Good Man Is Hard to Find

This is a short story written by Flannery O’connor, when I read this story I had a hard time trying to find the meaning to it as a whole. The main character of the story is the grandmother who has a lot of premonitions since she doesn’t  want to go to Florida but instead Tennessee because there is a killer on the loose, she mentions to her son Bailey that if she was him she would not take her children to where the killer is because “she couldn’t answer to her conscious”. This is Ironic since is she who takes them to a back road, it’s her cat who scares the driver (son) and she is the one that recognizes the killer which really ends and chance of him letting them go. This character the grandmother nags a lot she wants things done her way and complains when they are not. In a way she has a very childlike personality and in Irony the children John Wesley and June Star, are very adult like. The killer is an interesting character especially the fact that he does not remember the fact that he committed crimes. In a way it represents our difficulty in accepting when we do bad things he is very much ambiguous to his badness and crimes.  He is not in denial because he does accept committing the crimes he says “It wasn’t a mistake. They had the papers on me”; so he accepts what he did he just can’t recall it. In the story the son and his wife have a very dark quiet position, they hardly speak but you sense their hatred towards the grandmother or maybe it’s just a reflection of the reader’s dislike of the grandmother. (I really didn’t like the character) At the end of the story the killer kills the whole family but the last one he kills is the grandmother, here you have a lot of religious reference, and you also have background of the killer he mentions he used to be a gospel singer but ended up a killer, the story in a way is saying that any of us can be the killer because we can all become bad, the is a point in the story where the grandmother says “you can be my son” so he is anybody really but with the difference that he has become bad. I think writer does a really good job with the characters but with the plot there is not much.

Paris is Burning by Bell Hooks

When I first saw the movie in which this paper is written on, I had a deep sense of melancholy. Maybe because I had heard that the film was about African American drag queen in the states, and the idea of what I thought the film was like was really different to what t film was really like. I think  two main things that the film brings out is the difference in race and the difference in class. The article brings out that the film shows “the way in which colonized black (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worshiped at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, lie, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit.” (149) you can see this clearly in the film were people are constantly talking about money and how money would help them change not just their situation but also their body. The most dramatic example is when they mentioned that one of the girls interviewed Venus was killed. The article talks about how this moment is minimized and just stated there really is no time to mourn in the video, and that is what makes it sadder because in real life many of the people in this situation are killed and society really just overlooks it. I think the film tries to bring out a sense of community in the video when they do the “balls”, but really it’s just a way to castaway these people from the main stream society, it’s as if they were living in a fake version of what is real. In the article Hooks says clearly that he did not like thefilm in any way, but what I did find positive is that the film does a good job of showing the hopes and dreams these people have and how most don’t fulfill them but instead are always stuck in the world depicted in the film, you can especially see this when referring to the older drag queens who in a way have lost hope. In general in the end of the film as an observer you really don’t feel closure, there is something missing there is no resolution no prospect for the future and I really think this is what gives the movie such a sense of sadness and hopelessness.