A Thousand Voices I cannot speak for the rest of the world, consisting of girly girls and manly men, but I can speak for myself. Virginia Woolf is right on target in saying that every human being has a male half and a female half-I believe this because I am a living example; I think we all are. Julie always gives me scornful looks when I come to lunch from from gym with a red face, and an exhausted yet satisfied expression. "You've been playing floor hockey again, haven't you!?" she belligerently
Ten Thousand Proud Elephants I wore a dress to the gay pride parade this year. It’s a grand parade, fun filled with hundreds of stories like this, and how people go there looking for voice and they scream so loud for it that they come home voiceless. I wore my voice in the threads of a dress. I’m not gay but these are the bravest, most respectable people I’ve ever seen, and I wore a dress for hope that people feel safe to be people. The day began with a beer breakfast morning. My lover, Stephanie
"A Night of a Thousand Suicides" by Teruhiko Asada The novel based on actual events "A Night of a Thousand Suicides" by Teruhiko Asada, took place in an Australian prisoner of war camp, during World War II. The story involves captured Japanese soldiers planning an escape from an Australian POW camp. The soldiers knowing that a successful escape was most unlikely were faced with the reality of certain death. The battle came not only from their captors but mostly from within themselves. The struggle
A Fine Balance, written by Rohinton Mistry’s, illustrates the path to wisdom and humility before a calamitous end. The novel, A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley parallels a lot of similar themes and ideas depicted in A Fine Balance. As the story develops, a connection forms between the improbable household in both books and they generate an unbelievably uneven dysfunctional family, to either protect or torment one another through the experiences they encounter. Both novels develop the themes of, concern
How the Catholic Church Survived Two Thousand Introduction On theDay of Pardon in the Year of Jubilee, 2000 years after the birth of JesusChrist, Pope John Paul II and several other high members of the Catholic Churchperformed a prayer of forgiveness and confession, apologizing for all thewrongdoings of the Church. The Pope said later that they had been preparing todo this for several years, but had chosen the year 2000 Further, the Popeactually apologizing for the wrongdoings of the Church
A Thousand Acres is the story of King Lear updated for a modern audience hungry for an understanding of the malady that ripped apart Lear's family. Unlike King Lear, A Thousand Acres has one of the "bad" daughters as its narrator, which provides insight into the bitter conflict that undoes the family in the end. Those familiar with Shakespeare's play may be bothered by the idea that such stately patriarch could unknowingly produce such selfish schemers as Regan and Goneril, and Smiley's novel gives
The Character of No-one in Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Alan Quatermain, sitting hunched over and delirious from opium withdrawal, has been taken aboard a huge submersible vessel. The aging adventurer says, "P-please. I feel so sick. Need my medicine." A cold voice answers him, "You are aboard my ship, sir, and my remedies are bitter." Quatermain turns, with his eyes rolled back, teeth clenched, and streams of sweat rolling off of his face, and he says, "Who said that? .
