Mark Twain once wrote in one of his notebooks that he thought that Englishman only did things because they had been done before, and that Americans did things because they hadn’t been done before. Mark Twain wrote his books differently than any other book had been written before. It wasn’t normal to use grammar the way he did, or to have a plot line such as his. People who thought he was an amazing writer, believed him to be crazy after he wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The grammar was horrible; you were never supposed to use grammar in such a way. Neither were you supposed to have such immoral characters. People were also extremely horrified at the plot line. They thought that it promoted horrible behavior. To put things like this in a children’s book was just horrifying in itself. For years people were forbidden to read this book. It became one of the most banned books ever! People didn’t know what Mark Twain was thinking when he put out this piece of crap.

      Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn In a way people thought horrible, and illiterate. His sentences proved to have no structure, and many of his words were misspelled. He had the wrong punctuation, and none of his grammatical choices made sense.

      This was probably the number one reason why it was banned so much. Libraries refused to carry it. Teachers refused to let their students read it. Parents wouldn’t let their children touch it. They didn’t want the younger generation getting a hold of the books because it might influence them to start writing that way.

      But why not write that way? It supplies the book with color, and texture. It makes the book interesting. I am sure this is what Mark Twain thought when he was writing it. He wanted to do things differently; he wanted to be original. The reason why it wasn’t done before was that people didn’t think it was normal. It hadn’t been done before, and it was an unnecessary change to the way things had been done for hundreds of years.

 But the fact of the matter it, Mark Twain was only writing the way people would speak at the time. So why, if you speak like that, can’t you write like that also. The answer is once again peoples abilities to adapt to change. Some people just can’t do it, and obviously the people at the time weren’t ready for a book such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

      Another thing that got the people angry were the characters. They were immoral lairs, thieves, drunks, and troublemakers. You never put characters like that in a book, especially not a children’s book. Mark Twain was one of the first to introduce characters like this.

            However his characters were actually inspired by some of his childhood friends. His closest friend was actually a boy named Tome Blankenship, who was the son of the town drunkard. People said: “He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed, but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had.” Sound familiar?

            People refused to read this book because they thought that it promoted bad behavior and set standards that were not helpful to the rising generation. But some of these people were real people. And Mark Twain wasn’t afraid of making characters that had those kinds of values. Just another example of how Mark Twain did something different than what had already been done.

            One other thing that Mark Twain did to show his originality was creating plot line for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. People thought that was immoral, and horrible. It is a story about a boy faking his own death, then basically…steeling…a piece of valued property. Then he goes around lying to tons of people, and getting into a whole bunch of trouble all to get this slave to somewhere where he can be free.

            That was considered incredibly immoral. Never were you supposed to even think about helping a slave run away. You were supposed to think of them as a piece of property just like everybody else. Kids were taught that if you stole, or lied, or did anything like that (including “steeling” a slave) you were on your way to hell.

            Huck knew that it was immoral. He knew it was wrong to help Jim. But He began to know, and understand that, yes, Jim was an actual person. Slaves weren’t thought about in that way. They were a piece of property. They had no thoughts or feelings. They didn’t care what happened to their wife of children. They didn’t really have a soul. They were just a piece of property.

            But Mark Twain saw that they were really people, that they had thoughts and feelings, and wants just like anybody else. And so he made a story like this. He wanted to show that, not only could he be different, and original, but also he could show the world that slavery was wrong.

            So, he created a brilliant plot line were a boy runs off with a slave, and tries to help him so that he can someday be free. So that he can someday buy back his wife and children. He wanted to make the younger generation understand that these people we were enslaving were really just like us. They had family and friends, and they wanted to be happy; just like us.

            But his book was thought to be immoral, and horribly written. I think he might have expected this to happen. You cant just bring out this completely new way of writing, new kinds of character, and story line that is completely different from the way people had been living for centuries, and expect them accept everything that you were writing about.

            But Mark Twain did this because it hadn’t been done before. And someday somebody had to write about it, and why not it be himself. If Mark Twain’s definition is to be trusted, then Mark Twain truly was an American. He did things not because they had been done before, but because they hadn’t been done before. And The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, even though not accepted in his time, has become one of the most celebrated pieces of writing ever.

In a way, my music is my meditation. I will listen to hours of music a day, and do nothing else. I end up listening to music so often that when I hear a new song, I can imagine the notes on a page. I can see each instrument and the different parts they all play. It is an amazing feeling that you get inside’ it doesn’t fell like you are yourself any more. It is as if you have become the music.

