The Intuitionist: Found

On November 30, I rushed to the hospital in Glasgow. They were flying my grandmother from the Medical Center in Tompkinsville there to better treat her after she had stopped breathing, they said, as a result of pneumonia. I beat the helicopter and paced the hall of the ICU as they transferred her into a room. It was there we learned that she had had a massive heart attack. It was sudden. The doctor was direct in his prognosis: she was beyond their care and needed to be moved to Bowling Green. It was a heavy blow to us who had waited by her side in Tompkinsville for six hours thinking she had pneumonia. I followed the ambulance to Bowling Green, an ambulance because the weather would not permit a helicopter to fly. We got to Bowling Green and they said it could be several hours wait while they completed the surgery. Not able to stay in a room of thirty people I volunteered to return to my apartment to get overnight clothes for everyone about my size. On my way out the door I grabbed the Intuitionist.

In the waiting room, I read the same page over and over and over. I didn’t see the words, but I couldn’t look at my mother’s face, my grandfather’s face. I couldn’t let them see mine. Nurses came in and out updating us with worse an worse news. They moved her to another room… they were now doing this. That wasn’t working… they were going to try doing this and then that and then… there was nothing left to do. I held my grandmother’s hand as she slipped away. I promised I would forever take care of her family. I would always miss her. I would never forget her. As I said the words into her ear, tears slipped down her check. She’s crying I said, but the nurses said no, it was something else. Still, I wiped her tears, I held her hand, I said good bye.

The Intuitionist was left on the table. My tears streaked on that first page. They tracked down my mother and returned it to her- I don’t know what to do with it now. Every time I see it, I think it will bring on a bad memory. I don’t want to remember the hospital; I want to remember her laugh and smile and joy. But I can’t quite bring myself to get rid of it. Have you ever had something you didn’t like, but couldn’t quite get rid of? Have you stumbled upon it hidden away somewhere and experienced the rush of emotion from the memory?

Reflections on the Semester's Readings

At the end of the semester, I would like to reflect on what I have learned through readings assigned for this course. My favorite text is beyond a doubt Alexie’s True Diary. I loved this book. I wouldn’t recommend it to the young adolescents it is intended for; I think it is more appropriate for adults. As an adult, I found it hilarious. I loved the comics. I’ve never seen a text blend in aside pictures more efficiently. They flowed smoothly and added so much depth to the text.

My least favorite novel is the one I trudged through reading- Shadow Tag. While some of my peers flew through it, I had to make myself read it. I think the content just didn’t agree with me. I didn’t really like the content of Precious, or some of the other novels either, but in those the characters were the victims of behaviors. Irene in Shadow Tag just got on my nerves. She was cold, manipulative, and just plain mean. I think some would refer to her as a bitch.

So what was your favorite read? What was your least?

Text to World Connections?

Since we are in our final days of Multicultural Literature… our blogging team has been discussing ways that we can take what we have learned from this course and how we can apply these ideas and themes in our individual lives. (“Text to world connections.”)

I realized that after this course, I pay more attention to a lot of news stories that deal with different ethnicities than I used to (hence the former post about the ADA racial discrimination). I think it’s amazing that these multicultural course themes, ideas, and problems are everywhere around us, but most of us are so self absorbed in our own lives and with the people who are similar to us that we have no idea about what’s going on in the rest of the world.

I came across this website that features dates and locations for multicultural celebrations all over the USA (and the rest of the world if you keep navigating through the site). The best way to search for a specific type of festival is to use the “Find” feature and search “multicultural,” since all the festivals have tagged key words in their descriptions. As a future teacher, I think it would be fantastic to have my students attend one of these festivals so that I could take some of the themes that I have learned in this course and pass it on to my own students. Many of the festivals that are held in the south wouldn’t be difficult to attend during a day trip or something. I have enjoyed this course, the literature and especially the discussions from a variety of perspectives and different walks of life. It has really helped me become more aware of what’s happening in my own life.

Here is the website for those who are interested; let me know if you ever decide to attend one and I’ll join you! :)

http://www.2camels.com/festivals/usa.php

Here’s An Idea!

Due to the fact that this is our last week, I wanted to make a proposal. In my American Lit. 2 class, we recently finished reading a novel by Ruth L. Ozeki called My Year of Meats. Ozeki is a Japanese-American from Connecticut. The novel has earned numerous awards including the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award, and the Noble American Book Award. But that’s not the best thing about this novel. Ozeki manages to capture the true spirit of both a Japanese-American and a Japanese woman while effectively communicating the real facts about factory farming.

