Skip to main content

The hounds of Baxterville

    1: Of what I could parse from the strange verbiage used In this essay, I think that tattoos are a symbol of individuality and personal history to Baxter. She relates stories of various people throughout history using them as a means of self-identification: Anchors, pirate queens, bleeding hearts all offered something like an I.D. card. For the inked mummies of the Euro-Asian steppe and the bodies of the Iceman and an Egyptian priestess… what did their dots and dashes and their swirling chimerical animals mean to their owners? Perhaps only that they had names, even in death.

    2: Baxter tends to relate her story to people of old, showcasing how tattoos have been important to a lot of people for a long, long time. In a series of two passages I found darkly humorous (At least, I hope she meant it to be humorous), she shares the story of two martyrs who were brutally tortured via use of poetic tattoos: Over the course of two days he had their faces tattooed with twelve lines of his metrically correct although artistically unsuccessful poetry. Only to lead the next paragraph with a casual remark about a minor grievance with her own poetry-based tattoo: There is a comma missing in the poem on my left leg.
    As much as I find the essay to be too indirect with what it's saying, I do quite enjoy that sudden juxtaposition of "horrible torture" to "slight annoyance"

    3: I have... agonized... over this question, and for the life of me I can't think of a person I would quote from to describe my life. I don't even know a lot of quotes. My first thoughts were either The Stupendium or Tom Cardy because I like their songs, but I don't particularly think any of the lyrics fit me. Even when I spread my search to fictional characters, I can't find anything. I would love to be able to use Brian David Gilbert for this, but, unfortunately, I don't think "Because god has cursed me for my hubris, and my work is never finished." describes my life.

    4: To describe myself, I would research comedy, but if I had a choice of what to research, I would research marine biology. As an example: did you know that professional clowns will have their specific "look" painted on an egg for copywrite reasons? All the eggs are kept in the Clown Egg Register, located in England.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

They're Called Cell Phones Because The Phone is of Out Hot Cell Eat The Phone

     (The title is a reference, if you don't understand, don't worry about it.)      These two articles are a bit more linked than normal, as one is a direct response to the other. Though aside from the fact that they both talk about phones and are written in English, there aren't many comparisons I can make, they differ from each other quite severely.     First, and most obviously, their stances on cellphones are direct opposites. The one titled "Have Smartphones Destroyed A Generation?" Is, shockingly (not really,) thinks that the impact smartphones have on the youths is negative overall, whereas the response, "No, Smartphones are Not Destroying a Generation" thinks that this is not the case (another shocking revelation, I know)     There are also some more minor differences in format, for example, the response is much shorter than the paper it's responding to, which I appreciate greatly because my attention span is garbage. The source...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pandemic Book Part 2: Electric Boogaloo

      I'm not sure how I'm supposed to follow the note because I can't see what passages other people picked until I submit this. -writing this as I read, I find it  mildly interesting that Jeevan was a paparazzo twice. I thought it was one solid block of his life, but nope. -Also, what kind of name is Jeevan? for the remainder of this blog I'm gonna call him Jeeves -calling it now I think Frank's gonna die or otherwise be separated from Jeeves. -"his hands ached from compressing Arthur's unwilling heart" is a pretty neat line, good contender for the line I'll discuss. -when Jeeves's phone rang and he said "hua" I thought that was an exclamation of surprise, like "HUH?!" -I'm disappointed to find out Arthur wasn't patient zero, makes him less interesting to me, and it also makes the original "and this is when it happened" line I praised very dull in hindsight. Because even if "it" didn't happe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Forget this book, let's talk about Early Modern English!

-It's nice that they have a traveling acting troupe in the post-apocalypse. -I hope Jeeves died. Not because I dislike him, but because it would be narratively interesting. We get to learn about a person: their past, their hopes and dreams, their struggles... only for their story to be cut-short by the virus. -The farther we get from Shakespeare's time the more incomprehensible plays of that time become. "The safer sense will ne'er accommodate his master thus"?? What does "thus" mean in this context? In modern English it's used like "[cause] thus [effect]," you don't just end a sentence with it! And even if thus wasn't there to muck-up the whole line, what does it mean for a safer sense to not accommodate something? My best guess on what "safer sense" means is caution. Like, "Oh I would go play on the highway but I have a safer sense for that." or something. Does this mean that the person doesn't think cautio...
Post a Comment
Read more