Hamlet's Production Introduction

I expect a pretty accurate representation of the play, and I expect it will have good acting and scenery. I do not expect that I will like it, because I am not a huge fan of Shakespeare movies. This did look like it would be better than any I have seen so far, but I have not seen a single Shakespeare movie or play that I have liked, so my expectations are low. The aspects of the work that intrigue are whether or not the acting will be good and if I will like it or not. I think it is hard to do a good job reenacting Shakespeare while still using the language he used, because the audiences watching are not used to the type of language Shakespeare uses. I thought Branagh's idea to use a hall of mirrors to "mirror" the action of Hamlet's monologue's and "reflections" about himself was very smart. I also think using beautiful scenery in northern Europe will help the movie's success because the scenery will help bring the play to life. Other Shakespeare reenactments that I have seen often take place on stage, as they would have in Shakespeare's time, but I find this dull because of what movie producers are capable of doing now.

Canterbury Remix - The Wife of Bath

There was once a man who was full of lust.
He was a scum bag with a heart of dust.
Because he was rich he did as he pleased.
His attitude led to many bad deeds.
He raped a woman and then went to court.
To say the least his trial was quite short.
The judge was about to send him to jail,
When he was saved by an anxious female.
She was an influential feminist,
And she was angered by this chauvinist.
To raise the man’s ethical awareness,
She needed to act without violence.
He was at the feminist’s disposal,
And she kindly offered this proposal:
“You must now go and find the truth for me,
About what women most desire to see.”
I hope this criminal will not chance her
By providing her with the wrong answer.
He set out searching high and low to find
A truthful woman who would speak her mind.
And though he set out searching far and wide,
All the honest women would only hide.
Anyone who would speak to him
Only made his future appear more grim.
They said fine gifts or pampering one’s wife,
Was the answer that could help end his strife.
The dejected man knew this would not work,
But away from her he chose not to lurk.
On his way back to face his penalty,
He ran into a hag who was ugly.
After he begged the woman to save him,
She said she could if she could enslave him.
The desperate man agreed to this request,
So the two went to try to pass the test.
The feminist was quite delighted when
The man’s answer deserved ten out of ten.
There was no way this man she could accuse
After he showed such a change in values.
By saying women want to have control,
He dug himself out of a giant hole.
He should have fluttered high up to Cloud Nine,
But there was no way he could feel less fine.
The fat, old, poor, hag just reminded him
Of his previous promise binding them.
Now the man would have to marry the hag,
Which the man saw as the ultimate drag.
When his wife asked him, “What is wrong with you?”
He replied simply, “My problem is you.”
“It should not matter to you that I’m poor,
Because at least I’m not a skanky whore.
I can be ugly and always faithful,
Or beautiful and always untruthful.
I offer you this perplex choice to make,
I hope the decision is no headache.”
“I believe your offer I will refuse.
I now realize that only you can choose.”
“Since you have given the power to me,
I will be faithful and really pretty.”

The Road - Last Blog

"'I want to be with you.'  'You cant.'  'Please.'  'You cant.  You have to carry the fire.'  'I dont know how to.'  'Yes you do.'  'Is it real?  The fire?'  'Yes it is.'  'Where is it?  I dont know where it is.'  'Yes you do.  It's inside you.  It was always there.  I can see it'" (278-279).  The man and the boy have always been "the good guys" because they "carry the fire."  The still have hope, and they still have love for each other.  Throughout The Road, the boy asks if there are other good guys, and the man says yes, as any good father would, but the reader never knows if there actually are other good guys out there.  My doubt that there were any more good guys left decreased as the story went on, especially after the man and boy's encounter with "Ely," and the man who tries to steal their belongings when they are on the beach.  When the man leaves the thief to die, I was skeptical as to whether or not the man himself had turned into a bad guy, because as the boy points says, "But we did kill him" (260).  As the man is dying, he brings back up the concept of "the fire" that boy must now "carry" on his own.  The father is dying and the boy is now the only person who has any love left inside him, love for his dead father.  That fire might have burned out, because because the boy was going to die.  But "goodness finds the little boy" (281).  The "veteran of old skirmishes" comes while "the fire" is still burning, and by offering to take the boy with him, he will save the boy and the fire will not burn out.  The boy has come upon another group of people who will become his family, and the fire inside the boy will continue to burn for his them, as well as for his dad, who started the fire.

