Essay Blog Response

Brandon Lazovic

11/13/13

                For class this week we had to read a series of essays in a packet. There are a few essays in the packet, so I’ll discuss most of them. Two of the essays were “Sunday” and “Mint Snowball.” Both use colorful language to describe things, particularly food. “Sunday” is about a black family and how the cook and that’s where the imagery lies; in the food. “Snowball,” on the other hand, is about a family who worked at a soda fountain, particularly a great grandfather who’s secret recipe was mint vanilla ice cream. He sold the recipe, however, and no one could replicate the recipe after that. The essay takes a turn at the end as the narrator describes a disconnectedness with his or her personality, linking it to the mint recipe. Not sure the correlation, although the dessert was described as being like winter, so there might be a possible analogy or reference that I’m missing.

                The next essay, “Essay on the Sublimation of Dying” is really interesting. It bounces between two passages and it seems as though it’s drawing parallels and differences between the two. At first I thought that it was only talking about certain things with no correlation between each ‘Synthesis’ (the strings of passages) but as I continued to read it seemed as though each passage was either just a stream of consciousness for the writer or the writer wrote about the things that she saw in her day to day life. The first passage out of the Synthesis may not necessarily correlate, but I feel as though the second passages do (Synthesis 1, 3, and 5 correlate while Synthesis 2, 4, and 6 correlate). For 2, 4, and 6, they are titled ‘Distraction’ and the narrator breaks off into deep thought about the previous passage. Lastly there are excerpts or possibly poems at the bottom of each passage, which might give more context to each passage.

                The final essay, “Total Eclipse” is about a man named Gary and his wife going on a trip to see a Total Eclipse. The essay is pretty straight forward, being very descriptive about the scenery and the imagery is very noticeable. The narrator comments about how the whole things seems wrong because of the abnormality of the sun being missing during the eclipse and how everything is profoundly affected as a result. After the event the narrator seems frightened by the experience and even becomes a little nihilistic. “The sun was too small, and too cold, and too far away, to keep the world alive. The white ring is not enough. It was feeble and worthless.” She says she had been dead and gone and grieving. A boy described the sight as akin to a Life Saver, which snapped her out of her mind sight and ‘woke her up.’ At the end of it life continued to go on and everyone returned to their cars after the incidentto go about their daily lives again.