Online meeting notes

(Last) week's online meeting notes! Brought to you by the May 7th Live.

• Talked about how everything had been going, per usual
• A little info/update on the book project that Dr. Preston organized 
• I still have yet to start any writing, but I'm very excited about it!
• Mentioned how Dr. Preston, for the first time since we started meetings, had to postpone one
• Due to his internet glitching and having to take some unnecessary steps to submit our grades

Book Notes

• Started a new book! Catch-22
• The phrase Catch-22 became part of the English language due to the book's popularity
• Referring to when someone finds themselves between two decisions that don't go together
• Mentioned how compared to anything, war holds much significance
• no one would make fun of war, because it's not something to make fun of it, but even if you did, it just wouldn't feel right
• Talks about the setting of the book, even if it's supposedly satire, it isn't explained that way and the narrator tries to make sense of it
• Explained how the first line of the book, even though the book was about war and seriousness, the first line could throw people off
• "It was love at first sight."
• Especially during the 1950s and 1960s, it was very rare for the first few lines to be something that people could confidently relate to
• "The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him."
• Background: A man falling in love with another man. (Not that looked up to back then)
• The soldiers in the hospital, including Yossarian, are faking being sick so they can get out of battle
• Letters that the officer patients wrote had to be censored by enlisted-men patients
• Censored meaning that they had to read them and review them in order to take out any information or talk that was meant to not be given to the outside world
• Yossarian would black out a lot of the information from the letters, going as far as to black out any words or the whole letter, thinking of it as a game to cure his boredom
• Yossarian would sign off "Washington Irving" on the letters that he did read so people wouldn't know it was him that created a mess of all those letters
• Washington Irving referring to the Legend of Sleepy Hallow
• Yossarian was put in a ward that he and Dunbar had ended up enjoying far more than the others, suggesting that they had done this little faking game more than once
• "He was increasing his lifespan by cultivating boredom."
• When one is bored, the time drags on really slowly, so Dunbar was being so bored so that his "lifetime" would be slow
• Yossarian and Dumbar make fun to the Texan from Texas that had arrived at the ward by talking about patriotism and patriotism
• "madman" was used to describe soldiers, but that's not very common to say, because soldiers are referred to as heroes and such for their fighting