"The Great Gatsby Revisited" Response

I have only read The Great Gatsby once.  Maybe I should read it again, because I might be able to understand much more about the text.  The eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg were one of the most intriguing parts of The Great Gatsby to me.  As I read the novel, it was clear to me that the eyes were a symbol, but I could not decide what I thought they symbolized.  Mr. Wilson acts as if the eyes were the eyes of God.  I am not sure if they represent the eyes of God, because Wilson is the only person who thought the eyes were like God's eyes watching everyone; some of the worst events in the story happen under the gaze of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg.  No one else in the novel seemed to think the eyes symbolized anything, they just seemed llike a pair of faded eyes to them.  The fact that the eyes are located in the valley of ashes seems important to me.  The eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg are located in a desolate area of gray ash.  The valley of ash seems to be where the superficial areas of the Eggs become real.  The crash happens on the road overlooking the valley of ashes, and in Manhattan, Tom hits Myrtle, and Gatsby confronts Tom.  Even when Mr. Wilson goes to shoot Gatsby, which he does in West Egg, he is coming from the valley of ashes.  So the eyes lay in a barren "valley" that seems to spur bad incidents.  According to the blog post, the eyes "[disturb] the reader with a sense of formless moral scrutiny."  I did understand the "moral scrutiny" part, but I do not get how it is "formless," because the form is the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg.  If the eyes symbolize God, or moral scrutiny, why does Mr. Wilson ignore them when going to shoot Gatsby?  Maybe the death of Myrtle caused him to lose faith in God, or the symbol of God.  The loss of the meaning of the green light, another symbol, occured also, when Gatsby told Nick about what the light meant to Gatsby.  The conclusion I have come to is that the symbols are important only if the characters allow them to be.  I wonder if Fitzgerald  thinks it is good for characters to give the symbols meaning or not.
I know we are supposed to "respond" to this blog post, not evaluate it, but I just want to say that I did not like it.  I have not seen the movie of The Great Gatsby, so I am not counting the fifth point the author makes, but I thought the third and fourth points were the only insightful ones.  Nick makes a long point talking about how the story was a tale of the West, so I figured it was a tale about the West, even if I did not know why.  The author gives examples of Fitzgerald's great sentences, but says that she cannot describe how they are great.  That is not very impressive to me.  I am not saying I could describe the greatness of the sentences, but all the author does is say that the sentences are in fact, great.

The Road - Blog 3

"Oh my God, he whispered.  Oh my God" (138).  As the man and child were entering the second padlocked door, McCarthy used the same language he used when they were entering the first padlocked door.  This time, because the child had warned the man not to enter the room, and because of the repetition of the man's reaction, I was practically too afraid to read on to see what happened next, because I was expecting a room full of humans.  Needless to say, I was pretty relieved when the contents of this room was "the richness of a vanished world" instead of something horrific (139). 
"What he didnt find was a gun.  He took the battery lantern and walked over the floor and he checked the walls for any hidden compartment.  After a while he just sat on the bunk eating a bar of chocolate.  There was no gun and there wasnt going to be one" (143).  After reading this, I decided that I think guns symbolize something in The Road.  My first thought was that guns symbolize safety.  The revolver saved the man and child from the "bad guys" on the road by killing one of the "bad guys."  In this case, there was no gun, so they were not actually safe despite the fact their food was plentiful and they had shelter, because they were still very close to the house with the bad guys.  However, I am not sure a gun exactly symbolizes safety because when they were hiding in the ditch, the man gave the child the gun and told him to "put [the gun] in [his] mouth and point it up," to "do it quick and hard" (113).  The gun was going to kill the child.  This could still be safety, because suicide might have been the only way to be safe from the bad guys who were going to do worse things to the child than kill him. 

