History and Memory in Life is Beautiful

In Scott Ryan’s text History and Memory in Life is Beautiful he talks about the movie Life is Beautiful and how the protagonist, Guido, gives the movies a very fictional feel in a real setting. The world he tries to create for himself and his son, Joshua, is a very positive world; he views everything with a positive aspect. Even after Guido and his son got caught he still played it off to Joshua that everything will be fine and that the bus ride and the death camps were all apart of a game for his birthday. The reason for lying like that is to protect his own son so he doesn’t freak out. In a way, his text shows that you should relate to one another in always a positive way, although what Guido does may not be the best way to go through life. It is good to make the best situation possible out of a bad situation but sometimes, especially in the realities of the harsh camps, you need to realize reality and take things from there instead of pushing the bad to the side. I believe the text is straightforward about the values it proposes, considering in the second page of the text he says “the extreme barbarity or Nazism and Fascism acts as a backdrop to the narrative’s central premise that to see beauty in even the most heinous conditions is to triumph over evil.” I believe these values he talks about are very natural, because it is good to make good out of bad, but to deny to someone the realities of what’s going on is not always the best idea.

The New Colossus

In John Washington’s essay titled “The New Colossus: Exploring the Idea of Border,” he talks mainly about the US-Mexican border and the real troubles of the migrant workers that try to come across illegally into America for a better life and to find work. Washington can be seen as a very understanding person because he helped the illegal immigrants when it came to medical help, food supply, or even just listening to their stories. He was hearing their point of view, which gave him a completely different perspective about the US-Mexican border than most ordinary people already have about them. It can be determined from my point of view as the reader that Washington was looking and doing this for as a very informational journey while documenting his experience. He would help all of the migrants but at the same time he would watch them as border patrol came along and see them all scatter and hide for their lives while he would watch, as he said, almost like a game. Obviously it’s more than a game, and from his essay, John Washington came out of this whole experience very sympathetic for them. A value that is brought up in his paper is the value of freedom in our lives. As an American my whole life, I have been living under a free democracy, but for the migrant farmers, it’s our government who is trying to prevent them from living the same life style as that of Americans. It is a very sad situation that most of them are put in because all they are trying to do is provide money and food in low quantities for their families and maybe even themselves, but our government wont let it happen for reasons that are very understandable.

Community Identity

In the interview that I conducted about myself inside my community I have found out a few different things that I did not necessarily think about before I gave out the interview. I realized after the interview that the community I lived in was very culturally diverse. I lived in a town that was half Mexican and as a teenager growing up there, my school was fifty percent Hispanic. In my community, the education was not very high leveled compared to the rest of the United States according to the interview. As a part of my community I can relate to Gerald Graff’s short story about his troubles with reading as a teenager. As a teenager for me, reading was never a first priority and that also seemed to be the norm within my community as the same with Graff’s. He said that people would sometimes beat people up due to their intelligence, although that is not the case within my community, most people didn’t read though. The average student in my town had around a 2.8, didn’t read and also, sadly enough didn’t care. School for a lot of people was never a first priority. Gerald Graff seems to have grown up in a town that education was also not most teenager’s first priority.

The community I have chosen is my own community that I lived in right before I went to college, specifically Escondido, CA or San Diego. It was the place that I really developed who I am and when people ask me where I am from I always affiliate myself with San Diego, CA even though it is not the place that I was originally “from.” Everything about who I was when I first lived in New Jersey and then moved to California has changed because of the environment and community I lived within in Escondido. All of my friends that I will always be friends with and stay in close contact with are from my high school and I really developed the person that I am because of the people I surrounded myself in. So far I have learned that the reason that I make all the choices I do is because of how I saw my surroundings in a new area do it. In California the atmosphere is very relaxed and laid back and I now realize that that is how I am. I am of course like that because all of my friends are like that. People don’t realize how much of an influence all of your friends can be but they really are the biggest influence on you. I have not gathered a lot of information about my community from other people or artifacts yet so my insight might not be very detailed but this is the info I gathered from easy general knowledge of my community.