Jane, a documentarian from Quam, Minnesota now living and thriving in New York. The novel takes off from the first page with the statement, “Meat is the Message.” We soon learn that Jane is embarking on a new adventure of running a documentary series called My American Wife! which will broadcast in Japan. The series is supposed to highlight the stereotypical “American wife” and her family through showing Japanese audiences new recipes for meat. Jane takes over the show and slowly comes to a realization about meat and its production process from the slaughter house to the kitchen table. But the Ozeki doesn’t stop there. On the other side of the world in Japan, Akiko watches and critiques each episode for her husband Joichi Ueno, the production head of My American Wife!. As the story continues, the reader gets explore the worlds of an American documentarian, a Japanese housewife, and the world of meat.

Overall, the novel is eye-opening and realistic. Its creatively written using not only both first and third person prose, but also faxes, letters, and journals to carry the plot. I believe Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats would be a great addition to our Multicultural Lit. class and allow students to discover many different forms of narration and two different cultures.

Discrimination in the Workplace - even the ADA

Focusing on the theme of discrimination (racial or otherwise) in the workplace, as seen in The Intuitionist, I thought this story would be interesting to share and read. A dear friend of mine is in dental school, so any news stories that deal with the ADA tend to catch my eye. Raymond Gist, who is featured in the article, is the first African-American president of the American Dental Association-- elected just this October. We don't think about racial discrimination still occuring in the work place, but it does indeed happen and should never be ignored.

First paragraph of the article...

"In a historic move, the American Dental Association has apologized for not taking a stand against discriminatory membership practices. In an open letter, Dr. Raymond Gist, who became the ADA's first African-American president in October, said the dentist group should have done a better job in making sure minorities could join affiliated state and local organizations before the mid-1960s...."

Read the rest of the story here...

Racial Allegories, Supplementary Reading for The Intuitionist, and Harry Potter

"The freshest racial allegory since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye."
           -Walter Kirn, Time

Racial allegories are stories with deeper meanings that are directly and sometimes indirectly associated with race. The Intuitionist is a racial allegory along with the texts that Kirn mentions in the above quote. All of these texts focus on the hardships of people that are not of the dominant race. These texts follow the lives of such people and how they overcome prejudice and racism to make their own places in the world. Both of the texts above are great supplementary material to Whitehead’s novel. Unfortunately, I have not read either of the texts, but with the brief summaries of them, I can tell that they truly portray the direct association with race that I mentioned above.

While researching racial allegories for this post I came across an interesting site that considers the Harry Potter series a racial allegory. Being a fan of the serious and having read it several times, I found this label interesting. J.K. Rowling does a good job with creating a world where race has no importance, but this site expressed how Rowling uses blood lineage and species in a similar way that Whitehead, Morrison, and Ellison use race. In the Harry Potter series the main problem is a war for equality among the magical and the non-magical, humans and creatures, and creatures and creatures. Essentially, they are fighting to establish and maintain “world peace.” They want to rid the world of darkness—dark magic and quite possibly the inherent dark side of mankind. The whole series establishes an argument for equality. Half-bloods are just as “good” as pure-bloods. Two of the main characters, Lord Voldemort (the antagonist) and Harry Potter (the protagonist) have muggle blood in their family bloodlines. Women are offered equality in both job opportunities, pay, and respect. Hermione Granger (another main character) is one of the most valued educational minds of her generation. Without her, Harry would not have succeeded in any of his many adventures at Hogwarts. While these books do not directly deal with race, Rowling did not completely leave out the idea of prejudice. She established a sense of equality while simultaneously questioning the equality of impure bloodlines and “lesser” species. I didn’t think Harry Potter was a racial allegory, but it is. It just deals with race in a more indirect and symbolic way.

Can you think of any other novel that may fall into the category of racial allegory? Does  it have a direct or an indirect association with race? What qualifies it as a racial allegory?

Written By: Elizabeth Willbanks

Education Growth

I was actually intrigued by how much I enjoyed reading this novel. I have been worried about this book since the beginning of the semester because I knew that it was dialect heavy, but I was actually impressed with how easily I read this book. While the dialect was heavy and somewhat difficult for me, it was not nearly as problematic as I assumed it would be. Oddly enough, the two books that initially turned me off to reading strong dialects were The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Their Eyes Were Watching God—the latter being the most painful read I have ever experienced in terms of dialect. This semester I am forced to re-read Huck Finn, a book that I completely hated in high school because Jim’s speech made me feel like a slow reader who didn’t belong in an A.P. English class. However, when I started reading it again this semester, it didn’t seem quite as difficult as it did in the past. I wasn’t so overwhelmed with correcting and making sense of comment. It just kind of worked itself out. Between this experience and the amazing intrigue I found in the style of Push, I think I have grown as a reader. I think that I no longer struggle as much with the variations from standard English that most books use in dialogue and style. I didn’t feel like I was reading any slower than I normally do. I will probably always read slowly, but I can actually appreciate this style of writing more and might even try spicing up the dialogue in my own writing with unique dialects.

Have any of you experienced this type of “educational” growth?

What was your opinion of the literacy theme and dialect in this book?