Katherine’s Blog

Here is what you need to do. Wait until it is evening. Take a nice little walk around the block. Maybe you’re feeling extra athletic and you decide to expand your jaunt a few more blocks, perhaps you even circumambulate the entire neighborhood. Stroll at a leisurely pace, enjoy the fresh air. But remember, it is also night, so you must be aware of your surroundings. Keep your head at a constant swivel. Oh, look at the squirrel over there. And do you hear the wind chimes on your neighbor’s front porch? Well, isn’t that a lovely little porch. Look at that wreath that have on their door! Oh, their curtains are pulled back, and the windows are open! That’s looks like a comfy couch. And they have the football game on! Oh, they must like that child the most since they have the biggest picture hanging on the wall. But that’s all you can see as you continue your walk. Until there’s movement in the corner of your eye that catches your attention. Someone else in a different house is walking into...

Whenever I think about Ernest Hemingway, I can only ever think about that one scene from the movie  Midnight in Paris . If you haven’t seen it, it is about this guy named Gil (played by the one and only Owen Wilson) who is in France. At midnight, he is transported back in time to the 1920s, and he meets all the famous writers, poets, and artists who were actually in France at the time—including Ernest Hemingway. This movie is very good, and I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. It has Owen Wilson in it! You literally can’t go wrong.  Here is the scene where Gil meets Hemingway:  https://youtu.be/3wM06z5lA74 From everything I know about how Hemingway was in real life and what his writing style is, I think this is a pretty accurate depiction of him.  Anyway, that was in the back of my mind as I read his story “Hills Like White Elephants.” I have read the story before in high school, but I think I could appreciate it more the second time reading it. It’s usef...

Do you think Walt Whitman would lose in a fight against Carly Simon? Honest opinions only please.  Now Whitman does have a few things going for him. He’s a decent poet. He knows how to write some really pretty lines that invoke alluring imagery (see “I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass” from his poem “I celebrate myself, and sing myself”). However, he has an ego bigger than the room. I mean, he wrote an entire poem in which the speaker celebrates and sings about himself. Can someone really be that great? On the other hand, Carly Simon is a living icon. She’s in incredibly talented musician and singer-songwriter. She’s had many hit records including the famous “You’re So Vain.” Yes, that is the song from the movie How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days , and yes it is the song Kate Hudson’s character publicly scream-sings at Matthew McConaughey’s character. Carly Simon is not afraid to call out someone’s narcissism. I don’t think she’d be afraid to put Whitman in hi...

I have never been a huge Emily Dickinson fan. It is not that I don’t like her work—I generally do—but because I just have not read a lot of her poems. I have a faint memory of reading “Because I could not stop for Death—” in one of my high school classes, but we talked about it pretty briefly then moved on to something else.  That being said, I really enjoyed reading the poem again. Dickinson describes Death as kind and patient, which is not what people might typically think. Yet there is also this sense of deception on Death’s part by the last stanza. The speaker did not necessarily understand that the horses driving them were headed toward eternity in death. Also, the speaker was not prepared for this journey, since she was wearing the wrong clothes (a dress of gossamer). Still, I don’t think the speaker entirely resents this. She may not have wanted to die, but she also knows death is a fact of life no one is capable of changing. The reader needs to remember that life is fleetin...

  Hello, everyone! Welcome to my very first blog. Let’s get right into it.  One of the first poems we have read in the class that has intrigued me is “Doesn’t he realize…” by Ono no Komachi. We discussed how the speaker is commodified like seaweed, and that she will no longer put up with the actions of some man in her life. Although we don’t have any explicit description of the speaker as a woman, it just feels like it is. The most impactful part of this poem is the fact that was written around 1,000 years ago. One. Thousand. That is so crazy to me. But I guess not really either. I should know that female pain hasn’t really changed in all this time.  Its like when Lana del Rey said “Cause you’re just a man/Its just what you do/Your head in your hands/As you color me blue” in her song “Norman F***ing Rockwell”.  And it’s like when Kristin Scott Thomas’s character in Fleabag  said “Women are born with pain built in…We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives...