Q3 Journal 2

While searching for good poems to use for my paper on Allen Ginsberg, I found a poem called “America.”  This free verse poem uses many different voices in first person that air their grievances about the United States, and it grabbed my attention from the first line:  “America I've given you all and now I’m nothing.”  Those who do not know Ginsberg would probably think that this would be some sort of patriotic poem, but that first line surely proves them wrong.  The narrators in “America” range from a weary person who feels like America has taken everything away from him to an angry narrator who has become tired of America’s demands, someone who has become obsessed with Time Magazine, a worried politician, one who makes outcries of America’s abuses, an uneducated person who blames the Russians and Chinese for everything, and a voice who seems driven to change America’s condition.  I found it very interesting how all of the voices were in just one poem, sometimes not even separated by different stanzas.  Still, it was not tough to find out where the voices changed because of the shift in tone and sometimes grammatical structure.  At first I did not understand a few of the numerous allusions, all of which related to the Cold War era, but I was pretty sure that all of the events would be very clear to any readers of Ginsberg’s time because they usually related to America’s abuses.  I noticed a few similarities among all of the voices such as the use of anaphora and relatively short sentences.  Lastly, the line “It occurs to me that I am America” struck me the hardest in the poem.  It is probably the most important line, and it is an almost jarring change because the narrators have been complaining about America for the entire first half of the poem only to realize that they are talking to themselves.  I feel that this means that in some way each voice has become part of the corruption of America’s society, which I thought was a very powerful message from Ginsberg.  “America” certainly made me want to read more of Ginsberg’s works even though I knew that next up was “Howl,” a poem more than twice this one’s length.

Allen Ginsberg

After taking a look at and annotating some poems from Allen Ginsberg, I have noticed many common parts that appear in his poetry.   I chose Ginsberg almost blindly, only scanning “Homework” before putting him on the list of choices and hoping that no one had already picked him.  The first similarity I saw is that many of his works share the theme that there is much wrong with the world, specifically the United States.  “Homework” and “America” both point to situations such as pollution or abuses that reveal Ginsberg’s pessimism toward the world in his time.  Since he wrote poetry at around the time of the Cold War, I was not surprised that he had problems with the way that America was handling situations such as stockpiling nuclear weapons and ignoring the environmental consequences of the country’s actions.  Ginsberg’s poetry is also strictly free verse and includes many allusions to events well-known to people of the 1950s.  Readers of his time as well as those who know a good bit about twentieth-century history would be able to understand every reference that he makes, which gives each of his poems an even stronger impact.  These common elements of Ginsberg’s poetry really unify his work even though he uses very different lengths and main strategies to convey his negative feelings toward the world.  I started off with “Homework” and “America” to prepare myself for “Howl,” Ginsberg’s monstrously long masterpiece.   I did not have too much trouble analyzing the former two, but “Howl” is more than twice the length of “America,” taking up five pages of paper and including much longer trains of thought.  It is going to take me at least a few more days to fully grasp “Howl” because it is unlike any other poem I have ever seen before.  “Homework” and “America” at least had shorter verses to help me soak in all of the information more clearly, but “Howl” sometimes has lines that could be worth their own paragraphs.  I am very interested to see what I will find from “Howl” as I begin to tackle it this week, and I know that it will be worth the read.

This Is Water Reaction

David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” commencement speech provides useful guidelines on how one should use a more open mentality to the frustrating, mundane events in life in order to make the most out of every moment.  Mainly using an example of getting caught in rush hour traffic and then having to wait in a long grocery store line, Wallace talks about how we go on default mode or autopilot by allowing ourselves to think that we are the center of the universe.  It certainly makes me wonder about how in a few years, I will be subject to having an average, pettily frustrating work day.  After thinking a little, I can see that I am already getting a taste of this every time I drive through rush hour or school traffic every weekday.  As I get older, I will eventually have to face the years where day after day I will get up, drive through traffic, work on the same thing over and over again, drive through traffic again, and try to sleep early to prepare for another boring, tiring day.  It is true that, similar to what Wallace stated, it is easy to get lost in the narcissistic way of thinking that everyone and everything is out to get me as I watch a car change lanes just to get ahead of me.  Wallace’s speech challenges me to think about others’ situations, such as in his example where a lady screaming at her child may have been the low-wage clerk who helped your spouse with a horrific problem at the motor vehicle store.  It gives a new light on these slow, annoying situations by stressing that we can use the time that we are forced to slow down to really think and decide on what has meaning and what does not.  I hope to be able to use the advice in his speech to make my quality of life better as I move on through the stages of life.

(Gonna start adding stuff that I make whenever it sorta fits)

Q2 Journal 4

For my last big reading session of this quarter, I read even more of A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.  This time, I read thirteen pages in about half an hour.  I am back in Nao’s section of the book in the middle of her explaining her life at home and at school, which certainly is not ideal.  I learned that Nao and her family used to live in the United States but had to move back to Japan after her father lost his job.  There, Nao was bullied at school for being a foreigner and for being poor.  It is especially in the bullying part that she uses Japanese vocabulary to give a better idea of what exactly she is called.  For example, there is ijime, a term that means “bullying”; Iyada!  Gaijin kusai, which means “Gross!  She stinks like a foreigner!” and Bimbo kusai, which means “She stinks like a poor person!”  The insults are combined with some offensive Engrish (misspelling intended), which I can’t help but laugh at because the bullies try to sound so cool but really just jumble a bunch of English derogatory terms together.

This part of Nao’s story is more exposition than any other literary devices, but it gives us as readers more information about Nao’s hard life.  She lives in an apartment where her family can hear everything from the rooms above and below them, and her father has attempted suicide after his return to Japan and loss of even more money.  It is hard for me to really identify with this because I have never been in such a tight financial or familial situation, but I am sure that some others who may come upon this book can relate better.  I also find it hard to see a similarity with, in Nao’s words, how the “Man of the House makes all the Big Financial Decisions” in America compared to how the woman takes care of the money in Japan mostly because my mother and father share that responsibility almost equally.  Nao’s section ends with how karma, according to Jiko, punishes people for bad things that they have done, such as in the way that Nao’s father ends up feeding crows in the park instead of having a solid job after he spent all of his money betting on horses.  Perhaps these crows will have a greater significance later on, but only time will tell for that.  It was interesting to learn more about Nao, and I hope to read much more of this book as my time frees up for Christmas break.

Q2 Journal 3

The third time I read for pleasure this quarter, I continued Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.  This time, I read about thirteen pages in half an hour mostly in Ruth’s section of the book.  It must have taken longer to read because to me, Ruth’s chapters proceed more slowly than Nao’s.  Here, we are introduced to a retired anthropologist named Muriel who helps examine the Hello Kitty lunchbox.  Muriel takes a very critical, scientific approach to the find, unbiased about how the lunchbox ended up in the sea compared to how Ruth almost automatically thinks that it washed up from a tsunami a few years ago.  It makes me think that perhaps the diary may not have arrived in the West Coast in dramatic circumstances.  However, after reading this part, I predicted that Muriel will not take on a major role later on in the story because she was so suddenly introduced and just as suddenly not in any more scenes so far.

The most important part of this section was probably when the watch from the lunchbox starts to tick again.  There are many possibilities for its meaning as a symbol because a supposedly dead watch starting to tick again is no normal occurrence.  It could have something to do with what has been said before about lost time.  Perhaps by starting to work after a long time of being stopped, the watch represents time being found again.  Nao seems to be communicating to Ruth, the reader, what Ruth currently thinks of the entire situation with the diary:  “I am reaching through time to touch you.”  As Ruth listens to the watch ticking near her, this moment makes it clear to me that Ruth and Nao are connected through the boundaries of time.  Ruth’s section ends with her having a dream about Jiko, Nao’s great-grandmother, saying something about things going up and down.  Currently, I am not sure what this means exactly, but I guess that it will have significance later on.  This reading session ended when I began a little bit more of Nao’s story, which starts to give us a better idea of Nao’s family and school life.  Overall, though I was not drawn in as much to this part of the book, I still enjoyed it and am willing to read and write about more of the novel again. 

Q2 Journal 2

The second time I sat down to read this quarter, I continued reading more of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.  Again, I read about fourteen pages within half an hour.  Ozeki resumes the story from Nao’s perspective and later switches back to Ruth’s.  I find the structure of this novel to be a major point of discussion because it could possibly give us, the readers, more of a feeling for Ozeki’s purpose (which I am still trying to figure out) that she tries to convey with this work.  From what I currently see, the sections alternate between Nao’s diary entries and Ruth’s reactions to them.  This gives me the feeling that I am reading Nao’s diary along with Ruth and registering similar responses.  It is also interesting that Ruth eventually begins to annotate the diary because of all of the Japanese cultural references because there are also many footnotes at the bottom of most pages of Nao’s section.  It is as if we have received the diary after Ruth has written her notes about Japanese allusions down, which certainly makes our lives easier because we will not have to look up a term two or three times per page. 

Now back to a little bit of what is going on with the plot.  The motif of time continues to show importance, as seen in Nao’s diary and in her description of her great-grandmother, Jiko.  Nao’s diary is what is known as a hack because it contains the cover of an old book, but its contents were replaced with stationery in which Nao writes her story.  This hack merges the past and present into one being.  Moreover, the cover is from a philosophical book written by Marcel Proust titled A la recherche du temps perdu, which means “In search of lost time.”  This raises the question from both Nao and the reader, “How do you search for lost time?”  It is highly doubtful that Ozeki used this work to be the cover of Nao’s diary as a mere coincidence.  Perhaps Nao will discover more about time and find an answer to the question.  She asks this question to Jiko, who, according to Nao, really understands time.  Jiko responds, “For the time being,/Words scatter. . ./Are they fallen leaves?”  This probably sounds more melodic in Japanese because the original version of this text forms a haiku.  With this, we and Nao think about how searching for time could in a way be like looking through fallen leaves.  Though Jiko apparently knows much about time, I find it ironic that she does not even know her exact age or her birthday.  Yet perhaps this means that time measured in numbers is irrelevant compared to the bigger picture of time itself as one perceives it.  Again, I enjoyed reading this part of the book, and I look forward to writing more about it later.

Q2 Journal 1

For the second quarter, I chose to read A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki because Mrs. Healey said that the reading experience was entertaining yet still deserving of literary merit.  In about half an hour, I completed the first fourteen pages of the book, which is certainly not bad progress at all.  In this beginning, I noticed three major literary devices:  allusions, a change in point of view, and the motif of time.  The allusions generally come from Nao’s sections of the book, and they usually relate to Japanese culture.  For example, in just the first three pages, Ozeki includes mentions about otakus (obsessive fans or fanatics, often referring to computer geeks or nerds), keitais (cell phones), and hentais (perverts).  She likely leaves the Japanese terms for everything instead of translating them literally because the literal translations for most of the cultural allusions are bulky or lacking in power.  Without the Japanese words, the book would certainly feel more boring to me, and I would be less convinced of the book’s setting, which is at Akiba Electricity Town in Nao’s sections sometime around the present.  The second device, a change in point of view, is evident at the end of Nao’s first section of the book when all of a sudden the writing shifts from a first person point of view of sixteen-year-old Nao to the third person limited omniscient perspective of a married woman named Ruth.  Ruth’s section is set in the West Coast of the U.S. sometime after Nao had written her diary.  Ruth finds Nao’s diary in the beach covered with a Hello Kitty lunchbox and Ziploc plastic bags, and she would have thrown it away if her husband had not uncovered the diary before she had done so.  I am still not completely sure about what place Ruth’s story has in the novel so far, but I predict that it will have something to do with how we as readers know that someone will read and remember Nao’s story and that Nao’s hard work of writing about herself and her great-grandmother will not go to waste.  Lastly, Ozeki introduces time as an important motif right in the first long sentence of the novel when she writes in Nao’s perspective, “My name is Nao, and I am a time being.”  She continues this motif again when Nao thinks that she will soon “graduate from time” or, more accurately, “drop out of time.”  Time is very important to Nao because she does not have much of it left. From this language, I can also tell that Nao is seriously considering suicide, though she does not explicitly state that or her reasons for doing so.  Overall, I enjoyed this part of the book, and I look forward to reading more.