cats, cats, cats, cats and more cats

The Naming of Cats

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey–
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter–
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,
A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover–
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

THEME AND MESSAGE

It is proposed that cats have three names, each signifying something different. Their first name is the name that humans give them and is usually quite common. This name is something simple and easy to remember, such as James or Peter. However, even fancier names such as Plato and Demeter may be given to a cat. Simple or ornate, such a name is still only the first name of a cat. The second name is a nickname of sorts, and no other cat may share it. These names are quite different from everyday names and are quite dignified. Otherwise, a cat would not be able to display such pride and, at times, arrogance. The third name is a name that no human will ever discover……
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is a lively and entertaining look at the amusing antics of cats and the foibles of people. The cat owner will recognize many instances of familiar feline behavior, and the perceptive reader will see numerous parallels to human attitudes and behavior.
Social Sensitivity
Although Eliot obviously prefers Cats to Dogs (whom he characterizes as easygoing louts), generally he admires and satirizes his Cats without any discernible bias; social class and occupation.
LITERARY DEVICES
Eliot’s Cats have been much admired for their complexity of character. In relatively brief descriptions, the poet manages to capture the personality of the Cats and their human counterparts. The adult reader is aware of the human foibles being satirized, but as in fairy tales, evil is viewed from a rather detached perspective; and a light, whimsical tone is achieved through Eliot’s puns, and his use of familiar rhymes and nonsense words. At the same time Eliot maintains a childlike point of view which makes the poems appealing to younger readers. Eliot’s ability to capture the natural rhythms of speech also gives the poems an informality which adds to their appeal.
Eliot was also one of the most well informed literary historians of his time, and possibly ever. His poetry is riddled with allusions and quotes from such a vast number of historical literatures that it may be impossible to fully discover the number of references he used. there are some influences that always stayed with Eliot.
• EXAMPLE: Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter,
Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James, Such as Victor or Jonathan, Eliot used pun (ineffable effable effanineffable)
• and familiar rhymes and nonsense words. There is an alternate rhyme in the poem… such as matter, games, hatter, names, daily, James, Bailey… etc. At the same time he maintains a childlike point of view which makes the poems appealing to younger readers. Eliot’s ability to capture the natural rhythms of speech also gives the poems an informality which adds to their appeal.
MOOD AND TONE
• There is a playful, and feel -good mood in the poem
• A light, whimsical and entertaining tone as well as informative tone is achieved because of the usage of allusions in the names of the cats.
POINT OF VIEW
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is narrated in the third person. You are aware of all of the aspects of the cats and you are a spectator to their capers. The narrator guides you through each poem and introduces every cat. Their good points are laid out and their deeds are then described. Example: his, himself It is obvious that Eliot was a big fan of cats, someone you would definitely call a “cat person.” Dogs are somewhat looked down upon, especially the Pekinese breed. This may be due to the popularity of the Pekinese in London during the time this book was written.

ANALYSIS USING DIFFERENT LITERARY APPROACHES
HISTORICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH
• Generally he admires and satirizes his Cats without any discernible bias; social class and occupation. Eliot tried to use the best of everything. His influences were taken from the different literatures of almost every culture in the world. The dissimilarity between his influences was covered up with ease by his smooth writing style and syntax. Because of this, Eliot became a revolutionary writer and one of the greatest poets the world has ever known.
MYTH/SYMBOLIC/ARCHETYPAL APPROACH
• The cat himself is the myth, symbolic and archetype. In the poem, the cat symbolizes grace, playfulness at the same time deep contemplation.
PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH
• He represented the characters very real, symbolic yet complex. Since he’s a cat person, he personifies the cats without biases and represent them with human attitudes and behavior.
MORAL/PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH
• The poem may render readers to observe some of the good qualities of cats, particularly the way he meditated about life.
MIMETIC APPROACH
Eliot’s Cats have been much admired for their complexity of character. In relatively brief descriptions, the poet manages to capture the personality of the Cats and their human counterparts. The adult reader is aware of the human foibles being satirized, but as in fairy tales, evil is viewed from a rather detached perspective.

FORMALISM APPROACH
• Eliot was also one of the most well informed literary historians of his time, and possibly ever. His poetry is riddled with allusions and quotes from such a vast number of historical literatures that it may be impossible to fully discover the number of references he used. there are some influences that always stayed with Eliot.
• EXAMPLE: Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter,
Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James, Such as Victor or Jonathan, etc.
• Eliot used pun (ineffable effable effanineffable
• and familiar rhymes and nonsense words. There is an alternate rhyme in the poem… such as matter, games, hatter, names, daily, James, Bailey… etc.
READER RESPONSE APPROACH
• For some readers who are cat-lovers, they may really like this poem and start to analyze the names they may give to their pets that signifies one’s characteristics.

