This Blessed House

At the end of our class discussion on the interview of Jhumpa Lahiri and the story as a whole, the question "is everything you do a performance?" came up.  My first instinct was to say no, but then I got to thinking and realized the answer is much more complicated than a yes-no answer.  In the story, Twinkle could be interpreted as putting on a performance when she wants to display the Mary statue in their lawn and Sanjeev could been seen as putting on a performance when he acts like he doesn't hate the christian trinkets in front of his guests at his party.  I also started to think of everyday instances where people, including myself could be preforming instead of acting as myself.  The first occasion I can think of when I do put on a performance instead of acting as myself is when i meet people my dad works with.  This only occurs ever once in a while when my family has a party or my sisters and I go downtown to meet him for lunch.  Are there times in everyday life that people are putting on performances?  Are some people's entire lives performances?  I have never know a person whose entire life is a performance, but then again how would I know?  The only time I have seen this is in movies and books, but that is because as a reader or viewer you get to see all sides.  Everybody does their little performances in certain situations but I would like to believe that a person's entire life is not a performance but it could be.  

This Blessed House

I found it very interesting that Twinkle in a way converted to Christianity because of a game.  She was inspired by the many Christian knick-knacks she found hidden throughout her new house.  She treated each new trinket as if it was the best thing in the world.  When she started finding the Christian paraphernalia she was not Christian.  Her and her husband, Sanjeev, were "good little Hindus" (Lahiri 139).  Sanjeev was not very happy with Twinkle displaying the Christian symbols in his house.  He especially did not approve of the statue of Mary lawn ornament.  I find it a little strange how quick Twinkle was to change her religious beliefs, in a way.  She never started practicing Christianity but she refused to throw away or hide any of the items she found throughout the house.  As a reader, we do not get to find out much of Twinkle's past so we have to infer a reason for her quick change of heart.  There are many reasons and hopefully in class tomorrow some of my classmates might have come up with some of these reasons.

O

In class the question of why basketball was chosen to be the main sport for the movie was brought up.  I was very intrigued by this question so I decided to do some research on the history of basketball. I found one website that I really found interesting.  One thing the website claimed that I think is one of the main reasons basketball was chosen for the sport was "basketball has symbolized the best and the worst of American culture". Throughout "O", the best and worst qualities of Oden are revealed.  He starts out as a very nice, dedicated basketball player, he loves his girlfriend, and is friendly towards most people.  As the movie progresses, Oden becomes extremely jealous of what he thinks D is doing.  Just as basketball symbolizes the worst of American culture, Oden's worst qualities start to come out and are shown at their peak when he pushes Mike down in practice and attempts to beat him up before he is pulled off of him.  The website also shares that basketball is associated with black men most of the time, and Oden is a black man.  I couldn't find anything on wither or not the actually playing of basketball has any significance which could help in determining why it was the sport chosen.  I found the short article on the website very informative and if you were wondering why basketball was the sport chosen also check it out!

Othello

We spent time is class last Thursday in groups laying out what we thought the scene would be for the final act of the play Othello.  Above is a picture that I found online that resembles the one my group drew.  I thought this was a very interesting exercises.  Each group had a different interpretation of how the furniture laid out and what was included or not.  Each group also had different takes on the lighting and music, which sets the mood, for their scene.  After listening to the groups explain their layouts we were asked to watch the scene on YouTube and then next class we watched a more modern take of it.  I was interesting to see how the scenes my classmates and I laid out compared to the two film takes.  There were many creative differences between the two films and even more between the films and our drawings.  It is fascinating how many different interpretations there are for one scene.  The scene is written out, but how the directors decide to have them play out on screen was different.  Lines were cut out, angles were taken by the camera, lighting was done, and music was played in the background.  All of these lead to very different outcomes.  How can there be so many different takes on one piece of writing?  The writing doesn't change.  The language is the same for every person that reads it.  It boggles my mind how different each person's take is.  I have to wonder why this is.  All I can come up with is people see different events in different ways.  Certain events provoke certain emotions in people and it was the emotions of the directors of the films that were portrayed in the two different Othellos. 

Othello

In the play "Othello", one of the characters is named Iago.  Iago is the most cunning and manipulative character in the play by far.  Reading some of the things that Iago makes the other characters believe made me wonder if there were people like that in the real world.  I am fairly certain that there are some people like that, but then I questioned if I knew any of them.  None of the characters could really know the true Iago because he acted differently when he was in their presence and when he was not.  It was not until the end of the play that the other characters came to know the true Iago and his ways.  But if it were not for Emilia, then the characters would have never know Iago's true character.  I can only hope that there are people like Emilia in the world that can catch the people who are manipulating people and call them out on it.  

Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted, was a very interesting and strange movie.  The title, "Girl, Interrupted" is very strange itself.  We ended class on Tuesday with the question of why it is titled that.  Here is my interpretation.  An interruption is something that is not planned.  It is something that changes the course of your original thought and can sometimes make you forget where you were going with your original thought.  An interruption also has the ability to be either a good or bad thing.  Winona Ryder's character's Susanna Kaysen, who is also the main character, has a lot of interruptions in her life, both good and bad.  One of the first interruptions is when she sleeps with a family friends' husband.  This interruption is what makes her close herself off to everyone and leads everyone to believe that she is going crazy.  She is sent to Claymoore, a private mental hospital, where she has an eighteen month stay.  This interruption starts out as a bad one but becomes the best interruption in her life, in the movie.  As a result of this interruption, Susanna learns how to make herself into a better human and how to deal with things without taking them to the extreme.  Throughout the movie, the audience sees the results of all of the interruptions in her life.  That is why i believe the movie is titles "Girl, Interrupted".

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The main character in The Yellow Wallpaper, as with the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, suffered from a disease of depression.  In the story, the woman suffers from postpartum depression and Gilman suffered from a severe and  continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia. Gilman, and the woman in the story, were prescribed the "Rest Cure" which involved them doing absolutely nothing.  The women were not allowed to write, paint, or do anything creative and they were told spend much of their time just lying in bed.  This does not seem like a smart cure to me.  We touched on this subject in class and one of my classmates brought up the fact that if the women were told to lay in a bed all day by themselves, all they would have to keep them company would be their thoughts, which were one of the main causes of their depression.  The "rest cure" to me does exactly the opposite of what it was aiming to accomplish.  It is evident in The Yellow Wallpaper when the main character starts believing that there is a woman trapped behind the wallpaper and at the end of the story she believes that that woman was her and she was not going to be put back into the wallpaper.  The "rest cure" could possibly be the worst thing to prescribe to someone suffering from depression.