When the feeling's gone and you can't go on it's...

Tragedy to me has always involved strong feelings of catharsis with a climactic final scene featuring  a lot of death. Therefore the Salem witch trials are perfect for this. The only problem is witches seem a lot less fun, so now my childhood is ruined!

I knew Arthur Miller from Death Of A Salesman, which I studied for a long while in high school. It has a similar feel to The Crucible: A tragic play featuring a sympathetic yet weak (adulterous) protagonist, though The Crucible features the collapse of a whole city rather than a family unit.

There were a few too many characters for me to follow easily, and also more finger-pointing than several crime novels put together. Except it's a whodunnit where we already know that no-one diddit, so no-one wins either way. It'd almost be if Sherlock realised there'd been no crimes at all, and he'd just arrested a load of charity workers by mistake.

And what's more, Abigail, the character that seems most witch-esque, gets off scot-free! (Aside from a wee spot of madness) But then, when you look like Winona Ryder, it's quite easy to forget about a little thing like witchcr... wait she was only 12 at the time? John Proctor! You stay away from those kids!

Turns out their relationship never actually happened. Sorry John Proctor.

I'm sure Abigail would be happy to know that her efforts weren't all for nothing: she now has a metal band named after her. I've just had a listen to them, and I'm going to give them a D-. It'd be much better if there was a twee indie band called Rebecca Nurse.

She probably listened to this kind of music anyways.

Essay Reflections Pt. 2

I've been pretty glad with how my essays have gone so far this term, especially with my average mark going up by about 5%. 

My essays are a lot less cluttered and with stronger overall themes. Usually now I write down a lot of quotes from the book we're studying, then after I've picked the essay question that I think would be easiest for me to talk about at length, I just pick out all the quotes that seem to match the question's themes. I find that actually writing the essay becomes a lot simpler after this, as all the quotes usually form a good structure for me to work around. For example, if a question's overall theme is 'death', there'll be a lot of quotes about death in different contexts, so I just have to assign one paragraph each to talk about these different contexts.

Typing this reflection is starting to make me believe that essay writing is the easiest thing in the world, though of course that's not exactly the truth. I've found that after I've typed the points that come quickly to my mind, thinking of new ones for the same themes are incredibly difficult. Therefore my essays seem to be shorter than the norm, but I feel like if I tried to extend them the added points would be off-topic or weaker than usual. 

This brevity has occasionally resulted in a lack of textual evidence and supporting points in some places, so my main area of improvement will be to notice these weaker areas in my near-completed essays and to correct them. This also applies to any confusing or half though-out points I make, though I do these far less often than I did in Term 1.

So roll on the final two essays; there's no more Beauvoirs or Freuds or 500 page behemoths, so I reckon these ones will go a lot more smoothly. 

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the AAAHH!!

Another depressing book, with no characters that are likeable and an ending that left me unsatisfied (just like Apocalypse Now!), leaving us with the sad image of a mourning widow being lied to. I've got to hope that Things Fall Apart is a light romantic comedy, otherwise I don't know what I'll do.

I'm surprised that Heart Of Darkness was published in a British magazine at the time, considering how reserved it is on choosing sides with the colonial project. I don't know who comes off worse, the white colonisers or the black natives, but it certainly isn't an X good, Y bad situation.

There's a part of the novella, when they're waiting for the boat to be repaired, when I really had no idea what was going on. People were talking, there was an expedition (or something), and we see some pilgrims, but I found it all a bit confusing.

Another question: why is Marlow so unmoved by Kurtz's death, when he was 'obsessed' by him beforehand? Did the honeymoon phase wear off?

The depictions of evil in all it's many manifestations is very gripping though. Was everyone this evil in the late 1800s? It must have been due to all the violent video games they played back then.

A few years ago, I went to Disneyland Paris with my family and I had to take my baby brother on the 'It's a Small World' ride over and over and over again. It is due to this that I feel I can empathise with Marlow and his similarly horrifying boat ride, though I guess his probably had less upbeat music.