...Professor DiFranco Essay #2 Sacramento Both Ernesto Galarza’s “Barrio Boy” and Joan Didion’s “Notes From a Native Daughter” write about Sacramento’s past. Both authors talk about Sacramento during two different time periods. Joan Didion talks about the mid-century and Ernesto Galarza talks about the early 20th century. Although both author’s perspective of Sacramento differs from era to era, there are differences in certain characteristics described by both authors. Galarza’s essay focuses on an immigrant point of view arriving into Sacramento versus Didion’s experiences as a native decedent of Sacramento. Joan Didion’s Sacramento is a very different place compared to Ernesto Galarza’s , for him it’s an immigrant place where Mexican, Yugoslavs, Chinese and many other different cultures come together to make one home. For Joan Didion, Sacramento is a place that with the pas of time and the changes that has come with time, have forced memories to be lost and most importantly identities. Didion highlights the true nature of Californian lifestyle and how with its gradual disappearance more than the past is being lost, but a new generation is also losing an understanding of its true roots, its true history and as a result a loss of knowledge. The loss of knowledge is equivalent to the loss of identity because if one doesn’t know where they came from how one can truly know who they are. Didion talks about her own experiences as a child in Sacramento and adulthood. She compares...
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...“On Coming Home” – Joan Didion In this essay Joan Didion tried to compare and contrast life in the two separate places and realities she called home; The home of her birth and the home of her marriage which are totally different. Didion’s style is mainly that of storytelling. In her attempt to connect her two lives and show how difficult it was to reconnect to the home of her childhood, Didion takes the reader through a roller coster of rhythms. Note how she omits the use of conjunctions between words or phrases to produce a hurried rhythm, at another instance she over used the conjunction “and” in quick succession making the words feel like they are bouncing off the walls, and quickly returns to standard sentence structure to slow the pace. Didion seems to pay attention to details and dates as she described the content of the cupboard she tried to clean out; a bathing suit she wore when she was seventeen, a letter of rejection, three teacups and the 1954 photograph. Her tone mostly conveyed frustration. Frustration about losing and missing the home of her birth, her family, whose ways she had grown so use to; Frustration about the husband who is very much unlike them, unlike her. Frustration about the decay all around; physical and social. This frustration so real, she even spoke about them in the present tense. Interesting as it was, this essay left me totally exhausted and overwhelmed. How It Feels to Be Colored Me – Zora Neale Hurston What an overwhelming relief and...
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...Joan Didion: What is Home? In Joan Didion’s essay “On Going Home” she writes about leading a double life. She feels like one person when she’s with her husband and daughter in Los Angeles, and a completely different person when back “home” surrounded by her childhood family in the Central Valley of California. During this particular trip, she begins to reflect on her life in Los Angeles. Didion contemplates the fact that she often feels uneasy around her husband, just like he feels uneasy being around her family. At a crossroad, she must decide not only who she is, and the life she wants, but also the kind of life she wants for her daughter. Her life in Los Angeles has cleansed her from her youth—one that was dusty and full of useless trinkets. She ponders the time her husband wrote the word “D-U-S-T” on those useless trinkets and she remembers her feelings of sadness and indignation. She says, “We live in dusty houses…filled with mementos quite without value to him” (139-40). The dust-covered trinkets signify what is important to her, or what needs to be addressed in her marriage. Yet, these objects just lay there waiting for someone to see them—for someone to dust them off and care for them—not unlike how Didion wishes her husband would see her and nurture her in their marriage. Didion wonders which of her two homes is normal or if they are both flawed. When she and her husband are with her family, he becomes apprehensive about her behavior, “…because once there I fall...
