Blog Number 8

The Renegrade is written by Charles Simic and was featured in the New York Review of Books. I thought this essay was going to be good because I'm very interested in Hitler but this was one of the more boring essays we have read this semester. I didn't really find anything particularly interesting about it either. The type of essay I thought it was was just him telling his story, because it was not very entertaining at all and i do not think it was informing us of anything but about his life. The audience is whoever reads The New York Review of Books. :)

Cricket Rope

Cricket Fighting is written by Hugh Raffles and was featured in Granta magazine. I thought this essay would have been a lot better if it wasn’t so drawn out like it was. Like the whole sixth section just didn’t seem necessary to me. The beginning of the essay started out really interesting I thought, especially two parts I read. One was about the trainers giving the crickets the drug ecstasy. Apparently it makes them fight better and usually makes them the winning cricket. The second part I found interesting was that crickets had their own weight measurement, which is known as the zhen and is equal to about a fifth of a gram. I think this was an informative essay, they told us so many aspects of cricket fighting, it had to be informative. The magazine Granta is a publishing of the worlds finest writers tackling some the worlds most important subjects. So the target audiences are people who want to read world stories in a different light.

After we read Cricket fighting we watched Alfred Hitchcock’s move Rope. I wasn’t able to be there for the beginning of the movie but I was there for the end half of the movie. It was all about 2 characters killing one of the characters and one of them figuring it out and trying to get them to admit it after a party he attended. I thought the movie was going to be very boring because it was one of those old not kind of weird movies and I didn’t really know what was going on since I missed the beginning. But one of my favorite movies is Some Like It Hot, which is in black and white so I wasn’t that surprised when I didn’t completely hate the movie.

The Different Dress

The Lesbians Bride handbook is written by Ariel Levy and was featured in New York Magazine. This essay actually wasn’t that bad, I liked it because it was all about finding a wedding dress. Most girls are interested in that, or girls that I’m friends with at least. The dress she eventually picked out doesn’t sound like a very pretty dress with how she describes it. Maybe it would look prettier when I actually saw a picture of it but the way she describes it, it just doesn’t sound very pretty at all. But then the designer she bought it from makes absolutely gorgeous dresses so it kind of makes me think that it would actually be a pretty dress. But I wont ever know unless I see a picture. I think the essay is meant for entertainment, all she is trying to do is find a dress that won’t overshadow her partner, because it is her big day too. Also a handbook of this type is purely for entertainment, and not for actual use like a handbook for making chili. The target audience is whoever reads New York Magazine, that person would be concerned with the life culture, politics, and style of New York City. I went online to see what New York Magazine was all about and when I looked up the essay there was a picture of the couple on their wedding day. The dress was actually very pretty; it was nothing like I was expecting it to be at all. Another thing I looked at were the comments left on the essay. All but one or two were left by lesbians, in a relationship, and then half of those were talking about marriage with their partner. So ultimately I really liked this essay, it made me start thinking about what I want my wedding dress to look like.

Words Mean This To Me Assignment

**House- Big yard, Country, 2 Stories, White, Gated, Long Drive Way

**Summer- Beach, Pretty, Warm, Happy, Friends

**Room- Pictures Everywhere, Old Cast Iron Bed, Big Closet, Blue Walls, Big Pink Bookshelf

**Pet- 2 Dogs, Pugs, Emma-Kate and George, Emma-Kate was rescued, also 2 Cats, Rosie and Susie

**Red- Michaels (boyfriends) truck, Ford F-150, light on the top for when he goes hunting

**Fall- Leaves change color, gets cold, Ole Miss football, tailgating, and thanksgiving

**Home- 827 Maplewood Dr, Oxford, lived here for 15 years, in town

**Freedom- USA, have more in college, got in a lot of trouble for breaking rules in highschool

**Love- family, boyfriend, friends, pets

**Hope- Church, St. Peters Episcopal Church of Oxford

One assignment that we did was the one above. You gave us words and we were told to write down whatever first came to our mind when we heard that word. When I heard the word house I ultimately thought of my dream house. I want it to be in the country with a big yard and long drive way. I always want to live in Oxford, or Lafayette County but I’d like to live somewhere where I have room to do my own thing. I want to have a white two-story house with a big front and back porch like I have at my house. When I hear room I immediately thought of my room at my parents house. Its at the front of the house and has blue walls, my two favorite parts are the closet and the bed. When I walk in my closet theres a big mirror at the back, it takes up the whole wall so I can see my whole outfit shoes and all, and both walls have to rows for my clothing. The second favorite part is my bed, its cast iron and white, its been in my family for a veryyy long time. My dad and my grandfather both had it when they were growing up. They sell the same type of bed I have for thousands of dollars and I have one that has history. I absolutely love it.

