welcome to my blog!

You’re probably wondering why this is called summer dazzle. There are several reasons actually. The most important is that I have been assigned to write about ‘summer’—yes, that particular time of the year, that hot, sweaty season—as part of our project group in our language and literature class. At the time we decided on which topic to work on for the project, we were dealing with scansion, or the analysis of poetry, in class, so we thought that we should probably study poetry as well for our group project. Since it is a common enough subject matter of poems, and since we are four in the group, we figured ‘seasons’ would not only be appropriate, it would also make things, and the work, easy to divide. You will find then that this blog is actually linked to three others with names like spring burst, orange fall, and winter whiteness. So there: we are the four seasons, and I am summer. But still, it explains only the ‘summer’ bit. What about ‘dazzle’?

I’m actually not sure why I chose ‘dazzle,’ among the other words I had thought of (e.g., madness as in summer madness, fun as in summer fun, sunshine as in summer sunshine, blues as in summer blues). Perhaps, it has to do with the shiny brightness of the summer sun, the gleam of sweat on one’s brow that is quite common to see on a summer day, or the silvery blueness of sea and sky in the almost unbearable summer heat. Perhaps, it has to do with the magic and sparkle attributed to summer nights when people fall in love and relationships bloom. Then again, it may just be that I chose ‘dazzle,’ because when I told a friend about the name, she said it made her think of a bottle of cologne or a line of cosmetics made especially for use during summer, and I thought it was a rather cute reaction. In any case, dazzle it is.

Why in a blog format then? We wanted to do something creative, interactive, and fun. What’s creative in this case is that we get to do a formal exercise in an informal forum. We can add pictures, follow our own thoughts, and establish links to other interesting sites. What’s interactive is that we can edit and rework our thoughts, get comments from people reading our entries, and make the whole idea of analyzing literature using linguistic principles a bit more accessible. Fun, because, well, blogging, I just realized, is fun. It’s fun to play around with templates and images, look for interesting links, and mix formal and informal conventions of writing.

Now that proper introductions have been made, I’d like to welcome you to this blog. I hope you find something useful, insightful, or pretty in it.