Week 10

Week 10

Eudora Welty

Powerhouse

            Eudora Welty lived from 1909-2001.   She was born and grew up in Jackson, Mississippi.  She graduated from University of Wisconsin in 1929.  She began writing a few years later. She wrote about society news for a Memphis newspaper.   In June of 1936 her first short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman” was published. She wrote several novels until 1972.  She had a strong sense of the southern ways of life. 

            Powerhouse was a weird story to me and I really didn’t care for it much.  Powerhouse was a black man doing a show on a tour of some kind.  He is described horribly in my opinion.  He is described as Asiatic, monkey, devil.  It sounds like Eurdora Welty is rather racist.   Powerhouse is playing music and he talks an awful lot through out his performance. Half of the time I do not know if he is kidding or not.  In the story segregation was still a big part of the normal things going on.  Powerhouse and his band must play a white dance song, in which only the white people may dance.  This just brings sadness to my eyes.  Everyone should have a right to dance regardless of who is there.  I still do not understand why he is talking about a telegram about his wife being dead.  I am just not sure if he is serious or not, or if it’s just a part of a song.  He sounds like he really enjoys his music and is able to feel the music in his soul. He spends a lot of time talking to his band mates.  It sounds more like a comedic show instead of a music performance.  The songs through out the performance are really appropriate for the time.  I don’t think they enjoyed playing for the white people and in their own way have their own prejudices going on.

John Steinbeck

           

Flight

            John Steinbeck lived from 1902-1968.  He was born in Salina, California and used much his locale in his works.  He often wrote about native migrant workers and their struggles.  He had many different jobs since he was a young boy.  He worked as a newspaper reporter, bricklayer, chemist helper and sometimes a fruit picker.  He earned a Pulitzer Prizes in 1940 and in 1962 he earned a Nobel Prize in Literature. 

            In the story Flight, he was a great story teller who uses great description through out the tale.  Even though the story ends tragically it was a good read and kept me on my toes.  It starts out on a farm near the ocean in California. Pepe is a young boy who is the oldest child in the house of 3 kids.  His father was killed ten years ago from a rattlesnake bike to his chest.  Pepe is no help around the farm at all. While his little brother and sister catch fish for dinner, he simply plays with his father’s old knife. Pepe’s mother needs him to ride a horse into town in order to get medicine and salt.  He feels he is now a man for going on this jouney alone.  But his first  night away from home he gets into trouble.  He is supposed to stay at Mrs. Rodriguez house to rest.  While he was there they are all drinking whine and he gets into a fight with another man/boy and ends up throwing his fathers knife at him, killing him.  He rushes home where his mother packs him some things and sends him on his way in order to escape the men coming after him.  He is in no way ready to be out alone already.  Upon his journey he is cut  on his fingers and its all down hill from then. The men eventually catch up to him and he is shot dead. So sad at such a young age with so much life left to live.  Maybe his mother shouldn't have sent a kid out on a real man's journey.

Richard Wright

Native Son

            Richard Wright had a troubled childhood. His family was abandoned by his father and he was raised by his mother and grandmother. Growing up in the South in the 1920’s and being black he had many obstacles to overcome in school. He graduated as Valedictorian and already had stories published while still in high school.  He fled north up to Chicago where he worked several menial jobs.  He ended up in New York where he wrote Native Son.

            Native son takes place in Chicago where Bigger is a young black man looking for a job to help support his family.  He is hired as a driver for the Dalton family.  One of his first jobs is to take Mary the daughter to her University.  Soon as she is in the car she directs him elsewhere.  All the while he just wants to do the right thing for his job.  While out with Mary and Jan he is very uneasy.  They make him feel as one their own and he hates them for it.  He is not used to being treated equally.  I thought this was a great story with equality instead of the usual slave stories.  They end up drinking too much and he is loosening up.  At the end of the night Mary is too drunk to make it up to her own room and Bigger must help her.  He finally gets her into her room and suddenly Mrs. Dalton who is blind appears.  He is so afraid of being caught and fired he does everything to keep Mary quiet, he ends up pushing the pillow so hard on her mouth that she is suffocated and dies.  Even though what he did was wrong I can see his side of the story.  He of course would be punished and probably hung for murder when he was not intentionally trying to kill her, but he wanted that job so bad he just wanted to keep her quiet in order to get out of her room.  I felt sorry for him and the ending was sad.  But it was much better than reading Powerhouse.

