Passim Points

  Madame Crommelynck is certainly one of Black Swan Green’s most interesting characters. Her dialogue is metaphor and allusion laden and her impact on Jason is profound as such. However, there’s a sort of irony in how she presents herself.  One of the more notable conversations the two have is about truthfulness and beauty. Speaking to Jason about his poetry, Madame Crommelynck says “if an art is free of falseness, it is, a priori, beautiful.” She puts a huge emphasis on the fact that Jason needs to be truthful in his art. Their weekly visits are soon cut short for a shocking reason, Madame Crommelynck is arrested. Her sudden departure makes her character quite paradoxical, after all how could she hide so much if she believed in truth?  In another previous scene, she shows Jason a photograph of herself as a young girl. Jason doesn’t realize it’s her at first, Madame Crommelynck confirms it is saying “Yes. Whatever beauty is, I had it in those days. Or it had me.”...

  Due to the incredibly raw and honest nature of Alison Bechdel’s art and narrative, we’re given a complex understanding of her own thought process. Simultaneously, many of us are probably wondering why she decided to disclose such sensitive, personal information. The answer? Catharsis- Bechdel uses the art of comics to further digest, analyze, and release her emotions.  Although, even this explanation of the therapeutic nature of cartooning doesn’t really cut it. After all, why is it so important that she express her emotions through that? While I was pondering this question myself I remembered Alison describing her family of artists as a “mildly autistic colony.” Her gravitation to comics as a form of expression may be explained by alexithymia, which is experienced by around 55% of autistic people and is defined by difficulty identifying and describing one’s own emotions as well as others. Creating Fun Home must've been an incredibly introspective experience and helped her c...

  TW// Suicide All in all, Esther’s experience with therapy was pretty bad (not only because it was the 1940s and ECT was bad and the only option usually!) Esther’s negative experiences with Dr. Gordon definitely led her to become more suicidal. He doesn’t do ECT correctly and she never really feels comfortable talking to him so they make no progress in their sessions.  The majority of those negative experiences stem from the fact that Esther is unable to “break up” with Dr. Gordon. This is an issue even today because it’s a common misconception that you can’t leave your therapist if you feel things aren’t working with them. When reflecting on Dr. Gordon Esther says he’d “tell me why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't eat and why everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end. And then, I thought, he would help me, step by step, to be myself again” (Plath 68). She was expecting their time together to go much, much differe...

  From the start it’s pretty clear to every reader that Holden Caufield is a bit different than everyone else. But why? Why does he view everyone as phony? Why doesn’t he try in school despite being smart? Why does he want to horse around so much? The answer? Holden probably has ADHD, which in the 1940s was never diagnosed in children. The fact that he’s unable to understand himself through the lenses of diagnosis definitely doesn’t help with his utter disillusionment and depression. In some respects, I saw a lot of myself in him. When most people think of ADHD they only think of hyperactivity, but other major symptoms include stuff like anxiety, daydreaming as well as many comorbid disorders like depression. One major aspect of Holden’s story is his refusal to do hardly any schoolwork and his subsequent failure at school. Holden never tries unless it’s English writing because it’s the one subject he genuinely enjoys and sees the point in. For that same reason, he’s able to wri...

  CAUTION !!!!!!!!!!!! SPOILERS How do we define a successful coming of age as opposed to an unsuccessful one, and can it be defined solely by measures such as morality, growth, and independence? The troubled life of Jesse Pinkman, one of the hit show Breaking Bad’s two main protagonists, brings many of these questions to the table. Breaking Bad tells the story of how Jesse and Walter White rise to the top of the meth business. At the beginning, Jesse is portrayed as an immoral, drug addict and dealer whereas Walter is a smart, moral man who wants to cook meth to pay for his bills and family’s future in light of his lung cancer diagnosis.  Throughout the five seasons, Jesse and Walter seem to switch roles, becoming the hero and antihero respectively. Walter becomes corrupted by the drug business while Jesse persistently tries to uphold morality. Jesse and Walter’s partnership changes both of their lives drastically. Jesse’s journey is a sad one: we see him grow out of his ca...