Architecture in Poetry

What caught my attention about this Greek poet is that he bounced back after severe pain and sorrow. Based on the article, he suffered nervous breakdown and was forced to spend two months in bed. That’s terrible and horrible. I realize that to avoid nervous breakdown, we need to train our mind to have positive spirit within. It is a driving force in life unclogging our creativity, diversity and spontaneity. Life is beautiful and we should savor the moment and focus on the things we love to do.
In what become a recurring technique in Elytis’ poetry,
landscape is infused with sentiment and becomes a
projection and celebration of the human body.
In the “Garden Sees”, the poet reaffirms his conviction
that art is a force that creates life. His multi-faceted style
of writing along with his lucid theoretical formulations
earned him an enduring place in modern Greek literature.

Definitely, this tells that he advocates Surrealism and Freudian theory. Visual depictions of his poetic images have lucid philosophical concepts and emotionally-charged images. Aegean landscape and seascape later significantly influenced his poetry. Architecture in poetry and impact of emotional wounds in his works states the refusal of the poet to succumb to the weight of oppression and presents his resistance to whatever violates the free expression of the human spirit.
Nevertheless, he is a true blue poet who encourages free expression. Best of all, his poems celebrate the beauty of the natural world and its prevailing spiritual dimension.

INFLUENCE OF FAULKNER ON SIMON AND BUTON

In the nineteen thirties French critics classed
Faulkner with many other American writers, like
Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck,
as merely one of several interesting specimens of
the post-war generation. They belong to a theory of the
novel which reflects outdated philosophical ideas no
longer relevant to the modern situation of man.

Writers derive their plots and characters based on their experiences per se. Phenomenology for me is one great literary principle that every story-teller should imbibe. No amount of experience can equate to the writers as their sole themes in writing their masterpieces. Hence, these lines express that:
The dominant philosophy in Western Europe today is phenomenology, and to a very large extent the
New Novelists adopt the tenets of phenomenologists
concerning the nature of man’s experience.

These lines explain it eloquently how Faulkner uses idealism and innocence of childhood.
Violence in the novels is unleashed when men realize
they have lost the innocence and idealism of their childhood. Coindreau also discussed he subjective approach to reality
and time, which results from the personal accounts of events
by witnesses instead of objective relation of the story by the author.

Interestingly, I love children and I admire their attitude in life. Children are real. They also teach us how much we have yet to learn. They ensue us to take ourselves more lightly. They exude the sense of playfulness because life is a celebration for them. They tell us to unmask our absurdities and superficialities. They tell us to throw away our maliciousness and hypocrisy to avoid conflict. They tell us to put-off our inhibition and intimidation to avoid isolation. They are frank, straight-forward, enthusiastic and hearty. Therefore, we should be like children.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. A Researched Analytical Essay

In the novel “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison,
we are provided an extended interpretation of how
whiteness is the standard of beauty, which distorts
the lives of black women and children, through
messages everywhere that whiteness is superior.
The theme of race and that white skin is greater
is portrayed through the lives and stories told by the
characters, especially the three girls Claudia,
Pecola and Frieda. Through the struggles those
people have endured, Morrison shows us the destructive
effect of this internalized idea of white beauty on the
individual and on society.

After reading the analysis, I posed this question, “Is life a meaningless quest for the approval of other people? The characters are hooked up by the idea of distorted beauty. We should not be outer-directed and we should not develop lazy minds. We should not be scatter-brained people where we are easily influenced by others’ point of view. We should not be nobody’s fool where we always think in hundredfold on what people will say too.
The following lines support how low self-esteem affects us.
“Colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were
dirty and loud.” She had always favored her black cat
more than her own son, perhaps because it had
blue eyes. It was easier to love with blue eyes.
She assumed that if she possessed blue eyes,
her parents would be so fixated on how beautiful
her eyes were, that they’d forget all about arguing
and fighting. She felt that something just as simple
as a different eye color could change her life.

At some point in our life, we feel ugly and mean……. We are too focused on our ugliness and spend much time thinking what might have been if we are blessed with beauty. We feel so small and we refuse to see the inner beauty we have…….. We develop an unhealthy fixation. We strongly believe that “If we are beautiful, fortune is ours because we can capitalize on our beauty.