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...In her essay, “On going home”, Joan Didion expresses a profound sense of reminiscence for her family home in Central Valley of California where she goes to celebrate her daughter’s birthday. In the very beginning of her essay, Didion makes a simple yet complex distinction between her house in Los Angeles where she lives with her husband and her baby and her house in Central Valley where her family lives. Didion’s use of negative diction, especially the word “troublesome”, suggests that she feels unsettled at her family home. She accepts the disconcerting fact that once with her family, she falls into their “difficult”, “oblique” and “deliberately inarticulate” ways which make her husband uneasy. She sees this intimate attachment with her family as a “burden” not because of fights or differences, but because it took her almost thirty years before she could talk to her family on the telephone without crying after she hung up. This is when Didion introduces beautifully, the internal conflict she faces, “the nameless anxiety” that “colors the emotional charges” between herself and the place she comes from. Further, Didion illustrates how she walks around every turn and every corner in the house, from room to room, opening drawers and finding objects from her childhood. As days pass, Didion fears her husband’s phone call, for she might soon be asked about her whereabouts, almost forcing her to drive to nearby cities. Instead, she visits her family graveyard which is now vandalized...
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...Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect. I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others. Although the situation must have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald’s failure to become president of the Princeton Triangle Club, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honour, and the love of a good man (preferably a cross between Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and one of the Murchisons in a proxy fight); lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the...
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...Rozy Karim Professor: Dr. Joanna Mansbridge English 104W November 29th, 2013 Strangers and how we perceive them. I was appalled by the sight of a young girl, malnourished, dirty, in torn cloths crying and begging for money on Ahmedabad Street in India. Just as I reached for my purse to give her some money, my host, Dr. Dalal pushed me aside, gestured me inside our parked car, locked the doors and exclaimed “I should have warned you! Haven’t you seen the movie “Slumdog Millionaire?” I was left shaking, words cannot describe the horror I felt for not helping out a poor desolate child. How could this helpless child be a victim of an organized crime of self-made beggars? To answer this question would be an essay in itself, however, I describe this, as one of many etched incidences in my life to illustrate that I misrecognized the beggar and was influenced by someone else’s preconceived stereotype image of “other, a stranger described as a beggar” that was different then us. The notion of “other and misrecognition” is described in Toni Morrison’s essay “Strangers” (1998) when she explores this concept by depicting a stranger as an image of a bizarre fisherwomen dressed in men’s clothing; while Brent Staples portrays his own image as a stranger and depicts how he is perceived as a threat to others in his essay “Black Men and Public Space” (1986). Although both Morrison and Staples offer differing accounts of their experiences and feelings, they both share the same vision...
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...I choose a passage in Why I write by Joan didion on page 3 the middle paragraph. The paragraph has a deeper meaning than it looks and can inspire people to do what they truly want to do. Didion was a true believer in what she has become, a writer. Didion was a college student who was going to major in English , but thought she couldn’t do college because of the way she thinks. Her way of thinking wasn’t bad at all, she found what she truly wanted to be by her way of thinking. She didn’t recognize her true passion tell she wanted to write what she see in her head. In why I write didion said, “By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “ bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words...
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...The writers Joan Didion and Dave Berry can both create skillful sentences that carries a message to their readers. Their use of syntaxes and figurative language help shape and develop their sentences and its overall meaning, seemingly conveying ideas without actually stating it. Joan Didion writes for Vogue magazine as a essayist reaching towards a target audience of young to middle-age females. While, Dave Barry serves as a advice column writer for the washington post magazine serving a more generalized audience. Their diction reflects their target audience and their own personalities. Didion’s word are more elaborate and complex, and leaves a impression in her readers serving well in a glamorous and adult-orientate magazine. While Barry’s diction doesn’t include a lot of complex words and...
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...T he Catcher in the Rye is set around the 1950s and is narrated by a young man named Holden Caulfield. Holden is not specific about his location while he’s telling the story, but he makes it clear that he is undergoing treatment in a mental hospital or sanatorium. The events he narrates take place in the few days between the end of the fall school term and Christmas, when Holden is sixteen years old.As Holden goes out to the lobby, he starts to think about Jane Gallagher and, in a flashback, recounts how he got to know her. They met while spending a summer vacation in Maine, played golf and checkers, and held hands at the movies. One afternoon, during a game of checkers, her stepfather came onto the porch where they were playing, and when he left Jane began to cry. Holden had moved to sit beside her and kissed her all over her face, but she wouldn’t let him kiss her on the mouth. That was the closest they came to “necking.” Holden leaves the Edmont and takes a cab to Ernie’s jazz club in Greenwich Village. Again, he asks the cab driver where the ducks in Central Park go in the winter, and this cabbie is even more irritable than the first one. Holden sits alone at a table in Ernie’s and observes the other patrons with distaste. He runs into Lillian Simmons, one of his older brother’s former girlfriends, who invites him to sit with her and her date. Holden says he has to meet someone, leaves, and walks back to the Edmont. Maurice, the elevator operator at the Edmont, offers to...
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...Holden Caulfield is the protagonist in the novel the Catcher in the Rye. The 16 year old boy writes of his journey through a personal period in his life. He is alone and desperate for relationships. He feels as if everyone despises him and he fears the idea of growing up and becoming a “phony.” He is also afraid of death, mainly because of his experience with the death of his little brother Allie. Through his journey he goes from a lonely secluded boy who has nothing figured out to a young adult who has learned to accept others and has a small chance of hope in life. Holden thinks of himself as a sophisticated person who sees and understands all around him, but his not. Really he is just a kid at heart and wishes to stay a kid forever. He has a theory that children are pure and the epitome of innocence and once they grow up and become adults they become impure and corrupt, and for that reason Holden wishes to stay a kid forever. This causes Holden to be slightly distant from others and not very friendly. This isolation hurts him and tries to find way to communicate with others but can’t. With all of the personal problems his dealing with his school life suffers. He had dropped out of prep school and had no apparent plans for the future. Some of his old teachers like Mr. Spencer and Mr. Antolini try to help Holden and give him advice. Mr. Antolini criticizes Holden and Holden is forced to see the problem. Holden is afraid of the adult world and doesn’t want to be a part of...
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...Holden Caulfield, from Catcher in the Rye can be kept under observation for psychological problems. From what’s been read in the book, Holden seems like a troubled boy. You can tell from the four different schools he’s been kicked out of and especially that he is unable to relate or connect with any others and voices strong harsh opinions about others. As the story goes on, many more reasons about his troubled-ness should unfold. His symptoms cannot be filed away in a readily disorder or given advice from Dr. Phil. It may be helpful for Holden to know of his conditions, and also advice from Dr. Phil which he might be able to use to help relive somewhat of his troubles. First of his we could address is where he judges everybody and everything. Holden judges them in many categories but frequently judging them into groups of either being phony, stupid, or insecure. He judges everyone so quickly. To him phony people are considered who are predictable not insincere. That is considered strange because most consider phonies as ones who are insincere. What could be advised from Dr. Phil’s articles is to see everything in a positive light. Maybe Holden judges everyone and everything constantly to cover his own fear of being judged by others and what he needs to do is have control over it. He probably knows his actions causes people to talk and that’s why he talks about others. In order to control this, he just control his actions and not do anything that others could talk...
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...Joan of Arc was born on January 6, 1412 in the village of Domremy. Her parents, Jacques and Isabelle d’Arc named her Jehanne at birth . Joan grew up in a time of turmoil and trouble for France. The King of France during her childhood years was Charles VI, who was only twelve years old when his father died. Charles VI was known to have frequent spells of delusion, prompting family members to take over the throne. Soon after, the Duke of Louis of Orleans was assassinated in 1407 on the orders of his cousin, the Duke Jean-sans-Peur de Burgundy. After this time, France was divided between the two family factions, the Armagnac and the Bourgogne . War with England was not new to France. In several previous wars England had stolen land away from France, some of which was recovered during the reign of Charles V. Yet after Charles VI inherited the throne his leadership was so weak that almost all gains made by his father were lost. The uncles who seized the throne did not provide much more in the way of leadership than Charles VI. Fragmented and vulnerable, France found itself at war with England again in 1415. Claiming a legal right to the French throne, King Henry V of England invaded Normandy in August of 1415 and quickly defeated the French Royal army. The French citizens met the news of the English win with disbelief, given that the French far outnumbered the English. Many of the French royal family were killed, and Duke Charles d’Orleans was sentenced to serve 25 years as a prisoner...
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...Joan Miro was born on 1893 in Spain and he was a Spanish artist for the twentieth century. When he moved to Spain in 1919 after the World War I he met other struggling artist including Pablo Picasso who is also a Spaniard like Miro. Most of the artists there were Surrealist which is working with dreams, memory, and abstract. Joan Miro was a surrealist who created abstract art of people. He would use simple lines and flat, bright colored shapes to create his work. The reason Joan miro used abstract symbols was because after he graduated high school at the age of 17 he got sick and had to go to a families barn to recover but while he was there he used his surrounding such as the sun, plants, a ladder, and animals which was represented as realistically. In most of his art you will see a circle or lots of circles, this was his favorite shape. In one of his artworks called dog barking in the moon he created an image of a ladder going into the dark sky of going nowhere, the grotesque looking dog who is howling at the distorted moon, and a mysterious bird like figure above the ladder. He creates images like this to let the viewers use their imagination to figure out the haunting visual image. Joan Miro became famous for making a self portrait out of the style of abstract and then later he painted another self portrait of himself but more realistic but still has a little abstract. People loved his artwork because of the shapes and the bright colors and the thick bold lines in his...
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...to Rock and Roll 23 April 2016 Joan Jett Pioneers Through Rock and Roll History America has been characterized by revolutionary people changing the aspects and perspectives of its citizens through innovative acts, movements, and even through word of mouth. Martin Luther King Jr. changed the outlook of millions of Americans on the racial division in the country by using peaceful protests and eloquently delivered speeches. Benjamin Franklin and the founding fathers pioneered an idea that a country could be run by the people, which was in direct opposition to the rule they were under in Britain. These two events have set forth a phenomenon in America that allows people to challenge prototypical roles and views. When it comes to music icons that have changed the normalcy of music during their time, one would have to be Joan Jett. She was faced with the overwhelming obstacle of battling sexism and gender inequality throughout her musical career, particularly in the Rock and Roll industry in the 1970s and 80s. The music industry was changing during the 1960s in part to what Americans were experiencing; the British Invasion, the assassination of President Kennedy, the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement. Rock and Roll quickly made its way into the mainstream being a powerful voice for the cultural revolution. Rock and Roll was a man’s world during the 70s and 80s, and women rockers were unwelcomed by both the musicians and fans. Joan is sometimes overlooked by history...
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...Mel Pimentel May 26, 2016 Joan of Arc Joan of Arc was a story about a 17 year old farm girl who wanted to see the prince and tell him about the voices she hears, by the voices, it was god talking to her. After many times of her trying to meet the prince, she finally does so. Joan was anxious to tell the prince that the voices told her that she needed to help him get crowned as king of France as soon as possible in order to save her country from the English. She is not allowed to make any decisions at this point. Joan then convinced the prince into letting her go into battle and lead the soldiers to a victory. In the battle Joan was a smart and brave woman. Woman weren’t allowed to fight but she was eager to. She would write letters to the English dictators to just turn around and go home. They didn’t listen to her so she fought them until they turned around. Once she had France in advantage she tried to help out the prince becoming king. She went to court and she was treated like the lady in the room. She was excited for the kingdom to come and see the king get crowned, she tells them about the voices then. The king lets her do what the voices tell her. They taught she was crazy and that she was causing trouble. She was captured by the soldiers because they taught she was a witch and got locked up. She was tortured and put into a death situation. No one came to her rescue and the basically betrayed her. They kept asking her if she was a witch and she agreed to it, in order...
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