notes

I am a senior this year, and am going to unfortunately be graduating in May.  Colleen's opinions are very comparable to what I think is going through a lot of people's heads their senior year, especially girls.  There is an idea some people have that everyone is supposed to find their eventual spouse at college, and I have heard a lot of girls especially concerned about this matter, and going out of their way to find a boyfriend because of this notion.  A lot of girls I know have higher gpa's then my buddies or myself, and have jobs whereas neither my best buddies nor I have one, so I am not sure why this is the case, but I think it definitely is the case.

Turning now to weight, the retelling of stories:

In artistic retelling of fairy telling, does art help counteract ideology?

I have not had much experience, or really know what ideology means, but I think that Jeannette is trying to say that art, in some degree, does counteract the facts or the plot in fairy tales.  I think that if fairy tales are retold artistically, it can either stress the main point of the story, or counteract, or lead the reader's focus away from the main point or ending of the fairy tale.  For example, the only versions of Cinderella I have read or seen have been very simple and straight forward.  The versions we have read so far in class have been much more artistic then ones I have ever read, and after reading some of those versions, I remembered different parts of those stories much more distinctly instead of the main lesson of the story.  In some versions I would not have been that sure of what the main point might have really been if I had not read Cinderella previously.  

The part of Weight that I remembered after reading, and what really stuck with me because I really agreed with and have been thinking about recently is when she was talking about how real life has replaced imagination, and how she believes that language is much more than information.  Recently I just read The Rules of Attraction.  There is not much plot at all, but the language in the book combined with the humor made it very enjoyable for me to read and I flew through the book.  A couple days ago I tried to start a book by John Grisham called The Innocent Man, which is a true story.  The book was uncharacteristically very simply written, and just had a bunch of facts in the beginning, and pretty depressing ones at that.  I slightly bored, and kinda bummed, so I stopped reading it and probably will never start it again.  I did not think this thought process through entirely, but when reading Weight, I realized that is why I enjoyed one book so much while disliking the other one, when I expected the opposite.