Ice – A Poem From A JMS Student

ICE – by K. Ryan

Shiny gleaming points

Drip, drip, dripping, shaping, cracking

Falling, spinning, shiny gleaming points

Hit hard rocky earth, explodes

Into many pieces

Flying, shiny, gleaming, points smash clash

Bash against more

Shiny, gleaming points

Falling, hitting

End

Book Review of The Joy Luck Club

Book:            The Joy Luck Club
Genre:            Fiction
Author:        Amy Tan
Published:        1989

Review by Bipolarbear

“Confucius say a woman is worth a thousand words.

Tell your wife she’s used up her total.”

Using witty dialogue like the quote above, Amy Tan created a story mainly about relationships and therapy. The Joy Luck Club tells the story of four women, June Woo, Rose Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair as they struggle being the daughters of Chinese immigrants. Although their mothers, Suyuan Woo, Anmei Hsu, Lindo Jong and Ying-ying St. Clair, also have stories of their own.
The daughter’s stories were boring, to me, because they are the (new) “typical American stories” of divorce, single parents, “identity searching”, and doing everything you mother doesn’t want you to. For example, June, a daughter, was trying to find “who she is” by resisting and avoiding everything that came her way.  She dropped out of college and got a therapist; and not until her mother dies does she finally, really, ask herself who she is and sees her mother really sacrificed for her. Still, I need to remember The Joy Luck Club was published in 1989.
One thing the book has that the movie doesn’t is true emotions, because a lot of the story is narration. In making a movie it is hard to allow an actor to show emotion when narrating. Especially when the movie isn’t fantastic, and sometimes even when it is.
Since the movie focused so much on the daughters, the movie viewer doesn’t get the experience of really understanding the mother’s struggles, or even who the mothers really are. The book, for example, shows how the mothers really react and not just how the daughters think their parents reacted; you don’t get a biased opinion of the mothers. Getting ready to read the book I prepared myself for the mothers to be these people who don’t get anything in American culture and I was definitely proven wrong many times.

    The Joy Luck Club deserves to be an A-list book because Amy Tan successfully achieved writing a story about immigrants and how they’re not just “aliens”, but also people who have a story. Ms. Tan presented the characters in such a way that it seemed as if you were having a conversation with the character. For example, as soon as you get confused, whatever question you had, it is answered. It was as if Ms. Tan guided you down the exact path she wanted you to go down, and had you ask the questions she wanted to answer.
Ms. Tan also surprised me, at times, with some “out of character” actions the characters make. For example, one of the daughters, Lena St. Clair, is unhappily married to Harold, who is not interested in sharing but “balancing” everything. When she finally, surprisingly, tells her mom, her mother, to the reader’s and Lena’s surprise, says, “Then why don’t you stop it”. These out of character actions really made the book what it was because when you finally think you have a character figured out, they surprise you.
Maybe I dove into The Joy Luck Club and their characters knowing too much, since I had recently seen the movie version. Whatever the reason it all boils down to the simple fact that I could read The Joy Luck Club and toss it aside in just a few minutes after picking it up. It wasn’t a “page turner” and deserves, in my opinion, the grade of 8/10.

Book Review of Speaker for the Dead

A Book Review By “D. Speekor”

