Pat Parker’s poem is geared at “straight folks” who follow a pattern of hypocrisy in relation to “gays”. Throughout the poem, she highlights events where people who identify as straight will publicize personal information while also wishing that people who identify as gay “weren’t so blatant”. As we were reading the poem aloud in class, I was nodding my head and saying to myself “this is so true”. Most of my reactions stemmed from personal experiences of either hearing someone talk about their intimate life in public or discussing how people who identify as gay are too public with their relationship. These are the reasons this poem stuck out to me because I was shocked yet excited that Parker decided to call out this type of hypocrisy. Continue reading “For the Straight Folks”
Cookbook: Part 1
The process of keeping up to date is sometimes a difficult one for me, especially regarding the blog posts for this class. Every time I have attempted to publish a post I have felt distracted by the next class lecture and/or the reading for same. There are so many elements to this course that sometimes it makes my head hurt. When I saw Prince’s work “Peace of Mind” I liked the piece at first glance that I then decided to spend some of my “free time”
with it.
SAY HER NAME, KNOW HER STORY
The Black Lives Matter movement campaigns against violence and systemic racism towards Black people. Looking further into many cases between police violence and the Black community, two specific cases come to mind when looking at Ross Gay’s poem, “A Small Needful Fact.” I am particularly interested in how Garner’s actions are depicted in this poem. This then brings me to analyze my understanding of the poem and how I was only able to understand its complexity because I know Eric Garner’s story, and I also know Philando Castile’s, Trayvon Martin’s and Michael Brown’s but then realize I can only name one woman of color that experienced police violence, so in respect I will SAY HER NAME, Sandra Bland.
A Response to Analiese Vasciannie’s Theory on ‘Us’
I was very excited to read Analiese’s blog post as I recently saw ‘Us’ and made very similar connections in my mind. It is definitely a classic Jordan Peele move to have so many underlying meanings behind a film. I really thought it was interesting that he named the movie Us after the U.S, as I did not make that connection when seeing it. Going off of that, the movie seems to connect more when looking at it specifically through the lens of being American.
Continue reading “A Response to Analiese Vasciannie’s Theory on ‘Us’”
Visual Continuity in Prince’s Work
In the process of putting together our blog post “Untangling Sustainability,” the group I was a part of spent a good chunk of time finding a definition for sustainable/sustainability that wasn’t attached to a moral value. What we came to was “the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level,” which we were pointed towards by an online thesaurus that gave us synonyms for sustainable like continuous, continual, and unending. Briefly, we talked about how the concept of sustainability might visually manifest itself in Prince’s work, and while what we eventually wrote was a zoomed-out look at what his work might say or imply about sustainability in the world, I want to return in this post to what visual elements are literally sustained throughout Prince’s art.
The Underlying Implications of Consent and its Relation to Identity
As graduation is approaching much quicker than anticipated, I’ve been reflecting upon my impact on campus and how much of my heart and soul I have devoted to Geneseo. When I first committed to Geneseo, I was thinking short term; four years and then I graduate. As time went on, I slowly started to realize how incorrect I was. Yes I did sign up to be a student for four years, but at the same time, I also signed up to a lifetime contract with SUNY Geneseo as I will be considered “alumni” starting next month. My G-Number is permanent as my transcripts can be accessed whenever I choose to need them. The college as an institution has power over their students…Does that take away a student’s agency and/or their right to consent?
Continue reading “The Underlying Implications of Consent and its Relation to Identity”
The Epigraph.
Similarly to what Courtney stated in her post, I personally walked away from Friday’s class with more questions about the novel than answers. After I read her post, I wanted to dive into one of the “unnoticed” parts of the novel myself; the epigraph.
When I was flipping through the novel at the beginning of the semester I had noticed the epigraph but thought nothing of it. Now, as we are two-thirds of the way through the reading I find myself looking for answers to questions I never thought would arise. That is when I remembered the epigraph, “Nobody trusts anybody now, and we’re all very tired” -from John Carpenter’s The Thing.
As I thought about this I realized how many times in the section from Friday we see just how must distrust Ricky truly has for the people around him, and we learn some reasons as to why he could be this way. Personally I think it all started with the Washerwomen and his parents, “It sounds insane, I know, but we refused to accept that they’d pull the triggers. Until they did…I never doubted that our parents could do this to us” (214-215). Ricky realized in this moment that there was truly no one he could trust. The people he had been told to follow his entire life were now criminals who just “committed mass murder” (216), and his parents were the reason he was in this situation, and “then Rose’s gun touched Daphne’s temple…It’s true that Rose squeezed the trigger, but I sacrificed my sister to save myself” (216). If there had been anyone left that he would trust it would have been Daphne, but now even she was gone, and Ricky is truly left with noone.
The mistrust Ricky learned at a young age has affected how he is in the present day of the novel, “Who was I kidding? That lady was gone. How could I have believed that nonsense about calling the Dean? She wasn’t off to deal with Claude. She abandoned me” (220). I read this as Ricky realizing that when he has needed someone in the past they have done the complete opposite of what he needs, and leave, whether that be by death, or imprisonment. Now that Ricky is in the hospital unsure as to what is wrong, his mind has been conditioned to only think one way, that Adele Henry is going to leave him there, “We passed through the waiting room quickly, less than five seconds, and I made one last sweep for the Gray Lady, but she wasn’t to be seen. That’s when I felt the deepest fear. That I was truly alone, penniless, had no one to stand with me” (221). Ricky (and myself honestly) were shocked when Adele Henry announced, “Ricky Rice! I’m back!” (221). All Ricky has known is people leaving him and I had my doubts that Adele would stay and be with him.
There are still so many questions that I have about Ricky, the library, and this crazy adventure Adele and him are on. But maybe now that I have done some unpacking with the epigraph I begin to notice the unnoticeable.
Acknowledging the Acknowledgments
In our group discussion of Big Machine yesterday, we were all left grasping for straws. How do we make heroin, monsters called, “The Devils of the Mash,” male pregnancy, and a suicide cult fit together? We all have our theories, but we were left with the feeling that even after we finish the novel, we won’t have the answers that we want.
Simultaneous Participation
The first time that we, as a class, read sections within The America Play book by Suzan Lori Parks, I had a very hard time as an observer and a listener comprehending everything that was being read during the parts where sections were read out loud at the same time. Last Friday, April 12th, I volunteered to read out loud the left-hand side of the page. I volunteered to do this mainly to see if I was able to have a better understanding of the significance of this strategy when I was actually on the other side of it. Unfortunately, it left me even more confused than before. I have been thinking about this a lot and I am still having a lot of trouble understanding the significance of reading a text simultaneously.
The Theatre-Going Experience
In my previous blog post I wrote about making connections across the different classes I am taking. I had another one of those lightbulb moments as we were talking about the theatre and audience’s expectations. I’m currently taking Professor Blood’s Western Drama class in which we read and analyze plays and critical pieces on the theatre. In that class we are just wrapping up a unit on the avant-garde. In Elements of Style Suzan-Lori Parks describes artists of this time by saying, “most playwrights who consider themselves avant-garde spend a lot of time badmouthing the more traditional forms” (8). I find this statement to be accurate after having read Antonin Artaud’s manifesto, ”Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto”, specifically in regard to his thoughts on how an audience should consume a performance. Continue reading “The Theatre-Going Experience”