So I saw sort of a trend of people using their last blogs to remember all of the good times during AP Lit, so I thought I'd join in on this for my very last blog ever (which I'm proud of myself for even doing). Honestly, AP Lit was really fun, if you leave out all of the work and stress and procrastination when considering what fun is. This class has taught me a lot about symbolism (and that sounds totally fake and horrible but its true and I know I won't forget some of what I have learned for a very long time). For the first couple of books this Frankenstein and Winesburg  mostly, I totally was not feeling this class and as far as I can remember, I did not start to really feel this class until Hamlet. That play changed all works of literature for me forever. Everything really is Hamlet, even Invisible Man is Hamlet. Invisible Man is the other book that really changed everything for me. There was just SO MUCH to that book. Too much. Its like now I am analyzing movies and tv shows and everything I read. It has even gotten to the point where I have started considering the connotations of words that people use when talking to me. Likeeeee. This class really affected me, probably more than most of my other classes. It has both ruined me for any other book I will ever read ever, while also allowing me to realize just how much there is to book s and plays and poems and everything. All in all, I really liked this class and now that I am at the end looking back, all of the work and stress was totally worth it. I would do it all again.

Time has finally caught up with me

So I guess I can't just do poems for all three of my blogs, no matter how much I want to, so I'll have to talk about some book now. The last one I read, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, was so fabulously good that I went to Barnes and Noble and tried to buy another of her books, but they were out so I bought a different one that the lady assured me was sort of similar called The Interestings which is good so far. Anyway, the Goon Squad was a good book. I don't think it was very AP Lit worthy, especially compared to all of the other novels that we have read this year, but I think that it might be able to work for some prompt at some point, however I know that I will write about Invisible Man almost definitely for the exam this Thursday. This book was ordered so strangely and there were different weird points of view and narrative styles and it was all so complex and seemingly unconnected but then it ended up all being tied together. Juilee thinks it was a cycle but I totally disagree. One thing that I thought was weird was how in the first part of the novel Lou was like seemingly super important because he came up a lot but then in the second part he wasn't there at all. But then there was Lulu which sounds an awful lot like Lou and they were both pretty similar. Lulu is like the less greasy, more respectable version of Lou. They both have the innate ability to influence and almost control people. So that was weird. And then the way that the book began and ended with Alex, a character that did not appear in the novel anywhere other than the first and last chapter. That was weird too because what was that supposed to mean? Something like how even if you think you have just a small part in the world you actually have a big part and you are at the beginning and end of someones story??? I don't know. There are a lot of things in this book that I do not really totally understand. Like the general's chapter (which for the record was my favorite chapter) how did that fit into anything? I get where Dolly and Lulu and Kitty fit in but why did it all need it be centered around a dictator? I don't even know. Maybe this book was totally lit worthy and I just didn't try hard enough to analyze it because I enjoyed it too much. Hm. From now on I will never read a book the same way I did before this class. I will always connect fire with knowledge and point out the light and dark parts and it will annoy me forever, but I will always remember this class.

Sonnet Double I

Sonnet II

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery so gazed on now,
Will be a totter'd weed of small worth held: 
Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days; 
To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv'd thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,'
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
   This were to be new made when thou art old,
   And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.

Shakespeare man. Shakespeare. I like Shakespeare now way more than I liked him before this class. Its totally because of Hamlet. Knowing that whoever Shakespeare was was able to put so many meanings into literally every word (even if I do not always believe there is as many purposeful layers as it appears there are) is just mind blowing. I also really enjoy his sonnets and sonnets in general actually. Love poetry makes me very happy. I wish I lived in a time where courting was a thing, except that's totally not true because I am way  impatient in general, but I wish my girlfriend wrote me love poetry. Well anyway, yes Shakespeare is good yes. Last month I did Shakespeare's first sonnet, so this time I decided to do his second one (which I have not even read yet but swagever). So for a quick recap of what it says, its basically like "when you are really old and wrinkly and people ask you where all of your beauty went, wouldn't it be great to have a child and say that's where it all went and then he could carry on your life when you are dead." If this poem is really addressed to Shakespeare's young man friend, then its super sad since they can not have children together. This actually kind of feels like a "we shouldn't do this because you can't have kids this way and I just want you to be happy" poem. Which is super sad but also super sweet because it shows how much Shakespeare loved this guy. Anyway, the whole theme of this sonnet, which for some reason feels shorter than most other sonnets, is growing old and having something to survive after you. That seems like a theme that is present throughout several of Shakespeare's sonnets, dying and having something left afterwards. That's sad. Shakespeare makes me sad. Unless I am totally missing it, there actually doesn't seem to be a couplet tie in this sonnet? There aren't any repeated words so. The volta is at the third quatrain where it changes from sad death to wishful remembrance or something. Basically this poem was way sadder than I thought it would be and now I'm sad.

