Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Fitzgerald's hopeless and reminiscent tone shows how he feels about how people treat the things they love and want the most.

Fitzgerald says "and as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes..." The word moon makes the reader think of the night and the word night is usually correlated with struggles and obstacles. Then the section that says "inessential houses began to melt away" those houses are being compared to the struggles in the night, so when they "melt away" it is like the struggles are melting away. Then later it says "I became aware of the old island" this is like when people have a dream there will always be obstacles in the way and so those obstacles make the dreamer lose sight of that dream. Fitzgerald is saying that we need to let the world be still, like the shore that night, and let the obstacles "melt away" so people can focus on their dream, which at that time, and still today, was the American Dream.

In the twenties, when this book was written, the was a small sexual revolution. People were more open about the topic of sex. Fitzgerald used that new openness, when he correlates seeing the new world from the shore to seeing a breast. He is saying that seeing the new world puts the same gleam or sparkle in a man's eye as seeing a breast.

Humans are always looking in the past, but want a great future. He says that "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. " Then he says " So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." both of these quotes talk about a humans struggle between the future and the past. The second quote is a metaphor that compares people to boats going against a current. People are always trying to move to the future but the past keeps pulling them back.

In this passage Fitzgerald is basically saying that humans are always striving and dreaming and hoping for a better future ,and that they should not lose sight of their dreams and hopes just because a few obstacles get in their way. We have to "beat" on and not let the "current" of life push us back.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

3rd 9weeks reading list

I have read 3 books, the equivalent of 6 books



Invisible Man- Ralph Ellison



Copper Sun- Sharon Draper



The V Club- Kate Brian



Copper Sun by Sharon Draper is about a girl named Amari who becomes a slave. She lives in a village in Africa but is kidnapped by people who seem like friends and her and many other young people are transported to America to be slaves. She meets a girl and they work together to find their freedom. I liked this book because it really shows how slavery was, even though the book is fictional it is very accurate.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Tuesday, March 1, 2011




Web. 01 Mar. 2011. .

This is an ad I saw at the movie theater. What was funny was that I saw it after I complained about how expensive concessions were on top of the outrageous ticket prices. It really is a good deal if you are like me and don't like to spend one thousand dollars at the movies.

When I first saw the add I got really excited because I thought that concession prices were finally dropping. I suddenly realized it said stimulus Tuesday, and that these prices were only valid on Tuesday's. Now, in the summer a movie on a Tuesday night is okay, but during the school year no one's parents allows them to go to the movie theater on a Tuesday.

This move by the theater was pretty good. They realized that if they lowered concession prices on a Tuesday night that they would get more customers and the revenue wouldn't suffer because they would gain more people and make up for the price drop because before the discount there were less people coming.