ALAN WAKE.  Sure, it’s a video game.  But it’s a video game with TONS of literary merit!  The main character, a crime-thriller writer by the name of Alan Wake, goes on vacation with his wife after suffering 2 years of writer’s block after his triumphant last bestseller.  Thinking that a change of scenery would do him good, his wife plans a trip to ( Read more... )

I really like reading Greek plays and mythology and poetry because it always has you making a shocked face somewhere in the story.  The Greeks really went for substance rather than their Roman counterparts who wanted spectacle in their stories.  What I mean by that is that the words in the plays was simply enough for the Greeks, who I guess had ( Read more... )

“To be, or not to be?  That is the question.”  Suicide.  This line is about suicide, and nobody really knows it when they say it.  They are all “to be what?”  The answer, my compadre, is dead.  To be no longer among the living (not to come back as a zombie, although fingers are crossed for the apocalypse!!!). Hamlet is a very interesting piece of ( Read more... )

Back on the subject of short stories, I found that if we were to look at the idea of domestic slavery, not in the sense of slavery here in our country- although it still very much exists in the sex trafficking rings- but as being a slave to your own home.  In the short story Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, we can see the main ( Read more... )

Poetry is a very confusing, very deeply emotional, very romantic form of literature.  I love reading poetry because it’s fun to try and analyze the Hell out of it to get to the real meaning.  The only problem is, you’ll never really know what the author was thinking when they wrote the poem, so you can make up your own interpretation (within reason ( Read more... )

Music… I’ve been listening to music nonstop lately and I’m finding it rather funny because I didn’t think I could do it any more than I already have.  I bought a new pair of badass SkullCandy ™ headphones and they sound amazing- the only problem is that I don’t want to take them off and my mom is yelling at me right now.  I’m looking at my various ( Read more... )

I forgot to write about poetry!!!  We recently read A Super Market in California, by Allen Ginsberg.  Having grown up in California, I am familiar with supermarkets, so I’ll give this a whirl.  So, initially Priscilla and I thought that there were numerous sexual references in the poem… it’s strange, I know, but there is some underlying meanings to ( Read more... )

We started reading short stories and I felt like writing my thoughts on “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor.  It was an interesting story about a grandmother and her son’s family taking a trip to Florida.  The grandmother keeps talking about how great Tennessee and how wonderful it is and how they should go there instead.  I’ve never ( Read more... )

Okay, so this week I decided that I still liked my idea that knowledge can be dangerous for my research paper on Frankenstein, so I kept researching and came up with some good stuff.  At first, I wanted to pick cool sources like Indiana Jones and the Dead Space video games, but when I turned in my first draft of my annotated bibliography (which I ( Read more... )

As I was reading Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, I started to wonder about what the main theme was, but I kept getting stuck.  So as I read along I started to write notes on what kept reappearing throughout the story.  First off, there are a lot of references to the importance of family.  Sure, I could write an easy enough paper on that, but can I ( Read more... )