How are you feeling today? Are you feeling pent up or angry? Or maybe you’re excited and energetic? Maybe just feel like you need to scribble? Well now’s your chance! This exercise is incredible simply but will require your best pencil and a focus. Feel free to play some bops in the background or just listen to the white noise around you, whatever floats your boat. There are 4 simple steps. 1. Scribble 2. Follow the lines of the scribble with another line, try to keep it equidistant but don’t get worried if it’s a little off! It adds to the charm. 3. Keep filling in the lines, you can also fill in some bubbles with shading or just leave them blank to mix it up. 4. Nothing. Your masterpiece is done! 5. Buy a GraphGear mechanical pencil, seriously. I’ve had one GraphGear, it’s the only pencil I’ve used the last 2 years for both school work and art and I guard it with my life </3 (it’s a little pricey but it’s worth every penny because it’s the best pencil ever) also feel free to turn ...

I think the worst part of quarantine is that we can’t see our friends anymore. We miss them, they miss us, it’s a vicious cycle. It can be hard to even keep in touch sometimes, which is why you should reach out to them with this exercise! Grab your pencil, paper, and any other materials you want and get ready to draw! Think of a specific friend or group of friends and draw something you miss doing with them or a nice memory you share. When you’re done make sure to send it to them! Personally, quarantine has really stunted me because I’m unable to feed my boba addiction. Since subbie year, my friend Alice and have gone at least once a week, maybe even a few times to Green Street to get boba and talk. I really miss our weekly ritual so I decided to draw us doing cheers (but with boba of course). I sent it to her and she was really happy! 

Okay okay, here’s your first exercise on your art journey toward enlightenment. Think of 8 different emotions / concepts and use only lines to depict them. I know this might seem a little crazy, but it’ll be fun! Don’t be afraid to get a little crazy. Don’t think about thinks rigidly, really feel the lines and let them take you away. Your final creation will be an abstract masterpiece! For my practice run, I chose anger, joy, tranquility, depression, human energy, fraternity, illness, and growth! I think the most fun I had was definitely with the anger one, because anger is something really easily expressed with lines, especially scribbles! For the rest, I found myself using more and more shapes to express the more complex concepts. Which is okay! It’s good to just let your mind wander and your hand follow.

As many of us know, Corona has drastically affected our daily lives for better and for worse and keeping oneself happy and healthy is essential to surviving quarantine! With so much anxiety surrounding what will happen regarding the virus and in the future while also being unable to participate in normal routines, it can be hard to stay in the moment. Mindfulness, the practice of focusing and reflecting on the present moment, is an especially excellent way to push toward that healthy balance. I’ll be sharing 3 different ways to practice mindfulness… through art! I know you might be thinking, how can art help me be happier? Or maybe, I suck at drawing how am i going to do this! Have no fear! The exercises I’m going to share with you, for the low price of zero dollars but the reward of happiness and satisfaction, are incredibly simple! All you have to do is click on the next post! Enjoy!

  Q: How would you characterize Fatima’s relationship to her body in The Body’s Defenses Against Itself? A: From Fatima’s memories of her childhood, I got the sense that the judgemental nature caused by her shame doesn’t stop at other people, it also affects her own ego. The cycle of too much sweating resulting in shame and embarrassment due to her peers and thus more anxiety highlights how little control she has over her own body.  From my perspective, in addition to being shamed about her anxiety induced and amplified hyperhidrosis, Fatima really seems like she’s dealing with more behind the scenes. Perhaps due to the fact that she couldn’t control her sweating, she wanted to control a different aspect of her body, her weight. From her longlasting grudge against Christinia, we know that her non-chubbiness is something she takes pride in.  While recounting when her body started bleeding again at age 33, Fatima thinks “I try to believe the bleeding is just part o...

