Blog Assignment #4 In response to Angela's Ashes

     Frank McCourt Angela's Ashes does a great job at portraying living in the slums of  Limerick Ireland from a child's perspective. Children are innocuous, gentle and adventurous little beings and in this memoir McCourt captures the reality of what is like to be a child and have no worries. This role of innocence is seen strongly in this narrative especially in the line " Dad says it's like going away on our holidays to a warmer place like Italy. That's what we'll call upstairs from how on, Italy." These are particularly powerful lines because of the circumstances that surrounds them. McCourt comes home from school with his brother to see that his entire living room had been moved upstairs due to water mixed with excretion pouring in from outside. The living room as well as the kitchen is flooded with sewage and even in this harsh reality they  were able to make light of the situation jokingly referring to the warmer upstairs and Italy. Another line in the text that shows that significance of childlike perception is "After a few streets the newspapers gone altogether and everyone can see the pig's head. His nose is flat against my chest and pointing up at my chin and I feel sorry for him because he's dead and the world is laughing at him." In these line Frank McCourt draws two lines of perception. One view is from young McCourt feeling sorry for the pig that everyone is laughing at it and the other view is that of the reader feeling sorry that McCourt is oblivious to the fact that the kids are really laughing at him.
     Frank McCourt definitely develops a sense character from early on in the passage. He's explaining his mother who is fed up with their current living space as well as a recent move. He talks us through the hassle they had of moving their furniture into the new home and having to carry it on a pram. He also says that they feel rich because they have stairs to walk up and down which is a very relatable comment. Many people believe that they have "made it" once they have a house with an upstairs and downstairs.  Regardless of the neighborhood, or how poor their family actually was, McCourt remained an oblivious little child. This grabs your attention from the start once you realize that the story is being told through the eyes of a child. Things are seen in ways that an adult will not see them.
     I believe that this particular memoir was successful simply because of its innocence. McCourt describe this events has he remembered them. Never once did he ask from sympathy or pity from anyone in his writing. If things were bad they saw the good and that was that. Nothing was ever bad enough to cause sorrow in young McCourt therefore I believed that people saw that the writing was honest and sincere.

Penumbra

     My deadline was five PM. and I still had not taken the perfect picture. I spent my whole morning walking through the city snapping random pictures of the passerby's, looking down at my camera to view them, then deleting with anger and discontent. My anger only depend when I could here my fathers disapproving voice bellow through the wind low and husky " art is not a profession, you should take up politics or something worth doing." My parents never approved of my wanting to paint and be creative. From a very early age I remember when our family would ask me what I wanted to be my mother would answer for me "oh well darling, it obvious she will be a doctor what else would account for that horrid penmanship" Little did she know my handwriting was bad because of the hours I spent holding tight to a pencil as I attempted to recreate the corner of my room on a sheet of paper. I drew pictures all day, some realistic and others more fantastical. When my mother found them she depreciated my work as "a nice little hobby." I never blamed them for their lifelessness, father's father was a physician and his father was a lawyer and as for mother, she comes from a long line of women married to wealthy men.

    I decided to talk a  walk through a park near my school. The walkway started just on the outside of a car intersection and gradually became more and more rural. Walking into the park was like walking through the closet doors to Narnia. I fell into a different world just by walking fifteen feet into a park. The trees swung low and wilt and sad, they looked how the world felt cold and wet and limp. The greens of the trees swallowed up most of the grey sky that begin to darken with rain clouds. As I walked down the man made walkway my shoes clicked clacked against the pavement in harmony with the flutter of leaves against the wind and birds orchestrating the entire symphony. I pulled out my camera to catch a picture of two birds wading in a shallow puddle. I knelt down on one knee into the pavement, aimed my cannon at the two House Sparrows splashing in the pool of water and in a burst of bright yellowy orange the birds flew away and I captured them all at the same time. I stood up and looked to review my photo and to my disappointment the birds had began to fly away way before I snapped my picture. I deleted the photo put my camera back into the case and continued on with my walk.
     It was 3pm and I had 2 hours to digitally capture a piece of time that only I would be able to see first hand. My problem is that my best is never really good enough, even if I was able to imprison the 5am sunrise across the Sahara Desert within my camera there would still be something I could have done better. This inside voice sets me back everytime but this time around it might cost me my grade.
I was extremely confused, this entire fortress of solitude, the massive chocolate barks of the trees in correspondence with the forrest green tree tops, the somber air that the dark clouds produced, the angle at which the pavement dipped steeply down from where I stood and rose back up even higher about a quarter mile down, how could I have not produced the perfect still photo.
    I was approaching the end of the park limp and slow with disappointment. It was about 4pm now and the clouds had began to break and the sun assumed its position at the highest point in the sky. I stood on the outside of the park which let me out on the same side that I came in. I looked out onto the water that park overlooked and I opened my camera to look through some old photos to choose which one I would present instead. While turning my camera on I almost lost grip of it, and in a desperate attempt to prevent my device from plummeting to the ground I snatch it by the neck carrier and juggle it until it rested back in my hands. Once the equipment was back in my hands I was holding it a little tighter than necessary for fear it would fall again, while doing this I accidentally pressed the shutter button and took a picture. I stood there analyzing the photo, it was love at first sight. It was so simple yet it satisfied the objective. A photo of something that can only be seen from my perspective. There I realized that the one things that would work best for this assignment was following me around the entire day. My shadow.

     

     

     Annie Dillard uses many literary techniques in order to describe the entire environment of where she is during the eclipse. She uses a lot of comparisons and juxtapositions in an attempt to show us what she is experiencing herself. For example when Dillard writes " It looked as though we had all gathered on hilltops to pray for the world on its last day, It looked as though we had all crawled out of spaceships and were preparing to assault the valley below. It looked as though we were scattered on hilltops at dawn to sacrifice virgins, make rain, stelae in a ring." Here Dillard compare the simple act of standing on the hills to watch an eclipse to things you would see out of a science fiction movie. This line is important because it is dark and eerie.

     You can tell by how Annie Dillard is writing that this experience is new and different to her and that there is a slight apprehension toward the idea of being there. This is also seen in the line where       Dillard writes " There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world's dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet's crust, while the earth rolled down". In this line Dillard describes the settings as drained of life and energy. Only moments before the eclipse she is weary about being there to watch it happen.

     Dillard sets up a whole ambiance in which the reader feels as strange and uncomfortable as she feels. This works well for what she is writing about because not many people have witnessed an eclipse first hand therefore not many will know what to be expecting when reading about one. Annie Dillard does a great job in creating an experience, this is also shown in the line "I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. the grasses were wrong, they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographers platinum print." These lines paint an image. In the moment after the sun is engulfed in darkness the world does not go black, but instead goes silver and platinum. She goes on to talk about how the sky was a dark blue and her hand were also silver. The way she writes in these lines remind me of the twilight zone and give a new vibe to the idea of what an eclipse is. She paints a different picture than most would and I enjoy reading this essay.
    Anne Dillard is a picasso of  creative nonfiction in this essay. From the beginning of the story she illustrates her surroundings from the hotel and the painting of the clown on the wall to the people standing on the hill waiting for the eclipse up until the actual eclipse.
   

Lights... Camera... Action

Only the sound of my hard bottom H&M boots pounding the concrete filled the street as a stomped angrily down 58th street in Flushing, Queens. I was running late to a video shoot in which I was playing a extra in a party scene. Although, the only reason I was late was because the staff had forgotten to contact me the week prior to tell me where the shoot would be I attempted to stay collective as I was walked uphill for 13 blocks. I had been walking across the street from a cemetery which I tried to ignore for the first 2 blocks, it was a bright and hot Friday afternoon but the miles and miles of cemetery gave the day an airtight stiffness that left my skin feeling eerie and cold. There is just something about knowing that there a thousands of bodies laying to rest in the cold dirt that no matter how sunny the day is, everything feels cold and wet. I plugged my headphones into my iPod and began listening to J Cole's newest album to drown out some of the thickness my thoughts began to create. A few moments of sleepwalking worked well until the cemetery that once occupied only one side of the street, had now spread its way to the side that I was walking on.