I remember one time, a couple years back, I was the only one that was in the house at the moment. I sat down at the piano. I put my hands on the keys, I closed my eyes, and then I started to play. It was the most amazing thing that I have ever felt in my life. I was playing something completely forein to my mind, and yet it sounded brilliant. I put my whole soul into the piano, and it felt amazing. I didn’t even have to think about what I was playing, my fingers just carried on as if I had practiced the melody my whole life. I continued to play for hours, and then I finally became exhausted and had to stop. In Walden, Thoreau sai: “To be alive is to be awake. I have never yet met a man who is fully awake.” I think at that moment when I was playing the piano, I felt fully awake.

I wish I could do that again. It was the greatest feeling I had ever felt in my life. And it was such a big feeling that I have no words to describe how it made me feel. I think that is how Thoreau felt after he had meditated or done similar transcendental things. If being a transcendentalist felt like that every day, I would gladly become one, (as long as I got to listen to my music every day.)

So I have had experiences like Thoreau, mine are just musically oriented. I think that we all have transcendental experiences every day’ we just have to look for them in the things we enjoy most. When we started talking about transcendental experiences at the beginning of the week, I thought that there was no way that I would ever be able to come up with an experience by the end of the week. All I really had to do was listen to music all week, and I realized that even I have had transcending experiences most of my life.

“I’m nobody! Who are you?/ are you nobody too?” To be a nobody would be an awfully grand adventure. You would not be conforming to the outside world; but rather you would become your own self, never trying to please mankind. I think that we all, in our own way, try to hard to please the people around us. You always have to be more beautiful, more skinny, more fashionable, more talented then the others.

Pretend, if you will, for a moment, that there are no people to please, there is no world to conform to. Would you be any different. Would you try doing things you like, rather than the things others want you to do. I think we all, in a way, are trying to please people, it might even be our own subconscious, but we all do it. We might even be conforming to the world by trying to be different. I think that has become another trend. People wear there hair in spikes, and get tattoos. They get multiple piercings in their nose or eyebrows, and dress in odd fashions. They do it all to be more different than the next person.

“Then theres a pair of us – don’t tell!/They’d banish us you know.” People are often cruel to those who don’t fit in. They become bullies to those that are less conforming than the rest of mankind. They ignore them, or they use words that offend. They use a harsh way of peer pressure that usually does nothing for anyone. It just makes the bully feel better about them selves. They are cruel and useless beings who have nothing better to do with their time. The people who are being bullied are just trying to be them selves.

“How dreary to be somebody!/How public like a frog.” When you are conforming to the world, you are just making your self more miserable. Having your own personality, and your own way of doing things is the best thing you can do, for you and every body else around you.

To tell your name the livelong day/To an admiring bog” In truth the people who are trying to become like everyone else, the people who bully, are admiring of you. They want to have more personality, more enthusiasm, more that you have, and they can’t have it because they if they aren’t being pretty, or skinny, or fashionable, then they have nothing to live for. They have become so attached to the band wagon, that they can’t get off, and they don’t know what they would do when they had detached themselves from the world. In truth people who are not conforming are somebody, and the people who are, they are truly nobodies, who have nothing to live for.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was a very interesting person. He was extraordinarily odd, and kind of crazy. But crazy people are always more interesting than those that are sane. Henry David Thoreau’s adventure into the woods is a very interesting thing. He spent 2 years in there. That is an accomplishment I fear I could never complete. I doubt that I could ever have lived as simply as Thoreau did, or live even as simply as he thinks the rest of man kind should.

I tend to run into extremely interesting people at random moments in my life. One such person reminds me very much so of Henry David Thoreau. This mans name is Mr. Carron. He was my 8^th grade math teacher, and instead of teaching, told us of his grand adventures out in the world. He did live more simply than most people if not quite as simply as Thoreau.

One of Carron’s qualities that remind me most of Thoreau, is that he has had very grand associations with nature. A couple of years back, Mr. Carron was working for NASA, and decided that he would go on a hike. This was to be an amazing hike, and NASA would not let him have time off to complete his journey. So he quite and went on his hike.

He liked hiking so much that he continued to hiking until I had met him. He had hiked all over the USA, and had completed the Appellation trail over 2 times, where, he met his wife.

Anyway, he had a very odd longing to go live in the woods of a couple years, which reminds me of Thoreau. So Carron took some wilderness survival classes. He then began to make everything, by hand, that he would need on his trip. He made his cloths, and backpacks, and tents all by hand. Then he went and lived in some woods in Canada for 3 years!

