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Reading List Addition: Rhetoric by Aristotle

In the 4th century B.C., the great Greek mind Aristotle wrote a treatise on the art of persuasion. This influential work is still applicable to today, since every one of us still engages in discourse with one another, whether it be over the internet or in person. The art of rhetoric is slowly becoming a lost art in the general populace, and I think of that as a tragedy. Take a week to read this ancient text and see how modern its applications still are. I encourage everyone to practice the art of rhetoric in speech so that we all sound a bit more educated in our discussions with one another in everyday life. Barnes and Noble offers a paperback copy of both Rhetoric and Poetics by Aristotle for about $10. https://m.barnesandnoble.com/w/poetics-and-rhetoric-aristotle/1007562079

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Colorful notes lead to colorful thoughts. Colorful thoughts spark ingenuity.

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Electrical Circuit Engineering study. Gotta earn this bachelor's somehow.

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Poem of the Week Delayed

Normally I post my analysis and discussion for the week's poem today. But with school coming to an end and final projects mounting, I haven't had time to analyze "O Captain! My Captain!". So there's no analysis today. I'll post analysis a week from now. Sorry everybody.

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THERE IS FREEDOM WAITING FOR YOU, ON THE BREEZES OF THE SKY, AND YOU ASK “WHAT IF I FALL?” OH BUT MY DARLING, WHAT IF YOU FLY?

ERIN HANSON

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Poem of the Week: “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman

An absolute classic.  Enjoy your coffee and scones while reading one of Walt Whitman’s most famous poems published in his famous collection Leaves of Grass.  This poem does some interesting things with rhyme, composition, and theme.  Read, enjoy, analyze, and discuss.  I’ll be open for discussion all week.  Here’s the poem: 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45474/o-captain-my-captain

Photo from www.civilwaracademy.com

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Poems of the Week is dedicated to providing a simple, quick read to ponder while you’re in line getting your morning coffee, or on the bus headed to work. As always, I suggest reading the poems from a book. But if you can’t get your hands on one, I’ll always link the poems in these posts. If you feel so inclined to discuss the poem, I would love to. Shoot me a message. At the end of the week, I will compile a quick review answering relevant questions that you all ask and sharing anything new I learn about the poem as I study it throughout the week.

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Poem of the Week: “Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard”...Analysis and Discussion!

In an effort to clear up your Tumblr Dashboard and minimize scrolling, I’ve uploaded my Analysis and Discussion of this week’s poem into Google Docs and will link it here.  This week’s poem was a ton of fun to read through and analyze.  I hope you guys enjoy the analysis and if you have comments or questions, feel free to discuss them with me by messaging me!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1__lXr2MsY3ywI1CPUdWSOIeh9my78m4BVfMAhGBXRb4/edit?usp=sharing

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Poems of the Week is dedicated to providing a simple, quick read to ponder while you’re in line getting your morning coffee, or on the bus headed to work. As always, I suggest reading the poems from a book. But if you can’t get your hands on one, I’ll always link the poems in these posts. If you feel so inclined to discuss the poem, I would love to. Shoot me a message. At the end of the week, I will compile a quick review answering relevant questions that you all ask and sharing anything new I learn about the poem as I study it throughout the week.

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Here’s a bit of music for an evening study break! The ultimately creative electronic music artist K-391’s track “Back in Time” blends the rhythm of ragtime swing with the complexities of electro.

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"The world will keep on turning without matter where you land. You might as well be running when your feet should hit the sand."

- from the song "Sinking Ships" by Dawn Somewhere (Greg Hoffman)

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📚A night of studying begins!📚

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Boundless knowledge.

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"Today is the tomorrow you looked forward to yesterday."

- Unknown

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“Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.”

— Pelé (via the-study-diary)

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physics [fiz-iks], n “a branch of science chiefly concerned with using exceptionally long and complicated formulas to describe how a ball rolls.”

