Chapter 2 Travelouge

As a native on Marlowe's steamer i know everything, all the secrets and in's and out's of the  boat.I hear everything and people have no idea, they just think that everything goes in one ear and out the other. Earlier this week, i overheard a few people talking about some trader's scandal. I looked around a corner to investigate and i saw something that caught my eye, Marlowe was peeking around listening overhead as well. I have realized that the manager will do just about anything to hold his position. And it turned out to be him talking about the trader scandal! It was strange though, Marlowe didn't seem too comprehensive of the conversation that he was so eagerly listening in on. I imagine that he can help us out, the conditions here are declining rapidly. I have to talk to Marlowe soon about it all as well, i have to see if there is anything that we can do to maybe help out our situation.

From what i can deduce about Marlowe i know that he is a caring soul, the way he looks at the others as they sail by our steamer. I also know that he has an interested mind, he is here for different reasons than The Company is which is why i do not think that he want's much to do with them at all. He is here to learn about our country. I know this because he mentioned finding an old book that contained an old seaman's notes and he was enthralled by them.

This voyage is becoming increasingly more dangerous as we continue on. Marlowe, however wishes to keep going so we must. He is absolutely determined to reach someone who goes by the name Kurtz. I have hope that this man, Kurtz will be able to save us from the barbaric life style that i and my people are living now. But until we reach him, we have to survive, and it is getting harder. The pilgrim's hunger grows and it is making me nervous because i know that my flesh or that of any of my fellow natives is not far down the list for a meal,

There was a fight that broke out on the ship recently, my people and some of the other crew members got into a rather bloody brawl. I am against confrontation with the pilgrims because i know that any interference at all from me could result in terribly unnecessary punishment. So in an attempt to avoid involving myself with this i hid, i hid under the deck and stayed very still and very quiet while i heard the gunshots and screams from the deck.  When i was sure that the fighting was over i returned to the deck and found many dead on the deck and it was awful. But, without hesitation, Marlowe insisted that we continue on. Even though my people died, i felt safer knowing that Marlowe was sailing the ship. We are so close to Kurtz now, i might actually make it.

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La da da da da da da, Spring break was great. It was so nice being able to relax without any worries for a week and i think that it was just what i needed. I am really trying to push through these last three weeks and do all of my work. I have a considerable amount of work that i need to catch up on, but that is my goal for the rest of the year. One way or another, i am going to get it all done. I am done missing school as well, it is great being able to go do things while everyone else is at school but i have had enough. It has done terrible things to m grades because i have been very irresponsible about my schoolwork over the last quarter. But i am not missing anymore for the rest of the year and i am going to make sure that i get everything under control immediately.

Over spring break i actually had a ton of fun. I got to play golf basically every day and that rocked because i haven't been able to practice that consistently in forever. I also got to go to the Zurich Classic which is a professional golf tournament held in New Orleans at the TPC Louisiana Golf Course. I love going to tour events like that because I love to watch the way the pros hit the ball. They know exactly what they are doing when they hit that ball and it is just amazing. I also got to play in a few competitions myself, we had our district golf tournament at the LSU golf course and the team did well, we made it to the next level which was regionals but unfortunately the team didn't make it through. But i still had a lot of fun.

WWI Poems

WWI might link to modernism because the issues that caused World War 1 are also popular topics in Modernism. Also, they were happening around the same time so the same ideas would be prevalent. I chose two particular pieces of artwork, two poems. I chose "Back" by Wilfred Gibson and, "How to Die" by Siegfried Sassoon.

"Back" by Wilfred Gibson is written from the point of view of a soldier who, after the war, was asked how the war was. He describes how he doesn't know how to describe what he had lived through because he wasn't quite sure that words could describe it. He talks about the blame that he has to bear for killing all of the people he did because he was told to. It shows us just how traumatic and hard fought WWI was. He really tries to emphasize that there really was no way to describe the war to people after the fact.

"How to Die" by Siegfried Sassoon describes viewing the death of someone else in the army. He describes how he was almost "taught" to die correctly and that shows us the death became routine for the soldiers. Like, it became so common that there was a way that decided was the best i guess. He also talks about others' reactions to that persons death. He talks about how people go home with their minds just destroyed. He almost makes it sound artistic with the way that he describes the death.

Book Club

Frankenstein reflects the Romantic period of England which this novel was written during. In the novel there are two main characteristics of the Romantic period that are reflected. The use of nature is very reflective of the Romantic period and it shows up a lot in Frankenstein. In the novel, when the characters search for peace, quiet, and insight on something they usually go to the woods or victor would go to the mountains. This reflects Romanticism because there was a big focus on nature and the sort of power it contains. It also reflects Romanticism in that it has Enlightenment-style ideas that play major roles in the novel. For instance, Victor's unquenchable thirst for knowledge that lead him to create the monster, this is a very Enlightenment-style idea. Enlightenment ideas were very popular throughout the Romantic period.

