April

Alicia Ostriker
April
The optimists among us
taking heart because it is spring
skip along
attending their meetings
signing thier e-mail petitions
marching with their satiric signs
singing their we shall overcome songs
posting thier pungent twitters and blogs
believing in a better world
for no good reason
I envy them
said the old woman

The seasons go round they
go round and around
said the tulip
dancing among her friends
in the brown bed in the sun
in the April breeze
under a maple canopy
that was also dancing
only with greater motions
casting greater shadows
and the grass
hardly stirring

What a concerto
of good stinks said the dog
trotting along Riverside Drive
in the early spring afternoon
sniffing this way and that
how gratifying the cellos of the river
the tubas of the traffic
the trombones
of the leafing elms with the legato
of my rivals' piss at thier feet
and the leftover meat and grease
singning alo0ng in all the wastebaskets

Voice Behind The Character

When I read the article, by Anthony DePalma, about whom Huckleberry was inspired by. I immediately thought about voice actors. The article is, after all, called, "A Scholar Finds Huck Finn's Voice in Twain's Writing About a Black Youth" . I specifically thought of the voice actress Tara Strong, who plays various characters. She has played characters where her voice and personality helped create the entire character. There could be drawings of the character, or an animation with a storyline, but she helped complete the entire character by placing her voice, allowing the character to stand out. The , "10 year old black servant" Twain met just before starting his book, is not different to Tara Strong. Instead of placing his voice into a character on screen, his personality resounds in Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn is ,"the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker" just like the 10 year old boy, who gave him his voice.

Mammy

I remember when I was in elementary school, I use to watch all the old cartoons that were created way before I was born. I loved them, I found them entertaining, Bugs Bunny, Dumbo, Mickey Mouse, all of them. Last school year I found all those cartoons on YouTube, and what shocked me was that I did not realize how racist a lot of them are, when I was little. I never saw it as racist when I was little, I saw the dumb white hunter from bugs bunny exactly same way I saw the dumb African American hunter. I think the reason why I see those things as racist is because I have been taught to. When I hear someone say, "the Dumb Blond man" I think nothing of it, but when someone says, "The Dumb African American man" I immediately judge that person as racist. Off course I realize those cartoons were racists and were meant to make fun of the various non-Caucasian races.

Black face appears in a lot of the cartoons. Bugs Bunny even goes in Black face several times. People enjoyed it, and were fascinated by this form of entertainment. Even Mark Twain called it "the genuine nigger show, the extravagant nigger show." But Mark Twain does see African Americans as humans. He shows this with his character Jim. Even though Jim has a lot of stereotypical characteristics, he is also shown to be smart, think on his own, and a good friend to Huck Finn.
White people saw nothing wrong with Black Face; they enjoyed the imitation of "black man" dance and singing. But this is not because they were ignorant or blind to racism; they were purely racist and making fun of blacks. This is clearly seen by Court, a white man who posed as Jim for Mark Twains book, "he would jam his little black wool cap over his head, shoot out his lips and mumble coon talk.’ And when I look at Kemble's representations of Jim, I don't see a human being, but this same caricature. "

Yes people were racist, but even Mark Twain, a man who was entertained by Black Face, saw that racism was wrong, and that African Americans were equal to Whites. Huckleberry goes through the same transformation were he realizes that 'Jim is a Black man who has the mind of a white man' therefore showing we are the same.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/huckfinn/minstrl.html

Can't Change The Past, Learn From It, Change the Present

During the winter Holiday we were assigned to read the book, "The adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain. Although I did note that the "N" word and the "I" word popped up several times, I just thought of it as the way people spoke back then. Off course these two words were racist back then, and they are racist now, but as Mark Twain states at the beginning of the book, he uses the language used by people he is writing about, "The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech."

A new edition of the book, is planned to replace the "N" word by the word slave, as shown in the article from the Guardian . When my sister first told me about this during winter break my first reaction was, "What? No, they can't do that! Authors chose specific words to explain their ideas or to pass on a story. Why would they change the words of Mark Twain?". I realize these words are racist, but I don't feel that teachers need to be afraid to teach it. It’s part of history, and we need to be able to understand the mistakes made in the past, so that they will not be repeated. I completely agree with Churchwell, a senior lecturer from the University of East Anglia, who says that, “fault lies with the teaching, not the book." which is true. The book is not teaching people how to be racist, but how to move away from being afraid of something unknown. "You can't say 'I'll change Dickens so it is compatible with my teaching method'" it’s not right, and it takes away part of the idea the author was trying to express. They are ideas formed, and are locked memories of the past, "Twain's books are not just literary documents but historical documents, and that word is totemic because it encodes all of the violence of slavery."

'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', is a book to learn from, there is a moral to the story, and even a transformation to the lead character Huck Finn, "The point of the book is that Huckleberry Finn starts out racist in a racist society, and stops being racist and leaves that society."

