"Tell My Story"

Nesse Godin was a short, wide woman with short, wide hair and a thin, wide smile. She always smiled, no matter what story she was telling. She loved telling stories, and had made it her occupation. After hearing her speak, I've dedicated a lot of my time to reading more and more of the story, trying to get the full scope. You see, Nesse was a holocaust survivor who I met over the summer. It was hearing her story, going to ghettos and work camps and death marches, that inspired my fascination with Holocaust literature.

As soon as I got back to school, I read Eli Weisel's Night. After that, I read Diary of A Young Girl and finally the play A Child Shall Lead Them, a beautiful play which my brother will be starring in at the Wilmington Drama League this April. The stories are all completely moving, and studying them can be a great insight into how one can make a compelling, moving storyline.

Hopelessness plays a role in all of the pieces (and in Mrs. Godin's story, which I'm lumping in with the literary pieces). Night conveyed the horrible machine that would entirely manhandle the people with such detail, I felt as though I could see an industrial machine/human burning monster before me. After death and death and manhandling and death and religious abandonment and death, the book felt as though every page was prolonging Eli's inevitable fall. The imagery and repeated, chance batterings leave a reader wondering "what on earth could happen to this poor guy next?" Hardly a good thing, considering this is non-fiction, but still a good note.

The hopelessness of Diary, much like that of Mrs. Godin's story, has more to do with context and dramatic irony. The most famous line from Anne Frank's diary is "Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart." She wrote this before being carried away and gassed. Through the entire book, she looks forward to leaving- the idea of her mortality either isn't a prevalent thought or isn't something she can admit to herself through writing. It was peaches, D Day, flirt buddy, angst and gravy through most of the book. I would never downplay the torment she must have been under, I just think that she did. Nesse Godin spoke at length about the old Jewish women, who cared for her during the death march despite being perpetually on the verge of death. Nesse was only 17, weighed 74 pounds, and needed help. They became her support group, and gave her their food in exchange for her promise to "share [their] story. We may die, but do not let this be forgotten." 

Love stories, when put against this backdrop, are just too powerful. Ann and Peter dislike one another for most of the book, but when they realize that they are all they have, they overcome it to become a downright adorable couple. Nesse, being of the marriageable age of 17, was told by her mother to walk around where everyone was resting, find the first boy of proper age, and bring him to mama. They were married that night, and still are. (Que "awwwwwwwwwwwwww!")

A great love story is the one from A Child Shall Lead Them, but that's probably just how I see it because Aidan falls in love. The play features direct quotes from journals and poetry found in ghettos, and it's just so good. It reminded me why I love theater. For two hours, my brother gets to fall in love despite being a Jew in 1940s Poland. It's such a beautiful art.

So, to bring it back, the Holocaust is an amazing piece of human history, and has inspired some really excellent pieces. That's all the message this really needs.

Of Mice And Crummy Endings Part II

Is expanding my impression of this book into two journals a blatant attempt to get more journals out of less reading? Man, I just really liked this book, and wanted to write a lot about it, and that combined with my really busy life has made it the only book I've read in a while. Get off my back.

SO, to my original point- why is Steinbeck awesome? It can't hurt that the characters he weaves into his stories and the lives they live are inherently interesting. Nothing seems more boring to me than a book about rich people. As I'm reading, all I can think is "Stop whining, you're doing fine." Oh, Jay Gatsby, your girl left you while you were away at the war? The family in The Grapes of Wrath, who lived at the same time as you, are STARVING TO DEATH. Ask me how much I care about your feeling of emptiness. Money can't buy happiness, but it can definitely make misery suck less.

Steinbeck puts everything one level beneath the outside. I respect that. He doesn't ram a moral in your face, but you also don't need a cryptology degree to figure out what's going on. The infamous Turtle Chapter of Grapes of Wrath is a perfect example. Everyone's quick to say that it was meaningless or silly, but it was an easy image to put into the head and had an obvious message. I feel the sense of accomplishment that comes from literary analysis, but I don't really have to try that hard.

