Pirandello

The word I choose was Pirandello. At first I had no idea what the word was or could even mean. But after going to library and learning some different research skills I was able to figure out what the word Pirandello actually meant. From the first source I was able to figure out that my word Pirandello was a person. His name is Luigi Pirandello. Just by looking up the general information as in what books were actually about him I learned things before I even read or started looking up information. Also from the first source I learned that he was born I 1867 and died in 1936. I also learned that he wrote during the romantic period. (Baisin) From the second source, which I am not too sure how I found it, I was able to find different quotes from Luigi Pirandello. One quote was “"A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die! And to be able to to live for ever you don't need to have extraordinary gifts or be able to do miracles. Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Prospero?” (Six Characters) Another source I found was from a teacher I believe that wrote an analysis on one of Pirandello’s stories. He stated that, “Nevertheless, this epistemological-and by extension aesthetic-problem proved significant for writers such as Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Luigi Pirandello, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett.” (Lamb) The fourth source that I found I found it the most interesting because it actually interpreted the stories that Pirandello wrote about. From the story Right You Are (If You Think You Are) the source I found stated that the story has” No sex, no death, but there's plenty of passion in this play about identity and relative truths.” (Nichols)

I started my research on Ludacris the same way I start all of my research, by going to ask jeeves. I don’t know why but it seems like whenever I am looking for something I always start there. After typing his name in, of course a whole lot of wrong results came up so on the left side there was a tap that helped narrowed my search to find out just about Ludacris and not all the other random things it popped up. From here I clicked on the third topic and it gave me all the background information on him. I found out where he is originally from, his real name, and other basic background information. After I found this information out I started searching for different songs he wrote and the ones I found interesting I went to AZ lyrics to get the exact words and find out what the songs were really about. Just by finding out what his songs were really about and the environment that he grew up in the information help me out a little with writing my paper. Looking at the lyrics I felt that it was an advantage because I was able to see he his point was behind his music. This helped me to figure out what the argument could be for my paper. There was a disadvantage with me using Ask Jeeves as my starting point. By using it I had to do some extra researching to make sure that the information I found was true. Once I continued or at least seen that the information was in at least two other web sites I believed that it was true. I guess by doing this blog entry I did get some useful information for figuring out an argument for my paper.

Gansta Rap Music

“Clearly, offensive racial name-calling has been generally (but not entirely) stigmatized in dominant American culture. But, by this measure, we can then disown our national culture of racial hierarchy and power and point at the only racists who seem to remain: those who believe in and openly admit to holding and supporting racist ideas and behaviors.” Tricia Rose

After reading the source list from the reading “The Rebirth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Hip Hop: A Cultural Sociology of Gangsta Rap Music” I decided to choose the book “Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America” written by Tricia Rose. Ms. Rose has a PhD in American Civilization from Brown University. She lectures to audiences about topics such as music, gender, and black culture. Ms. Rose has been on television, in newspapers and magazines such as Essence. I believe the book Ms. Rose wrote was a good source to use for this reading because she discusses what hip hop is viewed as through the media and different critics. She also looks at the deeper meaning of the lyrics in certain rap songs and not what the videos are being viewed as. Rose starts of the book with, “Rap Music and Contemporary Black Cultural Production Public Enemy's "Can't Truss It" opens with rapper Flavor Flav shouting "Confusion!" over a heavy and energetic bass line. He could just as easily be describing the history of rap.” She is basically trying to show that lyrics can be interpreted differently to people.

Hip Hop Culture

I choose Panjabi MC whose real name is Rajinder Singh Rai. He got his name Panjabi MC from the language he uses in his music. Rajinder uses music from tv series like Knight Rider and combines it with a mix of bhangra. Rajinder said that, "One of my main goals is to fuse the two worlds. I would love to link everybody up, for sure." From reading about Rajinder i could tell that hip hop was not a major thing in his country and most of the people contested the music of Rajinder. Panjabi MC continued to produce, remix and collaborate on different songs. You could tell the it was going to be hard for him to convert his music to his people. The hip hop culture is not much different in over here in america, because Jay Z remixer his music to Rajinder's song and everybody in America loved it so his music will hopefully end up in hit in his country.

peer review

Today during peer review i felt like everything went ok. My group read the papers first then we answered the questions that were on the paper. After answering all the questions we then discussed each others paper. I did learn some things about my paper that helped me to fix my paper and make it better. I still felt like after reading over some of my group member's papers it was hard to give them advice on their paper because their paper was not fully done. The only thing that i would change would be that we get to take the papers with us then the next day of class we would have time to talk about different things in the paper. This way we can read the papers throughly and we would be able to give a better review of the paper to our group members. We seem to always begin to start discussing the papers and then time is up, so taking the papers home to read gives more time in class to discuss. Overall the peer review went ok, things could have been better or it could have been worst so i just today was just an ok day.