Jonathan Alonzo

The vignette that stood out to me was, “My Name.” This vignette stood out to me because one of my last names is Alonzo and that comes from my father. I have 2 last names, but this one has such a negative connotation because my father was an alcoholic, he was a drug addict, he physically and verbally abused my mother, and he abused me and my brother and sister. Knowing that my last name is what connects me to my father growing up made me carry such a heavy weight with me and it frustrates me that even now that he is older he is still the same person he was when I was a child growing up. I have been thinking for a while now to change my last name and remove it and leave the last name from my mother’s side which has a way better history and does not have negative weight for me to carry.

An idea I have for my research paper is children’s development in fairytales. The fairytale I will be using is Hercules, now this story is very special to me because I relate to it a lot and I picked up a few behaviors and thought processes because of this fairy tale. In Hercules you would learn to always be true to yourself, which is something I understood from watching this at a young age, and to me, it just seems so fascinating, and I wanted to be just like that. I also learned how much Hercules kept pushing and pushing to become what he wanted, a hero and to be recognized by the gods and find his place and he never gave up he truly put in the work to become what he wanted and that is who I wanted to be as a kid, be my own Hercules. At the moment I have not found an article on the BMCC library database, but I am on the lookout!

My attitude about fairytales has not changed much from the readings. As I grew, I began to understand that fairytales can be jam-packed with multiple meanings. When it comes to fairytales, I believe the audience chooses different bits and pieces of a story and will make that into the meaning until they re-read it at another date and will realize that there is more to the story. For example, in Snow White, you would see the Queen aging and her beauty deteriorating and because Snow White is the opposite of that she was treated unfairly. My mom experienced something like this personally, she would be overworked and treated unfairly by her family members just for being herself and now that she has her own daughter she did not continue the cycle she let my sister always shine and took care of her just like a mother should.

An idea that I was able to understand in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” that I would have missed if I had not read the article by the author is the growth of a character overtime for example I saw the grandmother as someone that’s self-centered and extremely snarky for example, “In my time,” said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, “children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh, look at the cute little pickaninny!” When I read this, it seems as if she was throwing shade at the kids, and the attitude before this quote she would dress up nicely and show off. Then towards the end of the reading when she was shot, she changed and started to see the Misfit as one of her children. From reading that article I would not be able to understand why she switched in an instant, she began from being selfish at the beginning to attempting to care at the end.

I would rate my ability to read and understand Oedipus the King from a scale of 1 – 10 a 3 because I am not comfortable in reading plays. I find it difficult to switch between characters, especially the chorus. To me jumping from one character to the other is not a smooth and easy transition, I prefer reading traditional books and stories, and this led to me being confused the entire time while reading this play. I did not enjoy reading this play, I was completely lost, it was not my cup of tea, but even though I did not enjoy the play, if I were to pick a character for me to play it would be Creon, because he wanted stability of Thebes!

I would say my ability to read poetry is still average, but I have the skills I need to improve my reading comprehension as well as my ability to understand a poem on a deeper level. For example, re-reading a poem a few times to be able to grasp every little detail of a poem, because they are short due to poems being so short a lot of details get glanced over but after re-reading a few times you can catch new details you’ve missed, and begin to understand the poets meaning of a poem clearer. This was one of my weaknesses in poems because I would skim quickly through them and at the end I would be confused and completely lost but if I practice re-reading and breaking down the poems I believe I would begin understanding poems better than before, for example, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost where I was completely confused but after the class went on I began to understand that the person literally stopped to take in the sights of the forest but he still has a long way to go to reach his destination.

The quote I picked was “Literature is painting, architecture, and music” by Yevgeny Zamyatin. I picked this quote because I was able to effectively connect its meaning with the story of “Araby” by James Joyce. Due to the fact that Joyce used a lot of descriptive words and imagery to set up the setting, to describe a character, to adding different sounds in his writing. One part that stuck with me his when he was describing the sounds of raindrops when the boy was in the back of the drawing room and wrote “I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds”. Using words like “impinge” and describing the raindrops as “fine incessant needles” can create a beautiful image to the reader of how real and vivid rain can be portrayed. This is why books are one of the most beautiful forms of art.

The sentence from the student’s essay “In the compelling short story “Araby” by James Joyce, the author encourages readers to examine the intricate character of the nameless narrator and the complexity of the human condition” shows a few ineffective elements. The first one is the student used “compelling short story” now I believe we all know Professor Conway will only pick compelling stories, which means the beginning sentence is starting off weak. The second issue the student basically listed off what the body of the essay is going to be instead of putting in some creative thinking where the body of the essay would explain that creativity. I would rewrite the sentence like this; In “Araby” by James Joyce, the author tells a story about a young boy who falls deeply in love, but he is so in love that it leads to him being distracted from his own life leading to disappointments.

In my essay about “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara I would write about the strong discrimination in the story, for example “Miss Moore was her name. The only women on the block with no first name. And she was black as hell, cept for her feet, which were fish-white and spooky” (Bambara). The way the kids describe her negatively by using strong words like hell to describe the color of her skin is shocking. Also, in the beginning of the story the kids made fun of her appearance for being different in town for having nappy hair, proper speech, and walks around with no makeup and then they compared her to a homeless man near the area which they call “the junk man”. The title I will give my essay is “Ignorance of Skin Color”, I will name my essay this because the children in the story don’t really know how successful Miss Moore is, she has a degree and speaks properly but just because of her skin color they see her negatively.

I relate to the narrator in “Salvation” by Langston Hughes, due to the reason that as a child my family was extremely religious and they wanted me to follow in the same footsteps. They fed me so many ideas of how good is our savior our hope and the important part that he would help us in times of need you just have to pray. As I grew older I started to question religion but my family went through a rough patch and we needed help so I prayed asking for help from god but nothing happened noting worked and I was left disappointed and all my faith was gone. For example the character in Salvation Westley where he did the following “Finally Westley said to me in a whisper: “God damn! I’m tired o’ sitting here. Let’s get up and be saved” (Hughes). Westley actions shows that he too questioned the entire ceremony but due to the pressure of everyone in the church he gave in and just got up to get it over with.

I believe the reason we were assigned “The Most Handsome Drowned Man” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez as the first reading is to distinguish our analyzing and processing skills. For example, the story begins with establishing the setting, but the writer wrote it with so much imagery that we the reader can clearly see the setting as we continue reading the text. Marquez also brought of something I found extremely interesting which is the thinking of the women and men in the village. For example, the women in the village gave the dead man a background story where he seemed heroic while on the other hand the men were enraged by the treatment, they saw the stranger receiving and were agitated, in the text it states “men finally exploded with since when has there ever been such a fuss over a drifting corpse, a drowned nobody, a piece of cold Wednesday meet”. (Marquez Pg. 6) Marquez using exploded in this part of the reading made it clear to the reader that the men were angry with what they were seeing concerning the dead man, the “drowned nobody” as the men in the village called him.