With our insecurity, we censor our thoughts in front of other people and secretly compare ourselves with them without due respect to our own individuality. With our fear, we give signals on what we say and do without being fully free and alive. Consequently, we still remain in our suffocating box. With our doubt, we depend our self-esteem on other people’s judgment. With our obsession, we intensely focus on our external appearance neglecting our internal qualities.

There is really nothing more to say –except why.
But since why is so difficult to handle, one must
take refuge in how.” Claudia would rather just
come up with a more functional description rather
than delving deep into the reasoning of society
and life’s events.

In regards to Emily Dickinson’s poetry, “Beauty is not caused.. it is… let me continue it! Beauty is not caused. It is made by what we think in our mind’s perception of beauty. It will never be the cause. It is the effect of faith in ourselves, hope we promise to ourselves, courage to be ourselves, discipline we do to ourselves and goodness we have in ourselves.”
Thus, if we based our happiness on outside forces, we will never be truly happy. As the lines tell:

“The Bluest Eye” and its title could definitely be discussed
with this subject. When looking at the word ‘bluest’,
one could consider the hue of blue, or possibly the
insinuation of implied sadness and despair.
‘Eye’ may come to represent ‘I’, rather than the title
stating a set of eyes in an optical form (such as
“The Bluest Eyes”), therefore implying Pecola’s
loneliness and isolation.

William Golding: The Lord of the Flies

Golding is a masterful strategist in the use of simile. This linguistic device became effective in bringing out his stories from all levels of readers. Thus:
Golding overuses simile in the novel in order to
describe his fictional places, his people, their actions
and feelings. All in all, this inquiry shows that this
linguistic device has a specific function in enriching
the language and giving it a special decoration.

The present inquiry attempted to account for the means
by which Golding deals with this same evil which exists
in all of his characters. With his mastery of such
literary tools as structure, syntax, diction, point of
view and presentation of character, Golding allows
the reader to easily relate to his characters and explore
the novel’s main theme, that within a person there are
forces of good and evil which must be controlled.

I believe that those characters are the representations of evil in our life. In real life, evils are those people and events that make us lonely. Best of all, they bring out the monster in us and the worst in us. However, we should not blame our unhappiness on them. We are unhappy because we tend to always remember the past experiences we should forget. We nurse and immerse the intimate pain that robs us from being free and happy. We take too seriously the losses, frustrations, failures and betrayals which eat and nibble us painfully.
The people who hurt and wronged us ought to be forgiven if we want to be truly happy in our life. Don’t allow past to control the future and don’t rehearse the mistakes committed against us because it disconnects us from God. I am saying these things because I experienced being wronged and found out that harboring grudge makes me unhappy. To forgive is a liberating experience and to endure the betrayal of false friends is a skill I need to develop to survive. I learnt to be vigilant of false friends and betrayers because this world is full of evils.

Lord of the Flies enables the reader to comprehend
that the “devil rises, not out of pirates and cannibals
and such alien creatures, but out of the darkness
of man’s heart” (Hynes, 1988).

Indeed, I am in total agreement with the lines. In both cases, anger hurts more the victim than it does to the offender. Darkness of man’s heart is the grudge and selfish nature. Don’t curse them and wish them bad luck for it is an ungodly task. Don’t harbor grudge because unforgiving attitude refrains us from experiencing real friendship that may come our way. Whichever the case maybe, both of them are hard in equal measure, choose the Christian way— forgive!
William Golding’s The Paper Men: A Critical Study
Golding provides images of the darker side of man.
This dark side of man’s nature inevitably wins and
man proves to be a pathetic race that refuses to
accept responsibility for all its shortcomings and challenges.

I arrive to a conclusion that, as human, we are self-directed. We want to preserve ourselves. Our motto is, “I’ll scratch your back and you’ll scratch mine!“…There’s a part of us that is selfish and self-serving. To help unconditionally, one part of us says “no“…another part of us says “yes.” We are human whose heart has many questions and reservations on helping and reaching out to others. We give something of ourselves when we still have much left. And sadly, we want to be thanked and praised much and we want something in return when we help people. Is it true giving?

Surviving a Stroke at 33 (and Blogging About It)

WordPress.com News

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee suffered a stroke when she was 33, and she has written about her experience in an inspiring personal essay for BuzzFeed.