Speaker for the Dead

By Orson Scott Card

This book, the sequel to the more popular book Ender’s Game, occurs approximately three thousand years after Ender wiped out the “Buggers”, in what is now called The Xenocide. Now, after a human effort to colonize all the worlds once populated by Buggers, a planet has been discovered where another form of non-human yet still sentient life exists. This world is dominated by the rules governing how a less intelligent race should be handled.
The colony is guarded by a fence, and only the xenologers are allowed outside. These animals are called pequeninos, piggies, and they have their own laws and such, as would befit a slightly warlike people. Their entire world is a genetic anomaly, with few species due to a certain disease that rewrites the genetic information of the subject. For any more information, you have to read the book.
It seems to me that Speaker For The Dead is the book that sparked the HALO: COMBAT ADVANCED video games and the books that followed after. The comparisons are numerous. Extra terrestrial life has a few misunderstandings with us, and then due to religious and social differences, someone gets killed, and it snowballs from there. This is about the aftermath of the war, as in what do we do with these new toys we just won by right of combat. In this case, they try to prevent it from ever happening again.
I think that this is sort of a representation of what our world is like today. There is our side, and there are the other sides, and once we destroy one completely, we try to make amends to our selves and make a salve of lies for our bruised conscience. Once that happens we take over some of their ideas completely, and then we force what’s left to fit our needs. If there is some one who is a threat to us, and our way of life, we will try do destroy them even if they’re no longer a threat, because they could become one again.
Speaker For the Dead also has elements of Hindu beliefs, particularly regarding reincarnation. If an animal native to the planet dies, it serves a new purpose in death, like the trees that grow from the bodies of the dead piggies, who are ritually sacrificed, to become trees that fertilize the female piggies. If you lead a good life as a Hindu, you die and you go to heaven, or are reincarnated. As a piggie, you die to become a tree if you’re male, and the only females that survive to become old are the ones who can’t have kids.
As far as books go, there isn’t really much that is even slightly similar to this one so I’ll use an analogy. Speaker for the Dead is to Jack London’s Call of the Wild, as the Chinese in America graphic novel is to Maus. The first two involve the acceptance of others, while the latter refer to seeing the world from a view not that of our own. No matter how odd or how unusual someone appears, it turns out that you and them have often something in common. Even if you can’t really see it.
A choice phrase for describing this book is “The truth will have out.” The job of the speakers is to talk about all of the deceased person’s qualities, whether they are good or bad. They simply reveal the truth, and then their job is done, but they do it in such a way that they seem neither inclined to the good or bad side. They tell it as it was, as the dead person probably saw it.
This practice has really nothing in common with the modern funerals of today. We tend to show our “respect” for the deceased by showing only what they did that was good, fair, and just. I have no idea why. Maybe its because we’re scared of seeing the dark side, and liking it. The book H.I.V.E. has a line in it which states it’s a good thing that the majority of the populace thinks that justice wins, for if people knew the pleasures of being on the “dark side” the world would be in total anarchy, instead of what is going on now (semi-anarchy).
“With great power comes great responsibility”. So says Spiderman. But in these times, do we really stop to consider the consequences of our actions? Or do those in power consider the options, and then go on with the original plan anyways? In both worlds, and also in a great deal of books, people commit all kinds of war crimes in the names of justice, freedom of the oppressed, and righteousness in general. This book is dissimilar, as one who tries to avoid these crimes, instead opting for penitence, for wrongs committed in the past.
The book Speaker for the Dead has a great many currents under the surface, and on the surface. The winds are a tempest. I think that the reason it’s better then Card’s predecessor because it has less of the confusing, chaotic, and confounding events that occur in Ender’s Game. As one of my teachers would say “it less plot and more of the WHY?” than the first book. I mean, how many things have altered the course of history by some one sitting down and asking “Why is that so?”
For these and all other reasons, Speaker for the Dead is an A-list, must read book.

Insanity Annonymous Riddle

This is for last weeks riddle.  Sorry it took so long to post.

A palindrome is a word that reads the same when spelled backwards (eg rotavator).
How could the following word be considered a palindrome?

FOOTSTOOL

Answer

Footstool is a palindrome when written in Morse code. It looks like:

..-. — — – … – — — .-..

Now for the new riddle.  I’m not going to post many more of these if people don’t start comming to the site and emailing me stuff and just COMMENTING!!!

In this teaser you must place a 3-letter word on the dashes to complete a word on the left and to begin another word with those letters on the right.

Example:

e a r _ _ _ m e = e a r T H Y/ T H Y m e

1. f e a t _ _ _ o i c = ?
2. c o u r _ _ _ n d a = ?
3. d i s p _ _ _ o v e r = ?
4. k e e _ _ _ s i s t = ?
5. r u n _ _ _ i c e = ?

JMS updates

To any one who doesn’t know, the blog email is jetrails@gmail.com and anything you want to submit is welcome.  It seems that some teacher are giving extra credit to students who submit to the blog.

Art Class Firsts

Here is some art done by a middle school art class.

Copper Wings

Paper Leaves

Italian Coffee

I was also sent this poem. It is by a middle school student as well.

What is a dream but a wish

What is a wish but a want

What is a want but a need

What is a need but fate

And if we rebel agains fate

Rebel agains our destiny

Do we lose all we hold dear

Do we lose our dreams

Experiment

Alright, here is an experimental entry.  I’ll try to make it as orgonized as possible, but if anyone has any suggestions they would be greatly appreciated.

