The OWU English Department Blog
At 15 years old I equated love to romantics, naively thinking that love was an emotion reserved for grown-ups and serious relationships. When I thought about love I pictured a cute couple walking down the street hand in hand, stealing small glances in secret and laughing at something corny, giddy just to be there with each other.…
In the faraway land of 1935, marking the end of the pre-code Hollywood era, a motion picture called It Happened One Night became the 7th recipient of the Academy Award for Best Picture. Last year, I decided–by the force of some mysterious ambition–to watch every single of the then ninety-two movies that have received the award.…
Richard Linklaterās Before trilogy is a collection of three movies–Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight–that tell the love story of an American man, Jesse, and a French woman, Celine, throughout eighteen years of their lives and through beautiful locations across the world. The movies are distinctive for being almost exclusively made up of dialogue between the two protagonists, as well as for the breathtaking backgrounds to these conversations: Vienna, Paris, and Pylos.…
The reason I had never watched Sofia Coppolaās Lost in Translation is excruciatingly ironic: in its translation to my first language, Portuguese, the movieās title was just plain boring. āEncounters and mismatchesā (my closest translation of a bad translation) never really caught my eye. But, mostly because of quarantine boredom, I came across it on a nightly Netflix scroll and didnāt see a good reason not to click on it.…
In the utter chaos of the world we live in right now, travelingĀ has ceased–for the moment, at least–to be an option. Though we know it is the responsible thing, and not getting in a plane somewhere is the least we can do for our fellow humans, the longing for travel and exploration wonāt simply fade away.…
Earlier this month, I hiked 8+ miles by myself through the Cleveland MetroParks. I had only planned on taking one trail, but was enjoying myself so much that I took another connecting route and made a longer loop back to where I had parked my car at the trailhead. It was just before peak color for the season, and between the colorful leaves, fresh autumn air, and smell of the outdoors, I felt far more refreshed than I had felt in a long time.…
It has always been hard to pinpoint the exact moment in my life when I officially decided what I wanted to study was English. It feels like this should be an easy question ā I have always been so certain, so confident that, if anyone was here with a single purpose, this was mine.…
The time whenĀ I read Giovanniās Room, an extraordinary novella by the even more extraordinary James Baldwin, could have been the worst possible moment ā but, surprisingly, it might have turned out to be the best. I was living through my very first real winter ā all the previous eighteen had been a collection of only slightly chillier and less rainy summer days, as every winter is in Rio de Janeiro.…
An aluminum vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air–this is what the word plane used to mean to me. I thought about them when one flew above me in the blue summer sky, a tiny greyish shape that inevitably leads anyone with a fertile imagination to indulge in a thousand theories about who the strangers in the sky are, where are they coming from and where they are going, and why it is I will never meet them.…