Good Monday Morning 470

I have completed with your midterm evaluations; if you have not received an evaluation sheet, or alternatively an email requesting your three links, then please do let me know. The class average is 15.3/20 [76%] – not bad at all, typically the final class average is 82%.

I have had a lovely week and a half re-reading all your blogs and following many fascinating hyperlinks, and engaging with some intriguing and always interesting dialogues; thank you all for your insights and contributions. I will spend the next week engaged with my other classes and completing all my midterm evaluations, and expect to return to your Unit Three Blogs for evaluation at the beginning of next week.

What follows are some quotes from my readings last week; enjoy!

Histories are incredibly valuable in orientation and wholeness of self. Home

The fact that all of our definitions of home come from preexisting experiences is valuable in understanding what norms we set when hearing others’ stories. Subconsciously we are holding up everyone else’s definition of home, to our own, just as we would when living in a new place. The Metaphysics of Cats

The article notes that in its fan fiction form, Fifty Shades apparently had 40,000 reviews on fanfiction.net. Some of it takes the form of expressing appreciation or excitement, but at other times there are more direct writing suggestions or ideas of how they wish the story to progress (617). Community and Hypertext

As Erika points out in our lesson this week, listeners of stories have more power than readers of text: “once words are written down, that’s it – they do not change.” However, it seems clear that the readers of online literature in this type of community has much more agency than those of traditional printed books, or even most self-published ebooks.

By structuring his retelling of the two creation stories in a way that supports the dichotomized way of thinking that is the “elemental structure of Western society”, King shows us the fault in our habits by allowing us to come to the conclusion ourselves.  It is our knee-jerk reaction to want to structure things in dichotomies, to see one thing, in this case a creation story, as “the one” or “true”.  It’s comfortable and safe and fits the other dichotomies that we have grown up abiding by “rich/poor, black/white, strong/weak, right/wrong, culture/nature, male/female” and so on, even if they don’t make sense or are toxic.  When King says “and theres the problem…if we believe one story as sacred, we must see the other as secular”, he is not making a statement, but rather probing us to question this belief that we hold, not him.  Is it true that only one story must rule as truth above the rest?  Its true, they are vastly different.  One has cooperating talking animals, a main character named Charm, while the other “celebrates law, order, and good government” created out of competition and authority.  But as we learned with last week’s blog assignment on homes, difference doesn’t mean inauthenticity.  Many of us had quite varied ideas of what home was, in from road trips in dingy cars to dorm rooms to nature landscapes all over the world.  But that doesn’t make any one of ours stories or beliefs of home any less true or real. The Purpose of Dichotomies

In “Living By Stories” (2005), Wendy Wickwire partially relates a story told to her by the Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson. At the creation of the world, two twins are sent to carry out some of the tasks: Coyote, the forefather of the Indians, and the first white man. In the course of his work, the white man steals a piece of paper he was not to touch. For this he is banished, but it is foretold that his descendants will return after many years to “reveal the contents of the written document” (Wickwire). But when they finally do return to the ancient birthplace, they start killing the descendants of Coyote and stealing their lands, all without keeping their promise to show the fated document.

I had a painful reaction to my first reading of the account – perhaps, because I saw it through the lens of the legacy in which I share. Colonization carries a motif of cultural genocide, coloured by shades of duplicity and insincerity. Robinson’s story is infused with this characterization of whites as treacherous and wanton. But the pain runs deeper than that, because Robinson also makes us kin. Meaning of the Split

Upon reading King, I did not know that his almost-oral way of writing is largely influenced by Robinson. So much of his writing seemed like a speech, delivered in the spur of the moment. However, I found the Coyote sections of Green Grass Running Water very jarring. I had no idea that Coyote was the trickster figure, or divinity–“Father”–of Indigenous storytelling, although that soon became apparent. These pages became magical, especially when I read out loud. Coyote’s Time

This is the 3rd part of our home assignment I guess. First we rewrote the story about the introduction of evil, secondly we wrote our own story and finally I get to reflect on the ongoing themes. Having read many well written and frankly quite touching recollections I feel closer to this digital group of students than I have in many of my physical lectures. So before I continue on with my assignment I wanted to express my gratitude for everyone’s bravery in sharing some very personal stories about family and more. Thank you. Reflections on Home

As a deaf boy my vocabulary was improving every day, and it seemed like that ran parallel to my experience of culture. I was going to Sexsmith Elementary School, which had a special class for the hard-of-hearing. I was one of the only white students in the school, which was mostly made up of Asians – part Vietnamese, Chinese and Filipino, and half Indian. But, while I noticed the uniqueness of our cultures, I noticed the larger difference between the hearing and the deaf. Home in Transition

I remember going to assemblies for cultural events like Chinese New Year and Diwali—there were fireworks in the gym, which I loved. The school did a good job valuing the diversity of the student body, and everyone was respectful. Nonetheless, on the playground, we congregated according to ethnicity. When we played soccer the Indians formed an exclusive fighting force so it was often me, Kevin (who was Chinese), my best friend Gevan (who was white), and Nelson (the lone Indian who would play on our side) against them. So basically: It was twelve of them, led by someone who was popular for giving everyone yogurt and hustling lunchables under the table, versus a trifecta of Evans—Evan, Gevan, and Kevin—with Nelson, our fellow outcast. However, the games went on forever; they decided when games ended, so they always ‘won.’ We were all kind of connected by popular culture, so we traded Pokemon cards in the hallway, or emulated our favourite wrestlers in the carpeted area.  Home in Transition

Home is an unsuppressed dive into whenever I’m with you. It is warm, cheap beers that taste like barely carbonated brown water enjoyed on garage rooftops as the sun slinks down into the cool Puget Sound causing the sky to slowly erupt into the graduated rainbow of sunset and we laugh until one of one of us nearly rolls off into freshly bloomed dahlias. Home