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Hello, my name is Madison Miller, and this blog was created to review books that I have read as a part of my Introduction to English Studies class at Kennesaw State University. Have fun reading my posts and feel free to leave a comment!

 

Language in “Glengary Glen Ross”

To say that there are many uses of profanity in David Mamet’s play, Glengary Glen Ross, would be an understatement. Throughout the entire length of the play, the characters use all sorts of creative foul language. The main thing to understand is that this language was essential to the play. The language in this play serves two main purposes: to show the how serious the characters in the play are and to show their “manliness.”

The characters in this play work as salesmen, and sales is a pretty competitive and demanding job arena. Salesmen make most of their money off of commissions from their sales so it is in their best interest to sell as much as possible. The only way a salesman can sell as much as possible is by having good leads, and the characters’ company does not hand out very good leads very often. As one can imagine, this would cause the characters a lot of stress and they show this stress through profane language. The language shows the seriousness of their situation. To add to this, the company is also adding a Cadillac as the prize for the top salesman and no job for the least performing salesman. This causes the characters to become very competitive with each other and turn somewhat verbally aggressive towards each other and even their boss.

The language used also shows the men’s “manliness.” Men tend to use more profanity than women do and, because there are no women in this play, the men’s language is more noticeable. The reason these men swear so much is because they see profane language as a man’s thing. Cussing is often not seen as a “ladylike” thing to do; it’s for the men. The thing about this, though, is that the use of profanity works as a shield of sorts. The character may be feeling weak, but because he cannot allow himself to be seen this way, he must use aggressive language. They are putting on a façade to avoid showing how they actually feel.

While this play could have been written without the profanity, it would not have delivered the same real message to its reader. It would no longer be close to reality and it would lose its authenticity.

Claudia Rankine & Citizen

Growing up in the Deep South, in a small town called Albany, Georgia, a town that still has racist scars from slavery and segregation, I found reading Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric to be an eye-opening experience. In this work, Rankine writes about what it is really and truly like to be an African American in today’s America. She highlights events that have happened during her lifetime and the lifetimes of others that show that this country is still suffering from the past. My hometown is one of the many places in America where racism still lives on, and it greatly impacts the lives of everyone that lives there or comes to visit. I feel like racism is an issue that most of us look at one-sided; we look at it from our point of view and that’s it when we should really be climbing into the other person’s skin and walking around in it. Claudia Rankine really helped open my eyes to things that I may not have ever considered to be prejudiced or offensive, but they actually are. This work has really made me think more about the things that I say and do and ask myself, “how will this be perceived?”

Throughout this work, Rankine uses a lot of imagery. Rankine not only uses imagery in the way she writes, but also by incorporating several pictures into the work. One of the images that really stood out to me was the two page spread of the Zora Neale Hurston quote “I do not always feel colored. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” In my Regional Literature class, we actually read Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” and that quote really stuck out to me so it was awesome to have it repeated a few hours later while reading Citizen: An American Lyric. Whenever I hear this quote, I think back to my high school; I attended a small private school Albany, Georgia that was majority white. I think about how my African American friends must have felt, being so surrounded by people that were unlike them. Looking back, I wish that I had taken time to make them more comfortable and welcomed; I always just assumed that they felt comfortable and welcomed, but I never asked or made an effort to make their experience better. This quote also takes me back to an event that took place this past summer; I attended a graduation party for my boyfriend’s dad’s boss’s son (that’s a lot, I know). The family was Indian and my boyfriend and his family are Hispanic, making me the only white person at the party which had about 100 or more people in attendance. I felt very, very white and a bit out of place, but everyone there made me feel very welcomed and I had a really great time.

Overall, I really enjoyed Citizen: An American Lyric and how the actual book was not just words, but there were actually also visual images. I really enjoyed Claudia Rankine’s writing style and her brutal honesty about the way things really are without pointing blame or projecting hate.

Thoreau’s Meaning & Value

Where does Henry David Thoreau find meaning and value? After reading his work, I have come to the conclusion that Thoreau finds meaning and value mainly in consciousness and solitude, but I think that the basis of this is his reverence and adoration of nature.

Thoreau goes out into the woods to live a life of solitude and simplicity and self-reliance; “I went to the wood because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (Where I Lived, and What I Lived For). Thoreau feels that solitude is something that is displayed in nature and that we should strive to be like nature in that way; “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself” (Where I Lived, and What I Lived For). Thoreau finds a peace in nature and finds life in the woods to be a life of “leisure and opportunity” (Spring). The idea that I think is most important to Thoreau is simplicity. Over and over again, Thoreau states the importance of simplicity; “Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail” (Where I Lived, and What I Lived For) and “Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other thing in proportion” (Where I Lived, and What I Lived For). Thoreau also goes on to say that our nation is one that has been “ruined by luxury and heedless expense” (Where I have Lived, and What I Lived For); I think he would be very disappointed with the way things are looking right now. “The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit – not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic” (Spring).  In the above passage from Spring, we see a clear picture of what Thoreau thinks of nature; he sees it as a book of truth to be read and to be learned from.

It is very hard to come up with a precise answer to the question of where Thoreau finds meaning because he is a very hard man to understand, but I think that Walden supplies ample evidence to suggest that he finds a majority of life’s meaning in nature.

The Moviegoer

“The Moviegoer”, written by Walker Percy in 1960, is a story about Binx Bolling and his great “search”.  Binx is a thirty-year-old stockbroker in New Orleans, Louisiana who spends his free time going to the movies and taking his new secretaries out on dates.  Binx comes from old money and is close to his Aunt and her stepdaughter, Kate. The “search” that Binx is on is his attempt to find the meaning of life, and this “search” was triggered when he was wounded during his time in the Korean War. Throughout the novel, the idea of the “search” is brought up many times, but it does not seem to be a constant action for Binx. This, I feel, is because of Binx’s fear of everydayness; if the “search” becomes a regular thing, it becomes an everyday thing.

At the beginning of the novel, I was hopeful that Binx would find the meaning of life in his “search”, but once I came to the end, I am inclined to say that he did not fulfill his quest; although it is up the reader to determine the meaning of what Binx says in the epilogue of the book, “As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject,” (Percy 237).  I am not sure to interpret that statement as meaning that Binx has found the answer and does not care much to talk about it, or whether he possibly thought that the “search” was a failure and just did not want to discuss it. I think that Binx is too distracted by analyzing other peoples’ lives to focus primarily on his own “search”. Binx says that he does not want to live in the everydayness, but he goes through the same pattern of going to the movies, visiting with his Aunt, taking out his secretary, and then getting a new secretary when the old one wanted something more. Binx has a fear of being stuck in everydayness and says, “What is the nature of the search? You ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair,” Binx does not want to be sunken in the everydayness, so he uses the name of the “search” to distract himself from the fact that his life is actually routine (Percy 13). It is when Binx can become content with his routine life, that his “search” will be over and that he will find happiness. I think that Binx has so much going on that he does not really have time to continue his search. Binx has his job, his cousin’s death, and Kate’s instability to deal with, so the search has been pushed to the back burner; Binx states on page 228 of the novel, “my search has been abandoned…”

This novel is unlike anything I have ever read, and, while it was not my favorite, I actually enjoyed the depth of the characters and how the author left the audience hanging at the end, allowing us to come to our own conclusions.