The Savior

It’s the wee hours of the morning, June 23^rd, 2010. I’m glued to my television set from the beginning. The familiar sounds of vuvuzelas filled my living room, but I can hear much more: the biting of fingernails, feet pacing back and forth on the hardwood floor, my heart racing more and more as time passed. But I knew I wasn’t the only one. 300 million others were hearing the exact same thing, praying that eleven men over 10,000 miles away would conjure up a miracle.

The United States Men’s Soccer Team needed a win against Algeria in their final match of Group C to move onto the knockout round in the FIFA World Cup. Seemed easy enough. The US rallied against Slovenia in the previous match before getting cheated out of a win, and Algeria was considered to be an inferior opponent. However, as the evening progressed in Pretoria, South Africa, it seemed luck was not on the Yanks side, seeing disallowed goals, dubious fouls, and many shots off the post.

Time was getting shorter. I, well we, were locked in, with agony and angst at all time highs, near physical pain. The sounds were growing louder. I was getting sick to my stomach. But then, deep into extra time, the sounds stopped.

“Cross, and Dempsey is denied again!!!!”….

It’s over. The sport I love, the country I love, has fallen short yet again. It’s not like anyone takes soccer seriously anyways. Why should I have expected anything more than an early exit? We were defeated.

“AND DONOVAN HAS SCORED!!!! OH CAN YOU BELIEVE IT??!?!? GOAL GOAL USA! CERTAINLY THROUGH!!!! OH IT’S INCREDIBLE!!! YOU COULD NOT WRITE A SCRIPT LIKE THIS!!!!” – Ian Darke, ESPN (video)

In the blink of an eye, agony had turned to true euphoria. I could hear my country, reveling in the angel-like heroics of the greatest American soccer player to ever grace the earth. You really couldn’t write a script like that: one goal, changing an entire country from soccer skeptics to believers.

The USA ended up losing to Ghana in the round of 16, but that is beside the point. Since that moment, the sport that I have tried to advocate for years finally had a place in American culture. MLS attendance is up, the USA games are all televised, and jersey sales are through the roof. Who said the United States couldn’t be a soccer country?

More importantly for me, it was a revelation. For so long, advocating the sport had been merely recreational, figuring I would never have a serious audience anyways. But after that day, I decided I wanted to major in journalism and become a soccer writer, hoping one day to replicate that same euphoria I felt almost two years ago, and spread the joy I get from the sport to the new American fans of the Beautiful Game.

I still get chills watching that footage. Any time I need motivation to get through journalism related work (posting on my own blog or school work), I spend hours watching footage, from that summer and beyond (This one gets me every time).

Goosebumps, engaged. 

A Chat With Hissa

Going into Tuesday, I didn’t really know what to expect. In high school I was part of a conversation program similar to this, but on the other side of the table as I was the Spanish student talking to fluent speakers. I was a tad nervous to see how this would play out.

Right from the beginning, we were having issues communicating on the phone. Hissa thought I said to meet at 2:50 (instead of 2:15), and I thought she said we would meet at the bookstore (when she meant Union Grounds).  Immediately I knew this was going to be a challenging affair, talking to a woman that knows very little English. After scrambling around campus for a while we finally met up.

Hissa is 27 years old and from Dammam, Saudi Arabia, about five hours from the capital Riyadh. She has never lived anywhere besides Saudi Arabia, but decided to come to America with her sister and brother (they are triplets!) for four years to study English. When her studies are done, she wants to move back to Saudi Arabia and be an English teacher.

One of the interesting points she brought up is the American stereotype of the Middle East. She wanted to make it very clear to me that Saudia Arabia, and the rest of the Arabic Peninsula for that matter, is not just sand, desert, and oil like us American’s tend to think it is. As she put it, there is a desert between Los Angeles and Dallas, just like there is a desert between Riyadh and Dammam. The big cities are no different than the urban areas we have in the United States.

To my surprise, talking to her was much easier than I had anticipated after our difficult phone call. Even though it is apparent she is still in the infant stages of learning the language, she was able to communicate one way or another, and was willing to take the time to figure out another way to say something with the basic language she knew. I really liked how open to critiquing she was, always willing to be corrected to learn something the right way. The toughest thing for her (and I can imagine it’s the same for any English learner) was the idioms and slang. For example, I once used the phrase “in the doghouse”, but she was unable to grasp that I meant “in trouble”, not literally in a doghouse. Also, she didn’t know the word “parents” stood for “mother and father”. Things like that one can only learn by speaking the language for a long period of time, and I’m not surprised she didn’t understand them.

All in all, it was a good first meeting with Hissa. I hope my future conversations with her go just as well.

Huck Finn Experience

1.     Have you read the novel –Huck Finn- before?  If so where and why?

Yes. I read it for high school - sophomore year.

Answer either 2 or 3 depending on your answer to 1.

2. If you have not read Huck Finn before, surely you know something about the novel and character from references and allusions in popular culture.  What do you know about either the novel and/or character?

2.     What was your response to reading Huck Finn, and what do you remember from your reading?  Also, did you actually read the whole novel, or just parts of it?  Did you read Cliff Notes or Monarch Notes instead?

I really enjoyed this novel the first time I read it. To be honest, I didn’t remember much except the general plot (i.e. Huck + Jim + Raft), but it all came back to me as I read this second time around. And, contrary to The Scarlet Letter and East of Eden from the same year, I actually made it all the way through this one without sparknotes.

3.     If you were assigned to read Huck Finn in a previous class, either here or in high school, how did your class as a whole react to the novel?  Why do you think your instructor assigned the novel?  How did he or she try to “teach” the novel?

