TOW #16- "A Room of One's Own" (IRB)

I've suffered through enough, being outside of my comfort zone, but I come back to you to say that Woolf's essay wasn't half-bad. I can clearly see now why people call "A Room of One's Own" a landmark of twentieth-century feminist thought. Throughout the essay, Woolf explores the history of women in literature through an unconventional and highly interesting investigation of the social and physical conditions required for the writing of literature. These conditions, which include leisure time, privacy, and financial independence underwrite all literary production. They are especially relevant to the understanding of the situation for women in the literary position, because women, have historically been left out of those prerequisites.

Interestingly enough, Woolf uses fiction to compensate for some of the gaps in the factual record about women as well as to counter the biases that insert more conventional scholarship. Woolf did that to a tee in the fact that although this is a non-fiction essay she used bits of fiction to cover up holes in her essays. Virginia Woolf writes a history of a woman's thinking about the history of thinking women. So essentially that means, her essay is a reconstruction and a reenactment as well as an argument. In the end of it all her essay is able to open up in three different lights which to me, made me appreciate it maybe not for the ideas it presented but for how it was a well-crafted piece of literature.

TOW #15- "Grandfather who beat three types of cancer completes trek to South Pole" (Written)

In the Spring of 2012, Patrick McIntosh,58, was diagnosed with bowel cancer. Seven months later in celebration of defeating cancer, Mr. McIntosh scaled one of the biggest mountains in the world, Mount Kilimanjaro. He was later diagnosed with skin cancer a mere month later and then in the Spring of 2013, Patrick was diagnosed with prostate cancer. McIntosh thought to himself that nobody likes reading stories about cancer, but everyone likes stories of physical feats. Patrick McIntosh set out on a journey to trek to the South Pole. In preparation for his trek, McIntosh would ski more than three miles a night on a machine in his garage as well as he would take a plunge in his freezing cold outdoor pool as a part of his fitness training. McIntosh also ran a marathon, walked the lengths of Hadrian's Walls in two days, and spent hours hiking with over thirty pounds on his back while he would drag tires behind him. In the end it took him eleven days with eight hours of trekking each day until he finally reached the South Pole.

The Telegraph delves into a topic that is typically sad, emotionally brutal, and heart wrenching. With the story, they posed a new perspective on the harsh disease that is cancer and turned it into a man's overcoming of such obstacles and his achievement of some of his personal goals. Camilla Turner, the author of this piece, did a great job incorporating statistics to display emphasis on the physical feats that McIntosh completed. "...who has just completed a 138-mile (222km) charity trek to the South Pole." Turner inserts this number to display the enormity of what Patrick McIntosh accomplished.

All in all I thought Camilla Turner did a great job writing about Patrick McIntosh's story. I had a pleasant time reading it given the fact that the majority of time cancer is brought up in the news it is a negative thing so it was a nice change of pace to read about somebody who fought the battle and won it.
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/antarctica/11353223/Grandfather-who-beat-three-types-of-cancer-completes-trek-to-South-Pole.html)