BAttle Royal aka the entire novel

So for the seminars on Invisibile MAn that we have been having, I originally wanted to do the paint fiasco scene, however I was unable to sign up for it, a tragedy, so instead I did the next most interesting/important seeming scene:the Battle Royal. This scene was actually a short story that Ellison wrote originally and from it he was inspired to wrote an entire novel, this novel is called Invisile Hombre (spanish edition si?) SO, knowing that the entire book was based off of this one scene and aslo knowing that generally the entire novel can be seen in the first chapter of a book, we can predict that the whole novel is present within this battle and after having studied it extensively, I can confirm that this is in fact true. The most striking motif seen througout the novel that orginates in this Battle Royal is the eye imagery that is created by the white folk surrounding the black fighter guys who are in turn surrounding the "Magnificent blonde" stripper. If you visualize this with just the volors in mind, you can see (haha get it? see like eyes) that it creates an image of an actual eye. This is seen throughout the novel and it also connects to the whole idea of invisibility and sight and blindness and knowledge and essentially to everything within the novel ever since everything is connected. Another interesting thing that i found in my research was an article that dealt with the females in the novel, mainly with the stripper, mary, and sybil. THe author claims that in order to understand why Ellison makes these women in to simple stark stereotypes, we must first accept these stereotypes as true This point was very interesting to me because we weren't just told to think about it, this author literally said to accept it as true, something that is not said very often when analyzing literature. After accepting these steretypes as true (or really lkying ans saying that I did) the rest of the article was very interesting becasue it discussed ]the similarities between the blonde woman in the Battle Royal and the invisible man in that same event, similarities that he fails to see, but still ones that teach him “his first lesson in invisibility." They were both being used as entertainment for the white guys, they were being ocmpletley controlled (something that the I M goes on to encounter a lot), and they were both also very terrified at parts. Basically the Battle Royal is the most important scene in the entire novel. ALong with this other stuff, somee connectons can also be seen with the electric rug and the explosion healing machine, the bronze gold coins and the bnank he breaks, the way the men control him and his relationship with the brotherhood ans Ras etc etc etc. In the end, if I had to suggest one part of this bookfor someone to read in order to be prepared for seminars or something, it would be this scene because it is literally a microcosm for the rest of the novel.

Out Out with your stereotypes

‘Out, Out—’
BY ROBERT FROST

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws know what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all was spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened to his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

This poem is by Robert Frost, the man who totally did not write that poem about Santa Claus. I think that this poem is AP Lit worthy mostly because I googled "AP Lit worthy poems" and this was on a site that was like "top 20 must read poems for AP Lit students", but also because we have talked about him in class. So, instead of being basic I decided to take the poem less read, and use this one. This poem is in essence about, well after actually reading it, I'm quite confused as to what the deep meaning is. It;s probably something to do with the fact that people only care about matters that involve them since as soon as this boy died, they just "turned to their affairs", essentially forgetting that this personified saw had "snarrled and rattled" this boy's hand off. This was a very dark poem and honestly I was surprised because I guess I have not really read and Robert Frost poems, so I expected them to be less dark. The saw in this poem may represent something like society wherein the boy would represent freedom of speech or ideas or something and tis like society has a mind of its own (its something that shouldn't usually act out of its own will) and so it immediatley killed this boy''s hopes and dreams (and literally killed him) as soon as he got excited about something. So this poem seems to maybe be about censored society, although there is a high chance that it is actually something else. Another unusual aspect of this poem is that it reads much like a short story, when in fact, its a poem!!! The fact that the boy "must have given the hand" seems to connect back to this idea of society, its like when people blame the victim for the accident like in rapes or what not. THen there is the line from the woman who simply says "supper". THis could be a commentary on the role of women in society, as if they are only there to provide for the rest of us, in this case the boy. Then since she seemed to not even have a reaction to the fact that this kids hand was just chopped off, it also seems like a comment on women as if they are simply mechanical beings made to serve a single purpose, not that I think that Robert Frost thinks this about women, in fact he is probably using this charectirization to bring to light a prexisting stereotype.

