Final Cultural Reference Blog Assignment

Dear Professor Sweet,
Throughout this course we have done many blog entries about the films we viewed and short stories we read in class. Like you, I also think that it is interesting how all of the students in the class were given the same assignment, but all of the students went in a different direction with their research in the blogs. Some people focused strictly on cultural things, while others, like myself, blogged about more non-specific things.
I personally blogged a lot about animals, such as parakeets in the story The Parakeet, as well as elephants which were in the story The Elephant Vanishes, as well as in the MFA assignment I chose an artwork that featured a bird. I chose to blog about animals because I like them, and it is something I am interested in.
Also, my blogs featured some background information about authors we have read stories from. I blogged about Henry David Thoreau, Can Xue who is the author of The Child Who Raised Poisonous Snakes, as well as Haruki Murakami who is the author of The Elephant Vanishes, just to name a few. I chose to blog about the authors of stories we have read in class because I think that it is interesting to know a little information about the author before reading a story. Knowing a little bit about the author gives me and idea of why the may write in the style they do, as well as why they chose to write about the things they write about.
Lastly, I chose to blog about random things that interested me, or that I wasn’t sure of the meaning in specific stories. For example, in the story The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor by Deborah Eisenberg, I chose to blog about a slicker. I discovered that it was just another word for a raincoat, but before researching it I had no idea what a slicker was. Another example is from the story Evermore written by Julian Barnes. In this story I chose to blog about Thiepval. I had never heard of that before and from my research I discovered that it is a major war memorial to British and South African men who died in World War I Battle of the Somme and have no known grave. I think that it is interesting to blog about and research things that I do not know much about.
In this course I have learned a lot about my blogs and the blogs of my classmates. I think that it is interesting how everyone in the class was given the same assignment and everyone went in a different direction with their blog research. I generally chose to blog about animals featured in the stories we read, background information about authors of stories we read, as well as random things that I wasn’t sure the meaning of. Overall, this course has taught me a lot through the blog entries that I and my classmates have completed.
Sincerely,
Randi Eggleston

The Story of the Weeping Camel, film by National Geographic World Films

I enjoyed this film a lot. The documentary takes place in a very desserted area in Mongolia. The documentary followed a family that cares for and raises camels. The family uses the camels for everything, including, travel, using their fur to create strings, and they also use them for compainionship. One day a camel has a baby. The baby camel was a rare white camel, and right away the mother camel rejected its baby. The baby camel tried very hard to have the mother begin to take care of it, but the mother refused and got very mad when the memebers of the family would try to have the baby feed from the her milk. The mother actually kicked the baby when the baby tried to drink some milk from her. It was very sad, and all the members of the family were very disturbed by it. The people finally had this music teacher come to their home and try to reunite the camel mother and baby. After a while of playing his instrument the mother camel gave in, and decided to allow her baby into her life. The mother camel actually shed a tear when they were reunited. I really liked this film because I thought that it was very cute how the camels reunited and could become a family that they never were before.

OSAMA film directed by Siddiq Barmak

The film Osama is about a young Afghan girl and her mother who have lost their jobs when the Taliban closes the hospital they work at. The young girl must disguse herself as a boy, as her grandmother suggested, so that she could go and get a job to support her family. The movie is very interesting, to me, because it shows the life of a family in a culture that I am not very familiar with, so that is why I enojyed the film.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 and died in 1862. He ws an American author, naturalist, as well as a philosopher. Thoreau is most known for Walden. Thoreau actually lived in the woods of Walden pond for about two years. At the pond he wrote about nature, and produced some essays during his stay in the woods.
While in the woods Thoreau wrote an essay entitled Walking. In this essay he rambles on and on about walking as well as nature and "wildness". He has a very different writing style than most other authors I am familiar with. Thoreau usually talks of random things and rambles on and on about a subject, so when I read Walking it was hard to understand what he meant. Never the less, he had and interesting view of the world in the time period he was living in, he was very in touch with nature, and realized, unlike most people in his time, that nature needs to be conserved and the world needs to be taken care of before it is too late. It was interesting to know that someone such a long time ago, when there seemed to be nothing harming the environment, was thinking about the effects of people on the environment.

The Child Who Raised Poisonous Snakes by Can Xue

Can Xue is a Chinese author that was born in 1953, she was brought up by her grandmother who had some strange habits. Can Xue's life was rather unusual and her life experiences give her interesting things to write about.

This story was about a boy, Sha-yuan, and his mother and father. Sha-yuan is a very interesting child who often escapes the house to go find poisonous snakes. The parents become very concerned about him, because he always comes home with bite marks all over him, so they decide to keep and eye on him at all times. Sha-yuan tells his parents that they are wasting their time keeping an eye on him at all times because the snakes are everywhere, he claims they are scattered all throughout the house. The boy later says that a lot of snakes live in his stomach, and once he threw up and blamed it on the snakes. The boy says that he collects snakes so that they don't feel lonely. The parents think that their son is very odd, and don't really understand what to do with him. When he returns from running off a few days before, the parents claim they don't really think that he is their son, and that they have no proof that he ever exisited. The mother also claims that she has no idea where his name came from.

I enjoyed this story because it was a easy read, and it was easy to understand. But I also thought that this story was very strange. It was odd how the child claims to have snakes living in his stomach and they seem to be eating away at him because he slowly is getting thinner and thinner. Also, I thought that the ending was strange when the parents were confused as to wether the boy was actually theirs or not, and how they don't even have any evidence as to wether he exisited or not. But, overall I thought it was an interesting story.

The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer and novelist.

SDI is the Strategic Defense Initiative, which is commonly called Star Wars after the popular movie, it was proposed by the US President Ronald Reagan on March 23rd 1983 to use ground-based and space-based systems to protect the US from attack by nuclear missiles.

Tateyama is a city in Chiba Prefecture, Japan

A Riddle by Antonio Tabucchi

Saint-Denis is located in the northern suburbs of Paris, France.


Meudon is a municipality in the southwestern suburbs of Paris, France.





Aston Martin is a manufacturer of luxury performance cars, whose headquarters are at Gaydon, Warwickshire, England in the United Kingdom.





Hispano-Suiza was an orginally Spanish and then Spanish-French automotive and engineering firm that was best known for their cars, engines and weapons designs in the pre World War II period. Today they are part of the French SAFRAN Group.

Isotta Fraschini is a Italian manufacturing company which produces marine engines and other goods.

The Parakeet by Victor Erofeyev

Victor Erofeyev was born in Russia in 1947, and is a highly controversial author. He is actually the son of a high-ranking Soviet diplopmat. He spent some of his childhood in Paris, which is why most of his work has been translated from Russian to French.



A Parakeet is a member of the parrot species. The term is descriptive and used for small to medium-sized, long-tailed parrots, but does not simply imply taxonomic link between the different parakeets.