Cotton-Eyed Bartleby

Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" is secretly about Cotton-Eyed Joe. We often talk about how poems resemble songs, so why can't the plots of short stories do the same? In the case of "Bartleby", I think that he as a person can easily be likened to our dear old pal CE Joe. We don't know where he came from, we don't know where he went (in the biblical sense). He has an air of mystery about him. He messes with the narrator's personal life. I know that this is silly, but I think it's fun to relate things that you don't necessarily enjoy to things that you do. If anyone can think of other parallels between the two, please feel free to comment them below.

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The Mini Wheats

Hello, class! I hope that this finds you well, if it finds you at all, that is. I just wanted to take a moment to give you all a review on our time in this class. No, I will not be discussing course content, but would you honestly expect anything else? I will now proceed to detail some of my favorite moments of our time together. Firstly, remember how crazy we all got fighting over a single word in "Rockabye Baby"? And our dramatic readings were to die for. We had a short-lived panic when we realized we all had different versions of the textbook. We sat around the big table for the first time and bonded over crickets, kelp, and small dogs in Yalta. We bonded even more when a few of the nobler student *hem hem* had some very intelligent things to say about The Princess Diaries . We were all so sad when Walter left for D.C. and so excited/begrudged when he fixed the projector. We fawned over Austin's dance video. Aubrey drank probably a million iced coffees. Dr. Reed, prefe...

Hats and Toilet Paper

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, I have been reflecting on the various stages of quarantine throughout the year. Some were focused on baking, some obsessed over new Netflix shows. One thing that is undeniably embarrassing is the stage where people hoarded toilet paper like that would somehow save them. In relation to this, I was thinking about A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. When discussing the scene where the ladies steal the hats, we all laughed at the absurdity of it. Who would steal something so mundane and unnecessary in such a serious situation? Clearly, most of the United States would. I think this is a great example of how easy it is to say how you would react to a situation if you aren't currently in it. People will say things like, "Well, if someone broke into my house I would just x, y, z," when in reality they'd likely hide in a closet. There truly is no way to know how you'll act in a situation until it's happening, and you proba...

Crickets and Kelp

This week in class, we discussed Kawabata's "The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket". Last week, we discussed a poem about kelp. In both cases, relationships/people are compared to these mundane creatures. This begs the question: how do you know if you're a cricket or kelp? Essentially, a cricket is something truly special; it's the end all be all person that you've been searching for and are lucky to have. Kelp means you allow someone to take what they want from you, leave, and come back as they please. Basically, kelp=doormat. But, how do you know if you're being treated like this? How do you know when you're a kelp when you think that you've been giving yourself freely but you've really been "being gathered" in a way? And what if you spend all your life thinking you're a cricket but you're actually a grasshopper? Or vice versa? And which would be worse? What if you really are a cricket and you end up with a grasshopper that t...

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