Perusing Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, I was thinking about the various ways in which he utilizes satire to discuss political flaws without being attacked. I genuinely laugh out loud thinking about the kind of content that Swift could have produced during this election cycle and over the past year especially. Swift's style is so unique because everything he produces is such a cosmic joke that you don't understand unless you first can understand that it's a joke. If you take him too seriously, everything makes sense in the way that fictional things make sense. But, if you know it's a joke, it makes sense on such an all-encompassing level. I would love it if he could somehow live again for just enough time to be caught up to speed on everything and write something roasting everything happening today. It would truly make 2020 more bearable.
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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