As you can tell this man was extraordinarily insane; just Thoreau was. I have been able to tell many similarities from the two, and not just their extreme love for nature. Mr. Carron was also full of profound thoughts many of which I have read from Walden. I am sure that Mr. Carron must have read Walden, or other of Thoreau’s books, because they both seem so similar. Mr. Carron lived as simply as he could, and so did Thoreau. Mr. Carron cared about nature as did Thoreau. They were also both full of mind blowing ideas.

Maybe someday I can be crazy enough to go out and live in the woods for a couple of years. Then maybe I can be crazy enough to have incredibly mind blowing ideas, and live so simply that I would probably explode from the simplicity of it all. But I thoroughly doubt that. I think it would be a good thing to live like Thoreau, but in our day and age it would be extremely difficult for people to give pretty much everything they own to become better people. And in our day and age, people don’t like doing difficult things. People want things made as simple as they can be made. That is why Thoreau, and Mr. Carron are some what of an idol to me. I could never become like them, but I would like to be like them.

            Nature plays an enormous part in Washington Irving’s stories. He seems to digress on and on about nature, and puts excruciatingly long details about the surrounding areas that his characters are residing in. Not that it is a bad thing to put in detail such as that, I actually enjoy it most of the time. But my point is that Washington Irving seems to make nature seem more than it really is.

            A lot of the time he seems to put in pointless details about something that has nothing to do with anything in particular. It gets really confusing when you are reading about the headless horseman, and then all of the sudden he puts in something pointless like: two birds on a windowsill eating a piece of dirt that had fallen of the mustache of a man by the name of Joe. Maybe I am exaggerating, but that is what it feels like.

            Maybe Washington Irving was just a really naturistic sort of person. It is like when people are obsessed about food, they can’t get enough, and it starts to control their life, and they are a slave to their own dessert. Perhaps Washington Irving had a sort of nature problem like that. Maybe he got so into nature that he couldn’t stop obsessing over it. It finally got to the point were, if he didn’t add a little bit of nature in every single sentence, that he would go mad. Then they would have to ship him off to a mental hospital were he would digress about nature for the rest of his days.

            But I am guessing, and I might be wrong, that it was a bigger problem than a mind controlling nature obsession. I think he was trying to cover up all the hardship and loss that happened in the after math of the war. He wanted to make things seem better than they were. Trying to make it seem that America was a happy place, with no problems, and with lots of beautiful scenery.

            It might not even have been to cover up all the tragedy that everyone in America had faced. It might just be to cover up his hardship, and everything that he went through.

He might have thought that if things were all well and beautiful in his stories, that things would be well and beautiful in his life as well. Maybe it wasn’t to make America seem great, but to try and hide the pain of everything he lost in the war.

            People tend to have a lot of psychological issues after something like a war takes place. And maybe all this nature stuff that was in Washington Irving’s stories was the result of all the things that happened in the war. Or maybe it was just an obsession about nature. Perhaps the world will never know which it truly was.

In memory of James Oliver Rigney Jr. (aka. Robert Jordan)

            There are many great Americans. It would take me a lifetime or more to name all of them. I doubt that I could choose just one. To choose the greatest of them all would be an extremely difficult task. So I will choose one that I think is pretty great. A man who has not just affected me, but millions of his fans. A man who has been a great author, and expanded the imagination of many. The Author of the Wheel of Time, and other great books. Robert Jordan.

            I have only ever read his Wheel of Time series, but just from those books, I have been able to grasp the concept of greatness. He was truly amazing. Not only did he have a way with arranging words, but he created a series that really made you think. He brought up questions that made you wonder, and create new ideas of your own. He made a series that was truly spectacular.

            The books he wrote enthralled me like no other book or series has. I had never been interested in the fantasy genre before I started reading his books. In fact I hadn’t really been that interested in reading at all before Wheel of Time. I had read, but it was usually just for an assignment or something that I was forced to read by one of my siblings. Jordan expanded my imagination and opened my mind to all the amazing possibilities that come from reading.

            I am sure that I am not the only one that feels this way about Robert Jordan. Many of his fans have expressed how his books have affected them. You can even look at a sight that shows how people have met, fell in love, and have been married, all because of his books. I think that is sort of funny, but it goes to show you that these books are truly effective. They have changed the life of many, and I am sure they will continue to do so in the future.

            He has not only changed the way I read, but he has also set up some values in his writing that, since I have read his books, try to emulate in my writing as well. I don’t know much about Robert Jordan’s personal values, but he always made sure that his writing was grade A quality, and that is one value in my writing that I wish to have. He also created characters that you knew and loved, and you became sad at anything that happened to them. One of my writing failures is that I create characters, but they are not well rounded, and people who read my writing find it hard to really like the characters I create. Since reading his books, and through paying close attention to the way he writes, I have been able to make my writing better.

