When I was writing this post, I was trying to come up with some universal key motives that authors have for writing a story.  I suppose I wanted to say that authors write a story to relay a message, specifically in a certain environment that they construct in their minds.  (If anyone thinks that this is not the case, I'm curious to debate whether or not that is true).  So it is the author's job to use words and context in order to give the reader an essence of the story and the environment.  Still, there is a level of uncertainty that is unavoidable - whether this is the author's intent or not.  In class we debated which type of writing allowed more freedom of interpretation - comics or the traditional novel.  The discussion seemed to rely on the glories of being able to have that freedom as a reader as opposed to the narrow view of a story.  On the board, I wrote that when comics are pushed to their limits, they turn into movies.  Movies are a certain visual interpretation of a story, certainly with a narrow view of what the characters look like and how they react to certain events throughout the story.  Often, readers are disappointed by movie interpretations of their favorite books because it is not what they had pictured, the movie was forced to leave out important events, or the movie altered the storyline.  We, as readers, cannot accept the alternate story when film directors change the plot.

This week I decided to write my post on music as a means of developing literacy because I will be bringing my Ukulele to Ghana.  I am still unsure of how to use my instrument as an educational tool.  I want to use it to teach but I still have not completely figured it out.  At the very least I can use it as a tool to show how fun and easy learning an instrument can be.  I would like to use my ukulele to help improve literacy through song but I would also be happy if my ukulele can be music education on its own.  I think it is incredibly important for kids to learn instruments and I wish that I had started at a younger age.   That being said, I wish I had more time and knowledge to use my instrument as a teaching tool.  There are so many ways that music can be beneficial in teaching languages.  First of all, almost everyone loves music, there is so much appeal in everything that has a tune.  Little kids are always humming and trying to whistle.  They view it as a fun thing instead of an educational thing.  I remember when I was little, I always liked it when people sang to me.  I liked it when my teachers sang my class songs, I also liked learning educational songs (such as songs about the names of 50 states), and my parents even sing to me before I went to bed.  When I was little I had so many different people singing so many different songs that I became really interested in learning how to do more with them and actually learn an instr

While "Lifting Bellies" was undoubtedly more a stream of consciousness text than the prose we are given in The Book of Salt, I think that there are places in The Book of Salt that seem like they could be imitating a stream of consciousness form. We are mostly given the story in first person, but at other points, there is a direct switch that Binh makes.

"Quinces are ripe, GertrudeStein, when there are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. They are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. But even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate--unless, GertrudeStein, until they are simmered, coddled for hours above a low, steady flame....a color you can taste...love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched."

The prose here is so aware of taste and scent and vision, and seems to pave the way for a conversation about how sexuality can be described -- and maybe best so-- when using terms of the five senses (This passage brought to mind Goblin Market in regards to the sense of taste/fruits). I think that it is interesting the way in which Truong has presented the main character -- we get to see what he is really thinking in a way that is a little disjointed sometimes.

This past week, we had two speakers come to class to speak about two vastly different topics: teaching reading and writing to students and women's agency through microfinance in Zimbabwe. These lectures marked a shift from the conceptual framework we were exploring during the first section of the class to more contextualized information in the second half. The connections between the two speakers were not necessary explicit which encouraged me to really expand my thinking and see how the many different concepts and material we have explored have been related.

                A big connection I saw between the two lectures was the theme of empowerment and what it means to be educated. Reading gave power and agency to the children in Anna’s class while the women selling their products in Zimbabwe gave them power and agency. I appreciated that Mary’s presentation portrayed literacy and empowerment outside of an educational context since most of what we have been focusing on is literacy in an academic setting.

I am wondering how the rest of the semester is going to look for our class since we have presentations up until spring break. I am curious to see how we will be connecting our trip to Ghana to the different placements to new materials and speakers in class.

Image above: Persepolis, capital of the Arachaemenid kings of Persia, now located in the province of Fars in southwestern Iran.

I have come to realize that I enjoy reading comics. I am more of a visual person and tend to be a slow reader, but what I found to be most intriguing about reading comics is the suspense in the gutter:  the space in between the frames that calls for your boundless imagination to be filled. As Scott McCloud describes it in Understanding Comics, “human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea” (66). The gutter allows for an imaginative, individualized experience as one sways their eyes from one frame to the next, connecting the trails of an unfinished story in their own mind.

In Chapter One of Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud writes of his youthful assumptions about comics; he "knew exactly what comics were.  Comics were those bright, colorful magazines filled with bad art, stupid stories and guys in tights.  [He] read real books, naturally" (pages 1-2, emphasis omitted).  This genre snobbery -- the idea of "real books" and other, lesser forms of reading material struck me, and it came to mind during part of our discussion in class on Tuesday.

Romance novels popped up in this discussion when Anne mentioned Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot and whether, in fact, this literary genre/storyline is still relevant today.  I said that I think it is; after all, romance novels are one of the best-selling genres out there.  Anne agreed that romance feeds a certain emotional requisite for some people.  A few minutes later, she mentioned that romance novels may "fulfill emotional needs for someone who has just been divorced or can't find a partner."

Aha!  I thought, writing it down in my notes.  That's a stereotype.  (And, I should add, one very widely-held, though untrue.)

So at Plenary today I bought myself a hand-made Pikachu hat.  Pikachu got me thinking about Pokemon which led me to a pretty big realization.  I don't know where Pokemon originated.  There's the TV show, but before that their were the video games.  There was also the card game, and there are a number of comics that explore the same world.  However, without actually typing it into google I couldn't tell you which came first.

This got me thinking about a lot of American Comics.  Primarily superhero ones.  I love comics, but I never really read a lot of American ones; and yet I can tell you who Superman and Batman and Spiderman all are, and I could pick them out of a crowd.  If I've never read any of their comics, how come I know them all so well?

Thinking back to Maria's demonstration of how to visually make a text more feminist, I wonder how this idea of recuperating a text might apply to "Born in Brothels" and documentary film in general. In class, we discussed how the editing of the film privileged some students over the others while also promoting a certain narrative. How might the film have been made in a more democratic way? Given that editing is a necessary part of filmmaking, is a fuller representation even possible? To all the future filmmakers/those who have a background in film, have there been/are there filmmakers who try to do this? What are their perspectives/techniques? What is the critical film theory regarding objectivity, especially in documentary-making?

I just wanted to highlight my newfound respect for comics as a result of Satrapi's Persepolis. I was fully engrossed in the narrative and I found Satrapi's story extremely compelling. I read the entire thing from cover to cover in one sitting. But I can't help wonder why this was so different from my experience with Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics.

I believe that this was because McCloud, though extremely casual and "chatty", writes non-fiction. Satrapi, on the other hand, is telling a story. This made me realize that the genre of the "comic" or "graphic narrative" is a lot more complex that we imagine. What interests me, however, is why the "comic" genre is separate from other genres.

Think about what we define as "genre" in literature. There's "drama", "thriller", "romance" etc. They're characterized by their content, not by the way they are layed out on the page. So why are we creating this label of "comic" when really, the comics themselves have content that lends itself to (sometimes multiple) genres? And in reverse, why do we characterize in terms of content if the content can also lend itself to genres by the ways that pages are laid out? So what does genre actually mean and how are we defining it?