My experience at this session was really fun and it inspired me to go learn and play the piano. What I found surprising was that Baruch College has a piano room for any who wants to play. The lesson wasn’t complicated at all, the instructor made it easy for everyone to learn how to play a specific rhythm of the blues. She would play on the left side of the piano while myself and others played on the right side. The instructor broke down our parts into five keys and we had to play them in a certain pattern. She would play a chorus, while others would play the melody. I learned that the blues uses the same keys for every song, but it’s all about creating different patterns with them. The piano has 88 keys in total with 44 being white and 44 being black. The pedals at the bottom of the piano allow for a note to last longer without having to hold the key. Under the hood of the piano is a row of strings that are plucked when you press a key, thus creating the sound. She mentioned how people are trying to create new ways to play the piano by plucking the strings from under the hood. This would then create a harp-like style of play mixed with the piano. I learned a lot coming to this session and I will definitely be back.

12:25-14:26

I was so intrigued by the short story Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer that I did some research on her and her background. I really believed that her short stories were about her experiences. However, they are not! She does like that most people believe that they were because it makes her feel like she did a good and rich description that would lead people to believe that it has to be real. She does say that she focused on the emotion each experience portrayed because that did come within. She says the experience and the emotions in the stories doesn’t correlate with real life but the emotions definitely do.

I didn’t really relate to the story but I was captivated by every detail and every description. The content was very rich, and it made the short story intriguing. My favorite part was when Dina was in the counselor’s office and she truly believes that she’s convincing him of that fake ending she but she wasn’t. “Maybe you’ll understand that when you need to express something truly significant, your mouth will revert to the insignificant nonsense it knows so well.” I feel like that sentence right there captured the whole short story in a nutshell, which was very nice.

I remeber losing a piece of my identity when I entered High School. I went to a school where the majority of the student population were primarily Caucasian, and as a result, I automatically felt out of place. Growing up in East Brooklyn, I was always used to a diverse school setting where I had people of color from different backgrounds (Hispanic and Black). It was always a nice, home feeling being in such a diverse school, because there were students who, like me, were first American generation. However, going into high school, I lost that home feeling and entered a new setting of uncertainty. I remember having to assimilate into this new setting by becoming “white” myself, and having to learn their ways. Learning their ways meant having a proper valley girl accent, wearing their “hipster, bohemian” clothing, and even understanding their white privilege background. I knew they always had it easier than us, never worrying about their lack of resources, or their financial, social status, but knowing the way this society is built, we’ll never have a privilege of our own. In brief, looking back, I wish I had never assimilated because I essentially left behind the “diverse” me thinking that it wasn’t good enough. I realized later during my senior year, that I never had to change who I was because everyone benefits from hearing cultural differences. Above all, valuing the different background ethnicities is the key to learning new things about people and understanding where they come from is way more important than assimilating into just one thing. My home feeling of diversity was never gone, I just simply had forgotten its importance.

The Art-A-Thon event, I attended was the “Playing the Blues in One Simple Lesson.” To begin with, I had no idea, Baruch had music and instrument rooms. I walked through the 7th floor oohing and awwing over my music room discovery. At first I was expecting it to be a long and large group lecture on music. However, when I walked into the room where the event was being hosted, it was actually a small room lecture with a grand piano inside with a music professor running it. The professor was really nice and informative about blues. She explained how blues had this certain rhythm and melody while being played on a piano. I personally thought the best part about her lecture was the fact that she had students try play blues hands on the piano while she helped and guide us. I learned that the piano, if the pedestal was footed down could actually be played like a harp by the strings inside. Overall, I think the event was a fun and it was a nice exposure to blues music.

The Art-A-Thon event that I attended on March 7 was called “How to Read a Sonnet.” My first assumption was it was going to be long and boring because I was not into reading poems as much. I still decided to attend it because I wanted to experience something new. The sonnet our instructor focused to analyze on was by Shakespeare. It did not a specific title; it was just called Sonnet 20 because Shakespeare wrote a big with multiple sonnets. First, I discovered the breakdown on how to identity a sonnet. I learned that the word “sonnet” means “little sound.” A sonnet is known to have 14 lines with 10 syllables each line so 140 syllables in total. Sonnet 20 has 11 syllables throughout every line; I suppose Shakespeare can do whichever because he is Shakespeare. a group of sonnets, like the book Shakespeare made, is called a sonnet sequence. Sonnets tend to explicitly be about love and romance whether it is about either a woman or a man, but a sonnet is decided to only one person. A sonnet follows a specific pattern; it will be 4 quatrains then one couplet. A quatrain is when the poem is put to rhyme in an “a, b, a, b” pattern. The rhyming will be with the last word of the line after the upcoming one. A couplet is the basic rhyming after the next line like “g, g.”

