Annemily's Blog

Addie has all the characteristics of an excessively terrible person. She likes beating children: “I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them” (170).   She cheated on her husband. She even hates spring (every sane person’s favorite season and you can fight me on that); she goes down to a stream after school “especially in the early spring, for it was the worst then” (169). And yet I found her one of the most sympathetic characters in the book? So how could such a terrible person be sympathetic? Well for one thing, a lot of the terrible things she does have some sort of justification. Addie hates her job and the children she has to work with but as a single woman without any family to support her, she has to work and she wouldn’t really have any options besides teaching. There’s no excuse for beating kids but at least it doesn’t just bring her joy because she’s a sadist, it brings her joy because she is able to hurt the peop...

A lot of the things I’m still struggling to understand in the Odyssey are rooted in things I don’t understand about society in Odysseus’s Greece and especially about class in the Odyssey. So I did a bit of historical research to see if it could help me understand what Odysseus is dealing with. First off – I understand that Greece was comprised of many small kingdoms ruled independently (kingdoms might not be the correct word, but you get the idea) and there was a lot of cultural variety and not everyone necessarily fit into a few neat class categories. I also understand that the Odyssey is set in a variety of locations and that it might have been written over an extended period of time. Nevertheless, I think some vague generalizations about ancient Greek culture might be useful. Basically, the hierarchy in Ancient Greek society had male citizens at the top (including aristocrats with land, poorer farmers, and a middle class including artisans and traders), t...

We’ve discussed a lot to what extent we think Odysseus is a reliable narrator. The main piece of evidence for his reliability is that he includes details about the way he treated his crew that reflect badly on him. Today in class I suggested that he could include these details to make lies seem more realistic and someone suggested that Odysseus probably just truly feels bad about his men’s deaths. But that started me thinking about the weird dynamic of Odysseus’s relationship with his crew so I looked back in the book to see how he talks about his men and their deaths. I presented on book eleven, so I immediately thought of Elpenor. Elpenor certainly seems important to Odysseus since Odysseus mentions him three times: when he first died, when he’s in the underworld, and when he’s actually buried. Odysseus’s attention to Elpenor both in burying him with all the proper rituals and in describing his death in detail in his story shows that Odysseus has some level of affection for him...

I first read The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett when I was eleven because the librarian on duty in the teen room at CPL recommended it. The novel is set on the Discworld, which flies through space on the back of four giant elephants who in turn stand on the back of the great turtle A’Tuin. Near the center of the Discworld is the Chalk, an area loosely based on a rural part of England (Wiltshire if you’re interested, which is southwest of Oxford). Tiffany Aching lives on the Chalk. She is nine years old. She has six older sisters and a two-year-old brother named Wentworth, who she often gets stuck babysitting. Her family are farmers and raise sheep and have farmed and raised sheep for as long as anyone can remember. Tiffany has other plans: “she’d decided only last week that she wanted to be a witch when she grew up.” Funnily enough, it’s exactly at that moment that Tiffany has her first interaction with magic – a monster jumps out of a stream and tries to steal her younger ...

All future posts are for Hero's Journey.

When we started Sorry to Bother you on Monday and the scene with Detroit’s performance started playing, I was really confused. I missed class on Thursday, so I had no idea what had happened in the last 45 minutes and I didn’t understand why people were throwing blood-filled water balloons at Detroit. I watched the rest of the movie today so I understand the context of the plot of the movie but I still have a lot of questions. Detroit quotes lines from The Last Dragon , which she describes as a “timeless Motown movie.” According to Wikipedia “the film was a critical disappointment but a financial success, and is considered a cult classic.” It’s about a black man who aims to become a great martial artist. In the scene Detroit quotes, a singer leaves her boyfriend because he’s kidnapped someone to help her career and she doesn’t want anybody to get hurt because of her. The theme of breaking up nicely reflects the state of Cassius’s and Detroit’s relationsh...

Even though Pyscho Loco had been planning it, I was still surprised by Gunnar’s marriage. One of the things that especially confused me was why Gunner’s mom was excited about it and totally on board. I realized that I don’t really understand her relationship with Gunnar that well, so I decided to review what we know so far in this post. In the first few pages of the novel we learn a lot about Gunner’s mother. She’s raised her kids alone after “a vicious custody battle that left the porcelain shrapnel of supper-dish grenades embedded in my father’s neck” (5-6). She works at a clinic that tests people for STIs for free. She’s mother is “a Brooklyn orphan who had never seen her parent or her birth certificate” (6). She holds the world record for the loudest swallow and she set it on the David Letterman show. She’s the one who tells Gunner all about his father’s family history, but she doesn’t tell him about the women in his father’s family even though she knows abou...