Parks21's Blog

4/21

parks21 — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:46:00 +0000

The final due date for project three is steadily approaching. I should be making my last trip to the archives tomorrow if everything goes smoothly. If I am able to narrow down the documents we already have and maybe find one more good one, then I will not have to go back. Unfortunately, I will probably be at Emory for a long time since there are so many documents to look through. I will most likely skim through all of the unpublished manuscripts to hopefully find the last document we need and then use the documents that we already found about Gibreel and his transformation into an angel as another document.

We are planning on using a large printer that I have at my house, instead of the printer in the library because that sounds like it could be a hassel to figure out a time to do it. Luckily, my mom owns a poster printer for work, so we will be able to easily have it printed in minutes there. We have yet to begin to actually design our poster, but I have some ideas that might work well. We will obviously have our three documents on the poster, but I was thinking that including a picture of an angel, maybe Michael Angelo’s angel from the Sistine Chapel, would work well with our theme. The poster needs to affectively convey the difference between Rushdie’s depiction of an angel and the typical picture of an angel.

Presenting our rough drafts in class should definitely help out with finalizing the project. It will be nice to get to hear others’ opinions on our project before we actual have to present, so we can tweak anything that does not look good. Even doing the mini-presentation of just our thesis and the documents we have found was helpful.

Blog 4/16

parks21 — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:43:02 +0000

Our group’s project is finally starting to come together a little bit. We think we decided on a specific thesis, which assumes that Gibreel is actually an angel and not just another crazy person believing he is a prophet or angel. Our project will compare Salman Rushdie’s version of an angel with the typical view of an angel. Normally, when people think of angels, they think of perfect beings that always know what to do and do God’s work on earth. In The Satanic Verses, when Gibreel transforms into an angel after falling from an airplane, he does not magically take on all these perfect qualities. He still is unsure of what to do most of the time and does not even lift a finger to help Saladin when immigration comes to get him.

Gibreel also rarely has control over his actions; it is usually other people that force him to do things. For instance, he stays to listen to all of Rosa Diamond’s stories not because he wants to, but because she needs him to and he can not leave. Also, when Gibreel meets with the prophet, Mahound, he gives him bad advice about accepting the other three gods as angels; he later changes his mind and Mahound interprets his original advice as the devil’s work, when actually Gibreel just made a mistake. The angels in the novel are apparently similar to those in Milton’s Paradise Lost because they do not have free will like humans. We have only just begun to do the research, but it is difficult because there is so much to look through. The most useful things in the archive so far have been the unpublished manuscripts because they present slightly different descriptions and views of the angel, Gibreel, and his actions.

4/7

parks21 — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 21:19:01 +0000

Project 3 seems like it will definitely be the hardest of the projects we have done thus far because it is so in depth and requires a massive amount of research. Luckily, I have really enjoyed the book so far, so I have not found it difficult to read, however, it is slightly difficult to understand mainly because of the characters’ names and the style of writing. The characters’ names are difficult to follow because some characters have the same name and others go by multiple different names. The style of writing is unique because it does not follow typical English grammar or norms; Rushdie often omits commas or changes sentence structure. Once you figure out his style of writing, it is much easier to follow.

The most intensive part of this project will be doing the research at the archives because there is so much to go through. My group’s topic is angels, which should not be too difficult of a topic considering the majority of the book deals with angels and one of the main characters even becomes an angel. Although I have not started to actually do the research, I am confident that there will be plenty of material in the archives dealing with angels; Rushdie must have done extensive research on every part of his book, including angels, before he wrote it, so there will be a lot to read. One difficult part might be deciding which articles to actually use because there will most likely be more than 3 useful articles in the entire archive. I do not think putting the poster together will be particularly hard because I have had a lot of experience with poster projects and feel fairly comfortable creating them on a computer.

Blog 4/2

parks21 — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:49:03 +0000

The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie, is an interesting piece of literature, however, it is not the easiest book to read. I was amazed to hear that the book caused so much controversy, to the point of a fatwa being issued. Those are serious consequences just for writing a book. Because I am only in the first part of the book, I have not quite gotten to the parts that are considered the most offensive or controversial, but even once I have finished the book, I still doubt that I will truly see what the big deal is. It will be difficult for me to understand the most offensive parts because I have a very limited knowledge of Islam and therefore, will not share the same emotions as a Muslim might.

