Sleep of the Just

I’ve had trouble understanding this story. I mostly understand up to the part where Hathaway lost his son and goes to Burgess, right?, and the various dreams. However, I will address the formatting of the graphic novel. The cover photo kind of creeped me out but I love how the story was drawn. Although it was a bit confusing to follow, the imagery itself is beautiful. I loved when Burgess was making the potion and used repetition by saying “come” constantly and calling different entities. This made me feel his potion. When I read stories like this, I like to read them out loud in different voices and for a moment I felt like I was creating my own spell and scared myself. Maybe I get too much into the story.

Also, The dark eyes really capture me. Did you notice them? Most to all of the characters had dark eyes. I think this not only symbolized sleeplessness but it symbolized these mystery characters. Unity dreamed of a man with eyes like the stars and said this beautiful line, “His eyes burn like twin stars in her head.” The imagery of eyes wearing off on some ones face came to mind because all stars die eventually. The connection I made to eyes with this story is that in the dark, we are unable to see clearly and eyes are considered the channel to our souls, however, the inability to see eyes is what powers the entities of the dark. Meaning, the spell in the story is so effective because the entities he was calling upon lurk in the dark and drawing the characters with dark eyes fuels the development of the story because it is written in a more magical sense. Or maybe a better way to say it is, the symbolism of drawing dark eyes suggest a more magical sense since we are unable to physically see spells or the creatures in the story.

Pop Art, Plato, and Ilan Stavans

When I started reading this essay, I automatically began thinking of Plato’s, the famous Greek philosopher, view of art. My philosophy teacher once mentioned it briefly and I did some research to find out that Plato believes that art is “art by intimidation”. I found an article about it on Rowan Universities website stating,

“Art is imitation This is a feature of both of Plato's theories. Of course he was not the first or the last person to think that art imitates reality. The idea was still very strong in the Renaissance, when Vasari, in his Lives of the Painters, said that "painting is just the imitation of all the living things of nature with their colors and designs just as they are in nature." It may still be the most commonly held theory. Most people still think that a picture must be a picture ofsomething, and that an artist is someone who can make a picture that "looks just like the real thing". It wasn't until late in the nineteenth century that the idea of art as imitation began to fade from western aesthetics, to be replaced by theories about art as expression, art as communication, art as pure form, art as whatever elicits an "aesthetic" response, and a number of other theories.”

Although Stavans made a pretty strong argument defending Pop art through his culture, I still have to agree more with Plato’s. I don’t believe that pop art should be banned or made a mockery of, but I do think that pop art is not as bold as art that Plato favors such as nature. Pop art has a large social influence on the audience and the society it comes from just like the author of Stavans defended it.

Sites used:

http://www.rowan.edu/open/philosop/clowney/aesthetics/philos_artists_onart/plato.htm