Sonny's Blues

Alex Hall

Family is a group of people who love each other no matter what happens and always stick by each other’s side. Family doesn’t have to be blood related or grandma or grandpa, it can be a bunch of random people who love each other unconditionally and are always there for each family member. Relationships in family’s can become very confusing and complex. A mother to son relationship is a unique one that the mother loves their son is sometimes very protective of her son. On the other hand, a father to son relationship can be extremely different. The father a lot of the times wants his son to fall in his footsteps and always to be very successful. Fathers aren’t always worried about things mothers worry about so it can sometimes become a split thing on who to necessarily ask which parent for a specific thing. The relationship of sibling-to-sibling is a lot different then parents to their child. Sibling to sibling all really relates to the age and gender. In James Baldwin’s Sunny Blues the relationship is between two brothers. One is older than the other and typically that situation can go either two ways. One is that the younger brother looks up to his older and tries to follow in his footsteps and learns from him. The other situation is the younger brother hates how his brother is so does and acts differently either in good or bad ways. In this case, the narrator’s brother, Sonny, acts differently in a very bad way. The two brothers seem to have a hard time interacting with each other. The background behind why seems reasonable considering Sonny was in jail for heroin, but a relationship within a family should always be a tight bond no matter what. They attempt to talk to each other after awhile of no talking and Sonny’s letter to the narrator made him “feel like a bastard” because it wasn’t what he was expecting. He didn’t know what to expect. After they start talking again you can tell with not much background that things are different between them. They attempt to have a good brother relationship but it just doesn’t work that well. Sonny is very self-centered and doesn’t care that much about that his brother thinks or knows is good for him. They seem to attempt communication and do talk and get things figured out between them, but overall their communication between each other isn’t very successful.

Response to "A Good Crot Is Hard to Find"

Alex Hall
A good essay consists of good grammar, no miss spellings, perfect format, and very well written and easy to comprehend. Tita Baumlin decided to give her class an assignment that goes completely against the traditional essay. But no one knew how or what to write. She gave no guideline on to write an essay. So she decided to help her students out she would write one of her own. The essay is nothing like I have ever seen before. It’s like the song by The Beatles “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite,” it just doesn’t really make any sense.
The essay has two chapters and about six different ways to write. Not the traditional ways, but ways most people have never thought of. Those ways are what really caught my eye, to see someone go completely outside the box. For example, on page forty-three (Straight line double voice”) she has one paragraph written out. If you read the whole paragraph as one, it appears to make no sense. Although half of it is italicized and half is not. If you read the italicized part all at once without reading the normal text, it makes sense. So what Tita did is in one paragraph she put two completely different texts but all as one. Very different from what I have ever seen but so inventive and creative at the same time. Another thing that Tita does that really intrigues me is she has about six different ways to write and tell you about them, all very creative. But while she is telling you about them, it is visually shown in the text what she is talking about. For example she talks about making lists. In one list she says a short vertical one. The next one is a list talking about making a long list with either short phrases or long ones. To me it is all very creative.
The one thing that really makes me feel uneasy is about five times in the essay she ends a section with a rhetorical question. Although it can be answered, it is just very hard to answer. For example she talks about crots and then fragments. Of course, while talking about fragments the whole paragraph is in fragments making it very hard to understand. At the end of it she says, “Get the point?” She leaves a space to let your mind soar to really figure it out. The only thing is that it’s very hard to actually figure it out. What point is she talking about? What am I trying to understand? In another part, at the end of chapter one she says, “It may not come again. Come again?” and then proceeds to chapter 2. What does she mean by come again? Maybe the magic she is talking about, but did it even come in the first place. Where is it coming from? All these open ended questions make me feel uneasy because I have no clue how to answer them and that is what truly bothers me the most.

Gerald Graff

Alex Hall

Gerald Graff wrote a short autobiography about himself and is eventual love for literature and how he came about loving it. Growing up he disliked literature and reading history. It was always boring and had no real relation to his life. Growing up I always felt the same way. Whether I was reading a book of no real literary merit or Grapes of Wrath, reading never interested me. Graff although had it a little different. He grew up in a city were people frowned upon you for being intellectually smart. It was beyond the norm to read books; in fact people would threaten you if you read novels. In the early ages of middle school it was never “cool” to read or be smart. People would think it was cool if you got a C on a test and never read a page of the assigned reading. I fell right in the middle of those kids.
Now college is in my present and future and unfortunately I still do not have the drive to read assigned reading. I love reading books, but only the ones that interest me. Graff went into college and decided on an English major because of his background and his family. Now, sixty years later things are a lot different. You don’t need to have a background to decide to be a business major, which is what I am. As an English major he obviously took more rigorous classes in the English department than I am. In his first few years, even as an English major, I still relate to him completely. He said in his short autobiography that when he read the assigned reading, he didn’t know what to say about the books or why people became so intrigued by them. I feel the exact same way. I have a problem with looking deep into novels that don’t interest me.
Graff main experience that really made him fall in love with reading was the discussion that he acquired with his class about the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its very controversial ending. After reading the novel once, he stated that he reread the novel with the discussion in mind and was looking and waiting for something, and that’s the reason why the novel became so interesting for him. For me, I am reading a biography on John Lennon. I am an avid Beatles fan and everything about them interests me. When I read the novel I know so much about them already that I am always anticipating something to come in the future of the book. That is the drive that keeps me wanting to read more. Unfortunately I do not have that drive with most books. Graff said that the best teaching is when you “Just put the student in front of a good book, provide teachers who are encouraging and helpful, and the rest presumably will take care of itself.” To me, that is the best advice I have heard with teaching because if I am in front of a good book with many discussions up for grab, the rest will take care of itself.