My Recommendation

A reading that I would recommend to a friend would be "In a Station on a Metro" by Pound. I would recommend this to my friends first off because I know that most of them don't like reading. This poem is perfect for my friends because it is super short and it has multiple meanings depending oh who reads it. It can paint many different images into the reader's mind. I would also recommend this poem because I have always thought that a person does not need a thousand words to explain his point. He just has to go to the main points. Another reading I would recommend would be "Flight Patterns". The reason is that I believe that a lot of people and not just my friends could relate to the story. It talks a lot about modern issues, which affects all of us today. The character of the story was also just a normal person. He was not anybody special and it makes the reader really understand his feeling even though the story was not really from the first person point of view. Also because I really just enjoyed reading it and I liked how the story had a serious tone to it, but also added a humorous side too.

Facebook

Bartleby’s facebook is a mystery. Nobody has ever seen his facebook. All a person has ever seen from his facebook is his headline. His headline reads “I prefer not to approve you as a friend”. Bartleby always denies all friend requests so he has no friends in his facebook. His status for facebook is always set on apathetic. If you were though, able to hack into his account and view his profile you would see that his profile is very plain and has nothing special about it. On his profile he shares a video. The video is a thirty minute film just centered on staring at a brick wall. On his wall he has written, “I have given up using facebook and you should be able to see the reason why”. I chose to describe Bartleby’s facebook like this because in the story he was a very mysterious character. You don’t really get to know much about him throughout the whole story. Even as the story starts to end and you think you’re about to find out about him, the story ends in a weird way. It never explains why he acts that way. In this case, just when you are able to hack into his profile and view it, you still find out nothing about him. I also chose to explain his profile this way because I know very little about Facebook and I only wrote about what I knew for Facebook. The reason is because I created a profile on Facebook and then I never logged on since then so I'm still a newbie when it comes to social networking websites.

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/5864257/2/istockphoto_5864257-question-mark-wall.jpg

Trusting Narrator?

How do you know if you can trust a person? People usually judge a person first by their looks and then by their personality. Another important factor is the impression that the person first makes. In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Cask of Amontillado”, the narrator of the story is Montresor. The first line of the story is “The thousands injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge” (127). The story starts off with Montresor vowing revenge against Fortunato. Okay, so the first impression that you get of Montresor is that he is a person who is out to get revenge. A little more into the story Montresor says, “I continued, as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation” (127). Here you get the idea that Montresor is a deceiving person. Throughout the story Montresor deceives Fortunato into following him by mocking him. He mocks Fortunato by comparing him to Luchresi, whom he knows will get on Fortunato’s nerve. Montresor does narrates through the whole story and tells how he got Fortunato drunk and trapped him, but he also comes off as a very deceptive person. He may even come off as a lunatic. It seems that Montresor was always ridiculing Fortunato until the last moment, “But to these words I hearkened in vain for a reply. I grew impatient” (131). Montresor was communicating with Fortunato until the very end. He even became a little agitated when Fortunato did not answer him. So I think that Montresor is an untrusting narrator because he comes off to conniving. After all the whole story is about how he tricked Fortunato into his death.

Introduction K. Moua

Everyone in their lifetime will eventually experience the feeling of death. It is a feeling that is inescapable. When I think of death I think about the death of my aunt. She was the first person that I lost, whom I really cared about. I remember her funeral like a picture in my mind. I looked to my left and my right and I can see my brothers and cousins crying. Like an uncontrollable burst, I felt the tears rolling down my eyes as well. I’ve cried before, but not like this. This type of crying was different. The last time I cried it was because my mom had just spanked me for being naughty. I told my cousin that his mother’s death was unavoidable, that she went peacefully, but was I wrong. Would it have been better if she had fought for her life, instead of giving it up? In Dylan Thomas’ poem he mentions, “Do not go gentle into that good night…Rage, Rage, against the dying of the light” (1-3).

In Thomas’ poem, he talks about the struggle against death. He describes four types of men in his poem who are the wise men, the good men, the wild men, and the grave men. In all his accounts of the men, he describes them as struggling against the forces of death. For each type of man, he gives a reason why they struggle against death. What is interesting about this is that he is telling this to his father, whom is on his deathbed. He tells his father that if these men can struggle against the forces of death, then his father too can struggle against death. Thomas then says, “Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray” (17). Here he signifies that even though he wants his father to fight against death, even he knows that one cannot escape death. He tells his father to do this one last thing for him just in case.