The Road - Blog 2

The boy keeps asking his dad if they are going to die, and he does not believe the dad when the dad tells him  they are not going to die.  "If they find us they'll kill us, wont they Papa" (115).  The boy seems to have more common sense than the man.  While the boy is aware that their chances of survival are extremely slim, the man has almost convinced himself that they are going to live, partly because of his efforts to reassure his son.  The boy says, "I dont think we should go up there," when they come upon a large house along their journey, but the father, blinded by his hunger, decides "it's okay," and that they have "got to find something to eat" (106).  The man should have followed the boy's natural instincts of fear in this situation, but "desperation...led him to...carelessness" and he nearly got them both killed, or worse (117).  The child is commonly afraid of entering abandoned houses, but in this case his fear turned out to be justified.  The two seemed to be growing further and further apart along their journey, but now maybe the father will listen to the child more and their bind will strengthen.  The father realized that he can not give be careless out of desperation again, "no matter what" (117).  I think this is good news for the father/son relationship, but I do not know how they are going to find food now.  The part with the people locked in the room disgusted me.  I think I am going to have nightmares tonight.  I guess the "bad guys" lock the other people up in that room and eat them.  I find that repulsive and I think I would prefer to die.  The man  and child seem to be in pretty bad shape right now and I do not know how they are going to keep surviving since the boy already looks "like something out of a deathcamp" (117).  A particularly disturbing line in my opinion was, "Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock?" (114).  The situation has come to the point where he has to consider killing his own son, and that is messed up.  McCarthy has created a scenario so scary that I can almost imagine why the man is thinking about taking this twisted form of action - because he does not want his child to be eaten by the freaks that live in the big house.  McCarthy has put inside the head of the man through his literary devices like rhetorical questions and the dialogue between the man and the son.  It is kind of creeping me out.

The Road - Blog 1

The Road has not reminded me of any book I have read.  The writing style is similiar to McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, using sentence fragments, lots of similies, and no quotation marks, but the story is very different.  The motion in the novel is walking, at least for the man and his child.  They move through the vast, gray wasteland of a country that few people now inhabit.  The men in the truck that the man and child have to run from are moving by truck, but their truck breaks down and they too have to walk a ways.  McCarthy's juxtaposes short, sentence fragments with long sentences involoving many actions.  "A pool of guts....No pieces of clothing.  Dark was coming on again and it was already very cold and he turned and went out to where he'd left the boy and knelt and put his arms around him and held him" (71).  This sentence structure allows the reader to feel what the man is feeling.  He is quickly looking around, noticing the pool of guts and everything lying around the dead man that he shot, and then he is doing what he can to make his child feel safe.  The sentence structure creates a feeling of confusion with the fragments, and then quick action with the long sentence using many verbs. 
The man and the boy are "each the other's world entire" (6).  On the last night the man and his wife are together, she tells him, "The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself.  I know because I would never have come this far.  A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost" (57).  The only reason the man and the child are surviving is that they have each other.  For some reason, the man and child were not enough for the mother to want to survive, but I do not know why.  Why was her heart "ripped out the night [the child] was born?"  The father and son love each other so much but the mother did not even care.  I am worried that the father and son are going to be torn apart because of everything that is happening through the course of the story, like the father not helping the man struck by lightning, and the father shooting the man from the truck.  We'll see.

Destiny's Dinner

My group decided that a recurring theme throughout The Canterbury Tales is destiny.  Our graphic organizer was a dinner table with the names of the four tales eating at each side, and the quotation we chose from each written on their plates.  These are the four quotes we chose from each of the tales we have read so far to represent the theme we chose:

The Knight's Tale:  "I shall see to it carefully that Palamon, who is your own knight, shall have his lady as you have promised him...Although Mars shall help his knight" (1619-1620).

The Miller's Tale:  "And thanne shul we be lordes al our lyfe of al the world, as Noe and his wyf" (396-396).

The Tale of the Wife of Bath:  "Yet may the hye God, and so hope I, grante me grace to liven vertuously.  Thanne am I gentil, whan that I biginne to liven vertuously and weyve sinne" (317-320).

The Pardoner's Tale:  "If that yow be so leef to find Deeth, turne up this croked wey, for in that grove I lafte him, by my fey, under a tree, and ther he wol abyde" (298-301).