Blog Number 4

Extreme Dinosaurs was pretty boring I thought. Its one of those essays your either going to like or your not. Some people just aren’t interested in dinosaurs and I’m definitely one of those people. I was never the little kid who wanted to sit there and watch Jurassic Park, I thought that kind of thing was pointless and stupid and im pretty sure at that age I was scared of dinosaurs. One thing I did like about the essay was when he started talking about what the dinosaurs would think of a human. How he refers to us actually seems like how the dinosaurs would actually look at us. This essay was written by John Updike and featured in National Geographic. One thing we always talk about is what type of essay it is and who the target audience is. I think the essay is clearly for entertainment and to inform us a little bit. He uses a lot of humor in the essay so you can really tell he was trying to entertain us, but with all the facts about dinosaurs he was trying to inform us about them a little bit. The target audience is obviously people who are interested in science because who else would be reading the National Geographic Magazine.

The next essay we read was Buzzards, which was written by Lee Zacharias and featured in the Southern Humanities Review. She used buzzards as a reference to her dead father who never accepted her writing and all she does is pity herself throughout the whole story. One thing we discussed is that everyone would feel a lot worse for her if she didn’t play the pity party and try to make people feel bad for her. The story would also be a lot more interesting if it weren’t about a nasty bird like buzzards. That just makes the essay even worse than it already is.

Blog Number 3

One thing we talked about in class about The Way We Age Now was that we were supposed to pick a passage that stuck out to us and write why we thought it was false and why we thought it was true. I ended up picking the passage “hair grows grey because we run out of the pigment cells that give hair its color.” In the text it says that the natural life cycle of the scalps pigment cells is just a few years so we rely on stems cells to migrate and replace them but gradually the stem call reservoir dries up so usually by the age of 50 the average persons hair has gone grey. I believe what the writer is telling us because I see people all the time with grey hair; my grandparents on my dad’s side had grey hair. But then I also think that’s false because my grandmother and her two sisters all have jet black hair, and they don’t dye it or any thing its been like that ever since I can remember for all of them. Another way to disprove what the author is saying is what about Italians and Spanish people, they don’t grey until way over their 50^th birthday. So that claim can go either way I think, it just depends on the person’s genes and where they come from.

One thing I really liked about The Way We Age Now was all the facts and statistics that were featured in the essay. I think they were very interesting because I am very interested and always have been interested in stuff medical related. The essay was written by Atul Gawande and featured in the New Yorker. The New Yorker is a weekly magazine that features essays, cartoons, satire, commentary, and criticisms. It has a wide base in not only New York but all around the world. My grandfather gets this magazine and I’ve looked at it a few times but never really read anything in it.

Blog Number 2

The Constant Gardener was written by Bernard Cooper and featured in Los Angeles magazine. The essay is about two men who have been together for 20 years but one of them has been HIV positive for seventeen of that 20 years. The essay basically tells about Bernard learning how to operate his partner, Brian’s, PICC line. The only reason I summarized this story is because m senior year of high school I worked at Smoothie King. There was this one guy who would come in every morning and get two smoothies that are specially designed for build up, they had weight gain and ice cream and all kinds of proteins in them and so many calories it is insane. Normally the people that get them are football players trying to bulk up, that type of person. He eventually started to become very close to some of our staff members and open up to us since he came in every morning when we aren’t that busy. It turned out that the man that came in was gay and that his partner, who always stayed in the car when he came to get the smoothies, was HIV positive. This situation reminds me a lot of the story because its based on the same thing. Except the couple in Oxford hasn’t had to take the drastic measures like Bernard and Brian did. They are trying to get his weight up by drinking the calorie packed smoothies. So that’s all I could picture in my head when we were reading this story, those two men were what I immediately envisioned Bernard and Brian looking like. One thing we discussed in class about this essay was what type of essay this was and who the target audience was. I think the essay is a personal essay, because he is writing about his partner’s personal struggle with HIV. It doesn’t get much more personal than that. The target audience is who ever reads Los Angeles Magazine. The magazine is all about LA, everything from store openings, to store ratings, restaurant ratings, where to go on vacations in California, and feature stories like the Constant Gardener.