I have a magic toenail

It is with utmost regret that I must admit I have fallen short of my strict principles of Procrastination and Anxiety. I finished my book, found all of my criticisms and background sources, and even wrote half the project.

Reading the book was a breeze. It took me forever, but that’s because I suck at reading. Every time I read a paragraph or two, I have to stop and think about it, which leads me to think about everything else I’ve read. Then I usually end up reading the same thing again.

Then again, that could be a good thing.

Reading Orwell was different from most things I have ever read. His writing is straightforward and concise, never leaving anything unexplained and never over-explaining. This makes it easy to understand and to realize when a statement that transcends mere plot is being made. This can also make it difficult to write about, because there is not much left for the reader to assume - at least not on the small scale.

Perhaps this is why it was so difficult to find good literary criticism on Nineteen Eighty-Four. Most the articles I could find were written about practical things such as modern day surveillance and court systems. The only good ones were those that broke down the style of Orwell’s writing and attempted to characterize it, and those that observed subtle motifs. Everything else that may be the subject of an average criticism is either absent from Nineteen Eighty-Four or too obvious to be worth explicating.

Or maybe I’m just really confused.

What I never expected was how much I thoroughly enjoyed reading the criticisms. The other two that I read for Paradise Lost and Slaughterhouse-Five were no less than brutally boring, but the three I found for Nineteen Eighty-Four were interesting, relevant, and hardly managed to escape my understanding. I was almost sad when I finished reading them and writing their respective abstracts.

Almost.

Due to my genuine enjoyment of Nineteen Eighty-Four, I have resolved to read George Orwell’s other famous work, Animal Farm, over the summer. That is, if I get around to cutting my toenails.

I am extremely behind in the reading of my chosen book, I’m supposed to have read the whole thing by now, at least once, but I am no where close. I have read the better first part of it and found a few criticisms though.

As I was reading it some time last week I came across a quote from Big Brother that hit me like a slap in the face:

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past”

This is - word for word - the bridge of one of my favorite songs from probably my favorite band, “Testify” by Rage Against the Machine.

As it turns out, several of RATM’s other songs have been influenced by the book including Sleep Now in the Fire and Voice of the Voiceless. Orwell’s name is even mentioned in Voice of the Voiceless, and the music videos for these songs have the recurring themes of dystopia and censorship.

 I would get back to reading it but I lost it. I will find it.

I have finally chosen a book for myself to read and to study for my final project. The Winner is George Orwell’s 1984. Written in 1948, the year 1984 seemed at the time quite futuristic and with a capacity for technologies that we still do not have, and these comprise the setting of the story. If you have read Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)  or Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), it’s kind of like that. What led me to this book? The other contestants must be introduced to answer this.

 The Princess Bride

This movie has been a favorite of mine until this day and when I found out that it was first a book and that it was more than just a work of fantasy I decided I wanted to read it. Reading books in my spare time is somewhere between clipping my toenails and putting windshield wiper fluid in my car on my list of priorities, unfortunately, so I never got around to it. I did read some reveiws though and learned that the book was satirical of writing for writing’s sake (and reading for reading’s sake), fantasy and other picturesque forms of writing, and, strangely, measurements and their devices.

Also it has Andre the Giant and Billy Crystal as a senile old man in it, making it automatically epic.

The book is not particularily themetical or deep but I figured I would give it a shot. Mr. Kreinbring said it was a “great book” but that I would not find enough criticism pertaining to it. There is criticism - a lot of it - but not of a literary nature. And Kreinbring suggested that if I like “That sort of thing”, I should look to my next contestant.

The Call of Cthulhu

I cannot find how this book is, in any way, like The Princess Bride as Mr Kreinbring suggested. It was fair judgement that he recommended it to me, however. I read a little bit into it and immediately picked up on the same theme that has been common to many of the books we have read in Ap English so far (The Fog). This redundancy, and the frightening overuse of adjectives, turned me off from it. It did look very interesting and I plan to read it (perhaps after next time I clip my toenails). How could I resist a story about this guy?

Cthulhu - rumor has it he is the subject of Cloverfield.

The main reason I didn’t choose to read it (I would have loved to - very short) was because there was very little criticism that focused in on this one particular story of H. P. Lovecraft’s (he wrote hundreds of them). The story has also become a MMORPG confusing the matter even more.

Continuing between the lines of science fiction and fantasy, and remembering how much I enjoyed  Fahrenheit 451 when I was still a novice reader (not to say I am anything more now), I discovered 1984 on a random list of 100 “Great Reads”. Skeptical of the scholarly value of the books on this list, I did some searches for criticism and brought back far more than I needed.

 And that is how I picked 1984.

