Angie Powers > Recent Status Updates

When Montag is introduced in the book, he is described as a "minstrel man" when he looked in the mirror (Bradbury 1). I pictured him with soot on his face, but when I looked up what a "minstrel man" is, I was shocked to discover that it's an allusion to the racist history of white people putting on black face to entertain. I'm not seeing a lot of other references to race in the book, but this one stuck out to me.

I have been waiting for literal DECADES for this.

I am hooked.

I just got @ed in the anger chapter. Thanks Brene...

The chapter on belonging was absolutely fantastic. Brown begins the chapter discussing belonging in childhood and adolescence but expands into adulthood. The most poignant part of the chapter was when she described what middle school students had to say about belonging vs fitting in: "If I get to be me, I belong. If I have to be like you, I fit in" (Brown 72%). From the mouth of babes...

Something I noticed about the writer's style is that Knight tends to include quotations from other people that are comparisons. Carol Walker, an instructional coach in Wyoming, reports, "[L]istening is like oxygen" (Knight 51). She continues to explain that a coach and a teacher can't form a relationship with the "oxygen" of listening. Knight's decision to select quotations from experts helps me understand the ideas.

In this book, the authors are explaining the history and meaning of rhetoric but they do so in a comic book format. They acknowledge that the word is loaded: "[Rhetoric] has connotations of duplicity, sneakiness, and even outright deception" (Losh 36). They even write, "[It's] a dirty word" (Losh 36). While we will learn about rhetoric next semester, I love that this books relates to our current learning too!

Omg this book reminds me of Permission to Feel so far. I loved that book and it helps me get over the gross title of this book.

The main character has been learning how to play a djembe drum, and finally he's getting the hang of it! He compares drumming to "a seance, a very loud seance, [that] whip[s] us into a fury" (Coates 130). This simile shows that he sees almost a spiritual effect to music.

I am close to finishing this book and I have to say that reading this book is like studying a foreign language at times. I have to look things up!

The main character of this story, Fort, bumps into a mysterious old man, who takes him to a magical place called the Between. As the old man explains the place to Fort, "the words whizzed around [his] head like moons around a planet" (Mbalia 13).

My book is still keeping my interest, but some of the poems are less interesting than others. I have found that I tend to enjoy the poems that don't have a lot of religious allusions more. Some of the allusions are harder to understand, so I have look things up, which breaks focus. Overall, I am still liking Emezi's writing, but I think I actually enjoy their fiction more than their poetry.