This week, you will be working on your response project to The Great Gatsby. For you blog post, you may write about anything that you want, as long as it is appropriate for your audience and is substantive enough to begin a discussion.
Recently I've been thinking about what my favorite book we've read this year is. I really enjoyed The Alchemist for its imagery and "mythology," as well as the explanations of the world it was set in. Coelho did an amazing job integrating supernatural phenomenons into everyday life in a way that made these phenomenons seem normal. But The Alchemist wasn't my favorite. Maus was one of those books that you don't want to read but you feel like you need to read it. Generally books concerning the Nazis are unpleasant, to say the least. But it was striking, how accurate the animal portrayals of different races are in the book, as well as how vivid the images were. You see one thing and it stays like a flash of light in the front of your mind for the next thirty pages. Maus wasn't my favorite either. I probably enjoyed the Odyssey most, since it was a more in depth discussion of the mythology I spent most of my childhood obsessed with. The writing and the translation were superb, and it amazes me how great of a job the translator did. The most amazing thing about this book was that I could relate with these characters created by some old dude thousands of years ago. The Great Gatsby was good, but there was too much information packed into too few pages. The story went too fast, but it certainly did a good job of explaining itself.
Sunday, March 8, 2015
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Gatsby against IHSS/Science
Comment on any connections that you were able to make between The Great Gatsby and the topics that you are exploring in IHSS and Science. How did our outings and/or the seminar contribute to your ability to make these connections.
One of the most prominent connections I can make between Gatsby and our current topic in IHSS is the way the lower classes live. In Gatsby, the lower class live in the valley of ashes. Fitzgerald makes this out to be that these people are living, eating, and breathing these ashes (figuratively, of course). They live in poverty, doing the higher echelons of society's dirty work day after day. The migrant workers that we've learned about in IHSS do much the same thing, living dirt-poor and doing the things on the farm that are too tedious or too dangerous for the higher-ups to complete. Our outings to the food marts in less-fortunate parts of town contributed to my ability to make these connections by showing me how things planted and harvested by the poor didn't even make it to the poor food marts. That was striking to me, how all-encompassing our food intake is that the poor don't even get any. It really makes me want to do anything I can to fix this.
One of the most prominent connections I can make between Gatsby and our current topic in IHSS is the way the lower classes live. In Gatsby, the lower class live in the valley of ashes. Fitzgerald makes this out to be that these people are living, eating, and breathing these ashes (figuratively, of course). They live in poverty, doing the higher echelons of society's dirty work day after day. The migrant workers that we've learned about in IHSS do much the same thing, living dirt-poor and doing the things on the farm that are too tedious or too dangerous for the higher-ups to complete. Our outings to the food marts in less-fortunate parts of town contributed to my ability to make these connections by showing me how things planted and harvested by the poor didn't even make it to the poor food marts. That was striking to me, how all-encompassing our food intake is that the poor don't even get any. It really makes me want to do anything I can to fix this.
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