Cat's Cradle

It seems like we accidentally missed a blog post last week, so I’m here to remedy that. In class, we all have our independent reading books, and I read Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

Seen above is a picture of a Cat’s Cradle, which is referenced several times throughout the book, and also in the title. It clearly does not look like a cat sitting in a cradle, it’s just string twisted in such a way that we can say that it kind of looks like a cradle. The use this as a metaphor for how we as people tell ourselves foma, or harmless untruths, in order to make our lives more bearable. I agree that people do this to some degree, but in the book it is a bit over exaggerated. The book applies the concept to everything in the world, while I believe it only applies to certain things. But people definitely do it. We all have a habit of rationalizing things in our mind so that we can stop dwelling on something, or so that we can stop feeling guilty about something. I enjoyed Cat’s Cradle very much, even if it was a bit odd.

A Game of Wuthering Thrones

In class we have been reading Wuthering Heights, which I have not enjoyed. It is definitely well written, but I am simply unable to get into it, and the reading has gone very slowly for me. However, recent events in the book have made it more exciting for me. People are starting to die. Now, I realize that this sounds morbid, but you must admit it always makes it more interesting. With the amount of characters in this book suddenly dying it made me think of one of my favorite book series. A Song of Ice and Fire, more commonly referred to as A Game of Thrones.

One of the most commonly told jokes about this series is simply “Everyone dies.” This is just referencing the very large amount of main characters who die in this series. The character who you would least expect to die, dies. I thought this was like Wuthering Heights because a large amount of the characters you were introduced to at the beginning of the story are suddenly dying, such as Hindley, Catherine, and Isabella. These are a few characters I wouldn’t have expected to die for a few reasons. Hindley and Catherine because they seemed too important to the story to die halfway through, and Isabella because she had not contributed enough to the story so far. So, while Game of Thrones is very different from Wuthering Heights, the unexpected and gratuitous deaths in both led me to relate themselves to each other in my mind.

Books and Bombs

This past week in class we have spent a lot of time focusing on our paper defining what literature is to us. Everyone has a different view point on what actually is literature. Must it be only words, is a T.V. or movie script literature, or is even the T.V. show or movie itself literature. Literature is a very broad topic that I like to think of as anything with artistic qualities and it has to use written words. I actually find this to compare very closely to varying types of explosives.

People use the word bomb to encompass everything that goes boom and is designed to hurt people. I choose a broader range, anything that explodes, releases an incendiary, or gas activated by a trigger mechanism. We can think of different types of literature subdividing like types of bombs. Some are very powerful stories that fly by in a second but they leave a lasting impact. This what we consider to be many of the great works of literature. They are usually big thick books that feel like you're carrying around a ton of bricks. These books are the old classics that just carry a lot of weight and description, and ideas in them. We can also see the same evolution of books as we can explosives. First the big powerful bombs just meant to tear everything apart, and then the incendiary which are quick burning fast paced and exciting. That is what the next era of great literature became. From the big dense books came more exhilarating faster paced books that keep your attention much better. These still continue and have become a mainstay of writing nowadays, but there are also the books that deal with deeper issues. These books like gas focus on your brain. These kinds of books are for a different kind of pleasure, one that causes you to think about real things. It's more than just trying to figure out a mystery novel; the fun is in seeing the problems we face in reality and trying to thin of ways to fix those. Literature and bombs are more closely related than you would think.