The Outsiders | A Hood Project

For Monday you should:

Complete the three-panel storyboard.  I will be looking at your storyboards!!   I am looking to see your thought process.  I want to know what choices you’re making and why. I want to have a sense of what feelings or ideas you want to convey and how you thought a particular choice might help you do that.

Complete AT LEAST TWO of your panels, but preferably all three of of the panels.  This means that you move from the storyboard to the larger first draft of the actual panel.  You can make the panels as large as you want. If you want it to take up a whole page, that’s fine.  Just make sure you don’t use the backside of the paper (unless it’s just for trying); you need to be able to put your panels in relation to each other.

It’s important that you complete at least two of the panels because on Monday, Mindy will talk about laying out the comic page.   This involves the arrangement of panels. If you don’t have at least two panels, you can’t do this part.  Better to have all three panels, so you can really think through it with her.

Note:  I will put a folder with lots of blank paper in my mailbox in the English department.  If you’re on campus, you’re welcome to get as much paper as you need.  I am sorry I didn’t load you up on paper before you left.

Remember:  You are responsible for bringing back all your supplies.  I HAVE NO EXTRA SUPPLIES.  I have specialty supplies (different size pens and pens for making smaller or bigger lines), but they are for the whole class and are only meant to be used for a specific part of your graphic, not the whole thing.  There will also be rulers, masking tape, and super hearty erasures that we can all share.

Only Sophia and Maryann gave me their colored pencils, and only Maryann gave me her pen.  So no one else (save the absent folks) should be asking me for any supplies on Monday.

In my other class, Ethnic Literature we are currently reading Filipino Stories – Scent of Apples by Bienvenido N. Santos.

The story is about a Filipino speaker who travels as a guest speaker during the war, and a farmer who comes to one of his talks just to hear him speak. The farmer himself is Filipino and has traveled miles just to see this other Filipino because he has not met another Filipino in 20 years. He invites the guest speaker over to his home for dinner so that he can meet his wife and son. There aren’t too many things that happen in this story just by reading it, to sum things up: farmer goes to hear Filipino speaker talk, invites him over to dinner, Filipino speaker accepts, meets the family has dinner and leaves.

It is the minor details that need to be paid attention to, the one thing that confused me was why would this story be called Scent of Apples if this is all that happens. But rereading the story and opening up my mind to the minor details I learn that the Scent of Apples is a symbol of the American dream/life.

“Where could he be now this month when leaves were turning into gold and the fragrance of gathered apples was in the wind?” and “the boys left for faraway lands without great icy winds, and promise of winter early in the air, lands without apple trees, the singing and the gold!” – these two lines associate apples with America, when it is revealed the farmer has an apple orchard and the constant smell of apples – Scent of Apples is the smell of the American dream. Which is exactly what the Filipino speaker experienced upon meeting the farmer, an immigrant from the Philippines who has adapted to the american way of life by marrying a blond white lady, and becoming an apple farmer with his orchard.

In the film Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams acts as an English professor teaching in a private school with rigorous academic standards and an apathetic student body that has no interest in the words of dead poets and authors. A pivotal scene in the movie is when John Keating (Williams’s character) recites poetry and explains the beauty of literature and art in life. He ends the scene in total silence when he reads the poem O Me! O Life! from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

“O Me! O Life! Of the questions of these recurring.
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish.
What good amid these, O Me, O Life?

Answer: That you are here. That life exists, and identity. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.”

This is extremely important to the scene because Williams mentions that the human race is filled with passion, and poetry, beauty, romance and love are what we stay alive for.

The last line of the poem, to me, speaks as the line that ties everything together for the scene. When Williams explains to his students that the human race lives for passion and beauty, Whitman’s words become even more relevant: life exists–with beauty and exuberance that humans fill it with. Identity exists with the beauty and love and passion we create, and it makes life full and colorful.

At the end of reciting Whitman’s poem, Williams asks his class: “What will your verse be?” To me, that is a perfect way to describe the human condition and utilize Whitman’s insight into the human race–that it requires and produces the beauty of unique identity to survive. That “identity” and that “powerful play” of life is what is essential to not only understanding Whitman’s poem, but also the film itself.