One Thousand Paper Cranes Walking toward his mother's bedroom, Mark slowed his pace. His heart ached and felt heavy. His mother's illness hung over him like a shroud, turning his life black. She had cancer in her lungs and he didn't know why and who to blame. She didn't smoke, so why did it have to happen to her. He questioned. He stopped at the door, gathering his thoughts. What would he say to his mother?. He took a deep breath, gathered his strength, and opened the door quietly. "Mom, how
The world today is full of so many cultures. Each one drastically different from the other and equipped with their own customs and “social norm”. The culture in America is radically different from that in Afghanistan. This fact is evident in A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. This book follows the journeys two young women living in the harsh world in Afghanistan until their paths cross and they unite to rebel against the maltreatment of women that is widely accepted in their country
Body and Nature as Metaphor in A Thousand Acres Most issues on a farm return to the issue of keeping up appearances. (Smiley p.199) [T]he female body is a reservoir, a virgin patch of still, pooled water where the fetus comes to term. (Paglia p.27) [A] fetus is a benign tumor, a vampire who steals in order to live. (Paglia p.11) The epigraph to this novel is from "The Ancient People and the Newly Come": The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other
The Scarlet Letter - The Letter of a Thousand Words The Scarlet Letter deals with the theme of sin. Throughout history, people have committed all types of sins, and whether they are major or minor, people have been punished. However the severity of a punishment is very difficult to agree on. Some people feel that sinners should be deeply punished no matter how little the wrongdoing was. Others feel that a person's punishment should be based upon the severity of their crime. What many people
A Thousand Days, in so many words Any writer presented with the daunting task of chronicling such an emotional figure as John F. Kennedy, while being personally and professionally involved in his administration is bound to either fail miserably or succeed brilliantly. Schlesinger seems to have done both. While setting out to impart the happenings, demeanors, exchanges, and truths regarding the period Kennedy was in office, Schlesinger alternates between objective analysis and outright apology
Choice in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Thousand Cranes The issue of choice arises when comparing Gabriel Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Yasunari Kawabata's Thousand Cranes. The men in each novel forever seem to be repeating the lives of their male ancestors. These cycles reveal that man as a being, just like the mythological heros, has no true choice in the ultimate course his life will take. The male characters' personal development is overshadowed by the identity of their
Incest in A Thousand Acres Incest in A Thousand Acres invades all the other items: it is there, and is crucial for everything that happens, but it is hidden beneath the surface of appearances. Tim Keppel has pointed out not only that "Smiley's major departure [...] is her decision to tell the story from the viewpoint of Ginny and explore the inner lives of the so-called 'evil' sisters" (Keppel, p.105), but that "Smiley makes her most dramatic re-vision of Shakespeare" (Keppel, p.109) in the storm
A Thousand Acres as Movie is Melodramatic and Bogus Perhaps Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "A Thousand Acres" was a bit over-rated. For one thing, the book's "dark secret" seemed utterly implausible. I just didn't believe that the book's protagonist and narrator, a 37-year-old Iowa farm wife named Ginny, could have completely repressed the fact that her father had sex with her when she was 15 years old, night after night, for a year. For True Believers in "Repressed Memory Syndrome
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words Photography may be a more effective and reasonably inexpensive alternative to drawing or painting, but more thought and feeling goes into a painting than a photograph. Photography is relatively simple in comparison to painting, which is a much more complex task. With photography, the composition is already completely arranged, but with a painting the objective is much more open to interpretation by the artist. The artist has the ability to capture much more
The landform of the current Thousand Islands National Park was created in two stages; the folding of the Frontenac Axis which created an ancient mountain range which is an extension of the Canadian Shield to the Adirondack Mountains in New York, and the continental glaciation erosion that scraped and rounded the tops of the mountain range. During the receding of the glacier, a channel was carved out to the Great Lakes basin, where the dammed water and meltwater of the glacier filled the channel now
[N]ature is a festering hornet's nest of aggression and overkill. (Paglia p.28) In a patriarchal and capitalist society grounded in the rape of the land, it is crucial that men should be able to tame both the female body and nature. This most often takes the forms of covert control, naturalizing the imperatives of the patriarchy into the whole of social interaction on one level, and the exploitation and gradual poisoning of the earth on another. But there are examples of overt control, too, in
A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words If I were to take a room filled entirely with people and ask them to write about something that holds value to them, what would it be? To some, the word “value” means something that holds only a monetary value, something that can be bought and sold. The values that I am referring to are the values that an individual cannot place a price tag on. They are of special significance that hold a dear meaning to us deep down in our hearts. They are the things that
A Thousand Acres and King Lear: A New Twist When Jane Smiley wrote A Thousand Acres, she consciously made the story parallel to Shakespeare's King Lear for several reasons. The novel's characters and basic storyline are almost direct parallels to King Lear, but Smiley's dissatisfaction with the traditional interpretation of King Lear is showcased in her modern day version (Berne 236). The story of the Cook family is almost a carbon copy of the saga of Lear's family. The ruler, or father, possesses