Past from the eyes of the Present

 ‘The Office’ has become one of those shows that everyone has seen or at least heard of, also known as one of those shows that people “can just not believe you haven’t watched the greatest TV show of all time!!!”. Steve Carell, whose character has a bit of a unique sense of humor, has claimed that should ‘The Office’ air in this age, it would most probably face multiple backlashes. So has our [audience’s] sense of humour changed? Has it become more sensitive? What has changed? When does humour stop being funny and just plain offensive? By this point, it has become apparent that humour is subjective and depends from person to person. But if humour is subjective, how can we draw a line, or how can we say something is not a joke but just plain offensive? Where does the line come in? In the play ‘Waiting for Godot’, some people may find humour in Lucky’s situation or, on a smaller level, the speech he gave. However, some people may find it offensive and slightly insulting to people who...

 I don’t want to do another blog post where I trash poetry and credit it with everything wrong in my life. Instead, I decided to shift gears and sort of think about the impact that poetry has on modern society. Typically poetry is associated with twisted words and meaning, a maze of meaning that you have to dig 900 times to make some sense of. But when we did the newer poems and poets who are under the age of 60 it sort of started clearing out.  This entire week we sort of focused on the mentor poets and all the poets were supposed to be alive (and not just in spirit), and were therefore speaking mostly in the same form as me. As in they weren’t using “thine” “thee” words but normal everyday words. What really sort of stood out to me while listening and reading poems from various poets and my own mentor poet was that they spoke about relatable issues that I am either familiar with or have a good understanding of. I have spoken (written (?)) about how poetry is used to talk abo...

  So poetry right? It’s fun and interesting and everything until you have to sit down and analyze a poem about the Titanic which is apparently structured like the Titanic. Cheers to all the poets out there, cause that’s exactly what I needed in my life, more things to analyze.  (‘Life’ ‘analyze’ do those two rhyme? Sounds like it. Eh I digress) In my last post I tried to be all intellectual and find out why poetry is still so relevant in our society, and I came up with this theory that poetry works well because it’s the grey area between novels and songs, and so you get the best of both worlds. But still I mean it’s not necessary for a poet to ensnare and confuse me with twisted riddles when all they want to say is ‘pay attention to what you’re doing, people can trick you’. Like yeah Mr. Olive Senior I know that, but because of you I now have to write an essay on that. Like proper using words and coherent sentences.  (I wonder though, what would happen if I answered a poe...

Everyone I have spoken to (the five other people I talk to on a regular basis) about poetry and their thoughts about it, have in so many words expressed the same idea, poetry is overrated. This made me wonder how poetry is still relevant. From my (very biased, and skewed) sample it is obvious that people don’t really like poetry. Now from personal experience I can say that I thought of poetry as an unnecessary middle ground between stories and songs ( alliterations, they’re perfect). Cause like you get the whole narrative that you get in stories, but you have to add a rhyme scheme and rhythm to it, and then add hidden meanings. AND ALL THIS IS IN 5 STANZAS. Now I have changed a lot of my opinions this year, and poetry has been one of those. Poetry because of its position as a middle ground has the capability to express deep and complex meanings in a few words. It expresses emotions that a story might express in 1000 words, and with a smaller word range each word emphasizes the overall...

The hero’s journey is one of the most prominent archetypes in literature. Whether we look at that 500 years ago or 500 hours ago, there is always some rendition of it available to the p[resent society.  What is it about this outline that makes it so appealing to an audience.  Comparing ‘Siddhartha’ by Herman Hesse and ‘Into the Spiderverse’ we start to see the overall purpose and therefore, benefit of using this plotline. Both of these stories try to promote a moral or stance. ‘Siddhartha’ tries to show the importance of individuality and how many times the tried and tested method is wrong because everyone is faking it till they make something they can’t make. Spirituality and enlightenment is a self-discovery journey and there is no one answer or procedure. Everyone is different and it takes a leap of faith to get to a point where you can say you know yourself and you can function at your highest potential. Wow how totally random that the last sentence fit perfectly with the ...

 With another year gone and another semester of school passed by, I sat down and did some self-reflection. What did I achieve, what I learned and how I have grown. Some of the most important things I have learned were due to my reflections and connections from English class. It’s easy to read literature with a disconnected mind because “How is this relevant to me, and when am I going to need to rely on such experiences?” and that is correct. I am never going to go through the experiences of Meursault or Oedipus but I am going to face similar problems, similar conflicts. I mean I’m not going to be in an existential dilemma after shooting a man 5 times (I hope) but, the main thematic conflicts with existentialism and this idea of redundancy really resonated with me. I didn’t have any earth-shattering realizations or anything, but more of a subtle change in perspective. I have become far more receptive to contradicting ideas, and I have also learned to look at things deeper than the s...