Ruben Dario

i don't have much to say in this post. it is more of just a comment. i really liked Dario as aperson. his poetry is good but the fact that he was a diplomat and a writer really suprised me. thats such a rare thing to find. i can assume that this is because of his poetry being such a hit but this is also rare for a poet's work to hit that hard with the people in charge of a country and have them make him a diplomat. like i said, not a very big post but just something i felt like i wanted to comment on.

Amichai Jerusalem

the most powerful lines that go with this poem i would say are the last two, lines14 and 15. they read "to make us think that they are happy. to make them think that they are happy." this is a very deep thing to say about people in the middle east. it is discribing the pyrric victory that comes with living there. these people are getting the land that they have been fighting over for centuries but the amount of people who are still dying for this land make it pointless. why would someone need a country if there are no people to put in the country? the flags that each side puts up are simply a facade so that the world won't know the difference. these are a proud people who don't want the world to know that they are hurting and they would rather solve their problems on their own. Because God knows how quickly a certain country would be over there once they started asking for help.

things fall apart part 1

with the start of the story, we are introduced to a culture that has complex rules and customs. these customs, however, help to maintain the Igbo's commitment to remaining harmonious. Achebe uses language throughout the piece to challenge stereotypes of primitive civilizations. he does this by emphasizing the tribe's complex system of language and the many rules of the tribe that prevent people from getting out of hand. except for Okonkwo. he acts violently on a regular basis by starting fights that could have been avoided. he does this from hatred of his father and a fear that he will be come like him. this violent behavior strains the relationships that he has around him. 
All this shows me that Okonkwo is the main focus of the story because he is the polar opposite of what we were led to believe the Igbo were about(harmony).

Neruda's "Tonight I Can Write..."

i did write my paper on on  this but i felt that there was more that i could say about some of the parts of this poem. in my paper i spoke alot about how confused he appeared to be through his writing. i discovered another part that demonstrates this. line 11 states "..To think that I  do not have her..." followed by line15 "...what does it matter that my love could not keep her." throughout the poem he has this continuous back and forth like he is pulling the pedals off of a flower. i just wanted to point out another part of the work that displayed his conflict over the way his relationship turned out.

the man who was almost a man

something that i was thinking about during the class discussion of this was how everyone was saying that he was clearlynot a man. while i do agree with this the fact that he knew how to operate the gun tells me otherwise. the gun he had, as the book tells us, is a revolver from the year 1818. the way that pistols were set up back then was very different from how they are today. they had to be loaded and packed like a colonial style musket. the fact that he could work his way through the process that took a skilled soldier a minute to perform says that we should give him more credit than we did in class.