* V a N 3 $ S a 's b L 0 G *

I’m doing my paper on “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson & I don’t think it will be that difficult for me because I think I understand the story pretty well. Plus, I have already read the story in a previous class so I have worked with this story before.  Although, I really need to start working on my rough draft so I won’t be rushing to finish.

*Also, I missed class on Wednesday, November 11th & I was wondering what I missed so if someone could tell me I would appreciate it =]

I think the play Othello is a very good play, but I just wish i could understand the language! The movie version we saw in class made  me understand the play a little better but I really didn’t like the way they tried to transform it into modern day. I didn’t like how basketball was compared to the play & Desdemona’s father was the head coach. I also that the ending of how everyone died in the end was not very convincing. It was a little over dramatic and I understand it is a drama play made into a movie, but i just thought that it could have been better. I would like to see another version of the play, which I am looking for, but with the same correlation with the actual play, but  in modern day language.

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is life the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

The poem I chose to respond to is called “Men at Forty” by Donald Justice. I decided to write a response to this poem because it has a life meaning to it. When Justice wrote this poem he was in his early forties and is probably writing about what he was feeling and the emotions he was going through at this time. Many times people think that only women go through emotional midlifes, but men also do too. At many times all people can really do is think about when they were a child and all thing silly little things they would do. In lines 9-12 Justices states, “And deep in mirrors / They rediscover / The face of the boy as he practices tying / His father’s tie there in secret”.  When the character of the poem looks in the mirror remembers how he would always try to tie on his father’s tie when his father was not around. I think this is a wonderful poem because almost everyone can relate to this type of feeling at some point in their life.

The poem I am thinking about doing for my essay is “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes. I like this poem because I think the narrator is trying to explain how he is not very much different from the other “white” students in his class. He explains that he likes a lot of the same things as other people who are of different race. At one point he tries to compare himself to his professor saying, “You are white / yet a part of me, as I am a part of you / That’s American” (30-32). I believe the narrator is trying to show that many different people share a lot of the same interests, no matter what their race might be. When this poem was written in 1951, African American were still struggling to survive socially. It had not been that long since slavery ended or even had had the right to vote. During this time, the Civil Rights Movement had not even started yet! I think Hughes did a great job on showing how African Americans weren’t as different as people may have thought. Unfortunately, people still judge & make assumptions about different races. You sure can’t judge a book by its cover.

Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou is the poem I chose because I think every woman should see themeselves the same way she describes in the poem.  In the first poem she explains that she is not perfect and does not have a perfect body but she is still a phenomenal woman. Every woman should be happy with their body and the way that they look. I think that in today’s society people are so worried about their appearance that they forget about the inner beauty because beauty today is only skin deep. It’s not only with women. Men are also overly concerned about their appearance as well. Everyone should be more accepting other people’s and their own appearance. It should not matter what someone looks like. The important thing is how a person feels and thinks.