We started to watch Macbeth this week. The movie was sort of hard to keep track of during the begining. For the first few minutes there was a ton going on with a bunch of characters that I was no familiar with. It was not until the second day that I was able to straighten everything out and figure out who was who in the movie. So luckily Luco was able to take some good notes in our shared Cornell notes. However after the first day I was able to contibute more stuff since I had finally gotten the idea of what was going on. I am more excited to actually getting the chance to see a hard copy of the dialogue for the play. I am positive that there is a ton that I have missed from just watching the play.
One thing I specifically remember form watching the movie was an instance of a couple members of our group missing a line form the play. The line in particular was ""False face must hide what the false heart doth know..." since we all missed it I did a quick google search to try and find the exact wording of the phrase and came across a bit from eNotes that had the quote and explained its meaning. This line is the end of Act I and is the moment that Macbeth has been convinced by Lady Macbeth to assassinate King Duncan and to place Macbeth on the Scottish throne.
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We started back up the poems this week which was pretty exciting. Our first one was Sonnet 146, which is one of William Shakespeare's many sonnets. The poem focused a lot on the mortality of mankind and their tendancy to use there material wealth to lavishly decorate their outward appearance before their deaths. It tried to make sense of why nearly all humans resort to this when there is not really any reason for them to do this.
On the other hand we also read the poem Ozymandias, the king of kings. This one was a bit trickier than Sonnet 146 because Ozymandias was not a name that I was familiar with so the meaning of the poem was lost to me at first. Until I did a little research and found Ozymandias' Wikipedia page and learned that it was actually a nickname for an ancient Egyptian pharoh. Which made the point of time erroding at the strength and influence of an empire. Lastly, we started our Critical Theory notes. My group chose the play Macbeth, which in short is a story of poor life choices. But we were specifically studying Philosophical/Existentialism before we watched the play Macbeth. As a group we sort of decided that the quicky definition to Philosophical/Existentialism was that there is no such thing as exact. It is more up to whoever is interpreting it. In this new trimester we are doing something different for our reading projects. We are doing our project in a Pecha Kucha designed presentation. Which is basically a timed slideshow that will reflect the subject that we decide to pursue for the next twelve weeks or so. For my two books I chose 1984 and Brave New World. My inspiration for picking these two books came from an internet post I saw the other day. It was re-post when I saw it and I do not have the original image but it resurfaced around the Presidential Election. The post contrasted the two books and was really thought provoking at the time. And Brave New World has been a book that I have wanted to read for a couple of years now, so I figured now was as good as time as any.
In addition to starting our new reading project we did a practice AP test, but only the multiple choice part. I realized that I needed to really refresh my knowledge of literature vocab. There were a couple of times that I was not confident of my answer because of not understanding a word. Which instictively made me pick a random answer. After finishing our tests we talked about what we thought were the best test taking stragies. Personally the thing that helps me the most is forgetting that it is a timed test. If I am actively being timed or feel rushed I do significantly worse. The part that I did the worst on was section regarding the man who talked about his gold. I am confident the reason I did so poorly on this section was because I noticed everyone sitting around me was already a story ahead of me which made me rush through the story and answer poorly. If I had answered only half of those questions correctly I would have gotten 5 points better. Putting me at a 43/55 instead of 38/55. Same thing with my SAT during every practice where we were never told how close to the end we were getting I was doing crazy good. In math I was scoring low 700's every time and in the reading I was only missing on average 5 questions in total. But when I have taken the actual SAT they rush you along at specfic intervals which I feel messes me up. This week we read the tragedy of Oedipus in class. It was probably the one of the best examples of a tragedy because Oedipus exemplifies a story of inescapable misfortune. From leaving his home town of Corinth to avoid the prophecy. Only to lead himself right into fulfilling the tragedy in the end.
