Kyle's Thoughts

This week in class we read a piece called Show and Tell by Scott McCloud. This piece showed (and told) the importance of pictures in readings. It started off with a short anecdote of this kid in front of his class explaining how his robot toy transforms into an airplane. He uses a mixture of words and plain showing how it does what it does. This develops the author's main argument that "words and pictures have great powers to tell stories when creators fully exploit them both," (McCloud 809). I believe that images in books don't make a work of literature any less intellectual. If the content is meant to be intellectual, pictures aren't going to make it any less. Actually, images bring a different dynamic and can allow for more intellectual content. If an author were to include a statement where there could be many interpretations, that would be considered intellectual, but if you add an image to that and turn it into a comic, there could be an infinite amount of i...

This week in class we read "Because My Father Always Said He Was The Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play 'The Star-Spangled Banner' At Woodstock" by Sheman Alexie. A theme in this chapter was the discrimination against minorities. Since Victor and his father are Native American they feel as though they are alone and treated wrongly. Victor's father goes as far as "beat[ing] the shit out of the National Guard private lying prone on the ground" (Alexie 25). His father goes to jail but comes back and there is a lot of tension between Victor's father and mother. This tension relates to the motif of war and peace in the story. Although there is a lot of fighting with words and disagreements, Victor thinks it is all okay because he heard them making love. Although these two don't always correlate, it was a little added humor for the story. To go along with this humor, there was sarcasm to make the serious anecdotes more lighthearted. An example of th...

In "This is Water", by David Foster Wallace, he talks about how most people think in their "natural default-setting" and this is how they "experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life," (Wallace 236). This default setting is the natural way people experience the world. Nobody can have anybody else's experiences, so automatically, people think in a self-centered way. Wallace talks on the point that you can learn to think a different way and change your perspective on the same situations. This could be very beneficially to a lot of people. Instead of having to do things and just getting it done, you could learn to think a different way, and maybe you will look at is as an opportunity to do something special or new. Wallace also talked about relativity. He told a fable about a wise fish asking two younger fish and the younger fish swim away and says, "What the hell is water?" (Wallace 233). This brings up a good conversation o...

During class this week we read a poem called "The History Teacher", by Billy Collins. This teacher puts forth an effort "to protect his students' innocence" (Collins 1). He does this by leaving out or completely making up parts of history, the subject he is being paid to teach. Examples of this include, the Chilly Age, where everyone wore sweaters, the Gravel Age where there were really long driveways, etc. I believe that this is very inappropriate. The teacher is responsible for teaching these kids a curriculum and this method of protecting their innocence is doing more harm than good. I understand how some teachers might leave out the gory or disturbing details, but to completely change history is wrong. The teacher is worried about if the students believed his story and too ignorant to see that his "innocent" students are on the playground tormenting each other. Although this is a made up story, it poses a lot of questions about the responsibility o...