In all the quotations, there is foreshadowing of what will occur to the character that the quotation is about.  The foreshadowing often involves religion, and also often comes true, so the characters often have a "destiny" that can be seen before it actually occurs.  I could not always recognize the character's destiny the first time I read the tales, but when one follows the steps about becoming a better reader that we listened to in class, the desitiny is recognizable.  So when you read the last two pages of "The Pardoner's Tale" and then go back looking for parts in the tale that contribute to the overall picture, the foreshadowing of the old man telling the three sinners that Death is waiting for them at the tree is clear foreshadowing of what their outcome will be if they continue "looking for Death," which they do.  In the Wife of Bath's quotation, the Wife's destiny is that she will live a good life, and she does because she gets what she wants, having the knight as an obedient husband. 

The Raven

I believe the raven in "The Raven" is supposed to symbolize death, specifically the death of Lenore and the "death" of the narrator's soul due to the loss of Lenore.  I think Lenore is a woman the narrator used to love, and she died.  The narrator desperately wants her back or wants to forget all about her, but without her, he is nothing.  He wants to forget her - "respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore," because without her the narrator's "soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor / Shall be lifted - nevermore!"  The narrator is so devastated by the loss of Lenore that his soul will never be happy again.

The Pardoner's Tale

The Pardoner, as he makes it clear in his prolugue, is a hypocrit.  He preaches about thed disasters of greed in order to cheat people out of their money.  After he is done telling his tale, he tries to convince his fellow pilgrims to give him their money in exchange for a "pardon," which he has already told them is fake.  I did not understand why he tried to trick the pilgrims into giving him an offering when he already told them that he was a fraud.  Did he really believe the pilgrims were stupid enough to pay for a pardon when he had already divulged all the secrets of his scam?  In the prologue of the Miller and the Pardoner, they both admit to being drunk, and sinning plays a large role in both the tales.  Drinking seems to be a bad sin that always causes trouble, as the Pardoner describes it in his tale; there is no difference "betwix a man that is out of his minde and a man which that is dronkelewe."  Religion reappears in this tale.  The three "ryotoures" end up dying in the story because of their greed and their sins; however, the Pardoner, who is equally greedy and sinful, does not have any bad consequences occur to him.  I cannot tell if Chaucer sees religion as a powerful force that one should follow or not.

The Wife of Bath's Tale

The Wife of Bath's Tale shows the Wife's opposition to patriarchal society.  The knight who rapes a woman is handed over to women who will decide his fate, a woman tells him an answer that saves him from being killed, and the answer is that "wommen desyren to have sovereyntee as wel over hir housbond as hir love, and for to been in maistrie him above."  Finally, the knight ends up with a beautiful and faithful wife only by giving her control of their relationship.  This is the first of the tales in which everyone ends up happy; in "The Knight's Tale" Arcite dies, and in "The Miller's Tale" John the carpenter is thought to be crazy by everyone in the town.  This could be because the Wife of Bath wants her tale of a more matriarchal society to be remembered as happy.  Just as the knight told a tale with a galiant duke, Theseus, the Wife's tale involves an old woman who has a wonderful personality and transforms into physically beautiful person as well.  The characters telling the tales portray the character who most represents themselves within the tale as someone almost unbelievably perfect.

The Wife of Bath's Prologue

The Wife of Bath is upset with the patriarchal society that exists during her time.  She does not want men to have, or think they have, control of women.  She talks describes how she was in control of her husbands, and describes what she did to manipulate them, which establishes her rebellion from traditional patriarchal expectancies.  Love is referred to again in this prologue, as is the role of Gods in human's lives.  The pattern of jealousy acting as a destructive force continues in this prolugue, because Alison's husbands are always jealous of her open attitude towards other men (and they have reason to be).  Alsion says she only married her first three husbands for money, but she seems to be happy while with them; Jankyn is the husband Alison loves the most, but she fights constantly, even physically.  Although someone seems to always end up happy in the tales, love is also always causing pain.  Alison blames her desire to have fun on Venus, instead of taking responsibility for her actions.  In "The Knight's Tale," Palamon and Arcite look to the God's for help before their big battle.  There is a tendency for the humans in the story to think they cannot behave a certain way without the influence of Gods, underlining a theme that Gods have control of humans.