Spring Break

Over spring break I watched the Reformation video and I have to say it was really good. I even got my family to watch it with me...maybe we are all geeks for that kind of stuff but I think PBS puts out some really good shows. Anyway, from there I read Mary E. Wilkes Freeman, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Sarah Piatt, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Sophia Jewett, Edith Wharton, etc. I was a busy reader and found that I really liked a lot of the different stories put out by these women, they were varied in their subject matter, interesting, and at times progressive for their time. I really enjoyed Mary Freeman's "A New England Nun" and liked the way she showed the character of Louisa as being capable and happy on her own. I could completely identify with her not wanting to get married and being comfortable in her life as it was...not wanting to share her space...this is something I can relate to as I'm sure most modern day women can.






I also really liked the poem The Wood-Chopper to His Ax by Elaine Goodale Eastman. There was something about this poem that I really liked and I found myself reading it out loud several times. The meter of the words, the words themselves, I'm not sure why but I just liked it a lot, it felt powerful and I could picture the man with his ax chopping down the tree and the power the ax had in his hands. Good imagery. On the topic of poems, I enjoyed I Sit and Sew by Alice Dunbar-Nelson as well. It ran in the same vein as Mary Freemans story...questioning the roles of women...but at the same time this one focused more on the tediousness of the domestic role of women rather than the enjoyment of womanly solitude to do domestic tasks as Freeman's story demonstrated. I could relate to what this peom was talking about as this feeling of wanting to break free from trivial things and instead do something of importance with your life. In her case she is thinking of the men who are fighting in the Civil War and how she wishes she could be part of that rather than spending her days sewing.

I'm now a big fan of Edith Wharton and I haven't even finished reading all of her work in this book yet. I especially liked the stories, Souls Belated and The Other Two, the complexity of the situations these characters find themselves in are truly modern day predicaments. The social constraints are not as apparent now as they were at that time but I still think much of it holds true today. In Souls Belated, Lydia and Gannett find themselves, having run away together to escape her bad marriage, in a upscale European hotel passing themselves off as a married couple. They had always thought they did not need the social hierarchy and had mocked it in the past but found themselves enjoying being part of it in this place. In the end Lydia feels that she should strike out on her own and leave Gannett because they will always be under this cloud of their scandalous affair. Even if they marry someday someone could find out and it would ruin their social standing that they have found they truly love being a part of. However, when faced with the choice of leaving or staying, Lydia finds that leaving and being a woman on her own in that time would be more difficult than staying with Gannett. It's a really good skeleton in the closet story and is a timeless situation but Wharton's ability to pull the reader in to the complex feelings of the characters and their tough decisions is really compelling. I found myself reading both of these stories rapidly, kind of on the edge of my seat, wondering right along with the characters what or where they were going to go from one situation to the next.

Week Before the Break

Well, I fell a little behind it seems in my blogging and didn't get my post on here for the week before the break. I have been reading like crazy but for this blog I will share just a few.




I read some stories from Men on the Moon by Simon Ortiz that were really good. As I was reading Men on the Moon I tried to get a sense of what the moral of the story was when I went through each one. Maybe that is silly but it almost felt like there was one if you look at it the right way. However, I don’t think it’s so much a moral as a search for what the meaning is for the Native American in the story. The Panther Waits was especially true in this way because I took from that story that the brother, Taft, was most in touch with what Harry Brown was saying when he told them his story. The parallel between Harry Brown being a drunk and Taft being a drinker in later life shows you how being more in touch with their heritage makes it harder for them to fit into the world around them. At least this is the way I take it. I watched a movie once that talked about how when the Native American man had his land taken, his way of life was diminished. He was no longer what he was raised to be, a warrior. He is in touch with a spiritual world that no longer has land or animals that are treated in the sacred manner of the people. Everything he has known is taken and he is placed on a piece of land nobody wants and told to live on it and be happy. How can you be a brave warrior of your people when you can no longer hunt and provide for them? When you add drinking to this loss you break this Indian warrior down even further. Or maybe the drinking is what makes them numb to their pain, to their loss of the old ways. I think this is the essence of what The Panther Waits is conveying to the reader, that Taft and the old man who are so in tune with their heritage are also the ones who cannot fit into the world around them.