I stood there contemplating my options. The thought of walking through a cemetery made my stomach pull and tug on itself. I already walked several blocks, and the cemetery that stretched for miles made any alternate route impossible. There was no sidewalk, only a brown muddy pathway that had calf height brown grass growing through cracks in the wall that separated the cemetery from the walkway.  I stood frozen in the street for several moments before thinking to myself that I was behaving ridiculously. "almost 20 years old and I am acting scared about walking next to a cemetery" I said to myself out loud, then I restarted my trek to the set.

I walked for approximately thirty more minutes before some kind of civilization revealed itself. Using the GPS on my phone I was beginning to think that I was lost until large set trucks and orange cones started to emerge from the sidewalk. Relief grew inside me when I saw a green sun stained street sign that read, in its bold pale block letters "Masbeth St".

Have you gotten hair and makeup?

No, I just got here

Well come over to my seat I will take care of you

Kelsey she has a tattoo on her arm that needs to be covered

Okay Ill cover the tattoo, while you do her face

I have one on my back as well

James can you handle it

Sure can honey, be over in a second

You get the superstar treatment today girl, you get to go and tell all your friends you had three people working on you at once.

Clusters of people walking in groups of four or five scurried by me, some to be fitted, others for hair and makeup. Time seemed to elapse at riveting speeds, none of which gave me a chance to catch my breath or even make sure my heart was still beating. The auditorium was filled one moment and the next we were all in line walking out the building to the buses that would drop us to the set.

The set we were filming in was an old basement in a building that look like it could have been hundred of years old. It resembled an old grey church with hint of design that resembled that of catholic architecture. Inside was another world altogether. Walking into the basement there were fumes of smoked that swiveled in the air making small eddies every time someone walked through them. There were graffiti on the walls with faint so distorted it was barley legible. I stumbled in and pushed past people with large afro's and patterns tops and platformed shoes. People were posted up against the walls others were in small group talking away. No one conversation was audible in the chaos that grew inside the basement. The staff began to come into the basement and quiet everyone down.

"Hello everyone, thank you for being here to be extras in this scene. As you all may know this is a party so we need high energy.

This is how this is going to go. You are in a nightclub it Friday night and the DJ is pumpin'. Julio is going to walk into the scene and as he walk by you you can give him a friendly face or a 'wassup'. How ever the kid walking in behind him doesn't belong here and i need to see that on your faces, so when the camera passes by you give it a nasty glare. we all got that?"

Everyone is unison sang that they understood and we were rolling. Energy was high, music was loud and everyone was dancing with one another as if we had know each other for years and were just enjoying a party like we usually would. The bass from the stereo seemed to shake the whole basement. I felt the rhythmic boom. boom. boom. stop and then restart my heart as I began to slowly get into character. And then we cut, and then we were rolling again, and then we cut, and once again the cameras were rolling. This cycle of starting and restarting continued for what felt like days. The basement had no natural light, only fluorescent bulbs in various colors aided in a light source. The basement was now filled in thin clouds of smoke from fake cigarettes and herbal joints along with the smoke that cascaded out of the smoke machines. There was no sense of time, I lost track of what number take we were at after about take 16. I remembered how fun this was only moment ago, or hours, or days I could not tell at this point. It was as if walking into that basement had actually sent me into a dance club from the 70's and I was stuck. Even the huge spaceship of a camera that rolled in and out of the room no longer made a breach in the reality of the situation. Where was I and how much longer would I be here.

Welcome to My Blog

I am excited to be embarking on a new creative writing journey. Writing is something that I am truly passionate about and I am eager to better my skills in the art of non-fiction. I hope to be to a read that everyone looks forward to, and I hope to feel the same way about others blogs. I am nervous about doing non-fiction and even more nervous about trying to make it creative, so bare with me.