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The Uncaged Bird
This hasty painting is based on Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” The bird, once caged, has broken free of the confining bars, but does not join the free bird’s frivolous flying. He does not sing like he did when he was caged; he screams for all of the time he wasted locked up. Although he is no longer caged, he will never be free spirited like the free bird. He can only be described as uncaged, but never as free.
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The Blending of Cultures in Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich narrates the story of June Kashpaw through the lives of her immediate and extended family. In addition to telling June’s story, Love Medicine demonstrates how the traditional Chippewa way of living has survived in contemporary America. In Erdrich’s novel, June’s and the Chippewas’ story brings the reader into the lives of everybody June has affected. Modern versions of the traditional Chippewa trickster, Nanabozho, appear throughout Love Medicine to communicate how Native Americans, particularly the Chippewa tribe, created a synthesis of ideologies to survive in contemporary America, while still walking in beauty to some extent. The religious differences between the European Immigrants and Native Americans clashed…
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Access Now
Getting around in today’s society can be difficult, especially if you have a disability that hinders your mobility. You really don’t pick up on how inaccessible places can be unless you know someone with a disability or experience it yourself. Fortunately, Maayan Ziv created an app, AccessNow, that allows people around the world to discover the accessibility of different locations and can add details about the accessibility of places themselves. They stated that their main goal “…is to map as many places as we possibly can…we want to find ways to create access where there is currently none,” (AccessNow). I personally think this is a fantastic program, as it can…
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Walt Whitman’s Courageous Expression of Homosexual Love in “Leaves of Grass”
Homosexuality has been viewed as unnatural and immoral throughout history. When Walt Whitman first published his 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, over a hundred years before the society even considered accepting homosexual behaviors, it included the “Calamus” sequence that describes his romance with another man. Reviewers called his poetry “obscene” and “that horrible sin not to be named among Christians’” (Schmidgall). His boss even fired him from his job as a clerk. Whitman admirably chose not to censor his poetry to fit society’s hateful ideologies as he expresses his beautiful relationship with another man. This bravery communicates a message of self-love and a sense of oneness between every person…
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Review: David Mitchell’s Slade House
David Mitchell is a thrilling author who weaves his works like a knotted ball of string; there is an end and a beginning, but the reader is seemingly on their own when it comes to everything in the middle. Because of these works, Mitchell is an award-winning and bestselling author who, according to his website, was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People world-wide. His novels are stand-alone explanations of these awards. Slade House is one of his twisted novels, where Mitchell’s knotted ball is never fully unwound. The novel’s basic structure is simple. There are two twins who inhabit Slade House, a time-warp of…
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Slade House: Embrace the Frustration
There comes a time in every reader’s life when you come across a book at precisely the right moment. That is the case with David Mitchell’s Slade House. A twisted blend of horror and sci-fi and detective fiction, Slade House challenges narrative conventions and plot structure in a way that entices you read the next chapter, and then the next one as you search for answers about this mysterious Slade House. In order to fully appreciate the story Mitchell is telling, it is necessary to throw all preconceived notions of what a novel is out the window. Otherwise you will set yourself up for disappointment, because Slade House doesn’t work…
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Inseparable Places in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
In Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, the author Ransom Riggs employs a lot of symbolism in order to paint an effective portrait of the Jacob’s life. For our main character, Florida represents monotony and a life of normalcy. Through his environment and social factors, Jacob is unable to break out of his shell and is left yearning for something not so ordinary. The stories his grandfather Abe tells him about “peculiar children,” and his cryptic last words propel Jacob on a journey in search of answers about his grandfather’s past. In doing so, he enters a world far from anything he could have imagined. The interactions he has in…
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The Tragedy of a Life of Abandonment
Emerson believed in the happenings of our lives to take place in the metaphorical character of a circle, to which there is always an inevitable tie of sorts to which connects the ends and the beginnings of our experiences. We leave home to grow into new surroundings and out of old friends, we go to universities to grow into new understandings and out of old trivalent thought, we grow into new lovers and out of old comforts, we grow out of the places and the people that make them and we inevitably begin to grow into ourselves. Our lives are inherently made up of the collection of things in which…
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I Believe in Yesterday
Life is a funny thing. One day, you’re in school, not paying attention as your economics teacher drags on and on about the importance of taxes, and all you can think about is the minutes counting down to freedom while you doodle horrible scribbles in the top corner of your textbook. Then, suddenly, you’re at the hospital every day of the week, morning until night for three weeks with the worst cup of coffee in your hand and anxiety constantly creeping up on you to say hello. Life is like that sometimes; one day the smallest of things can escalate in a fashion that no one was expecting. It’s a…
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The Musical Theatre Society Fall Broadway Cabaret
On October 12th I attended Slippery Rock’s Musical Theatre Society’s Fall Cabaret. This year, the cast of 64 talented singers and dancers performed seven-teen songs from the beloved Broadway classics such as Hamilton, All Shook Up, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and many more. All were played beautifully to the accompaniment of a live band. The show was directed by Rachel Sobota, with assistant directors Brody MeKenna and Andrew Borcherding. The choreography was done by Mindy Clearly and Sydney Don Giovanni. The Cabaret kicked off to a somewhat slow start with a set of songs from Godspell. I felt the energy was lagging and cast was lacking in enthusiasm in this opening…
