Blogging Around

After blogging around, a few blogs in particular stood out to me.  I decided to comment on blogs whose authors' ideas I don't get to hear very often.

My first comment was on Declan's Connection blog.  He connected Charlie Brown to Amir, very original.  "You bring up several unique and original thoughts and angles about Amir. I like how you choose one topic, and a very finite topic as well, and dissect it until you provoke thought and question to the reader. Another thing I appreciated was the fact that you carried over other things we talked about in class over to your blog entry. I could hear your voice in the writing and nothing sounded forced or awkward. Also, vocabulary recently learned was applied, but not forced."

Next, I commented on Molly's Best of the Week.  The post was short and sweet.  I like the whole thing, but i started asking myself some questions while reading. For example, would writing a memoir be effective in helping someone remember a past experience that they are presently fond of, and simply would like to go back to the time and place? Also, you said that writing a memoir would be like writing a diary. Would looking back and reading an old diary serve the same purpose as a memoir? We have seen that memory is usually inaccurate and distorted, because it's just like that... So would the "memoir" be more poweful or less powerful if it were an old diary as opposed to the conventional memoir? (Powerful in terms of the effect on the author).

Connection: Hot Rod

A theme in The Kite Runner is Father-Son Relationships, mainly between Baba and Amir.  We see Amir do anything he can to gain Baba's honor and respect.  He eventually does so by winning the kite contest.  Since everybody has a father at some point in their lives, there are many varieties of father-son relationships.  In the movie Hot Rod, Rod has to gain the respect of his stepfather by beating him in a fight.

There are many similarities between Rod and his father, and Baba and Amir.  One thing that the creators of these characters do, is they give them each a brother.  In both situations, they are step-brothers.  The reason there are step-brothers is to see a comparison between how the father treats the main character, opposed to how he treats the "better son." 

In both situations, Rod and Amir have to do something special to earn respect.  In fact, Rod has to save his dad... just so that he can beat him in a fight.  Rod saves him, and successfully beats him in a fight.  At the end of the fight, Rod holds his father down against the neighbor's car, and forces him to call him a man, repeatedly.  The fight and the kite competition are similar because both Rod and Amir had to train for a long time to win the fights.

My relationship with my father is similar to these two relationships.  My father was an All-State shortstop in high school, and went on to play in college.  Growing up, baseball consumed my summer, as well as my two brothers'.  However, as time passed by, I lost my passion for baseball.  I quit when I was in 7th grade, and my older brother quit after freshman year in high school.  My little brother still plays baseball.  In fact, he plays year-round, and his team finished in the top-ten in a tournament in Cooperstown, New York.  So the way I keep baseball in the family is by throwing batting practice to my little brother.  Now, seeing him play on the same baseball field we played on as kids is just as rewarding as playing on it myself.

Best of Week: Tim Hofmockel

This past week, I believe that Tim had a very good passage to share with the class.  He quoted page 200 of The Kite Runner.  "And now it was just another pile of rubble.  All the money Baba had spent, all those nights he'd sweated over the blueprints, all the visits to the construction site to make sure every brick, every beam, and every block was laid just right..."  In this passage, Amir was just informed by Rahim Khan that the Alliance had destroyed his father's orphanage. 

Tim points out several things.  First, he makes a connection from Baba's legacy to the orphanage.  He said that the Alliance tore down something more than a building.  They tore down a memento to Baba, they tore down all his hard work, they tore down all his time spent.  Second, Tim comments on the rhythm of the passage.  He points out a sentence fragment in, "And now it was just a pile of rubble." The abruptness of the fragment shows how sudden this all is to Amir.  This sentence is followed by one sentence that seems to last forever. "All the money Baba had spent, all those nights he'd sweated over the blueprints, all the visits to the construction site to make sure every brick, every beam, and every block was laid just right..."  There are three potential, complete sentences in this one sentence.  Tim has a good idea why Hosseni wrote this sentence as he did.  Tim thought that making this sentence longer allows the reader to see how much time and effort Baba spent building this orphanage.

Tim's observation makes me think about Beat by Beat.  Beat by Beat showed me how important sentence structure and flow is.  This passage provided me with a great example of top-notch writing.  The use of commas, and other punctuation marks makes this passage easy to read and easy to hear in your head.

This passage makes me feel more confident about my own writing.  In grade school, I was always told that I over-punctuate.  My philosophy was that when I read my work in my head, there should be a comma wherever I paused.  I realize now that that could result in over-punctuation in some situations, but that it could also be a good thing.  For example, "Confusion filled the streets, there were people everywhere, everybody had somewhere to go, someone to see, I couldn't see anything happening five feet ahead of me."  Here, punctuation helps me describe to the reader all the commotion and action that I experienced one day in Chicago.

What If?: His Tears Weren't Real?

As Rahim Khan states, Amir's first short has irony.  A man forces terrible deeds onto himself so that he can be rewarded with pearls.  The story ends with the man killing his own wife, which made him so sad that he was sitting on a mountain of pearls, which was supposed to make him happy.  The paradox in the story is so simple, yet complex.  However, Hassan points out an obvious flaw to Amir, "Why did the man kill his wife?  In fact, why did he ever have to feel sad to shed tears?  Couldn't he have just smelled an onion?"  So... what if the man had just smelled an onion?  If he had done that, here is what might have happened:
A man finds a magic cup and learns that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls.  But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear.  So he finds a way to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich.  He went to the grocery store and bought onions daily.  There, at the grocery store, he met a lovely young woman.  He began having affairs with her and a love connection spurred.  The story ends with the man on his mountain of pearls, along with his lover.  His beloved wife held a knife in her hand.