The book thus far is a pretty decent read, however. It is a very unique blend of old traditions and stories, such as those from the Koran, and modern life with Bollywood actors and rich Indians. Rushdie takes great care to fully develop every aspect of a character’s personality, such as with Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha; for instance, he goes into depth to describe Farishta’s upbringing from a poor worker to the most wealthy and loved star in India. This detail allows the reader to get a complete view of the character before that character actually does anything. With Farishta, you already know that he got a serious illness and lost his faith in God at one point in his life; this makes his decent from the plane and miraculous saving even more interesting.

Blog 4

parks21 — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:57:36 +0000

Disgrace, by Coetzee, is a slightly depressing novel, but it is interesting and not overly difficult to read. Disgrace is not a book I would ever choose to read on my own, but as far as a book for school goes, it is fairly entertaining. The reason I would not read this book on my own is because for some reason, I always dislike books when I hate the main character and David Lurie is such a self-centered and annoying person. He treats women awfully and generally does not care about other people; he reminds me of someone having a midlife crisis in a way because it is almost as if he is trying to prove his youth by sleeping with so many different women.

Another reason that I would typically not pick this book to read on my own is because unless the book I am reading is absolutely amazing or extremely interesting, I dislike books with depressing endings or when all the main characters get hurt. It reminds me of Candide in a certain sense just because of the rape and poor treatment of women, although other than that the books are totally different. Candide is actually an example of a book in which bad things happen to all of the main characters, even good ones, but I actually somewhat enjoyed the book. It was slightly different though because many of the characters were so comical.

I accidently thought our class was supposed to have read all of Candide by today, so I ended up finishing the book. I am actually glad that I made myself finish it though because now I am ahead of the homework schedule and will not have to do anything one night. It is also nice because I have my first calculus test tomorrow and it will prevent me from being overly stressed out.

Blog 3

parks21 — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:47:59 +0000

“Lara,” by Lord Byron, is an interesting, yet difficult piece of poetry to understand, especially considering poetry has never been one of my strong points. The language is more difficult to follow than a normal story because the diction is not plain, modern English. I could not understand a word of the poem the first time I read it; I had to reread it multiple times in order to figure out even a little bit of what was said. Once you can actually get past the language, the story is fairly interesting.

I was not expecting the twist at the end with Kaled being a woman. There was obviously something slightly weird about Lara’s page at the beginning of the poem, but I did not expect her to be Lara’s lover. The first incident that made me suspicious of the page was the fact that she was the same class as Lara; your average page is most likely going to be of a lower status than the page’s master. If I had read more carefully or had been able to understand the text slightly better, I probably could have figured out that the page was not simply a page.

The page represented a lot in this piece; she illustrated the orientalism, as well as the race and gender issues that might have dominated this time period. The woman cannot reveal that her and Lara are lovers because she is foreign. She must hide her identity from the gossiping public. Another interesting aspect of the poem is how much Lara’s journey affects him. While the reader does not actually get to see how Lara is before his journey, it is implied that he changes due to narration and by how he decides to defend the serfs, instead of the class he belongs to.

Blog2

parks21 — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:56:00 +0000

The video about using GoogleMaps as a writing tool is very interesting. I have never considered using something as visual as a map to create a piece for literature. The video does a good job of showing some of the various capabilities of using the MyMaps section of GoogleMaps, which most people, including myself, have never heard of. Using GoogleMaps to create a project for English could be a fascinating and new way to convey a thesis and idea; the project certainly is original and is something most students have probably never done before, so the projects should all be fairly diverse and creative.

The maps go well with what my literature class worked on last semester, which was utilizing various mediums to illustrate our ideas. For instance, I created an audio project that sounded like an NPR new report. It is a unique approach for a literature and English class to use considering they normally focus on reading and writing. As far as English projects go, the map project could actually be a fairly entertaining and will undoubtedly help the class see how transnational migration affects the characters in the books we read.

Also, having YouTube clips will add more variety to the project and allow viewers to see more than just words on a map. The clips can also bring credibility because they might be of a professional discussing something related to the topic. Another pro of the map idea is that the viewers can see an argument in less of a linear fashion, as it is with essay papers. The individual dots on the map show ideas that work alone and with the whole paper; it seems like they function like paragraphs do in a paper.

Hello world!

parks21 — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:50:06 +0000

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