Tuscana Trip

The experience at Tuscana was half what I expected it to be. I know what the atmosphere is like in Tuscana, but today it seemed to get pretty heated at our table. The five of us started out talking about different texts that we had brought. One person brought a book by Tony Dungy, another brought an Erwin McManus text and another student brought more of a theological book. My book in particular was "A Man Named Dave".


If anyone has ever read "A Child Called It" or "The Lost Boy", this is the third installment to that series. It talks about a boy that goes through abuses by his mother and how he's unable to tell anyone and what tourture it is for him. In the third book, he reflects back on his life and all that he came through and how much God was there for him the whole time and how much he's grown from such a horrible past.

After about half of us shared our books a bit of a theological argument started about "The Shack". It got pretty heated. I must say, I did not say much because I have not read the book, but with that said, I was really proud of my group. The reason is because they were passionate about literature, if only for a moment. It was an amazing experience to be able to sit back and watch everyone have their opinions about this particular book. I didn't feel the need to be apart of that particular part of the discussion, but I found it very eye-opening.

Would I do this experience again? Sure. I felt that it was nice to get out of the classroom and engage each other as classmates in some other ways other than just simple reading and talking about it. It was simply, a breath of fresh air.

Readings from "Howl"

While reading the poem in class I felt somewhat ignorant. I felt that Howl was a hard poem to figure out. The man that wrote this poem was odd. He interviewed jazz musicians, psychiatric patients and drug addicts. He was expelled from Columbia University for writing profanities on a dorm room window. He was a bit crazy himself. So I suppose that this poem not only talks about a world gone to the dogs, but also about men falling into horrible habits that lead to worse and worse things.

I looked on some websites to find out how I should've read it during class and there were a few ideas of pronounciation, but I choose to do it with a jazz beat behind the words. I thought that it would be appropriate because the poem itself had to do with the 1940s and the jazz age. When I found out that this poem was a beacon in the "Beat Generation" it caught me off guard. I decided to look the entire poem up online and after reading it, I couldn't believe that "Howl" would affect so many people in either a positive or negative way.

Some of the cool aspects of the poem were his use of uncommon words/phrases to describe very common feelings among men. Words like: Mohammedan, El, angelheaded, and dynamo. I had to look up many of these words to find the meanings behind them. But the words fit the poem well.