In Deepa Mehta’s 2005 film Water, Chuyia (Sarala Kariyawasam) is an eight year old widow who is forced to live in the temple of widows, which also forces her to become an untouchable. The untouchables are the lowest class of the social structure in India and are labeled untouchables for the rest of their lives. The film takes place in the 1940’s in Varanasi, India, during the rise of the revolutionary teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. Since Chuyia and the other widows are cut off from the rest of society, they did not know who Gandhi was and what he was fighting for. Because of this, the widows still believed in the old traditions that if a woman’s husband dies, she either has to die with him, marry his younger brother, or become an untouchable.
On the very first day that Chuyia is sent to the temple of widows, she meets a young woman named Kalyani (Lisa Ray) who stays in a treehouse in the temple by herself because she is considered to be tainted by the rest of the widows. The other widows believe that it is bad luck to associate with Kalyani because she is the temple’s whore. Even though she is the only reliable source of income for the temple (being a whore), she is considered even lower class within the untouchables.
When Chuyia meets Kalyani for the first time, Kalyan takes her to her treehouse and shows her a black puppy named Kaalu that she has been hiding. Kalyani then says, “dogs aren’t allowed here, they are a bad omen… don’t tell anyone about Kaalu”. Any black animal in India are considered a bad omen, especially black dogs since dogs in general are pests in India. Kaalu being a black dog would have been killed or badly mistreated if it were a stray in the streets of India and that is exactly the same situation that Kalyani is facing. Kaalu, being a dog, is Kalyani’s life as an untouchable and Kaalu’s blackness is Kalyani’s life as a whore. Anything represented as black is considered to be dirty and bad luck and that is exactly what society sees in Kalyani. Both Kalyani and Kaalu have a double disadvantage and she is mostly seen holding Kaalu at the beginning of the film to indicate that Kaalu is the only thing she relates to the most and she will hold onto it and protect it.

I wish I could find footage of how Chuyia and Kalyani meet, but here is the trailer that shows a couple of small clips of Kalyani with Kaalu. (the overall trailer is interesting to watch as well)

For Next Wednesday, you should come ready for the two part workshop by having done the following:

1) Finished the entirety of American Born Chinese.

2) Come up with an autobiographically based story that explores the overlap between adolescence and monstrosity.

3)  Identify in your story: the main thing (idea, feeling, question, picture, character, etc.) you want to get across.

4) Identify a potential beginning, middle, and end moment in your story.  (You should be able to identify each in one sentence.)

5) Identify a concrete object (like the transformer toy in American Born Chinese) that can act as a potential visual symbol or resonate object that works in service to communicating that main thing you want to get across.

Please remember for Monday, you should have finished the entirety of American Born Chinese.

Some questions to consider:

1) How is this story like The Bluest Eye and Frankenstein and even The Outsiders?

2) In Frankenstein the two and three times removed narrator often introduces philosophical consideration via rather by relaying rather explicit though eloquent commentary (or what would have been inner commentary except the story is constantly being narrated to someone).   In this way we get explicit thoughts about the nature of good and the forces of nature and family.  The Outsiders reserves its theoretical musings for the inner musings of the narrator Ponyboy who narrates the events inter spliced with his commentary.  In The Bluest Eye the narrator who is not a character per say offers extensive poetic contemplations.  Arguably the text is less plot (since the entirety of the plot is told to us in the first couple lines of the novel) is all about a poetic thinking or theorizing about the factors in the lives it portrays.   How does Yang’s text theorize or contemplate?  about adolescence?  race?  monstrosity? or anything else?

2) How do myth and stories work in the telling of this story?

3) How does the Danny/Chin-Kee divide in Jin’s dream relate to Pecola’s personality split or the Frankenstein/Creature duality or the many contrasts in types in The Outsiders  (Darry vs Soda; Dally vs Johnny; Soc vs Greasers; Cherry vs her friend; etc.)?

4) How does Yang’s text represent and think through the body that fits and doesn’t fit in?

5) From verbal taunts, to impaled holy men, to face punches, what role does violence and visualizing violence play in American Born Chinese?

6) When we see the images of the class pets which are exlab animals, we see that they comically have huge red lips that look like they are permanently made up with lipstick. This visual representation is extreme and silly in its extremity, but it also calls attention to the otherwise minor detail of the tiny cages these animals are forced into. It calls attention to the fact that one of the creatures is a monkey (a very very unlikely animal to be taken care of in a school classroom).   Not only does the monkey allude to a connection between the Monkey King narrative and Jin’s narrative, but this bit of humor asks us to think about how make up and trying to change the body contributes to making monstrous bodies.   Yang’s text is littered with similarly humorous minor moments.   How does Yang use humor to think through the idea of belonging, monstrosity, bodies, race, and other important themes?