I remember many people finding it interesting, but very tough to decipher (especially lots of the slang used). We were assigned it because it coincided with the time period being taught in our US History class, and no matter what people say that book does a mighty fine job of depicting life during the 1830’s. She tried teaching the novel very straightforwardly, admitting that it wasn’t her favorite from the beginning and just tried to get through it. Meh.

5. If you were required to read Huck Finn in a previous class, what sort of assignments were you required to complete, and what exactly did you do during the classes when

Huck Finn was being discussed.

We read 4-5 chapters per night (block scheduling) and had a short quiz on each section of reading. Every class period was an open-ended discussion on topics brought up by the class or the teacher. Notes were optional. That was pretty much it (Boring, right?)

6. Huck Finn is still one of the most controversial and most banned books in America.  Why is it so controversial? 

I think people find it controversial because of the difficult racist ideas brought up in it. In this age, many people think of slavery as a terrible, immoral act (which it was). But back in the day, that was regular life. What was Twain supposed to do, leave it all out? Make his world all pretty with flowers and butterflies? I mean, I understand it’s offensive but its there for a reason.  

7. Is Huck Finn still relevant to you as college student today?  Should it continue to be taught in college classrooms?

Yes. This book is a timeless story that deals with difficult issues Americans once had to face. It is a perfect glimpse into the past and a great coming of age story.

8.  The general consensus among critics is that Huck Finn is a brilliant and powerful novel, but also a flawed and problematic novel.  What do you think might be flawed and/or problematic about the novel?

It doesn’t stick to a steady plot, for one. Also, the absence of Jim for a very crucial section could be considered flawed. I don’t really know, because I don’t consider it flawed at all. What others might see as a flaw I like, especially the rapidly changing plot. 

Huck Finn & Racism

As we touched on in class, Huck Finn has been challenged across the country because of its questionable racist themes and ideas. However, despite many believing the novel is offensive and should be banned, I never got that feeling during my second reading of it. On the contrary, I actually felt the book acted as a subtle form of abolitionism, hinting at tolerance and desegregation during a tumultuous time.

Although the book is filled with racist characters supporting slavery and a heavy use of the “n-word”, I still felt Twain intended for the novel to satirize that society and point out its flaws. To me, Huck, despite referring to Jim as the “n-word” Jim, never sees him as more than a travelling companion. Since Huck is just as much on the run as Jim is, I think Huck is humbled and realizes that despite color of skin the two are very similar. Huck is a young boy, and although he is very capable of thinking for himself and making his own decisions he is still swayed by the society and culture of the time, accounting for his use of the derogatory word. His reflection near the end when he tries to decide whether or not to turn in Jim proves that he is tolerant. In his mind, the debate between the law (turning Jim in) and morality (letting his friend go) rages on, a battle that morality eventually wins. If Huck Finn, the main character of the novel, isn’t racist how could the novel overall be deemed racist?

On the flip side, I felt that most of the main “racist” characters were Twain’s way of satirizing the pre-civil war Border States. Just look at Pap. He is the epitome of a drunkard, throwing around racist slurs and causing mayhem around the town. Is that a character Mark Twain really intended for his novel to be reflected on? What about the widow Douglas, who owns Jim? It’s not like Huck ever tries to defend her. In my opinion, I found the novel to be more of a comment on the racism of the time rather than a racist work. But hey, if they want to keep banning this book, that’s their problem. They are missing out on a truly wonderful novel. 

A N'Yawk Childhood

After fifteen or so minutes of flipping through the huge New Yorker volume, I came across an interesting article in the November 26^th, 1932 issue. In between articles dealing with the possibilities of suicide and feminine luxuries found on 5^th Avenue (not to mention the loads of advertisements) was a short piece on a childhood transition. Right from the beginning, I could tell the author was trying to go for a personal approach. With a title like A N’Yawk Childhood, I feel like the author was trying to make his readers, most likely New Yorkers, think back to the days of their childhood, growing up on the streets of the Big Apple. In the article, author Joel Sayre describes the way he and his friends used to play “mobsters” in the streets, constantly saying that murder and assassinations were about to take place. To be perfectly honest, I had to read the article two or three times to even understand that the mobsters were just imaginary. That was the first major difference I noticed between 1930’s journalism and contemporary journalism: the stories were much more like stories, rather than features aimed at a mass audience. Just flipping through the rest of the magazine I could tell that the pieces were aimed more at an upper class, higher educated group of people as opposed to everyone like today’s magazines aim to target. As the story went on, the author described his lackadaisical lifestyle, playing with the other neighborhood children in the morning and retiring to the local drugstore in the afternoon. However, his life changes drastically when his parents take him out of public school and put him in a prep school at the age of nine. His new friends, all already versed in psychologist philosophies such as Jung, Adler, and Freud, teased him constantly about his upbringings. The story abruptly ends when he explains he learned these new kids didn’t know cards, and used that to his advantage to win money and respect. All in all, I thought the article was a great example of a coming-of-age story.

This volume of The New Yorker issues was extremely interesting to look through, mainly because magazines were so different 80 years ago compared to today. First of all, the issue I read only cost 15 cents, nothing compared to the $5 price tag on an issue today. The actual articles are much more prim and proper, having long, thought-out essays with literary qualities rather than the short and sweet journalistic articles we are used to these days. Lastly, I thought the advertisements were really interesting to look at. We are used to catchy color photos with few words for our ads, but these ones were wordy, descriptive, and had one basic, hand drawn picture. Overall, I thought it was really cool to go back and look at a magazine from the 1930’s.