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.

It Don't Matter If You're Black Or White (Except For When It Does)

This book should really be called 'The Second Race And Its Discontents', because I'm seeing a lot of Beauvoirisms and Freudisms, though perhaps Fanon was just trying to appeal to the adolescent boy market with all those references to genitalia.

Here's some Second Sex quotes that could easily be applied to 'Black Skin, White Masks', just replace women with 'Blacks' and men with 'Whites'.

"Woman has to be compared with man in her becoming"

"It is very difficult to give a generally valid description of the notion of female"

"Woman is her body ... but her body is something other than her"

"Woman's nature as suffering from natural defectiveness"

I find it interesting how it mentions that language can be used as a mask, especially after learning in Psychology how our language affects our perception of colour and time, and leaning in Anthropology how vital it is to learn the language of whatever culture you are studying, in order to become more immersed. The fact that colonised countries are still speaking English, French, and Spanish is an ugly reminder of Europe's past; Europeans took these countries' languages away from them, and they won't be getting them back.

Saying that having black skin is only a surface level thing and not symbolic of any black identity sounds quite controversial. It reminded me almost immediately of the 1969 White Paper, which proposed to eliminate the legal status of 'Indian'. It caused quite a bit of controversy, mainly because the Aboriginal community wanted to keep their identity, as assimilation would've meant the destruction of their culture.

Still, it makes me glad that this book was written over 50 years ago, and now racism is gone forever.

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Wait, it's not? Darn.

Like Downton Abbey, But In Book Form

I swear in the first 100 pages of this book, nothing actually happens. I can summarise the first 100 pages like this:

Catherine: likeable, if really, really naive and innocent. "A woman in love with one man cannot flirt with another" (140),  sorry to disappoint you Catherine but...
Her brother: nothing much going on there.
Isabella: seems nice enough (OR IS SHE?) and truly loves Catherine's characterless brother (OR DOES SHE??).
Her brother: I want to punch him in his stupid face.
Henry: dreamy, sarcastic love-boat (OR IS HE?).
His sister: nope, nothing much here either.

And X fancies Y but Y fancies Z while X's sister fancies Y's brother. But this takes 100 pages! And I still don't know what happens in a pump-room.

(pg. 5) Catherine is fond of "base ball"? I never even knew they had it back then. I mean, what did they put on their hotdogs?
(pg. 140) And I think many people would take issues with the statement that "No man is offended by another man's admiration [i.e. flirting] of the woman he loves". I think you'll find they usually are.

I'm having trouble connecting Shaun of the Dead to this book though. Is it just that outside influences (gothic novels) are dictating Catherine's actions without her thinking? If so (and that claim seems a bit dubious), I though Shaun of the Dead was more about satirising modern consumer day-in-day-out-everything-stays-the-same culture. I guess Northanger Abbey's characters do seem to be doing a lot of pump-rooming and not a lot else, but what else was there to do back then? You couldn't exactly go hand gliding or quad biking, your options were quite limited.

Great film though. Anyone who hasn't seen the films in the 'Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy' (as it's grown to be called) really should, they're three of the funniest films I know.

Hacking My Brain Off

I'm still on shaky grounds with this book, but couldn't Rewriting the Soul's main themes of

1. Many supposed 'facts' only being being contingently true and

2. 'making up' people through descriptions

be also representative of some of the key elements of prejudice? If humans are all about erroneously categorising and compartmentalising and generalising (like with the child abuse = MPD connection) then we couldn't we just as easily be talking about prejudiced stereotypes that are perpetuated through acting under descriptions? Just as 'child abuse' was not a recognised thing, so too, was racism (hence Heart of Darkness being a totally normal thing for its time. Also, accidentally racist old people).

Then the descriptions attributed to events in the past that are a formative influence on a person's being could quite easily be talking about the symptoms of internalised racism!

There, now where's my Nobel Peace Prize medal?

On a different note, this book's mentioning of semantic contagion of something improbable and (when seen from a completely neutral perspective) quite ridiculous reminded me of the hysteria around the Salem witch trials, and all the arrests in the US in the 80's over satanistic day-care centres. While these seem crazy now, I'm sure someone who was being told about multiple personality disorder for the first time would have many issues with it as well.

Term 1 Essay Reflection

My only real fault is that I'm just too much of a perfectionist. Oh, and all of these other things.

I think my biggest hurdle when I started writing these essays was formulating thesis statements and introductory paragraph sentences. While I've gradually improved at doing this, I still need to put more effort in linking paragraphs together thematically. This will also help eliminate random points that have little relevance to the topic and that I've just crowbarred in to try and sound clever (like my Heart Of Darkness references in my Tempest essay, which didn't really add anything). I need to spend more time before actually writing my essay thinking about the grand scheme of it, and whether an apparent 'overarching' topic/idea I have is strong enough to support an entire essay. Apparently my "insightful arguments" are my strong point, I just need to work at putting every single one of those strong points together in a way that clearly supports my thesis.

Another area that I think needs work is properly expanding on points (for example, Antigone and her supposedly 'ambiguous' morals, as well as her relation to a Knight Of Faith), as well as citing evidence from the text whenever the opportunity arises. So many times I've said a conclusion to a point without properly explaining how I came to it. I can help reduce this by getting other people to read my essay before it's submitted; if they are confused, then the marker probably will be as well.

I seem to always mention the same topics: personal freedom, oppression, power. These topics must come easier to me, so I should probably keep on writing about these whenever I get the chance. My essay's concluding sentences have also been consistently praised. I'm hoping this is not due to an unconscious feeling of relief for having finally finished my essay! Sadly, I cannot make my essay consist of only concluding sentences, which is a shame.