Picking a Scene

Artemis statue in Louvre, Paris, France
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I left my Norton Field Guide in Reb's car, so I'm going to talk about my proposal this time instead of the reading (I'll get to it.  Really.).  Okay, so I'm proposing using a myth criticism approach to The Hunger Games, and I'm going to focus on determining what kind of hero (or heroine) Katniss is.  I've been having trouble picking a scene for the project, and I really wish I could analyze two scenes, because she has a lot of different qualities.  She's self-sacrificing, above everything else, angry, clever -- but not about people, and she's a survivor.  This may sound weird, but I think she really fits the pattern of the Greek goddess Artemis, who is known as the Huntress.  I'll talk more about this next week, but for now, I am stuck on finding a scene, and I think I'm going to have to watch the film again.

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Hit or Myth?

Atalanta and Maleagar
(Jacob Jordaens)

Dr. Toffee has The Hunger Games in the Women's Studies category, but I've decided to use a myth criticism approach.  The way I understand it, I can discuss the characters and setting as archetypes and the scene I select as to where it fits into the pattern of the hero's journey.  What's interesting to me about this has to do with there being few archetypes of female heroes, which means I'm going to have to figure out which one of the male archetypes she fits.  And, since I have to talk about that male to female transformation (for lack of a better word), I'll be generating material for the paper right there!  It's a win-win choice.

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Hunger

The Hunger Games (film)
 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don't really want to talk about the essay I read for this week because I'm still thinking about the one I read last week.  This is because my sister Rebecca bought the DVD of The Hunger Games, and I finally managed to find the time to watch it.  I read the book a while back, and I was surprised at how little hunger was shown in the film.  It was almost as if they didn't want people to be thinking about an America where people are starving to death.  In the book, hunger is everywhere, even when they go to the capitol city (where Katniss forces herself to overeat to put on weight for when the games begin).  In the film, the people in District 12 look poor -- they're dirty, tired, and wearing old-fashioned clothes -- but they don't look underfed (if that's the right word for it).  The girl playing Katniss is pretty good in the part, but she looks really healthy, as if she never missed a meal in her life, and that was a problem for me when they flashed back to when she and her family are on the verge of starving to death and Peta throws a loaf of bread towards her.  Her face is just as rounded as it is in the rest of the film (just look at the poster above!).

And her clothing in the opening scenes of the film, where she's out hunting, doesn't look at all bad.  In fact, if you saw a clip of that scene and didn't know anything about the film it came from, you would not guess that she was even poor.  (A side note:  one of the articles below, with a picture of her in that scene, is about how Target is selling a line of clothing based on the film!)

The good thing for me about making this connection to the essay is that I've found the movie I want to use for my big project.  Now all I have to do is decide on which one of the critical approaches on the list would be the best one to use.

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Reading Complex Material

Hildegard reading and writing
 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I got a little behind in my postings because of the George essay I wrote about in my last post.  It was longer and more complicated than the stuff we've been reading, and it also had so much in it that I wanted/needed to think about that I couldn't discuss it for a while.  I think that being asked about how I handle this kind of writing was a good thing-- I realized that I'm going to be having to read more and more difficult stuff from now on, and thinking about my "reading strategies" (this is what The Norton Field Guide to Writing calls them) can only help me get a grip on what is being said.
One thing I've found out is that it helps me to go over the material again a couple of days after reading it all the way through, because I always come across things I didn't take in the first time.

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Poverty: Do You Know It When You See It?

Every 3 seconds, a child
dies from extreme poverty
 (Photo credit: Wen-Yan King)

I read an essay by Diana George called "Changing the Face of Poverty," and it got me wondering how many people I encounter every day are actually living in poverty.  One of her points is that if you base your idea of what poverty looks like on pictures like the one I have here, you are likely to misinterpret the size of the problem.  This reminded me of something I heard from a girl I went to high school with:  she told me that she knew a family that had to sell almost everything they owned because both parents were out of work, and the whole family eventually had to cut back on food so that they could look like things were okay with them.  If you saw the kids, you wouldn't be able to tell there was a problem, because their clothing was in really good shape and clean.  She said that the parents refused to apply for any kind of help, like food stamps or going to a food bank, because they were afraid that their neighbors would find out.  And all the while, they were sitting and sleeping on the floor, since they had sold all the furniture.  A couple of days later, I realized that it was her family she was talking about.
 

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Write, Rewrite, Repeat as Necessary

Peer Review (Photo credit: AJC1)

My memoir is finally finished, unless I come up with something to add to it before class today.  After the peer review last week, I decided to do a fresh draft; the story just wasn't cooperating with the point I was trying to make.  It seems to me that the problem was that I really wanted to say something about sisters.  I have two, Rebecca and she who shall remain nameless.  The nameless one is the focus of the story, but I came to the conclusion that I should put Reb in as a contrast to her.  The new draft was better, but it was over the maximum length, so that had to be fixed, and so on.

I never spent so much time on so short a paper in my life.

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Something Worth Reading

Autism Awareness (Photo credit:
Wikipedia)

I'm supposed to be reacting to a narrative in the Norton Field Guide this week, and I did read the one by Tanya Barrientos, but I want to talk about something else I read this morning, a blog post that was reposted (if that's what you call it) by The Huffington Post.  It's titled "The Target Post," and the author is a guy named Jim Walter.  His daughter is autistic, and he writes about a trip he made to Target where he noticed that the cashier ringing up his stuff was also autistic. 
 
Now, I thought that it was cool that Target hired the guy, but my main interest in the post had to do with what happened when Walter put a comment about this on Target's Facebook page.  According to him, the responses were overwhelmingly positive, but there were the usual Facebook jerks making their usual jerky comments, calling him names (liar, corporate shill, etc.), and this is what struck me.  It struck me because that's why I no longer do Facebook:  too many people -- and I'm talking people who are too cowardly to do this face-to-face -- use Facebook as a weapon, striking at people who are trying to do some good.  It gives bullies a forum, and I got sick of it. 

So, I guess what I want to say is, good for Jim Walter, for taking the time to let Target know what happened, good for Target for hiring the guy, and let's hope that all the 300,000+ likes his Facebook post got make some kind of impression on the jerks who will never get near that number. 

Finally, if you want to do something that translates into real action that can help (rather than just boosting Facebook numbers), go to theautismsite.com, where your click will help provide therapy for children with autism, without costing you anything or getting you on a mailing list or anything else you don't want.

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Picking a Thesis the Hard Way

Childhood Secrets (Photo credit:
 Lisa M Photography)

I'm a few days behind in posting this (I already had a peer review on my draft), but I was having problems with my thesis the whole time I was writing the draft.  I couldn't decide whether I wanted to just look at my own rocky relationship with my sister (who shall remain nameless) or take a wider view of the situation.  For the first, the thesis was something like "I learned, too early, not to trust the people closest to me."  The second one was "Kids like to ruin other kids' happy childhoods. 

After the peer review, I wound up somewhere in between the two.

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