Before that, she was using a pseudonym on WordPress.com to blog about her experiences, share details about her life, and practice her writing. In 2007, shortly after New Year’s Day, Lee wrote the following in a blog post:

something in my brain burped. most of what i want to do is just out of my grasp. i feel like i know how to do them, but then when i go to do them, i just…CAN’T. day by day, i’m regaining my abilities, so i hope this is just temporary.

Lee’s commenters urged her to see a doctor, and the next day, she responded to them from a hospital bed: “I had a stroke! Will be better.”

I spoke with Lee about her experience, and…

View original post 837 more words

Labyrinth of Solitude

The Labyrinth of Solitude creates Nobody, by denying
Somebody’s existence, is also changed into Nobody.
And if we are all Nobody, then none of us exists.
The circle is closed and the shadow of Nobody
spreads out over our land, choking the Gesticulator
and covering everything. Silence -the prehistoric silence,
stronger than all the pyramids and sacrifices,
all the churches and uprisings and popular songs-
comes back to rule over Mexico.

Octavio Paz, with how he worded powerfully his works is no doubt a controversial and interesting writer. Labyrinth of Solitude is something of a mystery in the existence of Nobody and Somebody. Upon interpreting it, I realize that his piece cries out for something we need to know about ourselves. It is about conquering ourselves and how silence helps us in hearing what needs to be heard.
In conquering ourselves, self-talk is the key to open our inner mind and inner soul. Self-talk is about silence that brings us into right path of analyzing and assessing our life. The world is so loud that we cannot hear little silence. Certainly, we need to be alone to hear our silence. It is in aloneness we can feel our inner silence and we can have an open and unabashed communication with ourselves. It is a soul-searching session with God where we evaluate how we live our life.
Labyrinth of Solitude for me means that we are all Nobody who need Somebody. And that Somebody is the Man Above. Every fiber of our existence is written in God’s will and every breath we take is produced by Him. It is because He encompasses everything in the universe. He is there even in smallest microscopic form of life up into the Milky Way. If we choose to devote our life to Him, Divine Guidance will be in our system. We will never be lost in the race of life and we will be Somebody in His eyes.

Love in the Time of Cholera

Based on the analysis, Marquez is a prolific and great writer. Gabriel-Garcia Marquez hails from Columbia who won Nobel Prize for Literature on 1982. His first novel, “Withering Leaves” ¬¬¬¬¬was written at the age of 19. He promotes Columbian tales in his works in an allegorical and mythical level. He is best remembered for his novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera” which received worldwide critical acclaim. The story below shows his unsurpassing skill in writing that brings out a different side of portraying a character in a story.
The author celebrates all sorts of love, without
privileging any particular kind. He calls the brothel,
“a museum of love,” where the clients leave
behind their belongings. Married love has its own
special flavor. Although Fermina has been
unhappy in her marriage, she wishes that as her
husband dies, he would know how much she had
loved him. She wishes they could start over again
and say what has been left unsaid. The city is also
in decay. It is a stagnant tropical port at the turn of
the century, with its crumbling old monuments that
look back to colonial times.

Delving into the story and movie, I found out that in the perspective of time, we don’t automatically love a person. Even when we are born, we don’t develop sacrificial love until we are 18, 20, 22, 24, 28, 30 and so forth. We learn love because of time spent and activities shared with them as well as the sacrifices we have for one another.
In a similar vein, choosing and loving a person equates serving him/her. It means accepting whole-heartedly the plusses and minuses of one’s personality without entering martyrdom. It also means strengthening one’s assets and standing up to one’s bad attitude and correcting them for God’s glory.
It is stronger than imperfections, stronger than flaws and stronger than weaknesses. It can go beyond the limits placed upon loving because it is changeless and endless. Let our love for them have its chain reaction and go on forever and ever.
Another thing to see on the novel is how he writes on an allegorical level.
The constant image of death gives the narrative
an apocalyptic tone underneath the romance. There
is death from cholera, death from war, death from
old age, suicide, and revenge. Dead bodies of animals
and people float in the river and bay: “a storm of
carnivorous mosquitoes rose out of the swamps,
and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad,
stirred the certainty of death in the depths of one’s soul.”