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NGC 891 vs Abell 347 : Distant galaxies lie beyond a foreground of spiky Milky Way stars in this telescopic field of view. Centered on yellowish star HD 14771, the scene spans about 1 degree on the sky toward the northern constellation Andromeda. At top right is large spiral galaxy NGC 891, 100 thousand light-years across and seen almost exactly edge-on. About 30 million light-years distant, NGC 891 looks a lot like our own Milky Way with a flattened, thin, galactic disk. Its disk and central bulge are cut along the middle by dark, obscuring dust clouds. Scattered toward the lower left are members of galaxy cluster Abell 347. Nearly 240 million light-years away, Abell 347 shows off its own large galaxies in the sharp image. They are similar to NGC 891 in physical size but located almost 8 times farther away, so Abell 347 galaxies have roughly one eighth the apparent size of NGC 891. via NASA

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Poem of the Week: “Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard” by Carl Sandburg

This week, we stray away from the human mind and human interactions to delve into a poem with nature at it’s heart.  Try to visualize the scene painted by this poem when you read it.  Read it several times through different lenses to get a fuller understanding of the poem.

http://www.bartleby.com/104/77.html

Photo from Spaceweather.com

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Poems of the Week is dedicated to providing a simple, quick read to ponder while you’re in line getting your morning coffee, or on the bus headed to work. As always, I suggest reading the poems from a book. But if you can’t get your hands on one, I’ll always link the poems in these posts. If you feel so inclined to discuss the poem, I would love to. Shoot me a message. At the end of the week, I will compile a quick review answering relevant questions that you all ask and sharing anything new I learn about the poem as I study it throughout the week.

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“The Loft” (Analysis and Discussion)

Here is my analysis and discussion on this week’s Poem of the Week: “The Loft” by Richard Jones.  Stay tuned tomorrow for the posting of next week’s Poem of the Week.

The Setting:

My first reaction is that this moment takes place in a city like Detroit or St. Louis; developed industrial cities on a river.  However, the author informs us that “afternoon light” is “falling beautifully into the room”.  The problem with Detroit or St. Louis is that both cities sit to the west of their respective rivers.  This means that you can’t open a window and have afternoon light pour in while also being able to see the river and the rest of the city.  This leads me to believe that this poem takes place in an industrialized city that is on the EAST side of its river.  Potential cities include: Washington D.C., Albuquerque, Memphis, or any industrialized city that sits on the east side of a river. (Personally, I would lean towards a suburb of Washington, D.C knowing that Richard Jones attended college in Virginia).  

The Characters: With the information about the setting, the reader can begin to form conclusions about the characters of the poem.  

1.      The narrator. After reading through the poem several times, you may conclude that the man, who is our narrator in this poem, is a rather apathetic individual. This is a pretty sound conclusion since the woman is the one doing all the action. The woman opened the windows.  The woman burned incense and candles.  The woman was talking quietly and moving about the room.  While the man “lay, calm as a lake reflecting the nothingness of late summer sky.”

2.      The woman.  The woman is not characterized very much in this poem.  She does a lot of mundane things like open windows and talk quietly about stuff that the narrator doesn’t feel the need to mention specifically. This character may exist solely for the purpose of focusing the narrators thoughts and actions so that the author could explore the narrator’s mind as it reacted to the woman.  

3.      Economic Status.  They live in a more fanciful house farther away from the poor housing around the factories.  This would suggest that the characters are in a more luxurious house.  Furthermore, poor people probably couldn’t afford to burn incense and candles just to set the mood for intimacy.  With this information, one could even go so far as to infer that these characters are of the upper middle class.  

The Message:  

What is the purpose of this work?  What is this poem trying to tell us?  I would argue that this poem is bringing up the idea of casual sex.  I would claim that this poem’s purpose is to highlight the average casual sex meeting as something that is mundane, passive, and unattractive.  

When you read this poem, it leaves you with a melancholy feeling.  It leaves this effect because we can relate to the narrator’s feelings of emptiness and lack of self-confidence.  Everybody feels that way once in a while.  However, in the modern time, we have dating sites that allows us to curb these feelings by meeting people online and then in real life to hook up (as early as Match.com in 1995).  The narrator does just this; he finds a woman and convinces himself that he wants to sleep with her.  But, after convincing her as well, finds he does not want to after all, since this won’t provide the satisfaction he wants, but rather, a temporary feeling of pleasure which amounts to nothing in the grand scheme of things.  He sees this same feeling reflected in the woman’s dreamy eyes and quiet muttering.  Richard Jones conveys this sexual encounter as mundane and unpleasant by choosing not to use any passionate words to describe their actions or feelings. Jones even has the characters open up a window to see the factories, which echoes the poem’s overall purpose: pulling back the shades and promises of casual sex to reveal the assembly line nature of it all and its lack of passion and romance.