Rhonda Does Research: 2015

Monday, August 24, 2015

Am I Ready for College?

Robert College Students in the Forum (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My first class starts in less than 2 hours, and after talking with Rebbie, my older sister, over the last couple of weeks, I'm not sure that I really know what to expect. She told me to check and see if my classes had Blackboard pages yet (two of them did), and that's how I learned that this blog is a major assignment for my English comp class. So, having set it up, I'm ahead at this point-- but that's not the way I usually am, and I guess that was what Rebbie was trying to get across to me. It looks like I'll have to make some big changes.

I'm supposed to be introducing myself in this first post, but I think I just gave away a big chunk of info that I normally don't tell anybody. When it comes to school, I can always find a reason to put homework off until the last minute. Rebbie asked me how that was working for me (she's kinda sarcastic, in case you couldn't tell), and I have to admit that it doesn't work too well. I always feel like I'm behind. Now you know something about me aside from my profile.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Get Hexed!

Turned in my résumé project yesterday and started in on Hexed, the next Iron Druid book, as soon as I got off work. My brother came over around 7 (more about that later), so I didn't get to pick it up again until an hour ago.

I canNOT believe HBO didn't pick up on these books when True Blood was winding down. There's lots of nudity, dangerous/scary goddess sex, porn-star looking witches, and a funny dog! What more could you ask for? I'm at the part where Atticus is fighting the German witches, half of whom are pregnant with demonspawn, and he's just decapitated one, losing half an ear in the process. I'm getting a new project tomorrow, so I need to finish this tonight and not start the next one-- I seriously cannot put these down.

Monday, April 20, 2015

By Special Request: More about the Iron Druid

Attila, Irish Wolfhound, propr. Mme Sylvie Saulue (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Rebbie, my sister, just read my last post and pointed out that (in her opinion) I didn't give enough information about the book. After reading it again, I think she may be right, so here goes.

The book is Hounded, by Kevin Hearne, and its hero is Atticus O'Sullivan, a 2000+ year old druid. In fact, he is the last druid, and over those years he's made some powerful enemies. He lives in Tempe, Arizona, which is kind of a safe zone because it is difficult for his enemies to reach. But it's not impossible, so he is repeatedly attacked by minions of his most powerful enemy, Aenghus Og, the Celtic god of love (who seems to be quite a hater for a love god). Other Celtic gods turn up to mess with his life, but he prevails with the help of his friends, including his dog Oberon, an Irish wolfhound who wants to be like Gengis Khan and have a harem of French poodles.

It's a lot of fun, and I think Rebbie should give it a chance.

Talk about Mythic--Kevin Hearne Has Got it All--and a Druid!

Druid Ghost lite (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In between writing my résumé and waiting to get my critical analysis back, I've been re-reading Kevin Hearne's funny Iron Druid books. After all the work I did on my paper, it's good to see that the myth criticism approach really does work even when you aren't trying to do it! Of course, Hearne is using actual myths (and creating new ones), both the classical and the little-known, so it shouldn't be surprising that I can pick out all sorts of monomyth elements and characteristics of the archetypes in the stories.

Anyway, if you haven't read them, you ought to give them a try, if only for the mind-to-mind conversations between Atticus (the hero) and Oberon (his dog). Hilarious dialogue!

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

More on Guardians of the Galaxy: I Was on the Right Track

Star-Lord (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to an item on FlickeringMyth.com today, James Gunn, the director of GotG, said "There’s a lot of stuff I’m excited about in the new movie. Listen, I’m still excited about Star-Lord’s character and where he goes. At its heart, Guardians is a story about families, and if the first film was about him and his mother, this is a story about fathers." The post goes on to point out that this does not necessarily mean Star Lord's father, but I think that's the most likely, what with all the material I found for my paper.

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Rap: So that's What It Is!

