TOW #3 Harvey Milk

The article I found is all about the life of Harvey Milk who was one of the first openly gay people to be senator. When he was about 40, he didn't like his previous jobs and looked back on his life with the feeling that he had yet to accomplish anything. He moved to San Francisco with his boyfriend and opened up a camera shop on Castro Street. He asked if his shop could join the business association of the area but was denied because he was gay. Harvey was mad so he ran for a position on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors multiple times. Harvey Milk ran several times and continued to not only bring more people to Castro Street, but also recruited supporters as well. He did eventually get the position he wanted. Towards the end of his life, he made tapes of himself telling everything that had happened so far and have been used to make several movies. This article was written by the “Official HARVEY MILK Biography”. They are people who have learned and researched Harvey’s life and continue to spread his legacy. They also work towards gay world-wide. They want to spread Harvey’s story to the rest of the world so his courage and sacrifice can be known and also inspire more people to support the LGBTQ Community. By including sentences like, “Milk’s unprecedented loud and unapologetic proclamation of his authenticity as an openly gay candidate for public office, and his subsequent election gave never before experienced hope  to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered (LGBT) people everywhere at a time when the community was encountering widespread hostility and discrimination”, and including Harvey’s own quote where he said, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door”, helped to show his bravery. Because Gays were very hated during this time, being so loud and proud and influential was very dangerous for his life. He ignored this fact and continue to help his people. Unfortunately, he was correct in thinking a bullet would enter his brain. The day before what would have been his 49^th birthday, Dave was convicted. What makes the situation even worse is that the judge decided Dave ate too much junk food and was not able to held accountable for his murders so he only went to jail for 8 years and was let out early. This information works to anger people reading as well and make people want to act in retaliation to make sure the LGBTQ Community is never silenced again. All in all, this article was incredibly inspiring and well written. It makes me want to find a way for his story to be taught in schools because his is a story that deserves to be told.

TOW #2 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Personally I find Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to be a particularly interesting guy but before I read all of the information I just read, I had based that idea off of his intelligence shown in the Sherlock Holmes stories. I have always been a giant fan of mysteries but I never knew anything about the man behind one of the most famous detectives ever written. Thanks to Dr Andrzej Diniejko, D. Litt.; Contributing Editor, Poland, I now know quite a bit about his writing career. He has written, "twenty-one novels and over 150 short stories. He also published nonfiction, essays, articles, memoirs and three volumes of poetry. He [wrote] thousands of letters" (Diniejko). I had never realized just how much he had accomplished literature wise throughout the course of his life and I believe that is the purpose of creating this website. Anyone who is able to read may now find this website and learn all about the career that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had more in depth. He did write much more than Sherlock Holmes stories but those were and still are, his most famous pieces of work written. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle however, was not a fan of his detective stories and felt he should be writing Historical Romances so he had Sherlock fall off of the Reichenbach falls with his nemesis Professor Moriarty. The public demanded that he bring Sherlock back but Sir Arthur was clever. He published stories about adventures Sherlock and John had gone on before Sherlock "died" but no one bought it. Eventually he did have to bring Sherlock back and I am sure many people, including myself, are very happy he eventually did so. As I said before, he is most famous for his Sherlock stories but he also wrote nonfiction stories as well as historical fiction, horror, suspense, science and more. Throughout the article there are headings that say which genre of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's works would be discussed in it. The author uses hyperbolas like when the author said Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "...restored confidence that the British were capable to maintain law and order not only in Britain but also in the Empire at large", by writing his Sherlock Holmes stories and novels. The organization of the piece also helped to make the article more understandable and enjoyable. I felt I learned very much about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I never knew, for example, that he hated Sherlock Holmes. Because the author had so many interesting facts, a wonderfully set up web article as well as hyperbolas that make me wonder how much exaggeration is really used because he was a very important guy, I feel this is a very well written site that accomplishes the purpose. People will now go to this site and learn a lot about an author they hopefully love.

TOW #1 Political Cartoon

In The Week magazine, a political cartoon was published that is showing the republican party (which is represented by an elephant) afraid to allow refugees into the country. This is a serious issue because the refugees come from very unstable nations. The Republicans are afraid that if we let in more refugees, we could therefore let terrorists into our nation and possibly have a repeat of what occurred on 9/11 which is definitely not wanted. The Democrats want to allow people into our country. It was drawn by Mike Luckovich who is a very well-known political cartoonist. As Donald Trump runs for president, he makes the issue of refugees staying in the Unites States one of the key issues he would like to address. It may be winning the votes of some people but it is also a reason people do not wish to vote for him. Mike uses analogy to compare the Pilgrims and the refugees to one another. The Pilgrims left England to escape religious persecution and start a new life on their own in a new country with more freedoms. Refugees want similar things to the Pilgrims; most want to leave in order to escape persecution of many kinds and to find freedom and safety. The analogy helps to make the refugees more understandable and is then able to show the desires of the people and how those same desires helped to create our country. It may even make people feel bad for them. The size of the Mayflower makes the issue of refugees look much bigger than the Republican party as if to say they cannot handle the challenges that would come with new people coming into America. This political cartoon is written for people that are going to vote for the democratic side (Hilary Clinton) this election because it is making fun of the Republicans by making them seem like cowards.

IRB Post #1

The first Independent Reading Book that I have chosen is called Wednesday is Indigo Blue by David Eagleman and Richard Cytowic. It is a book about Synesthesia which literally means "the combining of the senses." I chose this book because Synesthesia fascinates me. It sounds like a fictional idea and yet it is something that exists in the real world. I would love to get a better understanding of Synesthesia than I already have as well as just enjoy an interesting book. 

They All Just Went Away

Joyce Carol Oates' essay titled They All Just Went Away, is very thought provoking. It was written in 1995 and is a first hand account of a family that lived in a broken home where,” the roof of the house was made of sheets of tin, scarred and scanned like skin, and the front was covered in simulated-brick asphalt siding pieced together from lumberyard scraps" (Oates 558). The father was a drunk who beat his family. His wife never reported him, but instead lied and said he never laid a hand on anyone. One day he lit the house on fire and although it didn't burn the whole thing down, it still tore apart the family. Her use of rhetoric devices such as the imagery of the houses and, "the lyric smell of honeysuckle"(Oates 555)", make the narrative feel more real, as if the reader is there looking at the ashes of what used to be. She is also able to use metaphors to explain what a home is by saying," [...] the house is the mother's body, you have been expelled and are forbidden to now reenter"(Oates 554). This makes the reader understand that a house is meant to feel safe and familiar but at the same time so unreachable. She is able to speak to her audience of anyone who has ever felt like they might be alone, and make them see how her life changed as well as the life of one of the girls from the old broken house. In the end she befriended one of the girls who lived there but she would never admit her father broke her home. Instead she blamed it on lightning. She protects her father as her mother always had because that is what was done in her family. Joyce Carol Oates proved her point that a home is the people living inside a building and not the building itself, very well. Her ability to make readers feel apart of her story makes it more of an impact and heartfelt. Anyone interested in reading a well-written, short essay may want to consider reading They All Just Went Away. 


Lighting Strike
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The Figure a Poem Makes

Robert Frost is a poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry more than one time throughout his career. He is very highly respected in the literary world and considered to be one of the best ports so far. Although he is famous for poetry, he also wrote a very insightful essay called, The Figure a Poem Makes in 1939. It is written to his fellow poets (hence the use of the word we throughout the essay) about how a poem should be written. He uses hyperbolas to show that poems must be written wildly and naturally so that it will," run itself and [carry] the poet with it", so it's always loved. Of course a poem does not literally run off with its creator but it does show that the poem is in control of the direction it is going. The poet must let the poem take its intended course rather than try to control it. Mr. Frost also uses different types of figure of speech such as when he says that, "like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting" (Frost 178), to show how one must leave the course of the poem up to the poem itself because that is what he wanted to tell people. He feels that a poem must be wild in order to be worth reading or writing. Using these types of rhetoric devices makes the idea that poems must be written on their own accord very understandable. It also makes it seem as though the only correct way to write a poem is to let go of a person's hold on the poem and let it take the writer somewhere special so it is going to take the reader to a special place too. Robert Frost's The Figure a Poem Makes is a very well written essay. 

Flying Poem

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The Devil Baby at Hull-House

The Devil Baby at Hull-House by Jane Addams is a wonderfully written essay. It is written to men to show them that hard-working women make up the bulk of women in the word. They may go through terrible times but they keep on moving forward. Jane Addams was a suffragette leader and pushed women's rights as much as possible because she believed that men and women should be treated as equals. The Devil Baby at Hull-House was originally published in, "The Atlantic Monthly, 1916; collected in The Long Road of Woman's Memory"(Addams 75). It begins with the story of a devil child living in her town. People from all over gathered to pay money and see the demon child but there never was one. While some got angered and felt conned, others felt it was their time to talk about their lives and the demons that plague them. She sees how the women seem to be calloused and no longer feel then pains of life. Jane Addam's use of imagery in her narrative paints a picture in the minds of readers. A little girl went crazy because she saw, "blood splashed on the wall" (Addams 78), after her father killed himself. He had previously been trying to kill the girl and her mother. She," [...] shivered and shook all that night through, and the next morning she had lost her voice [...]" (Addams 78) making her madness more visible. It also made that part of the essay more haunting. She also had the brilliant allegory of the devil child also being a representation of the demons these women had to deal with cause the men in their lives had been either of no help in, or the cause of, the worst tragedies these women had to bear. This made her point that women continue to push through their hard times and work hard, very strong. 

Suffragette Women Talk

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