Modern-Day Hero and Their Themes

In "The Brothers K", Everett Chance is characterized as a modern-day hero. Holding the characteristics of a hero, Everett was able to bring out the theme of Unification. By accepting Atheism, Everett unconditionally set himself up to be shunned by his church and town, but most importantly his mother. However, as the tragic events come to play (Irwin's restrain in the mental facility), Everett makes his comeback and returns. He organizes supporters and devises a genius plan in hopes to rescue and bring his younger brother Irwin back. Aside from the decisions and choices he made (not go to war, flee to Canada, become Atheist, etc.), he was successfully able to rally and unite everyone under the common belief that the situation concerning Irwin is unjust and justice needed to be served. The theme of Unification runs parallel to the themes of Justice and Human Morals, revitalizing Everett's characterization of a modern-day hero.

Character Hero

In "The Brothers K", Everett Chance is characterized as one of the main characters in the novel. In terms of basic background info, Everett is the eldest son of four brothers. He's an unique, intelligent character who can be labeled as a modern-day hero. Like any modern-day hero, Everett faces a variety of challenges and hardships, to which he has to inevitably conquer. The first and foremost, is his depart from the family. This happens because at one point in the novel Everett becomes so sick of his mother's constant rants and strong drives for a Christian family, that he breaks his ties and declares his devotion to Atheism. Following, he is shunned by his mother, resulting of his removal from the family picture for a while. The second conflict he faces is the military draft. Unlike Irwin who accepts, Everett escapes to Canada, so he wouldn't be charged for dodging military draft and being sentenced to jail. Everett is considered to be a modern-day hero because through all the struggles he faces, he returns and "saves the day", saving his younger sibling Irwin Chance. This "re-turn" of an event spiral into a series of falling actions, such as the reunification of the Chance family, acceptance back to the town and its people, and most importantly the retrieval of Irwin from the mental institution. These series of events along with many mild conflicts are surpassed, thus illuminating Everett Chance to be labeled as a modern-day hero.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream: Puck's Actions and its Relation to the Overall Theme

            “Love is not an equation, it is not a contract, and it is not a happy ending. Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air. It is the place you come back to, no matter where your headed” - Jodi Picoult. Similarly, William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream tells a tale of true love, depicting the course of true love. As the play's mischievous prankster, Puck plays inevitably plays a trick on the four Athenians who possess a interlacing web of affections towards one another, thus contributing to overall theme that the course of true love never did run smooth.

            The play starts out with the controversial conflict addressing the issue of Hermia's available choices. Either she marries Demetrius, faces the death penalty, or becomes a nun for the rest of her life. Hermia refuses to accept any of the three choices due to the fact she loves none other than Lysander. Aside from the love triangle present here, Helena is an addition to it - she loves Demetrius. The complicated love web is depicted early on in the play, establishing the conflict of the overall plot.

            As stated in the overall theme itself, true love would not have been found without the presence of a sophisticated, problematic journey. The king of faeries Oberon notices the way the poor human Helena is treated by Demetrius, so he sends his servant Puck to acquire a magical flower, the juice of which can be spread over a sleeping person’s eyelids to make that person fall in love with the first thing he or she sees upon waking. Mistakenly, Puck induces Lysander with the love potion, tragically leading to him waking up to Helena and abandoning Hermia. As the night progresses, Puck tries to correct his mistake, but ends up having Demetrius fall in love with Helena as well. Consequentially, the two Athenian men duel for the hand of the fair Helena. Hermia becomes jealous and challenges Helena to a duel as well.

            As complicated and awry events have unfolded, Puck finds this hilarious. His actions clearly support the theme of the play by reflecting the tragic turn of events, which eventually lead to a happy ending. Through the actions of Puck, Shakespeare constitutes the complicated journey of true love. In the end, true love finds its way and is rejoiced with the marriage of the four Athenians to their respective lovers. Although Puck's actions cause utter confusion and chaos, his actions ultimately unite the lovers with their true loves, illuminating the overall theme of the play, "The course of true love never did run smooth".

Poetry - Analyzing Allusions

Yet Do I Marvel:

            In this poem, the poet Countee Cullen illustrates a couple of examples of God's actions. As already known, they may vary between rewards and punishments. The first allusion made in this poem is to the Greek God Tantalus - the son of Zeus; the king of Sipyolus. According to Greek mythology, he was punished for sharing the food of the Gods with the mortal humans who favored him. His punishment was being "tantalized", which means to torment or tease someone with the sight or promise of something unobtainable, by exciting their senses or desires.

            The second allusion made in this poem is of Sisyphus, the son of Aeolus, who was the king of Thessaly. According to the mythology, he was conniving and deceptive: he used to way-lay travelers and murder them. His punishment was pressed upon him due to his acts of betraying the secrets of the Gods and  chaining the God of Death, Thanatos. As a result he was forced to roll a block of stone against a steep hill, which inevitably tumbles back down when he reached the top. The whole punishment, like Tantalus' s lasts all eternity.

            At the end of the poem, Cullen illustrates that even though God is not hesitant to enact such horrifying punishments upon his creations, he is marveled at the fact that God actually creates African-American poets and also offer them the opportunities to sing and speak their minds.

On His Blindness:

            In this poem, John Milton infers biblical allusions. The allusion present in this poem runs parable of the talents by Matthew.  Milton reflects the idea that any object of materialistic value would not, could not, and is not needed at all by God. God presents a kingly state, therefore nothing is of value to him other than the value of patience portrayed by those who serve and wait, all in the name of God himself.

Miniver Cheevy:

            In this poem, Edwin Arlington Robinson makes allusions to cultural characteristics. The time period dates back to medieval times, which can be supported by the references made to the kingdoms of Thebes and Camelot. The message of this poem can be derived from the allusions which state that there is a fine line between dreams and reality. The second message is that heavy reflections of oneself may bring about a sense of self-hatred and develop an attitude of negativity.

My Son the Man:

            In this poem, Sharon Olds makes allusions to the famous cultural escape artist Harry Houdini, the stage name of Erich Weiss. He is most famous for his stunt of freeing himself after being chained, sealed in a padlock trunk, and being dropped into deep water. The narrator applies this reference to her growing son who is becoming a young adult. The mother herself represent the hardships and challenges (chains, lock, icy water), while the son represents Houdini, gradually outgrows the barriers. After "escaping" he simply smiles back at his mother as he observes that she is simply being an overprotective mother.

Siren Song:

            In this poem, the poet Margaret Atwood brings about allusions to the Greek mythology Sirens, who were "half women half bird -like" creatures who seduced countless sailors towards themselves with nothing but their beautiful and deceiving voices and looks. The narrator depicts that even though the men see numerous dead skeletons and skulls, they still leap overboard towards the siren. The siren sings how she will tell the men a secret if they come closer, that she is in fact crying for help, which make the men fall into its seduction even more. In the end, the siren says that even though this is a boring song, it still works every time. The message of the poem is that men are feeble creatures that strive for sexual pleasure by whoever they deem attractive.

Journey of the Magi:

            This poem in particular holds true to containing numerous biblical allusions. For example, the vine leaves symbolize the wine of the Eucharist and blood of the Lamb, who spare us from death; hands dicing for silver reflect the gambling over Jesus' garments and Judas's selling out; and the three trees symbolize both the three crosses of Calvary and the Trinity. The message of the poem is that all journeys encounter numerous situations and events; good or bad, they contain all sorts of negative aspects of the flaws and evils of the imperfect human nature.

Joel and I vs. The New Common Core State Standards

Joel Stein. I think I found a new favorite columnist! I love his word choice, especially because it is much easier to comprehend, as compared to the majority of other writers. In this article Joel Stein goes on about how students are now slowly, and surely losing connections to literary pieces of fiction. From the article, I learned that the Common core State Standards are issuing new curriculum standards, dramatically transitioning half of the nation's high school English reading lists toward emphasis on nonfiction.

As true as the new president of College Board David Coleman's opinion may be, "As you grow up in this world, you realize people don't really give a s--- about what you feel or what you think" I disagree with him. For one, I believe we are modernizing too fast and too much, in such little time. What I mean is, as growing students and young adults, we are losing our senses and abilities of creativity and critical thinking. If we continue down the path of nonfiction, we will slowly and surely lose our abilities to use language to our advantages, i.e. persuasion.

If we solely rely on hard facts for literature and history alike, where will the deeper understanding come from? It will become buried. Underneath. "Why?" you may ask? It is exactly the same reason why you can't win any arguments. Because you don't know how to persuade. In other words, manipulate the English language.

In the long run, by following the new curricula starting in 2014, school is going to become a lot like a robotic training facility or factory, call it whatever you like. Without advantageous communication skills, the future young adults will inevitably have a hard time achieving their goals of success. The reasoning behind my statements can be concluded by one simple example.

You may ask, "What helped people like Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Steve-O, and Drake become the people they are today? They are all rich and successful, but how?" The answer my friends, is pretty damn simple-- Language. Creativity. Self-expressionism. Everyone is different and special in their own way, it's up to you how you're going to put it to use to make yourself stand out. After all, success doesn't come to all the dull, "regular" people. It presents itself to those who aren't afraid to show their creativity to the rest of the world.