I've found that Steinbeck carefully balances dialogue and description so that dialogue teaches you about the characters, while description teaches you about their situation. The world around the characters is what shapes them in every book; fate, happenstance, etc. make them who they are. This has an everyman appeal; I can place myself into the work boots of any character, and it proves that the characters are meant to be representative of everybody who undergoes the same experiences.

So, in conclusion, John Steinbeck is the best they was, the best they is, and the best they gon' be.

Of Mice and Crummy Book Endings

John Steinbeck is, by far, my favorite writer. Every piece I'd read by him was an enjoyable read with an engaging storyline, but I'd always wondered exactly what it was about Steinbeck's writing that made him so readable. To figure this out, I read his only major work I hadn't experienced before: Of Mice and Men.

Now, the important question "why is he so amazing" has to be put aside for a moment so that I can rant about the ending of the book. Throughout the entire novel, I had enjoyed the message of the importance of life and how people have value outside of their utilitarian means. A simple example of this would have been the dog at the ranch; he was old and couldn't do a single useful thing, but it was still cringe inducing to hear him die. His owner was clearly upset that his dog was being killed, even though he did finally allow it to go. I like that message. Life is pretty sweet, and anybody who wants to defend it is okay in my book.

Then, Lennie gets shot. This is a dumb ending! What is that, I says to myself. I says self, Steinbeck must be doing something or else this wouldn't be considered one of the greatest books of all time. But seriously now? What is this? Now I have to start all over trying to figure out what the novel actually means, and it means I'm going to have to validate death. This is dumb.

But wait! Maybe not! Mrs. Reilly mentioned last year that the book had something to do with being a worker during the Great Depression, which wasn't a far reach for Steinbeck. His novella The Pearl had been about the dangers of greed, so maybe that plays into it. I finally reach a conclusion that makes some sense to me.

The book isn't trying to validate death, but rather make it look disgusting and show how horribly necessary letting things go in those desperate times was. The dog was eating food and wasting space/other resources. It's useless! It must go, for the people are poor and resources scarce. Lennie was going to ruin George's life, and if not send George to prison at least keep him out of work for a long time. George couldn't afford that, and had to get rid of him, as cruel as that was. A foil to this brutality could be found in the ranch-owner's son; he was a rich kid who was living in excess, showing that the huge wealth gap was erosive to all people.

Boom.

Everybody Click Here

Reporting live from AP English Class! I validate myself through page views on this thing, so if you could just stay on this page and hit F5 a couple of times, I'd appreciate it.

Love Christmas

A few weeks ago, the greatest thing ever happened.

Christmas started.

Christmas is definitely more than just a single day. All of my life, I've felt disappointed in Christmas at about 7 at night. That's it? That's the whole thing? Everyone makes such a fuss, that you assume it must be a life changing day. That's why I consider any sign of Christmas- songs on the radio, lights up, all that jazz- as the effective start of Christmas.

Even if Thanksgiving or December hasn't come yet, we should still be happy to see Christmas come. The first thing everyone rags on are Christmas songs on the radio. "Wahhhhhhhh, it isn't thanksgiving yet! I can't be joyful and thankful at the same time! I need Lil' Wayne!"  These people are genuinely bad people. Christmas is a time of happiness and joy and anyone who wants to put it off even 5 minutes has no soul. If you get bored of happiness and joy, you have no soul. You should be doing more christian things, like deciding who does and does not have a soul.

The Choice Is Yours

Nordstrom famously put out a sign before Thanksgiving saying that they wouldn't be "Decking the Halls" until December 1st, proving that the anti-Christmas crowd is gaining sway. But you can fight back. Love Christmas all of the time, because Christmas loves you all of the time. It can make you happier if you just accept that you can enjoy peace and love for more than one month out of the year.

The Powers

"The Song of The Powers" - David Mason

Mine, said the stone,

mine is the hour.

I crush the scissors,

such is my power.

Stronger than wishes,

my power, alone.

Mine, said the paper,

mine are the words

that smother the stone

with imagined birds,

reams of them, flown

from the mind of the shaper.

Mine, said the scissors,

mine all the knives

gashing through paper’s

ethereal lives;

nothing’s so proper

as tattering wishes.

As stone crushes scissors,

as paper snuffs stone

and scissors cut paper,

all end alone.