In The Time Machine there are a variety of Victorian ideas that are represented. Class issues were very important during the Victorian Era, and also in the novel. The entire future state was based on a very polarized class system with the workers which have evolved into flesh eating monsters and the upper class which evolved into a weak race of consumers. Another characteristic of the Victorian period in the novel is the focus on the individual's occupation more than them themselves. We see this in The Time Machine because a majority of the characters' names weren't even names, they were just they're jobs or what we would know them for if we lived in the community.

Free Post

Have we ever heard true silence? Is it  even possible? I have spent all day thinking about it and i don't think that we ever can truly achieve silence. There is always something we can hear, and I am not talking about noise pollution or whatever that is all about. I mean even in the middle of the forest, billion of years ago, at the dead of night, with nothing living around, there is noise. There has to be, i just don't think that it is possible to achieve absolute silence for an extended period of time. Just like, in chemistry trying to reach absolute zero, we can try but we will never completley reach it. For one, we would never be able do design a device able to measure that small of an amount of sound because we do not know how small the smallest possible measurement of sound is. Secondly, we wouldn't be able to discern how much area the silence would cover. 

I looked up the definition of silence and, what i found was not satisfying at all. It was simply, "The absence of sound". That's all, it doesn't define it as anything more than the absence of something. But whenever you search another "absolute zero' concept, like death, it is the state of being dead. It is a state of being something, or a state of something. I do not think that it is adequately characterized when just referred to as the absence of something else. I think that silence should be a state of being, a state of no sound or movement, of course unattainable. Or maybe that is the difference. Maybe, if we are able to experience something, like death than we can describe it as a state of being something that we have a reference for. Maybe, the only way that we know how to define something is by comparing it to something that we know exits. That makes sense, thataway, if we don't understand something, we can just automatically label it as the absence of something else, regardless of if we know if that is possible or not.But i think that, since silence is the absence of sound, and that can never be knowingly achieved by us, we shouldn't use the word incorrectly. We should at least consider what we mean before we say that something was silent or that they heard nothing but silence(which is another contradiction of the definition of the word!)...... 

Review

Although i am not caught up on the activities in Blackboard, i feel as though they have deepened our understandings of not only our novels but 19th Century British Literature as a whole. I have learned about

capitol R Romanticism and Victorian era Literature. The activities that we are supposed to have been doing, even though i haven't completed them yet, keep me on track. Like, at least i know what i need and how to keep going when I'm in class just kind of sitting there. They provide me with a way to move forward. Blackboard has been a very efficient way for me to learn about all of the aspects of the 19th century British literature while not reading a piece of all of them at the same time. I am able to read what others wrote and respond to them and ask questions about things i do not understand and it has helped a bunch. It is just a really great medium to learn through. 

I feel that the Blackboard activities have helped us by allowing us to communicate our progress using a medium that allows everybody to see everybody else's work and comment on it. Also, reading the Q&A board cleared up a few things that i was not clear on. The book questions are another way that blackboard has helped us learn more about the book more efficiently. Because aside from your own answers, you can read others' and comment and they can comment back and doing that you learn so much more than just answering the question and moving on. Through the activities that we have done with the novels in class, i feel like i have done a better job of analyzing what i read than i did while ii was reading. I didn't do much marking when i was reading because i don't like what it does to the experience of reading so what we did in class really helped me out. 

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Finally, i have done it. I have done what i never thought was possible for me to do. I have completed a long term assignment the right way. I read a little each night, even though i was at a week's disadvantage. I read and read and before i knew it, after reading each night for almost two weeks, I completed both of the novels, and loved them! The  books were so interesting and i could make all sorts of connections between Romanticism and Frankenstein and I looked up confusing things about The Time Machine and i figured them out. It was really cool because there was one episode of the Big Bang Theory that talks about Morlocks and revolves completley around the time machine from The Time Machine. I made that connection and then watched that episode and laughed my butt off. It was great, and i am so proud of myself for finishing all of that on time. Even though i am a little behind on the stuff on Blackboard(which i am working on) I still got through the big stuff in a timely manor.


It was a lot easier than i thought to keep in front of all that work. All it really takes is to reserve a little blot of time somewhere in the day just like 45 minutes when nothing is going on to read or do whatever you have to do. As long as you make sure that you have time you know you are going to do it and you force yourself to start, the rest is easy. All you have to do is read, and the books are not even boring so it's like a double-whammy. It's a shame that it has taken me this long to realize how easy it could be, but that's the past. When I look back on how much i actually enjoyed the books, i realize that i easily had more fun with the books than with whatever else i would have done with that time, like watch TV or something. I am just happy about the whole thing really.