Reflection

            I initially signed up for this class basing it on a previous experience that I had during last summer session at school. I had to start getting my English courses out of the way and signed up for an on-line course. I had anticipated a class where I got to sit at home and take a break from seeing people, where I wouldn’t necessarily have to interact. And to be honest, I thought something that I wouldn’t have to put much thought into. To my relief, it was exactly what I expected but also at the same time a bit disappointing. There were discussion board posts that were required once a week and you had to respond to two other “classmates” as well. All very easy and pretty impersonal. But the subjects that we were writing on for these posts (and for our required papers), I found extremely superficial and a lot of what I loathe about our society as a whole. The class was very easy and like I wanted, something that didn’t require much thought, but to have to read mindless dribble that lacked substance and then to have to write a decent paper about it was pretty awful. Though I had disappointments with taking that course, I had hoped that English 102 would still be consistent with the previous one as far as little interaction and just maybe, because it was a higher class, would contain materials that actually meant something.

            Before starting this class, I had gotten the required books and decided to get a head start on reading them and to my delight really enjoyed them. The chosen texts are very thought provoking and raw. I began thinking how wonderful it will be to write papers on what I read, still though somehow hoping that interaction would be to a minimum. Of course I soon found out with the first assignment that I couldn’t be more wrong.

            My experience using different facets of technology has been quite limited and through this course I have definitely learned a thing or two. Silly as it may seem I didn’t know how to set up links or make a video and then post it through utube and then post that to a blog, and I never really thought that I would ever be doing such a thing. I do have to admit that at the beginning I really wasn’t looking forward to all of that but in the end found it quite easy and very useful to know. I’ve also become way more proficient in using Microsoft Word which will be useful forever (or until something better comes long).

            As far as writing goes, I am sort of the queen of run-on sentences and in taking this course have become more conscious of that aspect of my writing. I also, even though I have been in a prior college English course, did not really know how to format my papers MLA style. And fortunately I was given great feedback on my papers that I have submitted this term that has definitely improved my technical writing skills.

            Overall I have enjoyed the whole experience that I’ve had in this class and do not regret taking it at all. It was  nice to read works with substance and hash the words over in my brain and then use concepts of analysis that I didn’t know existed (such as poetry of witness) to conceptualize my own papers. I am definitely walking away from this course with knowledge of how to write appropriate college papers and also how to utilize technology in a way that I never thought I would.

stefanie's blog english 102: Sam Hamill - The Necessity to Speak ... ( my respo...

 I enjoyed this blog post especially because i felt like i could speak my mind. It felt good to spout of my own rant for a moment of how i view society (something that i rarely do).
stefanie's blog english 102: Sam Hamill - The Necessity to Speak ... ( my respo...: "As I read Sam Hamill s’ The Necessity to Speak, I am filled again with this distaste tinged with apathy that I’ve come to recognize in mys..."

stefanie's blog english 102: Good Readers and Writers

 Before this blog assignment I never really thought of a person being a good reader....besides the ability to read the words written down. This one got me to be a bit introspective and look at myself a bit.

stefanie's blog english 102: Good Readers and Writers: "Nabokov believes that a “good” reader is one who has a certain level of imagination, one who goes willingly into the story told with no pre..."

stefanie's blog english 102: ...research...

 I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was pulled in so many different directions on what i wanted to write my paper on specifically. Having to blog my research topic was so good for me in the way that had i not had to post it, i may have never been able to narrow what i wanted to write about down completely.

stefanie's blog english 102: ...research...: "I have to wonder after reading Margaret Atwood’s take on the not so distant future in “The Handmaid’s Tale” if we are not headed down the..."

"Live Essay"

Comparing Huze and O’Brien: Short Essay # 3

            What goes through a person’s mind when they are knee-deep in death? How does a person wrap their brain around constant carnage without a moment of notice? Both Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Sean Huze’s The Sandstorm are filled with stories that bear witness to these questions. In between the joking, the anger, and overtly aggressive responses for coping mechanisms both works also show how the brain has the ability to detach from the harsh reality and then will focus on something a bit more obscure in order to deal with the situation at hand.

            Throughout Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story,” taken from his book The Things They Carried, several tales are told. Inevitably because of the nature, the reader is shown how the characters cope with their own realities. In a particular paragraph the author focuses on himself and his memory. One obviously so harsh that he states, “This one wakes me up.” (O’Brien 82) It isn’t really his quick remembrance of seeing Curt Lemmon being blown into a tree that troubles his sleep but instead it is an action/re-action of another army buddy Dave Jenson:

“The parts were just hanging there, so Dave Jenson and I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible, and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jenson singing “Lemon Tree” as we threw down parts.” (O’Brien)

How interesting that it is the song that plagues his dreams to the point of waking from sleep and not the horrific image of seeing his friend blown to bits. To imagine climbing up a tree to throw down what is left of someone that was just there moments before and not have those be the images that would wake him in the middle of the night doesn’t seem really possible. And although the author does admit that the scene was awful and a memory that sticks with him still, it seems that the predominant memory is the song that was sang. This is how his brain copes with the trauma of witnessing his friends’ death. And with that song, a disconnection to his friend Curt Lemmon occurs, where he is then no longer referred to as such but instead just as “parts.” (O’Brien 83) The whole scene is obscure and surreal unto itself, but this story shows how the author’s brain holds on to the most obscure scene in order to cope with the reality and also one way that he bears witness to it.

            In The Sandstorm, author Sean Huze writes a monologue in which PFC Weems retells an account of what he calls “Just another shit-hole town we shot up” (Huze 13) which also bears witness to the atrocities of war. It also shows how the brain copes with the horrific moments by latching onto the most obscure things:

“My ankle rolled and I almost fell into a pile of dead hajjis. I caught my balance and looked down to see what had tripped me. It was a foot. A fucking foot. I picked it up and stared at it. I couldn’t get past it. I was stuck on this foot. There I was, bodies were scattered throughout the streets and it didn’t faze me, but this foot for some reason really fucked me up.” (Huze 13)

PFC Weems proceeds to tell of how he searched for the leg. How he felt compelled to find the owner. As if that would right all of the wrongs he has had to do. Again, with this story, how interesting it is that the speaker openly says that it is not the carnage that he is surrounded by that is so overwhelming but a random appendage, a foot attached to nothing that messed with his head so much. PFC Weems, in order to cope with it all decides that if he can find that person/body that is missing the foot, he can then make it right. Instead of coping with a mass amount of dead bodies and the reality of that, Weems focuses on something so obscure and unreal in order to continue on. Here Sean Huze is showing how one, when faced with the brutal realities of war, can detach themselves in order to have some sort of handle on what lay ahead of them.

            To look at the moments that the two stories describe is unimaginable. Again, how is it possible to move on and conduct oneself with some sort of normalcy after experiencing times that are so brutal and horrific? One would only hope that there would be a way to detach from the actualities of the moment. How else would you get through it with any sort of sanity? Both excerpts, though told by different authors, set in two different time periods in two different wars effectively show how the brain can place importance on the obscurities of the situation instead of the gruesome actualities that have been placed before them in order to cope with the events at hand.  The similarities of the two stories portray one of the many ways men in war got through those moments in time when they were faced with the harshest of situations; and how they possibly saved a bit of their own sanity through the brains natural ability to detach itself from the awful carnage of war that they were participating in.

Works Cited

Huze, Sean. The Sandstorm: Stories from the Front. New York: Susan Schulman Literary Agency, 2004, Print.

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried: How To Tell a True War Story. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2009. Print.