  “I wanted to be free to be selfish and self-destructive and indulgent like the white girls at the high school my parents worked so hard to get me into, and once they did, once we moved into a neighborhood where no one hung out on the streets, where everyone was the same pasty shade of consumptive blotchy paleness, all it did was make me want to get away from my family. I envied white girls whose relationships with their parents were so abysmal that they could never disappoint them” (Zhang 154-5). Jenny’s response here to the big changes in her life, her little brother being born, moving to a suburban neighborhood and switching to a majority upper-middle class white school, highlights the contradiction of her parent’s hopes. They want the best for her, but they don’t entirely fit the white suburbanite mold of “parents”. Even though they’re often away from home, Jenny still feels repressed by the expectations they hold.  Not only is this a story of the conflict between ...

Then he wanders toward the U.N. soldiers at the corner, their rifles shiny in the twilight. They’re walking away from him, as if they were a mirage. The soldiers won’t wait for him but Jean doesn’t let up. He does everything to get their attention, screaming and crying, tugging at their shirt sleeves. They don’t understand what he says and begin to look around anxiously. Eventually they break free from Jean and disappear into the night.  We limp on into the chilly night, ascending the stony road into the hills. There’s a smaller mob coming toward us. These are our people on Maman’s side, and they’re all in military clothes. The next day Jean and I awake to gunshots. I return to the road and look back, our house is burnt to a crisp. Maman is no longer outside on the ground. When I return to Jean I notice a white vehicle coming down the road toward the bush. I quickly run back into the shade of the leaves, but it comes to a halt a few meters before us.  UN soldiers ...

  Within the war short story genre, pervading lonliness persistently appears thematically. In effect, the loneliness of war amplifies other emotions, even when positive, to an extreme and thus negative point. For example, Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” conveys how young  soldiers cope with being drafted into the Vietnam War, thus torn from their youth. Jimmy Cross is only 22 years old and as the leader of the plattoon he finds himself constantly conflicted with desires to be with his crush, Martha. The most important things Jimmy carries are pictures and letters sent to him by Martha. The members of the plattoon, in semi-sexualized fashion, jokingly refer to carrying objects as “humping” them. So, “...Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps...it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive.” (O’Brien 253) With the replacement verb, the impossibility of their hopes and desires is portrayed as something that weighs them d...

  “The Machine Stops” ends on a heavily marked criticism. Its narrator narrates the ultimate irony of humanity’s demise within “The Machine Stop”’s universe through omnipotent, bible-esque language. “And heavenly it had been for so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body--it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend--glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colorless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.” (E.M. Forster 77) Alone, this small portion of the verse sums up all the pessimistically apocalyptic outcomes of human’s “evolution”. Which is really de-evolution rather than evolution. The cause? The comfort of technology. That which first began as simply a betterment to the human ex...

  As soon as Gunnar moves to Hillside, the police are at his house to practice their “‘preventative police enforcement’” (Beatty 47). Of course , they need to know Gunnar’s gang affiliation first to fill in a few gaps in their knowledge. Obviously, Gunnar doesn’t have one because he just moved to Hillside! (but they don’t know that.) Instead, he wittily answers. “Oh I see. Well, on weekends I’m down with the Gang of Four.”  “Who?” To his partner, “Geez, these fucking turds are incredible, there’s a new gang every frigging week.” Then he turned back to me. “So, Gunnar, who you banging with in this Gang of Four?” “You know, it’s me, my homegirl Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chuqiao, and my nigger even if he don’t get no bigger Yao Wenyuan. Sheeeeit, we runnin’ thangs from Shanghai to Compton.” (Beatty 47) The police officers obviously don’t know, but I’ll give them a break for this given that most Americans know nothing about Chinese history nor can correctly pr...

