Examples of Quality Blog Posts
Wondering what constitutes a thoughtful blog post? These are two examples.
Sonny's Blues
I really love this story. I think the fact that it’s about music touched a vein of mine, but I’m pretty sure you could substitute any kind of life work.
I really think it’s beautiful the way Baldwin describes life as beautiful, and music or drugs or anything being the culmination of so much life.
It really is like everything that we are coalesces into every moment, and every note of music requires all that we are, all of our emotions, and most of all the willingness to liberate ourselves by making ourselves vulnerable to the universality of music. It really is like dispersing into something that floats away with the air. Everything is so private all of the time; we live in such a subjective, restrictive world. The one moment we let ourselves go to the music, we give into a world that can make connections between the subjective sacks of our individual beings. We allow our anger or our passion to become intelligible. We punch holes in the isolation of existentialism. And what makes it all possible is the agony we go through. Every empathetic note requires its own agony.
I think, though, that if we can let ourselves go to things like music, life becomes worth it. Loneliness is ameleorated. We all enter that communal lake, a lake in which being high is an experience shared by everyone through the means of some huge connected being of humanity.
One of my favorite composers is Mahler. I really like him because he wrote about things that everyone connects to. When we played the Resurrection symphony in the Helena symphony, I really felt like something inside of me was pulled away into the music.
I just really believein the power of music I guess. It’s sometimes my one reassurance that we are not all alone in our minds. Something inside of us is connected.
Imperfect Mimicry in the Time Before Invisibility
I was thinking yesterday morning about some of the best imagery in the novel Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Strangely enough, by two favorites were images for one idea: that of imperfect mimicry/assimilation. The first came while the narrator was working at Liberty Paints, creating “Optic White” (because if it ain’t white, it ain’t right). His task, to put exactly ten drops of black into each bucket of white, and stir until the gray mess became optic white. As an image of assimilation, it suggests that all black people just need to be dropped into whiteness and stirred around a bit before becoming a part of the perfect whiteness of white society. Then, when the narrator runs out of the black and finds some more in the back room (the wrong black) it doesn’t mix completely, and he ends up ruining whole batches of paint because the “wrong black” refuses to mix into society. Logically, this pisses off the narrator’s white boss…
Next, just before leaving Mary Rambo’s, the narrator is offered a cup of coffee. The coffee tasted bitter, because some renegade coffee grounds had leaked into the pot and ruined the narrator’s morning coffee. This is another suggestion that “a few bad grounds” can ruin the assimilation process for all blacks.
Can anyone think of some other images that suggest the same thing?
Previous examples from Mr. Pogreba's AP students
Sonny's Blues
I really love this story. I think the fact that it’s about music touched a vein of mine, but I’m pretty sure you could substitute any kind of life work.
I really think it’s beautiful the way Baldwin describes life as beautiful, and music or drugs or anything being the culmination of so much life.
It really is like everything that we are coalesces into every moment, and every note of music requires all that we are, all of our emotions, and most of all the willingness to liberate ourselves by making ourselves vulnerable to the universality of music. It really is like dispersing into something that floats away with the air. Everything is so private all of the time; we live in such a subjective, restrictive world. The one moment we let ourselves go to the music, we give into a world that can make connections between the subjective sacks of our individual beings. We allow our anger or our passion to become intelligible. We punch holes in the isolation of existentialism. And what makes it all possible is the agony we go through. Every empathetic note requires its own agony.
I think, though, that if we can let ourselves go to things like music, life becomes worth it. Loneliness is ameleorated. We all enter that communal lake, a lake in which being high is an experience shared by everyone through the means of some huge connected being of humanity.
One of my favorite composers is Mahler. I really like him because he wrote about things that everyone connects to. When we played the Resurrection symphony in the Helena symphony, I really felt like something inside of me was pulled away into the music.
I just really believein the power of music I guess. It’s sometimes my one reassurance that we are not all alone in our minds. Something inside of us is connected.
Imperfect Mimicry in the Time Before Invisibility
I was thinking yesterday morning about some of the best imagery in the novel Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Strangely enough, by two favorites were images for one idea: that of imperfect mimicry/assimilation. The first came while the narrator was working at Liberty Paints, creating “Optic White” (because if it ain’t white, it ain’t right). His task, to put exactly ten drops of black into each bucket of white, and stir until the gray mess became optic white. As an image of assimilation, it suggests that all black people just need to be dropped into whiteness and stirred around a bit before becoming a part of the perfect whiteness of white society. Then, when the narrator runs out of the black and finds some more in the back room (the wrong black) it doesn’t mix completely, and he ends up ruining whole batches of paint because the “wrong black” refuses to mix into society. Logically, this pisses off the narrator’s white boss…
Next, just before leaving Mary Rambo’s, the narrator is offered a cup of coffee. The coffee tasted bitter, because some renegade coffee grounds had leaked into the pot and ruined the narrator’s morning coffee. This is another suggestion that “a few bad grounds” can ruin the assimilation process for all blacks.
Can anyone think of some other images that suggest the same thing?
Previous examples from Mr. Pogreba's AP students
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