The past can hurt, but so can the present, the only way we can learn from them is if we know why we were wrong. Literature points things out in the world that we may or may not have realized, it’s not something to be afraid of.

Geff Barton, "It seems depressing that we are so squeamish that we can't credit youngsters with seeing the context for texts. Are we going to teach a sanitized version of The Merchant of Venice? What I would want to do is to explore issues of how language changes in context and culture,".

You git me that money

I read the first five chapters of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and what stood out to me most was how he felt about his father. At the beginning of the book, he was told that his father was dead, although he doesn't believe it. When he speaks of his past, he says that he was afraid of this father, and that his father was always drunk. Although he has been adopted by the widow, he is still affected by what his father. His father made him give all his money up, walk around in rags, and would never let him go to school.

When Huck sees a footprint with a mark he recognizes, he immediately gets rid of his money. When he runs into his father, in his room, his fears come back to him for a moment and then we realise that he wasn't that shocked to see his father. The footprint belongs to his father. His father is mean, and he insults Huck. He is jealous that his son is getting a better education then him. He doesn't want his son to be better off, and he doesn't like the fact that Huck has better clothes, and most of all he doesn't like that he has money, since the money should be his (so he thinks). His father has no ambition in life, except to drink and get the money to drink wherever he can find it. He takes the only money his son has, a dollar. His son gave up all his money to the judge, so that he wouldn't be in danger, and so that his father wouldn't put himself in anymore danger.

It was rather sad that the new judge didn't see that Hucks father was a bad influence for his son, and that he could actually change a man like Hucks father.

sad.sad. sad.


No picture for this blog.

Child, Do Not Throw This Book About

Book nosing by *Tooshtoosh on deviantART

In the library looking for a book,
In the poetry section did I look.
Up and down and all around.
A good book of interest cound not I find.
A book for the holidays, keep in mind.
Took a book out of the shelf.
Then another book came out and dropped
Then when I opened it I was quite shocked.
On the page was a message:
"Child, do not throw this book about."
That was the book to check out without doubt.


This story is true. The poem I read is the foreword at the beginning of the book where they speak of the importance of children reading poems.

Words... Words!... Words? English. An opinion blog

Our english language is very strange. So to understand it, we have to read it. We have to realise that our pronounciation is diffrent from other languagues. It is a unique language developed from its latin roots and from the phonecians alphabet, who had 22 letters instead of the 26 we now see in our own alphabet. Offcourse its an alphabet shared by many other languages, but its one of the few that you can almost never tell how a word is spelt. English is a beautiful language, with each word producing an image or an idea. It could be ear sights of disgust or ear sights of beauty, but all the same an image arrives in our heads which is developed from our past memories of that word. Grammer in english is not as difficult as in other languages. Offcourse this is just an opinion, but I am sure that grammer in english is much easier than grammer used in languages such as German or French. The only real difficult thing about english is spelling, we don't spell things the way they sound.

I like the idea that I can take one sentence in english and transform it in many different ways to achieve diffrent ideas.
Lets take the sentence:

The girl and her dog.
The sentence is very simple, yet it explains it all. The sentence could be said differently.

The dog and the girl.

This changes the image silightly but we still have the same idea. If we separate the dog, from the girl, we get an entirely diffrent idea.

The dog. The girl.

You can almost paint pictures out of these three sentences, and although they all have the girl and the dog, each painting would show a diffrent meaning to each sentence.

Adding descriptions adds to the magic of language.

The well kept girl and her stylish dog.

The poor girl and her dirty dog.

The sad girl and her comforting dog.

The teenage girl and her unwanted dog.

The little girl and her toy stuffed dog.

Each sentence conveys a different image. Looking at language is so cool! Sometimes you don't need a novel to enjoy words. All you need is a sentence. You can play with the sentence. Try to understand it differently, or change the word order. Words are not just Words to be thrown about, but when they are really thought out, its art, its almost music. Its an way of expressing ideas that can not be seen anywhere else unless, offcourse, you read these words aloud, or if they are meant to be acted out.

Reading is an amazing thing, but at times we put it aside to do other things which appear to be, "more important." I know, I have been putting off actually enjoying what I read for a year and a bit more. Theres a joy you find in reading that you dont find anywhere else.

So this Christmas break I plan to enjoy reading. I don't want to be youtubing all day, or facebooking all day. I want to read. So I checked out a book called 'This Singing World.' Its a book of poems. It looks very good. Plus the book spoke to me. I was looking for a book in the library and I dropped this one accidentally. When I opened the book, the first thing I read was, "Child do not throw this book about" from one of the poems. More on that book later. I also checked out, "The Count of Monte Cristo." I am told its really good, so I wanted to read a classic. I have to check out one more book from the library, but finally for AP literature, I will be reading "The adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

Dear reading.

I come.

Reader.