I just read Adam Bradley's "Rap Poetry 101," which was interesting, but it made me think more about regular (or do I mean traditional?) poetry more than rap. I had an English teacher in high school who was kind of obsessed about poetry, and I remember that she claimed that poetry started to die out as an art form when poets stopped using rhyme and repetition as primary techniques (at least, that's what I think she said). In Bradley's essay, he shows how rap is performed poetry, and he talks about rhymes and the use of a beat (big repetition there). This led me to think about my sister Rebbie's favorite poem, Poe's "The Raven," and I'm starting to wonder how it would sound as a rap song.

Friday, April 3, 2015

Gotta Love those E-readers!

I am totally crazy about my Nook, even though it doesn't perform up to specs. I could fix it, but that would involve re-registering it, which would clear out all of the books I side-loaded to the 32 gig card I added on--and it might not be possible to reload them, for reasons I don't want to get into here. Anyway, I've had it for a few years, and I have almost a thousand books, most of which were picked up for less than five dollars (probably a hundred or so were free). Yeah, I read a lot.

One of the things I love about it is that, thanks to the daily specials, I've been introduced to a lot of writers that I wouldn't have picked up on in print. A while back I bought Faye Kellerman's The Ritual Bath. It was the daily special to promote her latest book in the Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus series.

I don't know about you, but I like to learn stuff when I read a mystery, and this one has a lot to offer, in this case about Judaism and the daily issues that arise for the seriously religious. With that and the relationship that develops between the two main characters, I was able to take a mental vacation from everything that normally has my brain on the worrier's exercise wheel.
If this sounds good to you, try it for yourself.

I hate my textbook; I love to read

English: Six year old boy reading "Diary of a wimpy kid" License on Flickr (2011-01-07): CC-BY-2.0 Flickr tags: diary, wimpy, kid, book, read, bed, boy, hold (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This blog is supposed to be about writing and reading. So far, so good; I like to read, and I have to write for the class, so you'd think I'd have enough material right there. The problem is that I'm supposed to be writing (in half the posts) about the essays and articles in our textbook, How to Write about Anything, and I don't want to read most of them, much less write about them.

So, while it may look as though I'm not reading much, I'm actually reading a lot-- but I'm reading stuff that gives me a break from my everyday thoughts, particularly the sad ones. As just one example, the first anniversary of my mom's death is coming up (more about that later), and I've been reading mysteries. In those books, nobody dies of cancer of the spine. People are murdered, the murderers are caught and usually punished. Unlike real life, there's some kind of justice. There isn't anything that satisfying in the textbook.

Therefore, and with the permission of my prof, I'm going to write about what I've read lately.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Aliens, or Angels? Who Knows?

English: "The Snake in the Grass or
Satan Transform'd to an Angel
of Light." At the sides are a
Puritan and a Covenanter above an
author writing. Courtesy of the
British Museum.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yeah, I'm playing catch up again. I really intended to post every day while I was off school, but after working so hard on my critical analysis draft, I was feeling pretty self-indulgent. Anyway, this morning I realized it was Thursday, and now I'm kicking myself (also again).
I think my draft was okay, although my thesis was not. I went with: The information revealed about Quill's father in Guardians of the Galaxy adds up to him being an angel rather than just another nonhuman. I don't think I really made that point.

I had to make a list of everything that is said about him in the film, and in the draft I basically used the list, except for the material that was in my scene. The point of this was to include the info without saying too much about all of the other scenes, because I didn't want to give the impression that I was analyzing those scenes (something forbidden in the instructions). I'll find out if this is a problem at my conference with the prof next Monday, when I also hope to get some help with my thesis.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Proposing a Hero!

I was just thinking I had all my homework done for tomorrow when I reread the critical analysis project assignment and realized that the proposal is due tomorrow, too. Waah. Here goes:

My critical analysis paper will be on Guardians of the Galaxy, and I will be applying a myth criticism approach. I am interested in Peter Quill/Star Lord as a hero and how he measures up against the many hero archetypes. He's not exactly what might be expected as a hero: he's sarcastic, self-absorbed, and prone to bragging, and he is a criminal, on top of all that. The scene I have chosen to focus on is the prologue, which gives information about the birth stage of his hero's journey. My concerns about these choices center around material. At this point, I'm not sure that there will be enough.

