Senior Portfolio Workshop 2017

I found Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry to be a very interesting exploration into the limitations of an art medium — in this case, poetry. The idea that we view words as so essential to our humanity coupled with the idea that words cannot always accurately express our conceptions is a frustrating dichotomy. It also brings […]

Read Full Post »

In Ben Lerner’s essay The Hatred of Poetry, he directly addresses the mass hatred of the genre. He even admits that he “too, dislike[s] it.” He is beginning to seek how poetry shifts itself between the personal and the abstract. He also suggests that the reason that so many hate poetry is because words will […]

Read Full Post »

The usage of enjambment makes the author sound like he is observing and describing the urn in real life. The descriptions are very specific and by adding enjambments, one can make the transition from one line to the next, and one stanza to the next, much easier. Keats uses two different types of pronouns, the modern […]

Read Full Post »

Read Full Post »

Read Full Post »

Jane Bowles Truman Capote  

Read Full Post »

The theme of the writer as the character behind the story was a well-integrated one in this essay. Hilton Als narrates a change in culture towards the theatrical, drama-seeking society that needs to know the dirt behind its entertainment as well as the selfish and sometimes harmful intentions that may reside behind a work of […]

Read Full Post »

Billie Holiday was on the radio I was standing in the kitchen smoking my cigarette of this pack I plan to finish tonight last night of smoking youth. I made a cup of this funny kind of tea I’ve had hanging around. A little too sweet an odd mix. My only impulse was to make […]

Read Full Post »

These are amazing: each Joining a neighbor, as though speech Were a still performance. Arranging by chance To meet as far this morning From the world as agreeing With it, you and I Are suddenly what the trees try To tell us we are: That their merely being there Means something; that soon We may […]

Read Full Post »

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself […]

Read Full Post »

Hilton Als’ essay “The Women” is roughly about the author and filmmaker — and artist in many other senses — Truman Capote whose first book was published in 1947. Als stresses that this publication takes place “just when other ‘real’ women could not as freely enter the publishing world” (238). Als characterizes Capote as a woman because of the […]

Read Full Post »

Fluid oppositions are a part of several recurring themes that seem to permeate Hilton Als’ White Girls. This is especially true in intentionally gray and multi-layered juxtapositions of gender. In “The Women,” these contrasts  are heavily based in what attitudes, specifically the attitudes expressed through authorial voice, are ascribed to singularly women and singularly men. As […]

Read Full Post »

The essay is a critique of the feminine image that Capote steals from women authors to become a ‘white girl.’ Als suggests that by offering a ‘controversial’ author photograph, Capote morphs into a woman to talk about the queerness of his characters in a voice that is uniquely feminine. Thus, Capote becomes a white girl to […]

Read Full Post »

Go here for a brief discussion of the Harold Halma photo of Truman Capote that Hilton Las discusses in his essay “The Women.” “The photo made a huge impression on many artists,” the blog post’s author, Alex Selwyn-Holmes, writes.” The 20-year-old Andy Warhol wrote fan letters to Capote, and when Warhol moved to New York […]

Read Full Post »

In Hilton Als’ collection White Girls, he writes several different essays that all touch on similar topics of race, gender, sexuality, family, and identity. What makes his essays so challenging, beyond the difficult topics, is the unconventional style of writing Als uses, which is similar to stream-of-conciousness. Within this collection is the second essay “The Women.” In this […]

Read Full Post »

Read Full Post »

This story is very intriguing because it turns the Vampire myth on its head and makes it a source of pain and development for the character’s love story. The reader feels sympathetic to him because he does not desire to be a monster and was shaped by the Western/Eastern Vampire myths. His fear of acting […]

Read Full Post »

Karen Russell’s “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” makes several points about the nature of humanity and the mortal expectations of romantic relationships. Russell accomplishes this by implementing the preconceived predatory nature of vampires, as well as through the connections vampires have to the idea of eternity, and how each of these elements impacts Clyde’s relationship […]

Read Full Post »

Russel starts out this story in a very dull and monotone way. Her first sentence is a suggestion of excitement, but she quickly negates it with “but of course there is no way for anyone to verify that now.” She then goes on to write a long list of the characteristics that all of the worker […]

Read Full Post »

Karen Russell’s writing shows a similar connection between the two stories, “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” and “Reeling for the Empire”. In both of these short stories, Russell’s writing is not complex or outlandish. The writing itself is simply constructed. However, the messages portrayed in these short stories are complex. Looking specifically at “Vampires in the […]

Read Full Post »