            This week many people have chosen to write about who they think is the greatest American. Many of them have chosen Benjamin Franklin. I do not deny that Franklin did amazing things. He truly was great. But…..he was kind of insane. So I chose to write about someone who may not be the greatest American, but who has affected my life greatly. Robert Jordan has truly been a great American; and I don’t think I would be half the person I am today if it wasn’t for him. I really do think that he was an amazing man.

Robert Jordan died September 16^th 2007 from a rare blood disease called amyloidesis.

He was 58, and in the middle of finishing the last book in the WoT series

We will never know who killed Asmodean

Heaven falls. Details at eleven

You probably are not sensible of the things to come in our next life. For it may be that you will be greatly rewarded, or, that you shall forever be stuck in darkness, suffering in the pain of listening to horrible recordings of Danny Elfman, Patrick Doyle, and Greenday. You are the one to decide your fate. But listen carefully. The time of judgment is soon at hand, and the grand master, the god of all movie soundtracks, John Williams, knows what music you listen to. He knows if you have defiled, or have spoke loathsome words against him. He knows all.

He has created music for, and conducted, the grand musical orchestras of heaven. And now he must decide who has been faithful, and who must suffer an eternity listening to squeaky violins, and being hit on the head repeatedly with cellos and bassoon. For as a violin string snaps, detaching itself from the violin, will you be snapped from this earth, forever falling into a pit of eternal night.

And those who remain faithful, and everyday, continue to listen to his amazing music, will be blessed. We will sit on the clouds of heaven, blissfully listening as Mr. Williams conduct his orchestra. We will all delight as our hearts and minds are filled with music that feeds the soul. And we will pity those who have taken the wrong path. We will frown greatly upon those who have cursed his name, and those that have said his music is of no worth.

And yet John Williams has a magnificent heart. He knows that he is by far the best; and that no other could ever come close to being as great as he. He sees us as insignificant illiterate fools who pretend to know about music. And yet, he has chosen to save us if we will continue to listen to great music. But those who have refused, and those whom he sees as slubberdegullion idiots will fall, their spirits will be crushed, and they will realize that their life was truly of no worth.

So I say to you my friends, repent of every evil thought or word you may have spoken against the grand mast of music. For the day will soon come when we will be judged, and only you can decide weather you will forever swimming in darkness, or sitting blissfully on the right side of our musical master, forever listening to his amazing music in happiness and peace.

Matt Thomas

Language Arts 11

September 9^th

The American Dream

            We have been discussing both myths and the American Dream this week. But what if the American Dream is a myth? That is a question that appeared in this week in our discussion. There have been many students who agreed that the American Dream was indeed a myth. Yet others believed that it is true. My opinion, at this current moment, is that the American Dream is true. We discussed what the definition of the American Dream is. Then we continued to listen to our peer’s opinions about it. We were then asked if we knew anyone who was currently living the American dream, which helped us understand that people do live the American dream, making it true for at least one person. After giving much thought on the matter, many of us came to our own conclusion. And I personally believe that I am living the American Dream, and so is my family and friends. It may not be true for many people, but it is true for me, and many of the people that I associate with.

            Many of my peers explained the American Dream to be fame, fortune, wealth, and success. Others input was very different. They believed that if you were happy, it didn’t matter if you were rich or not, you were still living the American dream. I believe the same. I also believe that you don’t have to be in America to be living the American Dream. I think that if you are happy else were, you are living the American Dream, weather it is called the same thing in a different country, I do not know.

            Many of the students said the American Dream was false, because they don’t believe we are living freely, and the people who are already rich and successful put down any body that tries to become rich and successful. Others, such as myself, thought differently. Some people mentioned that their family is happy the way they are; that they are indeed living the American Dream. They do not have fame or fortune, and they were are very wealthy, but they are happy, and that is all that matters.

            We were also asked if we knew anyone living the American Dream. Some students mentioned a few famous people, and others, as I discussed in the last paragraph, mentioned their families, and how happy they are. I also believe that is also true for my me and my family. No one in my family is famous, and we are indeed very poor, but we are extremely happy with what we have been given; that we are blessed to live in a free country, away from kings and dictating rulers. We are indeed happy just the way we are.

            I know that some people do not agree with me, that the American Dream is true. But people are entitled to there own opinion. I do think the American Dream is true, and that people are living it every day. Others, just like myself, are living a joyful life every day, and they are living the American Dream, just like me and my family.