch and his gang already calling me “faggot” and “fruit,” since they’re “sixteen” and therefore in high school, I think “Butch and his gang” is referring to the fact that butch has friends, and Vincent doesn’t.

I think the more familiar you are with gays the less you see the difference in the fact that they’re just like straight people most of the time except they like the same sex.  Sometimes they might talk differently or like different clothing or maybe they walk differently but that shouldn’t mean they have any less rights, to marry whom they want or do anything else they want to.

Even though the congressman who “happened to be a notorious republican homophobe,” acted negatively toward gays but was gay himself, I generally think: the less familiar you are with, and the more sheltered toward gays, the more you care and the more you believe that gays are crazy and queer.

But what I don’t get is why people who are not gay themselves and have a negative attitude toward homosexuality, because it doesn’t affect them. There not going to be forced into an incredibly different way of life, unless you count seeing gay couples as an incredibly different way of life.

how to show change

In the Glass Castle by Jannette Walls you can easily see that Jannette has changed by seeing her faith in her dad change. Although in most books you can see a change in the main character over the course in the story I think there are many ways that you can see change in different way by looking at a characters beliefs and how they interact with other characters.

I chose to show Jannette’s change with her relationship with her dad. I think this is the most interesting change because of the extremes at which the trust varied. In the beginning she trusted her dad more than anyone in the world. Her dad was her best friend and also her teacher. As she grew older her family started to have less faith in him, and how he always has these crazy ideas about glass castles and gold extracting robots, she still had faith in him.  Although it wasn’t the toddler “my daddy could do anything” faith, it was still a strong trust. The trust started to wane when he had stopped drinking for her as a birthday present and then became an alcoholic and this time more serious. I think that’s when she started not to trust him. He would ask for some of the family’s money to spend on liquor and he knew that Jannette couldn’t stand up to him. He would disappear for days at a time and come home drunk. But when she lost all trust for her dad when Jannette and her sister had saved up money for her sister to go to New York, and her dad stole the money. As you can see as she grows older she loses her trust for her dad.

I can relate to Jannette’s change in her relation ship with her father. I never fully had no trust for my dad but I think that most everyone when they were a toddler had a “my daddy could do anything” attitude. And as I grew older I always believed in all my dad’s thoughts on the world but now I’m starting to have more differing ideas on life.

I think that in every character you can see change. Some more than others, and some there are more interesting ways of looking at the change. 

How familiar, how important

How familiar, how important

"Am I Blue?" by Bruce Coville

I grow up in an environment that is much more accepting of gays than say my mom who grew up in Santa Monica, California. Both neighbors on either side of myself are lesbian families. One of my best friends at sleep away camp is openly gay. The bar around the corner is what some people would say a “gay bar”, or others would just say it was a bar that attracted homosexuals. I can go into central park and see men kissing on a park bench.

When my mom grew up none of her neighbors were openly gay. The two people that she knew were gay were to girls at her school and they were teased. She also told me that it didn’t seam mean then and that after remembered this she cringed with guilt at the fact that she had been part of the name-calling.

In “Am I Blue” Melvin is actually killed because he was gay and the people who beat him to death tried to ”teach him a lesson” and never explain what that lesson is. Where as in Vincent’s case the guy who beat him up turns out to be gay.

I think this could show us what time period the story took place and also where. The farther back in time, the less gays are generally accepted. “Where” also matters because different places are more or less accepting of gays. I think it is fair to say this is around 2000 in an average American town where high school is everything. This would make sense because in the story Vincent is thinking about is it going to make the situation any worse by walking with Melvin “with Butch and his gang already calling me “faggot” and “fruit,” since they’re “sixteen” and therefore in high school, I think “Butch and his gang” is referring to the fact that butch has friends and Vincent doesn’t.

I think the more familiar you are with gays the less you see the difference in the fact that they’re just like straight people most of the time except they like the same sex.  Sometimes they might talk differently or like different clothing or maybe they walk differently but that shouldn’t mean they have any less rights, to marry whom they want or do anything else they want to.

Even though the congressman who “happened to be a notorious republican homophobe,” acted negatively toward gays but was gay himself, I generally think: the less familiar you are with, and the more sheltered toward gays, the more you care and the more you believe that gays are crazy and queer.

But what I don’t get is why people who are not gay themselves and have a negative attitude toward homosexuality, because it doesn’t affect them. There not going to be forced into an incredibly different way of life, unless you count seeing gay couples as an incredibly different way of life.

what is maturity?

The Glass Castle by Jannette Walls

Even though I am not yet in the ending of my book I can see the main character, Jennette, changing. She is changing how she thinks of the world, how she see’s her family, how she see’s herself, and also what her interests are.

In the beginning of the book she was a toddler, mature for her age. She saw her world like a fun game with her family her closet friends and as any young kid she was interested in fire. Then as she turned eight she started to see the major problems, and as she grew older she would see more. She liked exploring, the dessert, and shooting her dads gun. Then when she turns thirteen she starts to take charge. She thinks that her teeth are crooked so she makes herself braces. She starts finding faults in her dad who she believed in most. She starts getting interested in boys.

Even though some one could argue that this is just what every child goes through growing up; I would say that not many children have the same life as Jannette so for every kid, except for a few, this would be mostly different. The other thing I think would be different would be he ages at which each event occurs. Jannette seems mature for her age. I wasn’t translating my 4^th grade homework into binary computer code. I think she experience everything in her “mostly isolated from society” life faster so that when she is in a city or school she seams older in comparison. 