Week 9

Week 9

William Faulkner's        

 

 "That Evening Sun"

            William Faulkner lived from 1897-1962.  He received a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.  After that achievement his reputation spread around the world.  He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi. He used this town in many of his writings with some small changes.  He traveled a great deal, and trained as a pilot.  I find it interesting he never graduated from college yet accomplished so much.  Goes to show if you are truly talented you will succeed.

            “That Evening Sun” takes place in Jefferson.  I thought it was a rather odd story.  It was ok and kept me engaged enough to get through it but I really don’t see why it would be so special.  I read it as if a white family has a maid named Nancy.  She has a ex husband or boyfriend who was in trouble with the law and had left town, she is horribly scared he is back and wants to harm her.  After her job is done with the cooking and cleaning she doesn’t want to go home.  She instead just sits quietly in the family’s kitchen.  We find out she is afraid to walk home alone in the dark so Jason the man of the house walks her home with his 3 children.  His wife does not like this at all.  She thinks Jason cares more about he negro help than his own wife and family.  I thought it was really nice of him to care about her well being.  Soon enough Jason is tired of walking her home and tells her,  her husband is not out there.  She manages to talk the 3 children into walking her home with promises of fun.  When they arrive there is nothing fun about it for them. They want to go home but she offers them popcorn and stories so they stay. I was glad their father showed up to bring them home where they belong.  What if her crazy husband really did come back and harm them all.  I believe the constant worry drove her insane and she began drinking. In the beginning of the story she was in jail trying to hang herself.  It was confusing jumping from the present into the past and the two kids constantly talking during the story because they were too young to really understand what was going on with Nancy and Jesus. Overall it was good but another sad story about how unfair blacks where treated in those days. 

 Langston Hughes

Hughes' poetry and  "On the Road"

            Langston Hughes was born in 1902 and died in 1967.  In grammar school he was chosen as a class poet and in high school he published two poems in magazines. He had many talents including humorist, historian of blacks. He wrote many novels, short stories and poems.  They also included children’s books, songs, and operas.   He had great black heritage and living in New York City picked up tastes in jazz music which you can clearly see in his writings.

            I enjoyed the few poems we had to read.  In the poem,   The Weary Blues I can easily picture a low lit club with a piano player at his piano and small tables gathered about.  The piano player is playing his blues and the person in the audience is just getting caught up in the music forgetting their own worries.  In Harlem, I picture a person who has a dream that is put on hold.  They are wondering what happens, Do they dreams dry up?  Do they fester? Or just explode.   I thought the majority of his poems were easy to understand and I liked them. 

            “On the Road” was sad to me.  We have a man called Sargeant who gets off a freight train looking for a place to sleep.   He is so tired and hungry he pay’s no attention to the snow coming down on him.  He goes to a church where is he is turned away and referred to a shelter which he has already been rejected because they are already full and he is also a black man.  He is banging on the church door until cops arrive.  I believe they knock him unconscious but he is having his own dream of breaking Jesus off the cross and them leaving together and he finds shelter for the night and Jesus goes on to Kansas City. Sargeant wakes up to what he thinks is being beaten on his hands by cops again but he realizes he is in jail from the earlier incident.   I find it very sad because he was black he was not accepted by the church.  I bet if it were any white man they would have been given a spot to sleep. 

Ernest Hemingway

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

            Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois.  His father was a Physician who gave his son many adventures in fishing and hunting.  After high school graduation he went to work as a report in Kansas City.  He was in World War I and the first American to survive after being wounded on the Italian front.  He often wrote about a modern world filled with sterility, failure and death.

