Weighing the pros and cons of titles for my blogs

  It’s possible that this is the hottest of hot takes I will ever produce in this class, but throughout my reading of Sag Harbor , I feel like I haven’t actually seen much of Benji’s actual coming-of-age. Sure, he’s experienced plenty of quintessential coming-of-age moments: having a first kiss, drinking beer, sneaking out of houses, navigating friendships, etc. etc., but has he come out of the end of the summer actually having “grown up” any more? For me, I don’t really think so.  I’ll be the first to admit that my reading of Sag Harbor wasn’t nearly as dedicated as some of the other books we read; when I read Fun Home , I considered it the best book I had read in years, and I was always equal parts excited to read about Jason Taylor and also full of dread (man does that little teenager have an insane amount of misfortune). So, in a way that’s inherent to this big of a change of pace, I found myself less enraptured by this last novel.  Even so, I think that the contrast...

We get our initial look into Bruce and Helen’s relationship on page 13 of Fun Home – or shall we say, Alison gives an initial look into their relationship, through her perspective. The lines “in theory, his arrangement with my mother was more cooperative… In practice, it was not” follow panels depicting Bruce showing Helen a chandelier in a magazine, to which she says “Bordello,” meaning “brothel[like]” (Bechdel, 13). Of course, he buys it, and the subsequent page shows Helen disdainfully saying “whorehouse,” as he hangs the chandelier up. This introductory chapter paints Bruce as an architect, an artificer, and a Daedalus. For our first impressions of Helen to be that she is abjectly against Bruce’s architectural decisions –the very extensions of his identity– within their home, very distinctly shows that she and Bruce are utterly incompatible. Bruce is even worse: he purposely dismissed her input. Why doesn’t she make any act of resistance in the face of this disrespect? We don’t see...

Much like the rest of Plath’s comedic genius within The Belljar , Esther’s brief train of thought about homosexuality is incredibly hilarious. I cannot get the line “I wondered if all women did with other women was lie and hug” out of my head— no one will tell the poor girl anything about what lesbians actually do.  Esther’s first real introduction to gay behavior is when she forgets to leave after knocking on DeeDee’s door to no reply (218). She’s here to retrieve some sheet music, when she happens upon DeeDee and Joan vaguely lying on the bed together instead. We know it’s Joan because Esther describes “pale, pebble eyes regard[ing] me from the gloom,” and Esther had just finished ranting about how “horsey” Joan looked a page earlier: “I thought how sad it was Joan looked so horsey, with such big teeth and eyes like gray, goggly pebbles” (216). (Holden Horse Hypothesis, anyone? You know it’s Joan when the eyes are horsey goggly pebbles and you know it’s Doreen when they’re indest...

  When Holden is addressing us in the “present tense” context of The Catcher in the Rye , it’s clear to the readers that his current environment is purposefully vague. However, the brief amount of description of his surroundings suggests to a fairly likely theory that he is being held in some sort of mental health facility. At the beginning of the book, Holden says that he’s going to “just tell you about this madman stuff… just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy” (3).  It’s very clear to us by the end of the book that Holden is not only having a mental health crisis, but also a physical one. This would align well with the fact that the time period of The Catcher likely doesn’t have very good resources for mental health conditions, and provide a societal motivation for why the people around him would choose to have him go to some sort of psychiatric ward— if not for his rampant depression, than for the potential tuberculosis he might have ca...

          The first point in the Black Panther Party’s 10-point Program is the belief that  “Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny,” described by the title “We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community.”  The first poem we read representing the Black Arts movement was “For Black Poets Who Think of Suicide” by Etheridge Knight. Knight urges black poets not to commit suicide, as he designates suicide as a white activity--- an act of surrender which is made possible by having privilege. In contrast, “...Black Poets belong to Black People,” not death. In a philosophical sense, I do not believe there is any decision that gives one more agency, than the decision to decide to live. While killing oneself is a decision a person can make, no one can “determine their destiny” if they do not continue living. There is no way to have agency over one’s life if they are no longer living. ...

  While no attempt to define a pattern in nature, human or otherwise, has ever been fully successful at escaping the inherent nuance and exceptions in the natural world (call that the persistence of nature in naturalism), Zora Neale Hurston certainly abides by her list of uniquely Black traits in art, in her essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression”. There are many works written during the Harlem Renaissance that contrast with Hurston’s claims that, for example, that Black literature is always “absent of the concept of privacy”, when we have read several poems describing the pain of hiding one’s suffering due to their Black identity.  However, the entirety of The Gilded Six-Bits and the writing that paints the story are highly decorated in the exact styles that Hurston had highlighted; namely Adornment or “the Will to Adorn”, “Drama”, the “Absence of the Concept of Privacy”; upon further examination, you can find much more hidden throughout. In fact, I was hard pressed to f...