So heap up your paper

and scissor your wishes

and uproot the stone

from the top of the hill.

They all end alone

as you will, you will.

I was at first overwhelmed by the selection when I was asked to memorize a poem from a list the size of a phone book. My immediate reaction, being the positioning jerk that I am, was to memorize a poem by a big name author so that I could flaunt it sometime down the road. My decision to rest with a 10 year old poem by a more obscure author was an easy one, however, as this poem reached to me in a way few have before.

Nothing quite annoys me in poetry as much as when the poet assembles his words in a pretentious, jejune assembly of imagery without any grounding. If you're going to use a metaphor, make it a unique and powerful one. I don't care if your emotions flutter and shake like the breeze. Apparently, everyone's do. That's what made this poem grab me so well. The metaphor it used was pertinent, fun and original. It conjures images of standing on the street outside of St. Ann's Elementary School playing with my friends, but also conveys a message I find myself forgetting too often as I apply to university. All the fuss I make at school or home or trying to get this or that award is really an exercise in futility, and I have to remember that if I'm not doing it for fun, I might as well not do it.

But he gets a "B" on intricacy. He could have a lot of fun with this.

Occupying The Homeland

Today, I joined a hippie commune.


Facebook was the first place where I heard about Occupy Delaware. They'd spent a day in Rodney Square and then got kicked out. Sounds like my kind of party, I says to myself. I says self, I should see if I can get involved in this kind of a thing, so I follow them on Facebook. Controversy brings the group into the News Journal, and the next thing I know, I'm Occupying Fletcher Park.

And on a pretty good day for it, too.

If you know me well, you know that I'd love to discuss the politics or the usefulness of a movement like this, but that's not what I wanted to write about. Being a part of today's rally fueled  my understanding of democracy in a way that brought the term into reality for me. Frankly, it's a textbook term. We're all habituated to it, and it becomes more of a given than a beauty to us. It has been significant to me before, but this really jolted it for me.

The first moment where the meaning of it came to me was while we were marching. We went up Market St. around to Rodney Square, the symbolic center of Wilmington and home to many banks, including the Bank of America headquarters. What it meant to be a taxpaying citizen became clearer to me during the march. These streets really were mine. I'd payed for them. I payed for the park. The idea of independent humans choosing to come together and use their money for the benefit of everyone is just so neat. I watch CNN daily, and in the hustle of the social debate we forget what it all even does. It becomes a show, and the government just a character on the TV (not much different from The Jersey Shore a lot of the time). On top of that reminder, I remembered that I have the right to go there and speak ill about the government that organized it. Let that sink in. Look outside and recognize that in a very real sense, you own that street. You share it, but you own it, and you can say almost anything there and do a lot of things there. The constitution is three dimensional, and applies right here.

Me marching, Courtesy of Occupy Delaware

Four hours later, my new sense of what patriotism really was came at my first Occupy Delaware General Assembly. Occupy Delaware considers itself a group without leaders, only with organizers. All decisions must be voted on by whoever decides to show up. What do you know! I showed up. As I sat on public property and debated a central issue of the Occupy Delaware Movement- should they stay at Fletcher Park illegally or be bullied into the obscurity of Brandywine Park- a whole new wave of democratic feelings overcame me. Everybody was gathered around a few people who wanted only to maintain order. The decisions rested on everyone as a whole. Anyone could speak, and anyone could say anything they thought appropriate, and finally, everyone had a final vote. Once you see pure and real democracy, the entire idea of an election or a vote seems a lot more meaningful than it did before.

The General Assembly where I'm sitting between a teacher and a veteran. Courtesy of The News Journal

As I said, this post isn't meant to be about the stances of the movement or the debate over the location of Occupy Delaware, both of which are pretty touchy subjects. I'd love to address them, but this isn't the place. But no matter what you say about the movement, it is democracy at its purest. The only thing that disappointed me was that I was the only high school student there. Our generation stinks at caring about things.


Oh, and for anyone who likes a good laugh- two dishes of food were brought to the event, a vegetarian pasta salad and baked ziti with meat in it. The hippies devoured the whole pasta salad in minutes, and four hours later there was still half a ziti sitting there.