            We were assigned to read The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.  In the story we have a wealthy family of Francis and Margaret Macomber who are on a safari vacation in Africa.   This story keeps with his themes of failure and death.  The Macomber’s are out on a lion hunt with Mr. Wilson.  They finally find their prey and Francis first wants to shoot from the car which is a big NO NO.  He ends up shooting a lion but he does not die and they must look for him in the brush. Francis is very scared of the big kill and you can tell he just does not want to go through with it.  The time comes and the lion charges and Francis runs away like a chicken.  His wife is just downright disappointed and calls him a failure.   Back at camp for the night Francis wakes up and his wife is missing.  Turns out she has been with Mr. Wilson for a few hours and we can only imagine what they are up to.  She finds Mr. Wilson desirable because he is not afraid to kill the lion unlike her husband.  They both think the other will not leave each other because Mr. Macomber us rich and Mrs. Macomber is beautiful. 

            They are out on another hunt for buffalo and Mr. Macomber gets his kill and is very proud of him self. He has conquered his fear. Again he only wounded the buffalo so must go in the brush to finish him off. The buffalo charges again and he shoots and shoots but keeps hitting the horns which bullets just bounce off of.  Mr. Wilson is also shooting and Mrs. Macomber takes a shot and accidentally shoots her own husband dead.   I think this was their secret plan to get rid of him so they could be together.  This way she walks away with all her husbands money and Mr. Wilson.  The death could look accidental to most but only they know the truth. 

Week 8

Willa Cather

A Wagner Matinee

Willa Cather lived from 1873-1947.   She grew up in Nebraska and often dressed and acted like a boy.  She returned to the east and worked in a Pennsylvania newspaper and also taught high school English.  She wrote or ordinary people who often struggled with  finding the meaning of their lives. 

            An example of this was in her short story A Wagner Matinee.  In the story  we have Clark,  boy who is being visited by his Aunt Georgiana, who is in town to attend a settling of the estate from a relative. In her past she had been a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory.  She had fallen in love with Howard Carpendar and moved west and had to give up much of her music loves. Clark has many great memories of his Aunt raising him and all they shared together.  He thinks it would be a great idea to take her to the symphony. She is a bit out of place and underdressed compared to the others but is willing to go.   At the symphony Richard Wagner is playing and plays, “ The Flying Dutchman”.  This song brings back a lot of emotion out of Georgiana who begins crying during the performance.  In the end everyone leaves and she just doesn’t want to go.  I think  this brought back a lot of regret in her life.  She could have lived the life she wanted had she not left.

Paul’s Case

This story was very sad to me. Paul is a young boy being raised by his father. His mother passed away shortly after his birth.  Paul is very interested in music and not so much school. He gets in trouble at school and everyone seems to look down on him.  When he is at the theatre he is a different person.  He is happy and carefree.  He gets in trouble again and everything he loves is taken away from him. He can no longer go to the theater, see his friends and must get a job.  In doing so he happens to be in charge of a large sum of money and steals it.  He takes off to New York’s Carnegie Hall and has a weekend like no other.  He buys fancy clothes, stays at a fancy hotel, and hangs out with people just like him. He reads in the newspaper that he has been found out and his father is in New York looking for him. He cannot imagine going back to Cordelia  street ever again!  He travels back to Pennsylvania and desides to end his life by jumping in front of a train. So very sad no one ever listened to him. He could have made so much of his life had he just tried harder and not given up.

Susan Glaspell

Triffles

Susan Glaspell grew up in a time that woman were seen and not heard.  They pretty much did what they were told by their husbands and tended to the family and house.  She struggled to show the  struggle woman had for identity, equality and power to be seen and heard. I just can’t imagine growing up and living in that time of the century.