At first read, the turtle sex scene on page 124 of Beloved seems quite the odd metaphor to be thrown in at the end of a chapter. However, the anatomy of the turtle, a hard shell protecting a soft body, fits perfectly with the realities of Sethe and Paul D’s relationship. The description of the “embracing necks- hers stretching up toward his bending down”, embodies the strain associated with the vulnerability they gradually reveal to each other (Morrison 124). Likewise, Sethe “risking everything outside the bowl just to touch his face” reveals how she’s taking a risk loving him just as she did Beloved (Morrison 124).  Of course, if it involves Sethe and someone else, Beloved is jealous. Perhaps witnessing the turtles’ sexual act lead her to believe that sex was a way to make people vulnerable. This idea goes many ways. Beloved’s obsession with Sethe includes sexual desire because she wants to know as much about Sethe as she can and views her with possession. I...

         Due to the split narration style of Their Eyes Were Watching God, we’ll often get multiple different perspectives to Janie’s story. However, in Chapter 17, much of the perspective we get is solely from the narrator and the people of the Muck and Tea Cake in their dialogue. Due to the fact that Janie experiences domestic violence for no good reason, it was incredibly odd that we never got even a glance into what she thought or felt in result of that.  Supposedly, this is because of  the novel’s highly romantic nature. On the opening page the narrator says  “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.” (Hurston 1). Maybe we don’t get Janie’s view because she’s chosen to forget that part of her relationship with Tea Cake? That’s not the only time he’s unfairly and unjustly treated her, but perha...

In contrast with the blatant misogyny and objectification of women of women in the past couple books we’ve read, Zora Neale Hearston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is refreshingly relatable. The ultimate theme involving Janie’s quest for love is not necessarily one only permeating the experiences of women, it’s prevalent for all people. Moreover, coming from a broken home, Janie’s confusion in discovering for herself what love and marriage truly are is familiar to me. Without the primary example within the family, there’s no real fundamental idea which shapes that understanding. For Janie, her grandmother and mother were both raped, far beyond her idealistic hopes for love and the closest she’s gotten to visualizing a marriage before she witnesses the pear tree as an epitome is in the idea that her father wanted to marry her mother, which is why he kept chasing her.  Furthermore, Janie is caught between balancing romantic and platonic love. As Nanny warned, Killicks and even St...

Parallel to Native Son , Invisible Man presents racism in even more sickening racism yet Wright’s narrative does so in ever subtler ways. Invisible Man ’s society is shifting toward a “post-racial” and “antiracial” mindset. However, these “liberalist” viewpoints only serve to avoid and scorn blatant racist stereotypes and not condemn actual institutional racism. Multiple instances have demonstrated this contradiction. Specifically, since the narrator’s time in the Brotherhood, in a myriad of ways this hidden racism has been shown to reveal itself with due time. A pair of the red flags at the narrator’s first Brotherhood party also demonstrate this oxymoron of racism persisting through antiracism and post-racialism. The narrator brushes off Emma’s comment that he “should be a little blacker”, completely ignoring how she blatantly suggests the Brotherhood wants him just for the color of his skin, his race (Wright 303). Furthermore, when another brother asks the narrator ...

To Invisible Man ’s narrator, there is a stark difference between black and white. Blinded by the white superiority complex society has taught him, he strives to achieve success by playing into the white supremacists system. In doing this, he deems his own heritage, his skin, and his race, whatever he can define as “black” as bad and deems “whiteness” superior. Psychologically, he exercises “black and white” thinking also known as splitting.  He’s forced himself to think with incredible contrast and other details in the values fade away from his sight. Essentially, splitting magnifies the positive or negative aspects of a person to fit them into one of two categories, good and bad.  Much of the reason the narrator goes along with all the insanity of living in such a disgustingly oppressive, racist society is that he idealizes whiteness. The ideas he’s subject to are all built by white supremacy. That includes the scholarship, the college, and most importantly the “posit...