It only needed to be 100 words, so I hope this will work.

"CinderBella": Sara Buttsworth's Take on Twilight

The Vampire Deutsch: Der Vampir
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Rather than a stand-alone essay, this is excerpted from a book, and it covers first the male vampires of the "saga" in relation to the myth of the American Dream before turning to the females, mostly just Bella. According to Buttsworth, Cinderella is the version of the American Dream that applies to women. A lot of what she says rings true, but I decided to go to an expert for another opinion.

My expert is my sister Rebbie, who is kind of a vampire scholar/hobbyist (last year, she spent what I thought was an outrageous amount of money on the complete DVD set of Dark Shadows. It came in a coffin. Need I say more?). She once told me that "Bella is me-- when I was twelve years old!" Now (ten years later) she says that she agrees that Stephanie Meyer is working the Cinderella story in the Twilight books, but she says that's a problem, because what Bella wants are all childish things: "She wants to stay young and beautiful (which I don't think she is. Definitely not in the movies), marry a rich guy, and get her own way. She is unbelievably selfish, and doesn't have any interest in anything but herself." (my response: "Don't hold back. Tell me what you really think.)

Rebbie did grow out of her vampire fantasies by the time she was about sixteen, when, she says, "I began to realize that there were a lot of important things I should be worrying about, and the last thing I wanted to do was depend on someone else to give my life meaning." I should point out that she doesn't usually talk like this. I think she was trying to be the big sister when she said it. My take on her Goth years is that the black eyeliner kept irritating her eyes, which sort of took the romance out of it all.

Paglia on Mitchell's "Woodstock"

Blue (Joni Mitchell album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've just been reading Camille Paglia's analysis of Joni Mitchell's song "Woodstock." I have an uncle who's a big fan of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, so I've heard the song lots of times and remembered most of the lyrics, but Paglia points out that their performance of the song is very different from Joni Mitchell's recording, which I don't think I've ever heard.

I had some friends in high school who liked to analyze songs, but after reading Paglia's . . . well, call it a dissection, I have to say that their efforts and probably the songs they picked were pretty half- (uh) baked (yeah, that's the word) compared to this essay.

And, even though I don't think I could analyze anywhere near as well as Camille Paglia, I do feel better about my own writing after reading hers. I've been worrying a bit about how I'm going to get 2100 words out of one scene in a film, when she managed to write (just an estimate!) 5000 or so about a short poem.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Readings update

Charlie Brown pumpkin patch (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I forgot to mention that I read all of the narratives in How to Write about Anything. The one that made the biggest impression was the one about Peanuts (the comic strip), and that was because I've actually read the collection mentioned in the essay. My dad has a copy -- he's a big fan, although he doesn't seem to be interested in the cartoon shows. My favorite is It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. I love when Sally gets hysterical over missing trick or treating. And, of course, when Charlie Brown keeps getting a rock at every house. I know just how he feels, even though that never happened to me.
I'm moving on to the next set of readings. I should have something about them soon.

I Propose . . . Something -- I'm not sure what

Star-Lord (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yes, I know I'm behind. My narrative turned out okay, so I guess I'm done talking about that. Right now, I'm working on the proposal for my big paper, the critical analysis. I'm going to do a myth criticism analysis of Guardians of the Galaxy. I know that I'm going to focus on Peter Quill/Star Lord, but I haven't settled on a scene yet, and I'm not sure that I know enough about myth crit. I think I'll be looking at him in terms of a hero archetype, but which one is he? More later.