K. Moua Fictional Character Villanelle

With great power comes great responsibility
Advice from my late Uncle Ben
With this power comes infinite possibility

To the best of my ability
I fight the criminal acts of men
With great power comes great responsibility

Every day I face hostility
I try to center my mind in zen
With this power comes infinite possibility

I wonder about my life’s viability
This problem I face every now and then
With great power comes great responsibility

My social life lies in fragility
My love ones do not see the mask I’m in
With this power comes infinite possibility

As Peter Parker there are limits to my capability
As Spider Man my limits increases by ten
With great power comes great responsibility
With this power comes infinite possibility

I chose to write about Spider-Man because he is a character who struggles with the forces of good and evil. He also struggles with who he is and who he should be. Another reason that I wrote about him is because he was the first character that popped into my mind. After reading the poem about Batman, all I could think about were superheroes. Spider-Man just happened to be the first one that I thought of. I chose to use a villanelle because I wanted to emphasize the famous lines that everybody knows about. That line of course is the advice that Spider-Man got from his Uncle Ben.

The link to the picture is http://www.starstore.com/acatalog/spider-man-3-reflection.jpg

"The Tyger" K. Moua

In William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” Blake describes and questions the creation of the tiger. Blake describes the creation of the tiger to that of a smith. He uses the images of a hammer, chain, furnace, and anvil to describe the image of a smith in stanza four. In this stanza he questions why the smith would create a creature like the tiger. The image of the tiger is usually associated with the characteristics of a beast, ferocity, and fear. The image of the smith symbolizes the industrial process in which the tiger was created. This image in the poem contradicts Blake’s beliefs. Blake believed that all living creatures were holy and he was opposed to industrialization. This image though can be interpreted in a different way. Blake wrote this poem in a childish tone due to the rhythm and rhyme scheme of the poem. He also deliberately misspelled tiger as tyger. I think he did this to connect the tiger with the childish theme of his poem. In his illustration of the tiger, he portrayed the tiger as childlike instead of a strong beastly creature. His illustration showed the tiger’s face as clumsy and childish. When we think of a child we usually think of innocence. I think that the image of the smith creating the tiger means that the tiger is what we make of it. In the poem Blake also question why someone who created the lamb would also create a tiger. This question makes the tiger look like something evil who preys on the lamb. It also means that we are bias in our view of the tiger because the tiger is what we make of it. The tiger’s view of itself is not evil because it only preys on the lamb to survive. Blake connects the childish tone of the poem to the tiger to portray that the tiger is not evil but good because he thinks all living things are holy. In Blake’s final stanza he repeats the first stanza, but changes the word “could” to “dare.” This means that do we still dare to think of the tiger as something evil because we do not see through the same eyes as the tiger.

"In a Station of the Metro" Interpretation

Ezra Pound’s poem depicts the image of a crowded subway station in a metropolitan. The poem can have multiple meanings depending on the reader’s point of view. For example, the poem can be read and interpreted as pro-modernization or anti-modernization depending on whom the reader is. In the poem Pound describes the people in the crowds as “The apparition of these faces in the crowd.”(Page 1264, line 1) Apparitions are usually interpreted as something that is supernatural in appearance like a ghost. Pound then goes on and says, “Petals on a wet, black bough.” (Page 1264, line 2) The image of the flowers can and the image of the tree bough can represent life in nature, but Pound mentions that the flowers are on a black bough. The black bough in this case can represent death because tree boughs are usually brown in color. This image of the petals gives the image of life, but the image of the black bough gives the image of death. In this case the image of the subway station represents modernization, darkness, and being trapped. The subway station can represent being trapped because subways stations are usually underground. The image of being underground usually means that you are trapped. When all of the meanings are put together it means that you think there is life in modernization, but it leads to problems that have no way out because it grows on something that is already dead or dying. The poem though can also be interpreted as pro-modernization. Line one of Pounds poem can also be interpreted as the images of the crowd that pound saw. Line two can be seen as petals growing on a black bough, which is the image of a beautiful scenery. The poem can then be interpreted as a comparison of the scene in a crowded subway station to petals growing a black bough. This comparison would mean that modernization is beautiful like nature and would be pro-modernization.

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