Love? Religion? WHY???

I am not really sure what exactly to take away from this story.  On one hand I could take it face value and just realize that it is a story about two Indian people that got married, and the wife is overpowering.  Twinkle seemed to find all of these items, Christian memorabilia, and kept on displaying them.  If she is Hindu then she should not be having anything to do with that stuff.  I definitely would stay away from anything that is not Christian.  It is as if taking all respect for her religion and throwing it out the window. 

As for Sanjeev, and the respect that he should have required from twinkle, he did whatever twinkle told him to do.  Sure she didn’t outright tell him what to do, but she manipulated him to do what she wanted him to do.  From the first time that she found the small figurine next to the malt vinegar, to the time that she found the Virgin Mary outdoors statue, and then finally the end when he walked down stairs with the Jesus bust; he did her bidding.  If I were in his shoes I would have talked about it with her and got her to realize what she was doing and how it was sacrilegious. 

If I were to look at the story and try to take something out of it, I do not know that I would.   I usually have trouble looking for underlining tones, but I did not see anything.  It is a story about a marriage gone wrong, and a marriage where the husband did not love his wife truly and a wife that did not submit to her husband.  This story, like the others about love, was negative and gave a bad view on love.  Not all love and marriage is bad.  I have but one question to ask.  When will we read something that truly does show love? All that I get is a bad view of love. Too much of this could lead to depression I feel like.

Darkness and Crazyness...

Darkness, Questions, Poetry, and Spiritual Hope

I must say, it is a very well written essay Professor Corrigan.  The world is full of darkness; and when I say full I mean that in my world, especially now, it is very easy to feel like there is no way out.  I adapted the quote: “Where is God when the world is falling to pieces?” and turned it into “Where is God when MY world is falling to pieces? So many people think about how bad the world has gotten.  And, yes the world has gotten very dark and terrible, but we also need to think about the individual people in the world.  Day in and day out there are so many people that feel down and depressed, and this type of essay, the essay that brings sadness and darkness to account is just what is needed. As of late the chapel at SEU has been, well, terrible in the sense that all the chapel is about, is the Southeastern Singers and some pastor that preaches some “feel good message” or a “message of hope.”  They do not bring up the main problems; they sugarcoat Christianity and don’t mention what to do or how to combat depression and sadness. I like the ending of this essay, “I will never leave you.”

Reading for Transformation through the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Ok, I am going to just come out and say it. I DO NOT LIKE THIS ESSAY.  Lectio Divina, which is translated as “sacred reading” is used to read the Bible and meditate on it.  Last I checked, Gerard Manley Hopkins did not write the Bible and his work is not inspired.  I am not saying it is wrong to meditate on a poem or essay that has some universal theme, but I am however saying that if it is not a Holy Bible then one should not treat it as such.  To “Sacredly” read something that is not “Sacred” is sacrilegious, and I have a huge problem with that. The Bible is the Bible and Gerard Manly Hopkins is Gerard Manly Hopkins.  Gerard is not God. Enough said.

Love... What is Love?

Raymond Carver seemed very interesting.  He did not write very much and was not a published writer until later in life.  The alcohol content and even just the mere mention of alcohol surprised me.  I went to a small private school where the only literature we read truly was just some boring dry poems and short stories written old boring Christians.  I never realized that true literature would be more realistic.  The most alcoholic content that I ever read about was all the mead from the story of Beowulf.  As for the cursing; it too was a surprise to me, but it was not overbearing.  I feel as though it fit into the story well. I noticed that the more gin that was flowing the worse their language got.

Love is not always great and wonderful. TV portrays love as something perfect and wonderful, when in all reality it can be very painful.  There are so many different types of love and this story takes one form of love, a love between a married couple and expands it to multiple different views.  The “love” that Terri talks about is not real love in my opinion.  She can say whatever she wants but how can someone say that they love the other person when they beat them.  That is abuse not love and it is very disturbing that someone could call that love and not see it for what it truly is.  The mature love that was spoken about with the couple that had moved on from other marriages but still loved the first spouse was perplexing to be honest.  Aside from being forced to divorce I do not understand why a couple would separate if they love each other.  It is interesting that both love their first spouse more than their current love.  If not for love, why get married?  The other type of love; the type of love with the other couple having been divorced already but finding each other and truly loving each other more than anything if what I feel is the best example about love.  True, both couples were hurt in their first marriage but two of the people moved on and were able to find a partner that they truly do love. 

Do we truly understand love? Is my opinion of love different than your opinion of love? Why is it, that everyone looks for love, but so many get hurt by it in the process? All intriguing questions and questions that I do not know the answer to. Maybe the second question is the meaning of the story.

Reading... Does it really matter how you read???

Reading.  I can’t say that I have ever paid very much attention to “How I read” or “What I did to read attentively.”  I never annotated the “text,” what I was reading.  To be honest, I never had any desire to read anything due to the fact that all the works that we were forced to read in High School and Middle School were all just pointless stories that we would get shoved into our mind by a crazy English teacher who was OBSESSED with reading and books.  I would read just enough to get a good grade if there was a quiz the next day, although most of the time I would not even read that much.  The thought of “active reading” is very intriguing.  I can definitely see how reading and then annotating would help ingrain what you read about further into your brain.  One thing for sure that I do realize in literature is the fact that once you start reading one thing, you will not understand the full meaning until you have a working knowledge of many other forms of literature.  It seems as though writers love to “cross reference” each other and by doing so it seems as though a graduate level understanding of reading is required to understand even the most basic of prose.  As far as the statement, “What you get out of what you read is determined by how you read,” goes; I have always read, except on occasion a children’s book, because I was forced to.  I have always struggled with reading.  I have never read to “gain some great understanding” or to “answer life’s great questions.” As a result of that, I really have not got anything out of it.  I guess that the statement is true.  I suppose if I tried to enjoy reading more or had something better to read I would be in a different position. But that is not the case and I will always respect my literature teachers for doing something that I have never seen a point in and doing something that they truly do enjoy. There is something to be said and I am glad that there are literature teachers that do what they love doing aside from the negativity from students that are like me and are so negative about reading.

Jeffrey Koratich

My earliest memories of childhood literature would probably be the children book Goodnight Moon.  My mother would read it to me many times along the course of my childhood.  My sister remembers some riddles and rhymes from when she was a young child, but I do not remember them as well as her.  I was in Target a month ago with Alexis and I saw the book, Goodnight Moon.  It brought back so many memories.
My most recent memories of literature would probably that of my high school.  My English/Literature teacher, miss Buchanan, and I would get into multiple, shall we say, "discussions" about the good and bad of Literature.  She happened to read hundreds of books a year; while, I read zero books a year.  The reason why I did not like reading was not that I did not know how but the fact that I had no interest in books and reading, the only book that I recently have enjoyed reading was the book of Judges in the Bible.  Aside from that book, I really struggle to read.

The most significant literary work that I have read recently would probably be that of the assortment of Shakespeare that we were required to read in class, each year in high school we were required to read on, Macbeth was probably my favorite.  My initial thoughts on the essay that we were required to read about the class, were that of surprise.  I have never had a teacher write an essay about the class and all the policies therein.  I found it to be interesting.  The only thing that I wonder about is the grading scale.  I do not understand how a B- is the base grade.  I understand that I need to earn my grades, but just how much extra work do I need to do in order to get an "A."