Blog Response #11

For this blog response, I'm going to talk about the three essays we talked about in class on Tuesday The Fine Art of Sighing, Crumbling Expectations, and Essay on the Sublimation of Dying. All of these essays are similar in the sense that they all talk about grieving someone that is dying or already dead. Although, The Fine Art of Sighing does not talk about grieving, sighing can be connected with grieving because sighing is a emphasized release of air, which is kind of what you are trying to do when grieving over someone - let go and release, never forgetting about them but letting them go.

The Fine Art of Sighing used an interesting way of showing that we are all connected - through sighs. The author could have used many other things to show we are connected like the desire to reproduce or the hunger for nourishment, but he used sighing, I though that was a creative take on the connection between all of us humans. I also thought Cooper did an excellent job of describing what a sigh is creatively and creating an image of what a sigh is.

Crumbling Expectations did an excellent job of telling a story about a man that came up short in many different aspects. The father cheated on his wife, ruined his business relationships, and lost his resort. This story reminds me of To After That how it is a story withing another story. The main narrator is explaining about a novel his father had written about a resort owner who's resort fell into Lake Michigan. Like a student said in class, there is a parallel drawn between the fathers body falling apart from cancer and the story about a man whose life is falling apart.

The last essay that I'm going to talk about is a tough one to fully understand. The way it is formatted and the style in which it is written is unusual. I thought that it was formatted in fragments (synthesis I, synthesis II, etc.) to show the transformation from life to death. Synthesis means combining two or more things together, so I thought that it also added to my theory, when someone dies it can seem like the line between life and death is paper thin. The author talks a great deal about language and text, what she should revise in her text. This also reminded me of the writing style of To After That.

To me, all of these essays seemed connected by the fact that they are dealing with the release of something or someone and the fact that they are an essay talking about writing another essay.