So yeah, just like in everything we ever read, I has decided that my interpretation of this poem is that it is a comment on the stereoptypes in sociery, as well as the prevalence of censorship and general creativity disrupting that occurs within it.

Sonnet 1 aka the young man is the one and only

Sonnet 1- Shakespeare

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding:   
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,   
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

This is Shakespeare's first sonnet, at least in the "young man" series. So, it will be interesting to look at this sonnet compared to the other shakesperean sonnets that we have analyzed. Since this is the very first sonnet, we can use context clues and intuition to predict that this will be more loving and possibly even more sincere than later sonnets, like the ones to the dark lady which just seem sketchy and awkward, or the ones that involve the young man's other suitor or the rival or whatever. All of those seem to have the potential to be tainted with some alterior motive, but this one is early enough, well its the earliest one so duh, but it still probably has some sort of innocence in it that has yet to be tainted. Granted I have not read the thing yet, but I soon will. I know that this is a shakespearean sonnet not only because I searched "Shakespeare sonnet number 1", but also because of its ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme, the fourteen lines cut into three quatrians and a copluet, and finally the fact that it stick s to iambic pentameter, meaning that it has ten syllables per line as well as going by the hard soft syllable rule that goes along with this. So, with not context clues, we could know that this was a shakespearean sonnet. It differs from an italian sonnet or a petrarchian sonnet because of the rhyme scheme since the other types of sonnets follow either an interlocking ABAB BCBC CDCD EE rhyme scheme or the other one which I can not currently remember. 

So basically what I think that shakespeare is saying in this poem, apart from the obvious subject of love, is that he truly adores and admires his young man suitor guy, and he thinks that his beauty can stand on its on while some others have to have some fuel for it. That can be seen in the line "Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel," see so here shakespeare is saying that this guys "flame" or his beauty or life force or something is basically eternal, an idea that ocnnects back to the shakespearean sonnet we read in class where he was like apologizing for not praising the kid but then covered himself by saying that his beauty would last even after wars ans such, actually no thats a mix of two of the sonnests that we read, but the idea is still there.

So basically in conclusion, this sonnet just like evry sonnet is about how shakespeare is in love with his young man and he thinks that his beauty and life force are eternal.

Invisible Man aka a book full of lies

Honestly, I do not like Invisible Man so far. I do not like it at all. You know how theres that idea that you might not be able to believe like anything a first person narrator says? Yeah, I feel like that totally applies to this book. Also, before we really get into that, there are some parts where its just seemingly pointless metaphors after metaphors and it feels like I could just skip four pages and still know what was happening in the story. Like with the blind guest preacher who was giving a sermon about the founder (weird). He was just talking and talking and none of what he was saying about the founder seemed important at all. Okay, back to the real reason that I dislike the book: all of the lies that I feel like this guy is telling. The biggest thing that I have felt was complete bs so far was the boxing match or whatever the heck it was before he was given a scholarship. Things like that do not happen in real life and I highly doubt they happened back then. not only was it so unbelievable, but there were also some inconsistencies with his descriptions of the other 'boxers.' At first they were giant thugs who were so angry that this little scrawny kid had made their friend lose his job. Then they were all very scared and worried right before the fight, as if they did not know what was going to happen. How could they not know what was going to happen if it was their job? Also, the way they all vaguely knew how to fight blindfolded and they all knew not to touch the electric rug too much also suggests that they had done it before. That electric rug though, like what the heck??? The way all of the white guys were attacking them and throwing them on the rug?? That just did not seem plausible to me at all, also why the heck would the school superintendent put him through all of that and then be like "oh yeah I totally respect this kid and I want him to have all of this money even though he almost got beaten up when he said something about equality." That entire part made me completely lose faith in the truthfulness of this narrator. The next dumb part that I totally think is unrealistic is the whole deal with Mr. Norton. Like firstly, why is there a mental hospital on the school campus/close to it? Why do they let all these men roam around freely to drink and have sex with whores? How am I supposed to think that this actually happened? Maybe I have unrealistically positive beliefs about the world, but I really just cannot believe the way that Mr. Norton was acting/being treated, the way all of the men were acting, the way the bar tender was acting, the fact that whiskey apparently cures illnesses, the fact that incest is super interesting to white men, etc. Just all of these things so far, I just can not believe any of them and its making me just really not want to read the book and thats a major issue, so come on mr nameless narrator, make your story more believable!