This makes me think that it isn’t the number of years old that defines your maturity; it’s the intensity level of life that you have experienced

fighting frustration and life

Welch, West Virginia, is known to the Walls family as the “fightingist” town they have ever stayed in. in “the Glass Castle” by Janette Walls, Janette who is 10 in her book, is now staying in a little mining town in West Virginia. No one is all that content with his or her life and everyone is angry, so everyone fights but why

            My first thought was that it was just because they were in a small town and that because I live in the city not everyone fights. But then I realized that people get into fights in the city all the time. I thought that the other reason they might fight is because they are poor.

            In all the towns they have lived in they got into fights in most of them. Usually they would be with poor people. The Walls would live in the poor parts of towns and get into fights with poor people.

            If the dad got made he would take it out on the wife. The wife would take it out on the kids and the kids would take it out on other kids. Everyone would take it out on someone they thought they could beat up on.

            I think this is because when something or someone who they couldn’t beat up, beats them up, they would beat up something or someone that they could beat up on that wouldn’t be able to beat them back. I think this happens because of their frustration with life and the fact that they feel small but want to feel more improtant.

how familiar, how important

"Am I Blue?" by Bruce Coville

I grow up in an environment that is much more accepting of gays than say my mom who grew up in Santa Monica, California. Both neighbors on either side of myself are lesbian families. One of my best friends at sleep away camp is openly gay. The bar around the corner is what some people would say a “gay bar”, or others would just say it was a bar that attracted homosexuals. I can go into central park and see men kissing on a park bench.

When my mom grew up none of her neighbors were openly gay. The two people that she knew were gay were to girls at her school and they were teased. She also told me that it didn’t seam mean then and that after remembered this she cringed with guilt at the fact that she had been part of the name-calling.

In “Am I Blue” Marvin is actually killed because he was gay and the people who beat him to death tried to ”teach him a lesson” and never explain what that lesson is. Where as in the main characters case the guy who beat him up turns out to be gay.

I think the more familiar you are with gays the less you see the difference in the fact that they’re just like straight people most of the time except they like the same sex.  Sometimes they might talk differently or like different clothing or maybe they walk differently but that shouldn’t mean they have any less rights to marry who they want.

I think the less familiar you are with gays the more you care and the more you believe that gays are crazy and queer. But what I don’t get is why people who are not gay themselves and have a negative attitude toward homosexuality, because it doesn’t affect them. There not going to be forced into an incredibly different way of life, unless you count seeing gay couples as an incredibly different way of life.

The Drummer Boy of Shiloh

            

The Drummer Boy of Shiloh

By Ray Bradbary

            In the drummer for Shiloh there are a few metaphors that are very meaningful. In the very beginning the author talks about peach blossoms. I later figured out that this is a metaphor for Joby and other young soldiers. I think this was the metaphor for the youth and Innocence of the young men who had never seen war. I think that’s because in the life of the peach the blossom would be the youth. Also when you think of a blossom you think of a pure pink pretty flower as opposed to a violent ugly one.

Another metaphor is “ for we here with the careless bones of the young men, harvested by night and bindled around your fires, with the similarly  where the similarly strewn steel bones of their rifles with bayonet fixed like eternal lightning lost in the orchard grass.” I think this is a metaphor for the rifles being alive. Even though this is more like personification, it still shows the relation from the soldiers haphazardly laying around the guns that are also haphazardly laying around.

  The third metaphor I noticed was when he thinks to himself “ had he seen the ocean ever, seen the waves rolling in like a well ordered cavalry charge to the sand?”  Even though he hadn’t seen the ocean, he knew what a cavalry charge  was meant to be and could probably guess that the waves charged together as one force, showing Joby that this is what he needed to do.

Glass Castle

Jeannette seams to be mature for her age. At three, unsupervised, she was making hot dogs on a stove. Then again she lived in a trailer park and her parents were not the most civilized people but she could take care of herself at three. This shows me that since she didn’t have the most structured parents that had a plan for her and that they were living day by day. Since she wasn’t always taken care of by her parents, she had to learn to take care of her self. Of course sine she’s a three year old she eventually gets her dress caught on fire and gets badly burned.

When at the hospital she enjoys her life stuck in a bed with three meals a day and a TV more than her life in the trailer park. When one of the nurses is chewing something for Jeannette asks what it is and finds out what chewing gum is. I don’t know if this means she is sheltered or if she is just young and eventually found out what it was. In the end, her dad comes and breaks her out of the hospital and they pack up at the trailer park and move on to the next town.

13 Reasons Why

13 Reasons Why  

       Clay Jensen’s s friend Hannah Baker commits suicide in high school. A few weeks later Clay gets an anonymously sent box of 7 caste tapes. Each side of the tapes is one person that is one of the 13 reasons that contributed to Hannah getting depressed and eventually killing herself.
            After reading all her reasons why I don’t think they are enough to drive a person to killing them self I mean people have different tolerances for pain but I don’t think that the reasons would drive anyone without a previous mental condition, witch is not mentioned in the book, would kill them self’s after what happened to Hannah. What I think is the worst thing that happened to her is she stayed in a hot tub while a guy “raped” he, but it was very obvious she could have gotten out and left. I think that for her to have killed herself for a legitimate reason she would have had to have either have a previous mental condition, have had worse things happen to her, or be a mix of all of the above, with a killer attention problem.

 I thought that the book was well written in the way that it was half one life and half another but still had a clear main character and smooth transitions between the stories. Another thing I found interesting is that the story takes place in a little over one day, but the entire book is only 245 pages.

What I found most interesting is that by reading this book you could get inside a suicide victims head and see what would supposedly drive people to take their own life.