However, the ending of Oedipus allowed us to implement something that we had learned last week from The Tragic Fallacy by Joseph Krutch. When he said that "its conclusion must be, by its premise, outwardly calamitous..." you get a glimpse what the ending of Oedipus really meant. Starting when we learn of Jocasta hanging herself and then moving to Oedipus puncturing his own eyes with the brooches from his wife's robes. These commotion is very calamitous there is an enormous amount of chaos that takes place in a very short period of time. Which eventually leads to Creon showing mercy to his nephew/brother-in-law and sparing his life. Restoring faith in humanity. Concluding the story of Oedipus. It was really cool seeing how all of the different things that we had learned about and read ending up tying together in the end. Which lead me to think about other things that made me though of tragedy. Immediately I went to the story of Allan Turing, an English computer scientist from the 40's. Which is why one of my tragedy blog post has a picture from the movie The Imitation Game. The story of this amazing man is a perfect real world example of a tragedy and I would recommend that if you do not know about this man and his work. Go and read about him on http://www.turing.org.uk/. This week we asked ourselves what is a tragedy. Instinctively I thought of the stories of "Romeo and Juliet" and "Hamlet" but I learned it has other applications. Such as in the sense of economics. With the tragedy of the commons. I spent most of my time reading that wiki page because I felt like it was the most interesting. It basically preached how if you let people regulate a common good with only their conscious the resource will eventually be depleted. Then their was an example of a man who applied this theory to the idea that welfare created a sort of unhealthy belief that people could leech off the work of others while not contributing back to society. Which I guess can sort of be true in some cases but not all. Seeing as most of the time welfare does serve its purpose and be the social security net that is needed to keep people from living in awful conditions for long periods of time. Little bit of a side track but the story serves as another way to describe the idea of a tragedy by showing that things like basic economics can be an example of a tragedy.
On Friday we also talked about the Dakota Access Pipeline and the protesters. Personally I did not have too much of an opinion on the pipeline because it is very rare for one of the many pipelines to leak. So I felt like the concern about it was mostly unwarranted until Luco showed us this article that held the reason that the first proposed pipeline was rejected. Since the pipeline had run near the capital's water supply for the same reason that the Standing Rock tribe do not want the pipeline. Basically saying that the people of Bismarck are more important that the Standing Rock tribe. This past week was dominated by slide shows. Everyday we spent pretty much the entire hour preparing and presenting our presentations about the different elements of fiction. The presentations were supposed to teach the class what we learned about the different elements. Yet, I feel like this only partially of worked because nothing that was presented changed how I thought of the elements. It definitely made a couple of key things get strongly reinforced but there was not much new. After the first few presentations it seemed more like people just regurgitating the basic information of their elements. However, I don't think this week was wasted since the class got to practice their presentation skills. While I have not seen a greater understanding of these elements of fiction I do feel more confident with the classes presentation skills. It's always good to be able to see so many people try to present so you can see the good and the bad and learn from their mistakes.
Akin the to presentations we spent a lot of time getting ready for them. One of the things that we did was watch a TED talk about the basic structure of a good presentation. The speaker tried to convince us that they had the same shape but I am not entirely won over on that idea. I say this because this past weekend I listened to a speech given by president Obama (2012) that I did not feel like follow the format. He did not really bounce back and forth between the norm and the amazing potential of something new. I felt that rather treating his proposal like they were unbelievably awesome he tried to make it seem like it was silly that we were not already doing these things. This week was dedicated to finishing up our group presentations. To start out the week we had to finish up our reading for fantasy which was the Jilting of Granny Weatherall. Which after reading as a group we felt was very lacking in the area of fantasy. We began discussing that maybe it took a page out of Dickinson's book when she explicitly left out sight from her poem "I Felt A Funeral in My Brain" because a lot of the things we believed could happen. From our close read of fantasy the definition was more or less impossible scenarios to explain something. Which the "Jilting" seem all very possible. Granny Weatherall just seemed like a senile older woman who was loosing her grip on reality. Everything that is talked about in the story that appeared to be impossible we felt could have been explained through the fact that Granny was slowly losing her sanity. Which is what lead me to look at SparkNotes' analysis of the story to get more information and it did not help too much. Nothing in their analysis really had any answers to what I was looking for.
