38 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2016
  2. teaching.lfhanley.net teaching.lfhanley.net
    1. death had undone

      the undead, this sort of in between, at first I read it as if it was the deaths of others making people so depressed but after class, the second interpretation seems more fitting

    2. “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

      these lines of dramatic dialogue insinuate many things, such as: death being serious and sad while at the same time being obscured and normal, the dialogue suggests several speakers, at least two and adds to the context of book 1. The last stanza opens with "unreal city" so to ask about a corpse planted in a garden is justifiable in regards to the current conditions

  3. Sep 2016
    1. Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.

      this is such good advice

    1. is a rose

      as an iconic element of Stein's aesthetics, my question would be does this suffice for what a rose is? is it ok to not explain it? If I could answer my own posed question, I would say that our minds already have preconceived notions of objects, things, roses, we do not need her to explain it, she does in her own way and it perfectly transcends into my subjective experience

    2. Nicely

      the isolation of words so very peculiar and amazing. written above is the lines "cousin tip nicely/cousin tip/then 'nicely'" What does the isolation of indivudal words, here an adverb, do when a reader is reciting this poem outloud? I listened to an audio recording of an English woman reading this and it profoundly changed my experience, I feel like I know how to read this now...maybe

    3. Happy happy happy

      as this can be said for her entire poem, a question would be how has she manipulated or constructed her mind to make words have meaning before she puts meaning to words? Her stream of conscious thought is profound

    1. Provide

      to provide for others is a friendly quality, but the word is used right after "none at all." The elements of friendship and good nature are seen differently through the elaborate context created by this poem. Also using the exclamation point at the end of the poem is interesting to note as well, and written twice

    2. avoid

      "avoid"...how can one avoid fate, things happen as they should or simulation? His diction about eternity and the fleeting is so intertwined and interesting. To avoid fate seems like a juxtaposition

    1. Whitman

      seems to be going back to Romantic notions of Whitman's work, "roared in the pines." Whitman is a revolutionary in American Romanticism and is being compared to this shy poet. example being- "woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers- long to all of it all my life long" Whitman's poetry is a juxtaposing element and almost hints at jealousy by this "petit, the poet" who was unable to observe the self, happily in Nature. Using Whitman as a sort of allegory to his un-accomplishments about writing poetry the way this Romantic did

    1. But I can write when she is out

      the narrator's journal is a conflicting thing itself. It is supposed to be this place where she can release emotion and be honest in privacy, feel connected to her writing...but it is also a fearful thing, to write the feelings she has in this book could give away her innermost thoughts to keep her hidden away for longer. The instrument that is supposed to keep her sane is used against her by people who don't necessarily know what is best for the individual

    1. double-consciousness

      the idea of double consciousness is so fascinating to me, alludes to ideas like the simulation hypothesis and works of Philosopher Alan Watts, and artist/director, David Lynch. I mentioned in a reply above about the idea of a psychogenic fugue, examined in Lynch's "Lost Highway." But in this story, double consciousness examines the self from an honest and intellectual standpoint, forced to reckon with the self you think you know and then the self that is examined by other (bodies). The idea of existing inside a body is already strange enough but here, Du Bois shows the aspects of a black man forced to see the simulated persona of himself curated specially by society and then the person he sees in the mirror. Using his third eye, as Watts might have suggested positions the self to notice this doubleness and the oddities of stereotypes in the first place and may help the mind realize that it is more than a body

    1. historian

      just the constant reiteration of him as historian/others as historians, a very important part of his life, questioning the past, present and future and becoming engulfed in the meaning of it all

    2. vibrations and rays which were new, and he would have hugged Marconi

      vibrations and rays/ heading towards quantum physics and mechanics... Marconi was the first successful engineer to send a radio signal across the Atlantic, praise and an understanding for the technology to come

  4. Aug 2016
    1. he comes

      cyclical oppression/the poem itself is not written for an extremely educated audience, it is fragmented and seems again that it is for working class/oppressed families/men, etc. a somewhat continuous condition

    2. Out of

      suggestive of coming out of, persisting through -the out of is followed by gray hills/industrial barns/rain, somewhat depressing ideas it does not necessarily turn positive, but accumulates/ deep, deep oppression

    3. burlap sacks

      industrial times/burlap sacks for labor intensive work, hardening the individual, making them stronger...leading into the illusion of man as lion, lion needing to grow, needing to be fed, etc. However, the growing lion's strength could be equated with overall suffering, the continuation and expansion of it

    4. They Lion grow.

      this re-occuring, ending line of the first four stanzas shows how they is used to describe a collective group of people/workers, the lion grew could be rage but also ferocity growing within the individual