The most important part and point in attending this event was to learn how to read a sonnet and our instructor gave us three questions that must be answered beforehand.

1. What does it sound like?
2. What does it mean?
3. How does the sound affect the meaning?

It can be hard to answer these questions, but with enough discussion and hearings as we did, we were enough to figure it out. We listened to the sonnet read aloud five times and began to analyze the meaning line by line. Overall, we concluded that it can be about either a man or a woman. Although, the poem states feminine words as woman, it was found to be words of only a description. This poem has a syllable of feminine which the rhyme was more than 2 syllables. When it is only one, it has a masculine rhyme, it can be depicted upon one’s opinion, but it can go either way. it was an enjoyable time and it made me take a liking more into short poems.

1. Respond to two of your classmates’ questions about “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.” You cannot respond to any questions that have already been answered. Most of the questions are in stand-alone posts, but five sets of questions can be found in the comments on the original assignment post, so you will have to scroll back to find them!

2. Read Jhumpa Lahiri, “Interpreter of Maladies”

The Art-A-Thon event I attended focused on the structure and interpretation of Sonnets. At the end of this event, I was able to comprehend how Shakespeare organized his 20th Sonnet and was able to appreciate the meaning behind it. I learned that each line was composed of 11 syllables which was a special number when it comes to Shakespeare. Most interestingly- I learned that words can have “genders” depending if they’re stressed or not.

Sonnets are a beautiful form of poetry that usually are about love. Shakespeare’s 20th Sonnet is both beautiful and mysterious in nature. It is composed of a specific pattern of rhyming and as stated previously, syllables. This Sonnet speaks about a person whom Shakespeare was intrigued by. As you read it, you wonder whether this person is either a male or female. The gender of the person in question is not revealed. Shakespeare describes them as having a beautiful and natural face (of  a woman). Later on however, he claims that the person does not have the heart of a woman because it does not “shift” around too easily. In addition to the woman, a boy is mentioned in the poem as well.

Spoiler alert: The person in question is both a man and a woman. Many scholars have tried to decipher whether Shakespeare is heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. His poetry, not just Sonnet 20 has many hints that leave people wondering.

I attended “How to read a Sonnet,” which was facilitated by Professor Laura Kolb. This was a very interesting and surprising experience because I am not a fan of Literature, especially Shakespeare. However, I did enjoy being there and learning how to understand and deconstruct a sonnet like Shakespeare’s sonnets.

For general information, I learned that a sonnet, which derives from the Latin word sonetto sueno, means little sound. A sonnet consist of 14 lines with 10 syllables per line, however, this sonnet had 11 syllables per line. A sonnet is composed of three quatrains with one couplet. I learn that a feminine rhyme has two or more syllables while a masculine rhyme has one syllable. I also learned about a sibilance and fricatives. Professor Kolb gave us three guidelines for how to read a sonnet:

1. What does it Sound Like?
2. How does it mean?
3. How does the sound affect the Meaning?

For the sonnet that we read, it had a mixture of fix rhyme, such as “passion”, “fashion”, “gazeth” and “amazeth”, and slight rhymes, such as “created”, “defeated”, “nothing” and “a-doting”. Lines 1-8, Shakespeare is complimenting this beauty. The sonnet is about a man who nature intended to be a woman, because of its beautiful features, but “by adding one thing” which is a penis, prove to be not beneficial to Shakespeare. Shakespeare admired this man because of his woman features. For example, “A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted,” which describes his natural beauty, in addition to his gentle heart which is not subject to change like a women’s fashion. Shakespeare highlighted that the man attracts everyone with his beauty, “which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.” However with the addition that characterise him as a man, Shakespeare ended suggesting that the man gives him his heart and the woman the use of his treasure.

1. How does the author’s skin color (and its associated stereotypes) affect her experience at her college orientation? Both negatively and positively.
2. What does Dina’s first conversation with Heidi say about Dina’s view in terms of labels? How does she react to them throughout the story?
3. How does her relationship with her parents affect her relationship with others around her?