“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea”

The scene that I have chosen – the assault of the small coastal Vietnamese village – does not specifically appear in the book, Heart of Darkness. But it does work to convey the ideas that are mentioned in the passage from the book that I have chosen. The first idea is that “The conquest of the earth [is] the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves”. The people in the village that is being assaulted are doing nothing in the war that is going on around them. All they are is people with “a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves” who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But this part is obvious. It is the justification for this pointless assault that relies more on the cinematic orchestration of the film to express: Conrad’s “idea”. The idea is, more or less, that we, the civilizers, are God. We must bring order to the “chaos” that is produced by the cultures of the rest of the world, and only God can bring order to chaos. And we must have an “unselfish belief” in the idea. The way that the filmmaker accomplished this was by the music that was played throughout the clip, the Lieutenant’s (captain/colonel/whatever) desire to surf at that particular spot, and the unsparing slaughter of the natives. The music clashes with the action of the scene horribly; it is somewhat happy and nonchalant. The whole time it is playing I wanted to turn it off. But it reflects the states of mind that the soldiers have to maintain during the assault, shown must prominently by the Lieutenant when all he cares about is surfing on the shore. There are innocent natives being chased down, explosions going off left and right, and children and women getting shot in the back all around them, but they are indifferent to it. The lives of these people matter nothing to the petty desires of the soldiers, the civilizers, the Gods.

Most charcters in the novella have an equivalent in the movie. How are they altered and why?

 There are many characters in the novella that have obvious relations to characters in the movie - Colonel Kurtz and Agent Kurtz, Willard and Marlow, most of the people on the boat, the Africans and the Vietnamese, and so on. But there is one character of certain importance in the novella who has no blatant correlation to any one character in Apocalypse Now - The Intended. The way in which this character is “portrayed” in Apocalypse Now is far more subtle than the other characters. Women are nearly entirely absent in both of the works and yet they play quite a prominent role and are representative of one of the core themes that the two works share. In the novella, the only women are The Intended who shows up briefly near the end, and Kurtz’ African mistress. The reason that women play such a symbolic role in the novella is because the way in which Marlow would have us believe that they live - in a world that is too good to be real. This world that he describes is symbolic of the world that we all put ourselves into, or want to be put into, or are forced into, by way of lying, lying to ourselves. It is my belief that this aspect of the novella is shown, or at least alluded to, by several different (lesser) characters that otherwise seem relatively unimportant. They are the Playboy bunnies, and Clean’s(?) mom. These characters all display the characteristics of living in “that beautiful world of their own”. The Playboy bunnies enter the scene by way of a helicopter and spend there entire stay in Vietnam on a stage, in a place enclosed by a fence on one side and a river on the other. These women are beautiful - it is their profession - and are there only to entertain, to bring a sense of “the real world” back to the men at the station. And Clean’s mom sends him a tape recording talking about trivial things happening back at home, and says almost jokingly to “make it back home in one piece”, moments after he has been slaughtered by Vietnamese natives.

The reason this “character” was changed this way was because to include the Intended, exactly as she was in Heart of Darkness, just wouldn’t work with the adjusted plot and circumstance of the film. In particular, it would require much suspense of disbelief to allow The Intended to have a civilised conversation with the man who killed her lover. Also, the two images in the movie previously discussed are more visually and emotionally engrossing.

I hope engrossing means what I think it means.

Sources:

http://firstsearch.oclc.org.huaryu.kl.oakland.edu/html/webscript.html:%3Asessionid=fsapp11-33259-fc2hqj63-z6iq6c:sessionid=fsapp11-33259-fc2hqj63-z6iq6c:

http://www.imageandnarrative.be/issue08/donatameneghelli.htm

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

 And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
  And should I then presume?
  And how should I begin?

In this stanza, Prufrock addresses his frustration with engaging women in conversation. The first few lines suggest that Prufrock has come into contact with many women (all of them, in fact) and, as I learned in the Odyssey, the white, braceleted arms of these women suggested that they are young and beautiful. Prufrock does not refer to women as entire humans here, he only says that he has seen the arms and that the perfume from a dress may be the reason that he is distracted. This is because Prufrock is intimidated by the beauty of the women, and has a hard time seeing them as beings on a plane level with himself. In the last two lines, Prufrock asks two questions. The first is “Should I then presume?” which is very similar to “Do i dare?” which is asked several other times throughout the poem. Frustration is eminent in this question, and the second question “And how should I begin?” increases the sense of frustration twofold. Frustration, confusion, and uncertainty are prevalent in the poem, and in this stanza they are directly linked to Profrock’s veiw of confrontation of women.

I picked this stanza because I find it difficult to talk (to anyone). Talking about something, a certain idea or occurence, is not so hard. The initiation is another story. I hate small talk, it makes me feel retarded.

Static Images:

and

Moving Image:

http://www.fotosearch.com/ATB430/gu101/

It wouldn’t let me embed it, but it’s a clip of an old dude getting laughed at as he approaches 4 young girls.

 Music: