Intro to English Major-Molly Sabella

       I feel like the men’s bathroom will be gross, but at the same time, I realize that I have this preconceived notion partially because of stereotypes. Dorms that are all men and no women are typically depicted as being messy or gross, but thinking back, I’ve not really been in many spaces like that. However, I’m from a household of six women and three men, and can certainly verify that the bathroom my dad and brother use is not as clean as the one I share with my sisters. I don’t expect this to be horrendous though, mostly because it’s a bathroom on a college campus in an academic building; there’s some standard of cleanliness here.       Firstly, it was bland. I knew that it (probably, probably ) wasn’t going to be dirty because we have janitors, but it was basically the same as the women’s room, maybe even a bit cleaner. The floor was blue rather than beige, and there were two urinals and one stall. I feel like there's always a lot of rando...

       I actually enjoyed this reading, despite disliking the main character; Dmitri, an older man of about forty, is a bit of a woman hater. He refers to women as “the lower race” and dislikes intellectual women, finding more appeal in passivity and innocence, a huge red flag in my eyes. He doesn’t even have higher grounds to stand on; it’s stated within the story that “without his ‘lower race’ he could not have existed a single day.” He’s a very unlikeable man, overall, so I’m disappointed to say that I really enjoyed certain parts of the story where he talked about his ‘love’ for Anna Sergeyevna. Paragraph 86 was particularly great in my eyes; it says “Anna Sergeyevna too, came in. She sat down in the third row, and when Gurov looked at her his heart contracted, and he understood clearly that for him there was in the whole world no creature so near, so precious, and so important to him; she, this little woman, in no way remarkable, lost in a provincial crowd, with...

  The contents of this poem were not what I predicted from the title; I had an inkling that the term “waltz” might signify a life story of some sort, perhaps in the form of a child’s perspective towards their father’s early death. I was wrong; the poem is written in past tense, indicating that the speaker is describing childhood memories rather than contemporary experiences, and the memories are not at all fond. The “waltz” in this poem is not an elegant dance through life; it is a violent, back and forth sequence of drunken abuse from the author’s father. It has an atmosphere of fear and desperation, at least to me; it’s like the narrator valued (or maybe respected?) his father, on some level (despite the abuse), and that the memories are convoluted because of that vague confusion and negative association. I like how abuse is painted as a dance; it conveys the poem as haunting and makes it feel like there’s some kind of terrible rapport between the narrator, his memories, and his ...

  Firstly, I’m not sure why, but I really like the title, although I didn’t know what a ball turret gunner was when I began reading. I’m not a huge fan of sad or depressing poetry, but I like this one. Overall, it was heavy. It’s only five lines, but manages to leave the same impact that other poems do in entire stanzas. The author lays the depression on thick, describing a cold, horrible experience and subtly guiding readers’ minds towards abortion. You have this picture of a shivering, terrified little man going in and out of consciousness in the belly of a fighter jet, then meeting his death and being unceremoniously sprayed from the vessel with a hose. It’s awful, as if the author was already kicking you while you were down, then you’re hit with the last line and it gets even worse. The shock impact is high and the horrors of war and death are clear. I thought it was really good. 

  It’s difficult to say a lot about this poem, other than how much I liked it. It thrives off of simplicity; it’s not a grand, fantastic state of affairs, just a guy having a pleasant interaction with nature in a way that makes him reminisce fondly and feel happy. When you read it, you’re not elbow deep in symbolism or left feeling empty at the end, which is a good, moving experience sometimes, but I do enjoy a happy ending. I think it fits into that sort of ‘sublime experience’ we talked about during class; the man in the poem refers to the memory as something that brings him ‘wealth’, but not in the monetary sense. The wealth he gains is the benefit of a beautiful memory, and the ability to think back on it any time he needs some peace or optimism. I feel like I relate to the experience; I grew up in a very rural town, and with the exception of one neighbor and a few occasional campers, it was basically just my family’s home in the woods. I spent a ton of time as a kid playing ou...