City Eclouge part 2 Sit In What City We're city in

 

“Sit in What City We’re In” takes on that famous form of civil rights protest that took place at lunch counters in numerous U.S. cities, perhaps most famously in Greensboro and Nashville. Roberson’s interest in interdependence is reflected in his description of the mirrors that surrounded the counters and depicted the segregation-era drama to its participants in “infinite regressions”:
locked together in the mirror’s
march from deep caves of long alike march back
into the necessary together
living we are
reflected in the face to face we are
a nation facing ourselves our back turned
on ourselves

City Eclouge part 1

I do not think it would be going too far to call City Eclogue Ed Roberson’s masterpiece. This collection, which reads effectively as a long poem, despite its show of individually titled poems, synthesizes and perfects the poetics Roberson has been working with since he began publishing in 1970. His control of language—or his ability to reveal to us the telling elusiveness of language—has never been stronger, though he draws upon syntactic and metaphoric practices that typify his oeuvre. These poems are lyrical, even in their disjunctive sentences; intimately conversational, even in their determined orientation toward the page. He gives us the opportunity to see the cities that have formed his personal landscape through widening lenses that clarify their beauty and their ugliness, lenses that aren’t so much new as newly polished with the soft, insistent cloth of Roberson’s political and aesthetic sensibilities. City Eclogue is actually pretty incredible. Ed Roberson is what happens when multiculturalism meets avante-garde. He has this incredible way of getting the most out of each word, using both its figurative and literal meaning in service of the poem, and he multiplies possibilities of meaning without taking away from the poem's purpose. If all opposites in poetry (highbrow vs. lowbrow, accessibility vs. "experimental") could find a perfect balance together, then they've done so in this book. At first I was completely lost at first reading City Eclogue. But after rereading certain parts multiple times over. It all began to smoothly fall into place.

  

Lenses Annie Dillard anaylisis

To me, Annie Dillard addresses the same principle of total apocalypses and the end of the world, yet her tone and mood throughout the essay were completely debatable., in "Lenses", Dillard narrates how she used to enjoy "setting up" several "apocalypses" with the living creatures she retrieves from a pond . She clearly states that she would stage “hundreds” “ends-of-the-world” and observe “enthralled” as the organisms start roasting (106). This completely defeats the purpose of her earlier essay, due to the fact that it seems that she is in favor of the world’s destruction. She actually enjoys the mass murder of many creatures that are defenseless to humans. Why would she change her mind all of a sudden? Is she trying to provide us with both sides of the argument? This may be a sort of allegory for the effect of science: how too much scientific investigation can destroy what you are investigating". I really liked your statement here; in some it supports my opinion on the essay. For instance, if it is an allegory of how too much science may destroy the investigation, we could compare it to how too much science may deteriorate our planet (I have never been so environmentalist before). The constant growth of human technologies and experiments could be industrializing the Earth, replacing its nature with machines, destroying the wild life we do experiments on. A possible analogy could be how scientists study the rainforests around the globe, yet the jet fuel they use to travel is slowly ravaging the air and damaging their source of investigation. It actually seems as if Dillard plays the image of scientists and humans who are destroying the natural beauty on our planet while being fascinated by the sight of it . She casts the image that those who harm the Earth’s nature do it for the fun of it. However, I still can’t fit the swans into my analysis.

Maps to anywhere part 2 House of the future

The longest entry and my particular favorite is entitled "The House of the Future". It is roughly thirty pages long and it is beautifully written in such an unassuming way. It gets its title from the Disneyland exhibit that the 12-year-old Bernard adores. He praises the "durability of plastic" while at home his older brother grows paler and thinner. The memoir ends after the brother's funeral, with a brief meditation on another house of the future--death. Cooper describes a futuristic modular house made entirely of plastic. He compares the staged solitude of the model home with that of his actual home, which was more chaotic and less welcoming, due in part to his older brother’s struggle with leukemia and his father’s infidelities. Cooper frames his family’s losses around the fortified structure of a home that will never break down, never deteriorate and never need repair. The story, subtitled "a reminiscence," conveys in a remarkable way the hopes and fears, the habits and eccentricities of this ordinary yet outlandish family. The belief in the clarity of architecture which sustained the younger brother through the year of his older brother's dying, collapses in the end, leaving him to enter a new house, a new ambiguous space, for making sense of his loss.

Maps to anywhere part 1

Upon first viewing, the thirty something essays that are displayed in Bernard Cooper’s Maps to Anywhere seem to lack a common connecting narrative. Upon closer inspection, the unifying factor of these works becomes much more evident. Personally, what I admire most about Cooper’s work is how adept he is at noticing things that others might miss, and then capturing them in words that are both simple yet stunning. The portraits that Copper presents are thoughtful, tender, and thought provoking  Maps to Anywhere is a unique pleasure. Cooper's curiosity is broad ranging and contagious, his intelligence refreshing, his writing fine and revealing in this book's diverse topography.This book, comprised of vignettes or episodes was an absolute pleasure to read. I imagine I will revisit it again, particularly for the precision of language. I particularly enjoyed the sections where the author braided his thoughts about art and architecture through his impressions of childhood. I found Cooper's poetic style to be really inspiring to me. This probably, mostly, because it seems a lot like my own, although more honed; the way he deals with subjects, de-familiarizing them, is something I would like to incorporate into my own voice.          

fiction packet 3

For the most part, the stories presented in fiction packet 3 are independent, barring excerpts from “The Sing Fish”, and largely riddled with obscure, symbolic messages on a variety of different topics. They mostly follow a concretely direct narrative that can be followed with little anxiety. The reading itself was very relaxing.

"The Sing Fish,"a inquisitive story of brothers, and mud, fish. The narrative is straightforward flavored with ample peculiar aspects to them but also of mystery and silent indistinctness, which really pronounces the authors creativity and imagination. Luckily the context isnt tortuous, seemingly incomplete sentences jumbled together, yet at the same time challenges the reader to look behind the content.

Juice Response part 2

  Gladman delightfully skewers the dialogue through which our underlying principles manifest themselves. What we are given fulfills us with the desolation of seeing through the cracks in our preexisting arrangements, and into a topic's unknown and strangeness. Where usual narratives motifs of the Neo-Realism tradition would integrate these gaps and attempt to make aware any gaps in logic, Gladman accepts the crevasses within her narrators to be exposed.

“The juice on my mind was no longer 
juice. There was an absence there, but one so constant it 
became familiar. I did not want to drink it. “
                                   (From "Proportion Surviving,")

“In the first years of my life, everything I ate was mush. Today I will tolerate only the toughest of green vegetables and date people who will always forget this. When I had that remarkable glass of apple juice, I had no idea that one day I simply would not be able to find it. The city gets rid of its apples. People find themselves inventing fruit.”

                                   (From “Proportion Surviving”)