 Today was Martin Luthor King Jr.’s birthday, and next monday this great American civil rights hero will be honored.  There is some new art and a story that, if I may say so, isn’t that bad.  If anyone would like to submit anything just email me at Jettrails@gmail.com.  If there is anything that anyone thinks I should change I would love the help.  Email me or comment here.Yes, I know, there are two t’s in this address and only one in this blog name.  Please bear with us. 

 This week, the dabate topic is government.  What the best methods are, why we have government, and any not-to-terribly-insulting views about current governments.  Anyone who wants to put their two cents in is welcome to, though I do ask that we keep things to a semi-respectful tone so as to not insult anyone to much.

 A story was sent to me that seems worth putting up, and I hope that everyone reading this will send comments that I can pass along to the author.  This is by a middle school student, who goes by the pen name Banrion.  The story is called Space, Time, and Repetitions.

The young boy slid down the edge of the moon crater.  He was lost.  Utterly, hopelessly lost.  The sun was beginning to rise, and he knew that his parents were leaving shortly after the sun was fully up.  Would they even notice that he was gone?  With six brothers and sisters, why should they even bother to go looking for him?  Why should anyone come looking for him?  He started to cry.

            Lee, for that was the boy’s name, was the middle child in a family with seven children.  He had two older sisters and an older brother.  These siblings required very little to no attention from Lee’s parents.  None of them were too much older than him, he being of seven years of age.  There were also the triplets, two boys and a girl, who were three and needed a lot of looking after.  Lee had had a twin, Sam.  Sam had died four years ago, when his parents had lost track of him and he had fallen over the edge of a crater of much larger proportions than the one in which Lee now took refuge.

            Lee had wandered off a couple hours prior, and had followed the faint smell of cold bacon, only recently remembering what that was the smell of. It was acid, specifically luneric acid, that was a recently discovered substance that was found only on Earth’s moon.  This acid was poisonous to the touch.  Yet unknown to Lee was the fact that the acid emitted fumes that were suspected to cause hallucinations by the leading lunar radiation specialists.  The bacon-like smell was maddening to Lee, for he had not eaten for some many hours.

            Lee became restless, and began to climb to the opposite edge of the crater, whether out of curiosity, is search of his family, or in plain, pure boredom I am unsure.  He soon discovered that he was, in fact, only a few yards from the nearest of the small craters that held the deadly acid.  No wonder the boy’s mouth was full of drool, just waiting to spill over his lip at the mere thought of food.  Lee took a step closer to the crater.  Then he saw something that made him stop dead in his tracks.

            There was someone there whom he knew, or had known, very well.  It was Sam.  Lee didn’t know how he knew, but he knew in his heart that this was Sam.  As Lee smiled in recognition, Sam gestured for Lee to follow him into the light steam-like vapors that were being emitted from many of the rocks on the ground, which were stained dull orange by the odd toxic phenomenon.

            Lee hesitated, considering his options.  He could of course go back and sit in the crater, or he could even go searching for his family.  He could also follow his twin into the vapors, trusting that he would not be lead awry.  He could go back to the family that didn’t want him.  Didn’t need him.  Or he could choose not to.

            Lee took a step towards Sam, and then another.  As he moved his foot down again, there was suddenly nothing below him.  He fell headlong into the center of the crater, and the center of the acrid, orange tinged pool.  He knew that he was dying. He didn’t mind too much.  He couldn’t feel a thing.  Then he heard it.  The many voices of his family, calling out to him.  Then he wanted to live.  They did want him!  But he couldn’t make a sound.  He was taken.

If there is anything that anyone thinks I should change or add or anything, I would love the help.  Email and comment!!!

HEY POEPLE!!!!

Is anyone out there?!?!  COME ON!!!!  Please email me or just comment on the blog.  Send in suggestions for debate/discussion topics.  Send in art and literature.  Tell your friends!!!  Please!!

Aria

Hello world!

Hi Everyone!!!

This is my first post so here it is! This is like an advice/gallery/anything blog. If anyone wants to submit some art, poetry, a story, or an anonymous question then I will happily post it here. My email is jettrails@gmail.com.  The submissions will be censored and filtered to some extent, but we will try to keep that to a minimum. Confidentiality and security with your work will hopefully be maintained, and to help us, please send everything in under a pen name. Please tell ANYONE about this blog!!!! Thanks!!!

Aria R.