One other story that I really liked was To Change a Life in a Good Way. I liked the way that Bill and Ida became friends with Pete and Mary and they all accepted each other regardless of the differences in their heritage. When Bill’s brother died I liked the way Pete and Mary brought the Indian bundle to them and explained that it would help them, even if they couldn’t explain the old ways of how or why since they didn’t really remember exactly. This is such a modern twist on the way the Native American has lost some of his heritage over time but has still kept the traditions going because they know it has value. In the end it really did help Bill and Ida in their healing and acceptance of the death of Slick. I believe that both of these stories as well as the other’s that Ortiz writes about, show us how the Native American lives and deals with everyday life in a dominant white world. Some have learned to accept it and still hold on to some of the old ways, some don’t deal with it at all and are either broken or damaged, and some of the very old ones sit back and are bewildered by the ways of the white man. He gives us the broken homes of the Native and the hard way of adjusting and the sacrifice they make in order to live as an Indian in a white world. These glimpses of hardship, puzzlement, and acceptance of the modern Indian’s way of life are important to share, to try to make sense of the aftermath of what has been done to these people. How they continue to go on even after they have had their culture ripped from them, how they continue to recapture the old ways, how they have endured is a lesson for everyone.

One other author I wish to share from week before last was Karen Blixen or Isak Dineson who wrote Out of Africa. I really enjoyed this story with it's rich characters and landscapes. I felt that this wasn't just a typical love story but a complicated relationship of various people and you could even say it was a love story to the people and the place of Africa as well. Throughout her story I felt that she was remembering back to a place and time that was vivid unlike any other part of her life before or after. There was such happiness but so much sadness for the people that she had become so immersed in and finally had to leave behind. After I finished the book I watched the movie with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. The movie was a bit different in that it focused more on her relationship with Robert Redford's character than any of the other characters in the story. You got a sense of her closeness and her feeling for the African people from it but the book was better at conveying...which I feel is always true of books.


Anyway, I really enjoyed this and recommend it to anyone who is looking for a good atypical love story to read.

Reading Big

So this weekend I found a reprieve from all of my other homework for a change and had some time to read. I read a lot but I will just put on here the ones that I enjoyed the most. I really enjoyed Jack London's story, "South of the Slot," it was an interesting read about a guy living two very distinct and seperate lives. Not in the sense that he has one family here and another over there but more that he splits his personality to take on a whole other persona, "acting" as he would call it, to fit in. However, I believe he is really the everyday guy with the gregarious personality more than he is the stiff and cold college professor, True to this feeling, that is the guy he ends up being in the end. I liked the way London showed the complexity of what this character was thinking and how he actually became what he thought he was only acting to be. It was an excellent story.



Sarah Winnemucca was also an interesting read and kind of encompassed all of the Native American reading I did this weekend. She was a very educated "Indian" woman and gave a heartbreaking narrative of her encounter with the whites as a child. She gives the reader a true sense of how terrifying it was to be a woman in those times, especially a Native woman. Her experience with the white man, she aptly contrasts to the experience of her grandfather with the white man. She shows how different everything is from the woman's perspective and how helpless they felt at that time.



I was also able to read a little Louisa May Alcott and though I have read "Little Women" a long time ago I wasn't sure what to expect of "My Contraband." I found it to be a moving story of a white woman on the side of the Yankees during the civil war and of the mullato soldier who finds himself in the same hospital with his white brother. There is no love lost there and needless to say she is able to keep him from killing his dying white brother and helps him in his pursuit of finding his lost wife. The conclusion is good, if a bit expected, but I found this story interesting because it was such a contrast to reading "Little Women" and it was very different from what I at first thought it would be. I guess I will have to try to find more of her work.


The last story I will comment on was something else that Dr. Hepworth mentioned in class as a personal reading assingment. I decided to get "Out of Africa" by Karen Blixen or Isak Dineson, which is the name she wrote under. It was kind of funny because I almost didn't get the book because I thought it was the wrong one since I was looking for Blixen not Dineson. I got the book anyway and started to read the pre-face and realized that it was indeed Blixen writing so I was glad I took the time to read into it anyway or I would have felt silly. Anyway, I just started it so I will have to comment on that a little later. Just wanted to keep everyone posted on where I'm at and what I'm up to...in case you had some burning desire to know.

Oh, and I also listened to the wax recordings of Whitman and a few others too. A little creepy in some ways because of the way their voices sounded. Whitman's was a little distorted too because of the scratchy sound on the recording. However, it was pretty cool to think that this was what their voices sounded like reading their poems. I was a little bummed that I couldn't get the Alan Ginsberg recording to work...maybe I will try it again later.