            In her play :” Triffles” she writes of some of the challenges she deals with every day in her own life.   In this play we have  Mrs. Wright who had murdered her husband by strangling him with a rope in their bed.   The county Attorney, Sheriff, Mr. Hale, Mrs. Hale, and Mrs. Peters are all in the home while Mrs. Wright is at the jail. They are investigating the murder in order to find some clues.  Of course only the men are looking and the woman are downstairs trying to assemble some items to take to Mrs. Wright.  The men talk about Mrs. Wright like she is a bad wife. The house is not kept clean enough for them, there are dishes about the kitchen, not what they would like to see.  They cannot seem to find any clues they are looking for.  The woman are finding clues though.  They find that the bird has been strangled and saved in a box maybe for a proper burial.  They can immediately tell the bird has been strangled. They both know it’s a clue because Mr. Wright was also strangled and who else would want to strangle him but maybe his wife because he strangled her only joy and happiness.  They also find the birds cage door is broke as if someone flipped it too hard to get at that bird.  I wonder why they keep quiet. Is it because they are woman and feel that they will not be thought of as serious in their findings?  They seem to stick to do what is expected of them. Maybe they feel he deserved to die after killing an innocent bird and keeping Mrs. Wright home to do nothing all these years. 

Zora Neale Hurston

How it Feels to be Colored Me

Zora Neale Hurston lived from 1891?-1960.  She lived in a time that slavery was no longer legal but there discrimination was still very well known.  I really enjoyed both of her stories that we had to read. They were both really inspiring to me. 

            How It Feels to be  Colored me is about a little girl who had a happy childhood. At the age of 13 her mother died and she was left to be cared for by her father. Her father could not care for her so he sends her to live with various family members.  This is when she realized that she was not like everyone else.  It sounded like her mother gave her great self esteem and growing up in a all black city she was very much secluded from the real prejudices of the world. Zora Neale Hurston had a very similar life and managed to overcome so much. She was able to get into great schools to study and was always recognized in her literary writings.  She went on to write several great novels, short stories.

            The Gilded SixBits was probably my favorite reading of the week.  It was good to see a couple so in love and sad to see it almost ruined by greed and money, especially to find out Mister Otis D. Slemmons was a cheat and liar. Pretending his gold was all real when it wasn’t.  Missie May seemed like such a loving and caring wife. I never thought she would betray her husband in that way.  Made me really  sad how money and greed can come between a couple so in love. I was shocked that Joe did not up and leave right away but stayed until they found their love back to each other.  Im glad he had the faith that he had and they were able to find each other again. 

Week 7 Robert Frost

Robert Frost

After reading a few of Robert Frost’s poems I can see where he grew up has a lot to due with his settings.  He grew up in Salem, New Hampshire.  In many of his poem’s he talks about the cold winters with snow falling. As usual I do not understand much of what the poet is trying to say, but with a few of his poems I can relate to some parts.  The first poem we were assigned to read, Mending Wall really was the worst.  Maybe I need to read it a few more times but I did not understand a word of it.   I think my three favorite poems were: Home Burial, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, and Desert Places.

          The poem Home Burial  was very sad!  When reading it I picture a setting with a husband and wife.  They are talking about having a infant that died and they are trying to deal with his death in their own way.  It sounds like the wife wants to run away and not deal with it, Or she runs away and confides in someone else on how she feels about it.  The husband wants her to stay and talk about it.   She doesn’t understand how he can just dig the grave and go on like it was no big deal.  I think this would be a typical conversation with two people trying to deal with grief in their own ways.

          The poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy evening was nice and short.  There is nothing special about this poem but I like the flow of it and the picture in my head.  I believe he is riding his horse and he stops in someone’s woods to just watch it snow. He has a long way to go but wants to just watch the beauty of the snow falling, covering up the woods.

          The last poem I chose was Desert Places. I chose those  poem because of its flow again. I like when they rhyme and make sense.  He sounds very lonely here.  He explains its loney out there in the woods. Maybe he is traveling.  But again he is in no hurry to get home because it is lonely there also.  Most of his poems are nice. I enjoyed them.