When you think about it, this article isn't just about some change literature and history. There's much, much more to it. The results of shifting from a balanced fiction and nonfiction curriculum to a majority nonfiction curriculum pretty much shapes the developing communication and social skills of all incoming high school students. Joel Stein concludes the idea that this curriculum has major flaws and long term negative results. I for one, definitely agree with him!  

Do You Know How to Google?

            Google. It's the top answer to anyone's question when another person falls short of coming up with a reasonable answer. The search process begins with a simple, "Hmm, I don't know. Go 'Google' it." On the Google website, the common user would input a series of words which seem most appropriate to find what they are looking for. The common user also has the mindset that, “If it’s not on the first or second page of Google, it doesn’t exist”. In some cases this may be true, but little do they know that the Google search engine contains a variety of options available to filter and narrow down the desired search results.

            An example would be when I search, “How do the Democratic and Republican positions on the “fiscal cliff” differ?” When you casually search up the referred question above, Google delivers to you, “About 31,900,000 results (0.22 seconds)”. The large number obviously refers to the number of search results found. Interestingly, the “(0.22 seconds)” indicates the time in seconds it took Google to find what you were looking for. This brings us to the first few search operators are “AND”, “OR”, and “NOT”. These operators can be considered the “first level” of filtering, because they remove a large number of irrelevant search results. When I add one of the three above search operators, it cuts down the amount of results by 31,819,700! When I added “NOTObama” to the original search result, Google took 0.48 seconds to filter out my results and leave me with only 80,300 results! I emphasize on the “only” because considering the fact there were originally roughly 31 million, I’m pretty sure I’d much rather search through a mere 80,300 results rather than a whopping 31 million!

            Is that it? Nope! There’s much more! Suppose I want to refine and filter my searches even more; I want to find present-day, recent answers for my question. When I click upon a time range of one year, my resulting searches amount to About 13,900 results, (taking Google 0.29 seconds to search for results using the new, added option). Although time ranges are not considered operators, they do significantly narrow down your search results even more.

            The next search operator Google has is the minus sign, (-). The minus sign works similar to the “NOT” operator, but proves to be much more effective. For example, when I change my search to, “How do the Democratic Republican positions on the “fiscal cliff” differ? NOTObama –jobs”  my resulting amount of searches yet again drastically cuts down and narrows to about 3,480 results, taking Google 0.21 seconds to show me my more improved search. The reasoning behind it is that the minus sign completely eradicates all resulting searches that include the key term “jobs”. According to the derived numbers, about 10,000 of the searches from the previous filter alone contained the word “jobs”. In an actual search I would use another word in place of jobs, because in reality jobs are in fact important in relation to the "fiscal cliff". I used this example to prove the power and abilities these search operators hold, making searching for all things on Google easier with utmost precision. The searches can be narrowed further; it's  what I did next out of curiosity. When I added more “minus+keywords” the results narrowed down further.

            Using the given time I had at the LIC, the most narrow results I was able to derive were about 132 results, taking approximately 0.32 seconds to search. In the end, I was able to find a an article from the search which gave me a clear and concise answer as to what each political party wanted with the economy,  and also defined how their positions differ. From this experience, I learned how to use the Google search operators to find more specific results. I look forward to using these operators and other various search tools from now on whenever I find the need to Google something!

                            

Loneliness: Frankenstein & The Monster

Lonliness is a common theme shared between Victor Frankenstein and the Monster throughout the novel. Towards the beginning of the novel, Victor shares a poem in Chapter 4:

            Like one who, on a lonely road,
                Doth walk in fear and dread,
            And, having once turned round, walks on,
                And turns no more his head;
            Because he knows a frightful fiend
                Doth close behind him tread.

This poem depicts Victor's current situation quite clearly. He is a lonely person who walks in fear, frequently turning his head around because he knows a frightful figure is following close behind it. The figure is of course, the Monster. The reasoning behind Victor's lonliness is actually a result of his very own actions. His thirst for knowledge and discovering the science behind the process of acquiring life is what caused him to isolate himself from the outside world, as well as his family.

The Monster too encounters the theme of lonliness throughout the novel. In fact, he learns how it feels to be lonliness since the very beginning of the novel. To the Monster, Victor has a father-like stature. It's like a new born baby being left by his dad. What else is there to do but to follow? A perfect example is on page 82, Chapter 10, where the Monster confronts Victor and demands answers. The Monster expresses his sadness and lonliness, by reflecting upon the many encounters he had with other humans, the Monster realizes he is definetly not accepted and able to integrate into society, unless Victor helps him.