As a group we also prepared a slide show for the class to explain Humor and Fantasy and to address our big question. We finished up everything that we wanted to for the slide show in class. Now all we really have to do is flesh out how we want to present it to the class. Hoping to be all done with the project by early to mid next week if all goes to plan! The main focus of this week in class was reading and working on our group projects. We finished up the rest of humor this week by reading "The Drunkard" which was more of a fun read than "Rape Fantasies". I think that was due to the fact that as a group we gave each character their own unique voices. Which proved amusing later on in the story when Larry, the little kid, got wasted off of a pint of what he thought was lemonade. I think adding the voices really improved the reaction that we had for the story and definitely made it more memorable. Also the humor in "Rape Fantasies" was heavily based on irony in the sense that all of the women talked about these rape fantasies that were not what you would normally think of when you think of rape. The speaker in the story also plays on that idea for a lot of the text.
On a side note. For a bit of follow up research on the passage rape fantasies, I decided to read an article on why some women have them. The research done by some researchers at Notre Dame and the University of North Texas found that women who were very sexually open or felt desirable were more likely to have rape fantasies Another thing that I finished up this week was the Quiet American. Which turned out to be a lot better than I had expected. I crammed the last bit of reading I had to do on Thursday night after I got home from my game in Saginaw. After about page eighty the story really kicks off and I started to get into the guts of the story. My favorite part of the story was *spoiler* finding how Fowler was kind of sort of involved in the murder of Alden (A.K.A. Pyle). The way the story jumps around different periods of the past was a unique way to tell the story and I really enjoyed it in the end, even though it did confuse me a bit in the beginning. I can definitely see how this book is considered to have "literary merit" and I would absolutely recommend this book to other people. I feel like I can relate to the poem from last Thursday "Did I Miss Anything" because I have not really been here all week. Due to the school closing on Thursday and missing school of Tuesday because of the Slice of Life at U of M,.
Monday we did a lot of talking about our new poem "Bright Star" and we read our SSR books. We talked a lot about who we could relate to and identify with from "Bright Star" in regards to the speaker, the speaker's lover, and the bright star. Personally I felt more akin to the bright star rather than the other two for a couple of reasons. The first being I feel like I have been steadfast in my ways for most of my life. Also I am not like the speaker or his lover because I do not have the kind of affection or received that sort of affection from any other person. I checked out shmoop to see the analyze portion of the website. It I read a little bit of loyalty section which went into depth about the speaker's loyalty to his lover. Even bringing up the idea that the speaker is more concerned about himself rather than his lover. Tuesday we got into our groups and spent a large amount of time discussing which short stories we wanted to read for our project. My group decided to read the drunkard and rape fantasies for the humor section. We have not gotten a chance to begin reading however we were able to talk a little about what exactly is humor in a literary sense. However we were able to take a look at the passages about humor. I look forward to reading both short stories and talking about them with Sloan and Luco for out project. *Note* Sorry about the late post everything minus the last few sentences had been written. It's just a little difficult to do these blogs when you miss a lot of the week. This week in class the thing that stood out to me the most was the TED talk with the lady who explained that much like at an art gallery, you have to be selective on what Literature you read. Being selective when reading literature is necessary because if you aren't drawn to a piece of work you won't have a connection with it. If you don't have a connection with a text then there really isn't a reason for reading it. We also talked extensively about Emily Dickinson's "A Funeral in my Brain" Which was a pretty straight forward poem. The speaker of the poem was experiencing a poem inside of their brain. The writer of the poem excludes any use of immediate visual imagery from the point of view of the speaker. This is to limit the setting of the poem to the amygdala or the part of the brain where most emotions such as depression are handled. This technique is particularly interesting because it isn't what the writer including in the poem but what they excluded. Dickinson wrote the poem with the intention of not having the speaker use their eyes and then relied heavily on the other senses in order to describe the entire poem to the reader. One big thing from Dickinson's poem that stood out to me was my first interpretation of what the meaning of the poem. At first I thought maybe the poem was about a person or loved one who was keeping the speaker from going insane. The line "Then a plank in reason broke" was where I got the idea from. This theory was kind of debunked, because I based it off the idea that Dickinson had close people in her real life and was trying to communicate a loss. Specifically I thought about a husband or sibling dying. After checking the internet I found out that she never married and died prior to both of her siblings. |
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March 2017
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