This led me to the realization that our love should be like a candle…. a candle will continue burning as long as it lives. Let us say, ‘there was no other person before my beloved and there won’t be any other person after him/her. Cognizant of the fact that this statement sound so idealistic and poetic, true love can be unstoppable. It is when we die, someone will hold our hands firmly until our last breath….

a catharsis

On Grief and Reason, On Poetry and Film:
Elena Shvarts, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Tarkovsky

The analysis on this article elucidates how grief impacted an individual and how reason becomes cheap and useless for those whose grief is so overwhelming. Truly so, only through empathy can we know what a person is going through. No one will understand others unless he/she goes through the same disaster. Until we suffer, we can never truly understand the sufferings of others. Until we fail, we can never truly understand the shame of others. Until we are frustrated, we can never truly understand the loneliness of others. Until we lose someone, we can never truly understand the grief of others.
Until we are rejected, we can never truly understand the bitterness of others. Until we are being judged and put down, we can never truly understand the dismay of others. Until we are betrayed, we can never truly understand the anger of others. Until we are attacked, we can never truly understand the fear of others. Until we are hurt, we can never truly understand the hurt of others. These are my realizations after 31 years of living on this earth. Hence, as the article articulates,
Is grief a process of mind that requires or
deforms logical, self-conscious thinking?
How much of the experience of loss and recovery
does any given poem face with lucid self-awareness?
In asking about the limits of what can be known
linguistically, might poems nonetheless seek
to explore the philosophical meanings of death?

This shows that it tries to explore the philosophical meanings of death and loss. Truly indeed, only where there is loss, can there be this gain and a worthy compensation it is. The universe operates on one basic truth which is balance….. When there is life, there is death and when there is gain, there is loss. Every disadvantage is an advantage when people have to realize that we can turn our problems into projects or crises into opportunities. Thus, it explains,

The title .“On Grief and Reason.” comes from
a lecture Joseph Brodsky delivered on the
American poet Robert Frost, whom he described
as terrifying, as distinct from tragic. The terror Brodsky
had in mind and the terror all people confront is
that of loss. Many theorists of the psyche tell us
that a sense of loss is a precondition to language
and to selfhood: only where there is loss can there
be this gain, and a mighty compensation it is.

In much the same way, it mirrors that a poet can really pour out the emotions when grief is heightened. It is something of a catharsis that words cannot express the true meaning of loss.

Much in the elegiac tradition affirms a sense of
self even as it explores the poet’s losses, and the
poet who comes to mourn is often one who
has found a new language for writing, as Peter Sacks,
writing in The English Elegy, has influentially shown.

Personally, elegies are kinds of poems that I love to read. I don’t know but I love reading poems which have themes on death and loss. They are real and sincere to me.
Particularly in post-nineteenth century poetry, however,
the element of self-creation can be more unstable
and bring little sense of consolation. Modern poems
often seem to go to the very edge of language’s
capacities to know. But the drama of loss and gain
remains at the center of such elegies, and
compensatory gestures abound even when they
do not satisfy.

hail to negritude literature

A Song for the Road
Wole Soyinka’s Imagery and Tradition
Perhaps there is no cultural heritage and historical force as rich, powerful, provoking and encompassing as African literature. In as much, it is enduringly-valuable to civilization which conveys thoughts and emotions necessary for the growth of an individual and nation. This introduces us to what literatures of the world is all about. We cannot dichotomize history from literature because they are not separate from one another. African literature is the reflection of history in a given point in time and both are intricately-intertwined along with each other. It gives us facts and ideas of the culture and tradition of our ancestors that we may not have known before.
As the critic says so eloquently:
Basically a satiric writer, Soyinka exposes the society
in breadth. He is dissatisfied with men of power- as
is evident from his plays. As Klima Vladimir says,
Soyinka exposes snobbery, corruption, bureaucracy
and hypocrisy in modern urban life. Nigeria with its
social and communal pattern has provided the
rich background to his plays. The atmosphere
is steeped in traditionalism. The plays unfold,
one after another, the high drama of life.
Traditional ideas mingle with new ideas.

There can be no question concerning the quality of written works the African writers produce. It refers to the literature of and from Africa wherein it breathes African sentiments and struggles. Their universal theme emanates from their struggles as a nation setting us forth a distinctly African Literature. In effect, Soyinka helps us in historicizing texts that are products of ideological and political institutions which are shaped by social conditions. Lastly, colonial repression is the unyielding moral and ethical context of his literature.

His response to life is more natural and instinctive
rather than intellectual. What he attempts to capture
is the totality of an emotion in its most
concentrated form, the authentic experience
of the single moment in the fullness of its
emotional intensity, its existential totality.

These lines tell us that an artist whether in writing, music or visual art should focus more on emotions rather than intellectual. It is not how one interprets but how one internalizes one’s piece. Emotional intensity is of the essence. It is not how one interprets intellectually, but of course it has bearing yet it is how emotional interpretation touches the audience or reader.