Monday, February 9, 2009

Critique1 ERivas

Critique1 ERivas
For my critique assignment, I selected a poem called Faith by Robert Kendall. The reason why is that it is such a beautiful short word and has so much meaning. Faith has enormous power to destroy or to build something. Without faith nothing can be accomplished. This is my personal opinion and now back to the assignment.

First, this short poem is not about the normal expectations of a traditional poem like meter, rhyme, or alliteration and assonance that create sound effects, but rather visual EFFECTS. This short poem visually speaking offers striking effects such as the color of letters and words as well as the arrangement of words. It also has the power of engaging three of our five senses: sight, hearing and touch.

When reading this short poem, it is important to pay special attention to the color of each letter and word. Then, it has this special and positive effect when reading it with music. The sense of touch is also part of the experience because we need to keep pressing a mouse to continue reading.

It is definitely a great piece of electronic literature and I loved it. I was motivated to keep reading it over and over again to find meanings. The more times I read it, I kept asking different questions: why the color of the letters or words? What the different colors mean? What do some letters such us o, r and or where inside quotation marks? Then, after pressing to the next page without knowing how it looked like, it produced or introduced a mysterious element. I loved the collapsing of all the words and the word FAITH on top of them all at the end of the poem. In a traditional or a printed poem, elements such as meter, rhythm or rhyme are important. On the other hand, in an electronic or digital version such us this beautiful short piece of the poem FAITH, the author created a powerful striking effect by engaging our senses of sight, hearing and touch.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Rivas'blog

Manifesto

Lately, I can’t have peace of mind due to so many CROOKS, CON ARTISTS and frauds in my life. They came out of no where and all of them are - according to my belief system parasites. They claim the economy is in really bad shape to justify their scams.Now, I am really sick to the point that I created an OBSESSION for literary phrases like POETIC JUSTICE, KARMA, SARCASM, and SATIRE… I even started reading the epic poem THE DIVINE COMEDY by Dante Alighieri. I can almost feel his indignation of INJUSTICE and it is a great example of writing as a form of ART.



I am finding my self in need to borrow a great line from the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill: “burning desire.” I have it all the time. This burning desire is to turn my anger and frustration into an opportunity to master the concepts or literary devices of POETIC JUSTICE AND SATIRE. It will be a great vengeance to be able to laugh Out Loud out of these parasites’ materialism, greed and lack of virtues.You might be asking why you don’t sue these cheaters? My answer: because the legal system it is just a waste of time. Crooks have legal rights too. So what happens is that if a plaintiff cannot afford a lawyer, then there is a potential for mistakes in a mountain of paperwork. To make matters worst, a defendant have free legal resources. Isn’t this ironic? So a crook can be absolved just from a technicality. The bottom line the way I see the legal system is just a necessary process because we are a civilized society that respect the rule of law, and a civilized individual cannot take the law on their own hands – right?


In my idealist world, there are no demands or rules to propose to make it a better system, but rather rely in the philosophy of CAUSE AND EFFECT. Having this philosophy in mind I come to realized how closely related are the concepts of Karma and poetic justice. According to many accounts KARMA is defined as “what goes around comes around.” And according to the wonderful Wikipedia “ Poetic justice is a literary device in which virtue is ultimately rewarded or vice punished, often in modern literature by an ironic twist of fate intimately related to the character's own conduct (wikipedia.org)." hence, my ultimate literary goal is to create evil characters that have no conscious acting like sociopaths. But in the end they fall victims of their own vices. However, it is not an easy task when there is so much bitterness and the challenge is to replace bitterness by creativity. It is a great challenge like trying to write in English when I dream and think in Spanish.I cannot condemn the legal system because even with all its technicalities issues and unfairness, it is the ONLY weapon of a civilized society. Me on the other hand, I rather look for another form of justice which is A DIVINE JUSTICE that I am sure it exists. I don’t need to be a religious person that goes to church every Sunday or believe in a physical being called GOD or Allah in order to believe with all my heart that divine justice does exist. The way I believe it is through the natural laws or through METAPHYSICS. This is the other field that I would love to explore in order to create great writings of ART. By the way, talking about going to church every Sunday, it does not mean that people can get away with all the bad deeds they do their human fellows. I know this theme evoke passions and controversies, but I need to take my chances because the people that have hurt me the most go to church every Sunday.


In conclusion my MANIFESTO turned out to be so personal that right at this moment I feel a form of Catharsis. This is exactly what I need to accomplished with my writings as an ART form. My divine justice would come from the satisfaction of learning to express my emotions through poetic justice and satire as literary devices. When I was writing this assignment I couldn’t stop thinking about Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Cervantes’ characters illustrated the greatest literary concepts of all times: Realism and Idealism. According to so many accounts the author of this wonderful Spanish novel suffered enormous injustices during his life time. My little injustices are nothing compared to what other people suffer because of unscrupulous people. Nonetheless, it hurts so badly and I am learning to express my anger through an artistic mode such as writing as an art form. I know I have a long way to go because this is just the beginning, but it is worth it to pursuit this dream and be able to have a positive impact in people’s lives by Laughing Out Loud. What I mean is that my writings will be so funny that my audience will have a form of catharsis after reading my stories. Is a grand dream – isn’t it?