Thursday, January 24, 2019

Small Town Noir Overview

I decided to look at a site called Small Town Noir. It has mug shots and the stories related to these mug shots.  They are from a town called New Castle, Pennsylvania in the time between 1930 and 1960. They are rescued mugshots that were headed to the trash and they got the stories that relate to them from the newspaper. I think the tone of the page is kind of ironic. An example of this would be this named Glen who was on suspension for driving drunk and ended up dying at the hands of a drunk driver. When I first started reading it I thought that it was just a mug shot of a guy that was driving drunk. He ended up drunk in the passenger seat with a guy named Virgil who was also intoxicated. Virgil wrecked the car and Glenn died because of the injuries he sustained. In that same post the man Virgil that killed Glen killed again 42 years later this time a 7 year old boy when again he was driving drunk. Ironically Virgil died on the first anniversary of the little boys death. Another instance of irony is a man named Fioravante Pisano, whose first encounter with the police was when his wife called them because he fired a gun in his basement and she thought he was going to try and kill himself. Years later while with his second wife he did end up killing himself by shooting himself in the head. His new wife buried him next to his first wife and went on to lead a long life. It is a very interesting blog with a lot of ironic twists and turns. 

4 comments:

  1. Yeesh. That sounds dark. Do you have a link to the site? I thought it was fascinating in the textbook that the blogger rescued all the mugshots from the trash. A good way to start a project. I dug up a bunch of trash out of my grandmother's kitchen trashcan after she died. My Dad and Uncle were just throwing stuff away. I rescued all these news clippings including their own birth announcements!

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  2. Great blog on an interesting topic! This reminds me of those wine bottles with a sepia photo where you can download an ap to scan it and they will tell their story from the wine bottle. -Dorian

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  3. When I first read about Small Town Noir in the textbook, I thought it sounded interesting. Now I want to read it even more because I like the irony of the events you explained. I also think it would make a good tv show from the events you described.

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  4. Great analysis of the literary features of tone and irony!

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