Monday, January 26, 2015

An Interesting Way of Teaching

English: David Sedaris at WBUR studios in June 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's 4:05am, and I still can't sleep, so I decided to do my reading for this blog. I read David Sedaris's essay, "Me Talk Pretty One Day," and something about it hit home. Not what the title suggests -- although I feel the same way about Spanish that he does about French (I took three years of Spanish in high school, and I'm too embarrassed about my lack of fluency to say more than thank you and hello to a native speaker).

What got me about his narrative was the teacher he had in France. When I was in fourth grade, this kid in my class -- I think his name was Bobby -- used to get fed up by about 1 o'clock every day and start trying to irritate our teacher, whom I will call Mr. Smith, since I can't remember his name either. Anyway, one day we're all sitting there, an hour after lunch, with the sun beating in on us through the windows, and Bobby starts humming. I think it was the song from Titanic. He kept stopping just before the end of the verse and starting again.

Mr. Smith told him to knock it off, and he would, for a few minutes, but then it started up again. Unlike Sedaris's French teacher, Mr. Smith was usually pretty calm, even when Bobby would do much more annoying things (spitballs, etc.), but this day he had had enough, and he hurled an eraser at him. I think he might have done some pitching before this, because it hit Bobby square in the face and bounced back about ten feet. It was a whiteboard eraser, and it left a greasy black oblong in the middle of Bobby's face. Again unlike the French teacher, Mr. Smith looked kind of surprised that he had done that, and he was probably going to apologize, but the whole class started cheering and applauding.

I'm guessing that Bobby decided not to complain about it because he could tell that he would get no support from the rest of us if he did. He cleaned up his act after that, so I guess he really did learn something in that class, even if it wasn't that week's vocabulary list.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Getting a jump on English 101--and alligators!

My class doesn't start until tomorrow, but I looked at the course page on Blackboard and got the first two assignments. Project 1 is to set up a blog and post 30 100-word entries by the end of the term, so I'm (obviously!) tackling it first. One of the prompts for this week asks about Project 2, which is a narrative essay about something that happened to me before I was twelve years old.

I think I've already made my decision about what experience to write about, but I can't be sure it'll work until after we talk about the assignment in class. When I was about 6 years old my parents took us (my sister, brother, and 16-year-old aunt) on a road trip to Miami. One of the places we went to was a sort of reptile zoo, and my aunt fainted when she saw that a foot-long chunk of an alligator's tail was lying inside the exhibit. Ever since then, we've been giving her a hard time about it every time we see her. I think this will work because I've never forgotten it. All I have to do now is figure out what it means to me.

Related material
Video- Alligator fight. It's not very exciting, but you can see that the end of the tail is a favorite target when alligators attack each other.

When a student loses steam

"Dr. Toffee" sums up Rhonda's fall 2014 semester:

Those of us who teach first year composition are (sadly) very familiar with students who find themselves in over their heads. The nature of a writing class is grounded in near constant writing, and it takes a while for some students to get up to speed. This last term that happened to Rhonda. Between her family situation, her job, and her courseload, she had a lot to handle. The biggest problem she faced as a student was time management. She tried to complete the major projects, but often forgot about Project 1: her blog. By the end of the term, she found that there was no way that she could catch up and complete the last two projects plus the required number of blog entries. She came to my office hours two weeks before the final, looking for some kind of a solution, but (as you can imagine) it was too late for that. If she had come to see me even a couple of weeks earlier, I'm fairly certain that we could have worked it out, but she just waited too long. She had to drop the course.

Rhonda's problems have had an impact on me-- from now on, I'll be checking in on my students' blogs more often over the semester, and I'm thinking about requiring them to come to my office hours at least once during the first 8 weeks of the term. We'll see how this works out.

As a final note for those who follow this blog, you should know that Rhonda will be taking 101 this spring (doing the whole 2014-2015 school year in reverse).

Related articles:

"10 Common Problems Students Face During College" - the comments here are also useful.

"What are the Biggest Issues Facing Community Colleges Today? New Study has Answers." This article from the Community College Review discusses the issue of college readiness.

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