Cartoons by the Master

        At first glance, anyone who has been around American pop culture most likely recognizes the style of this illustration as the work of Dr. Seuss. Therefore, without reading the caption, you would assume that the subject is one that is light-hearted and silly, given his previous work. You  quickly find out otherwise by only the forth word of the caption.
        The title of the book and the insignia on the spine key the reader in on the fact that the "Foreign Children" being discussed are the Jewish and other minority people being slaughtered in Europe. He even brings the viewers attention to these words by underlining and capitalizing them.The opinion of the woman is show by the words she says, the words on her t-shirt, and the snooty, I'm-the-only-one-that-matters look on her face. She thinks that since the problems in Europe during World War II don't directly affect her and her country, she doesn't need to worry. By the nonchalant tone of her words and the very disagreeable look on her face, we can see that the point that Dr. Seuss is trying to make is that it doesn't matter if those effected aren't our people; people are dying and something needs to be done about it.
        I think that there is also an underlying theme of this cartoon. You may have noticed the look of utter shock on the faces of the children on either side of the woman. The cat also looks shocked, but I'm going to focus on the children. Something in the life of the woman has brought her to choose her self-centered wardrobe and opinions. The children on the other hand have not been around for long enough to have been engraved by the chisel of life as deeply as the as the woman has. I believe that what Dr. Seuss is trying to say here is that, if we truly want to make this world a better place, we need to be like a child in our thinking, letting go of past prejudices and caring for all others. we need to turn life's chisel back on the world and turn it into something beautiful, leaving it better than we found it.

The Words, not the Birds

       

 Birds. Such a simple life form. They don't live long and the small amount of time that they are alive they spend doing little more than hopping, flying, and worm-finding. Nevertheless, they help display the way literature can be used to make so much out of so little. When John James Audubon and Annie Dillard were faced with the the same subject to write about, they came up with utterly different results.
         After first seen numerous large flocks of pigeons, Audubon factually describes the 163 flocks he saw in 21 minutes, while Dillard artfully describes the flocks she sees as appearing "like a loosened skein." They both see the same thing and yet, through the medium of their words, they are able to complete a completely different picture. If they used photography, they wouldn't have been able to show anything different from each other, because both have the same physical situation. An audio recording would have also yielded the same for each. But not words.
         These pieces go to show that you can write very effectively about anything. Don't let an excuse of "I don't have anything to write about" as a reason not to write because it simply isn't true. There is always something that you can write about. Afterall, it's the words, not the birds, that made Audubon's and Dillard's piece something special.

Puzzle Paragraph

      In "The Death of the Moth" by Virginia Woolf, she describes the mundane event of a moth dying. While others might say that this is all she was trying to accomplish, and she had no ulterior motive, I happen to know otherwise; she is displaying the lack of purpose in life. In her view, we as humans just fire coins into the slot machines in the casino of life, hoping we can accomplish something of importance. However, we all come up short because of our inevitable mortality. Another thing she tries to do is to display how all alone people are in the world. She depicts the moth roaming around alone, profiling the people she is writing about as Lone Ranger-type figures left to take on the world by themselves.

                                               

       I, however, disagree with this perspective of life. I believe that we are all here to endure the troubles of life and come out on the other end having made something beautiful of ourselves. As Jeannette Walls says in her personal childhood memoir "The Glass Castle," "I wanted to dig it up... Mom frowned at me. 'You'd be destroying what makes it special,' she said. 'It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.'" If you want to live a happy life, don't live like a moth. You'll end up going from corner to corner, never getting anywhere, never accomplishing anything.