I feel...

               My father commented that whenever he heard a girl start a sentence "I feel..." he felt scared. Which I can hardly blame him for. But what I hate even more when people in a college English classroom start to say "I feel..." when they are talking about a text. This is a college class not a dorky little book club or some over-opinionated blog (what? do you expect me to have enough self-control to resist making fun of myself?). 
              No one cares about the deep inner passions that this book inspired in you. English classes are about your analysis of the book, it's meaning, it's characters, it's plot, and then whatever proof you can find to support it. If someone wants to analyze why some book inspires some emotion, then fine, more or less.
             My dad than envisioned, after my somewhat passionate tirade, me becoming an English professor. He could see me, on the first day, telling all my students "I do not care about your feelings. You are never to start a sentence with I feel." (I'm such a sweetheart.)
               Well, never mind the fact that it does seem likely that professorship will be very possible.
              Not that I am saying that books should not inspire emotions, much good writing does, but no one needs to go to a classroom in order to learn feel. One gets an education in order to think.
               That is one of the reasons I love a good English class. Not only am I overtly fond of literature, but I also like the analysing and the critical thinking skills employed in it.
              Going back to his original statement I had to agree with him that young ladies (especially in English classes) should eradicate the words "I feel" from their  vocabulary. It makes me shudder even more when a guy uses those words.
               Anyway that was a fun conversation.
           

             Well I am reading Beowulf for maybe the third or fourth time. For school, mostly. It is the majority of what poetry that remains from the Anglo Saxon period. Some scholars think that it started out as a pagan tale and then when the English people converted the text was converted to be a more christionlike. That may be true or it may be the whole thing was written by some christion scribe looking at the old days. I don't know, nor do I particularily care. Because face it, it's just a good yarn, in an Anglo Saxon violent way of course.  How many stories do we read now that have the main hero ripping off the villians arm?
         I have not watched any of the movies which I hear are awful, and from what I hear of the movies I have to think that I would agree with them. I don't think that we would be able to make a good movie based on it. Firstly it is a poem, hello, unless you want people speaking in verse, most likely it should be left alone. Second we like to psychoanaylize people from back than. Well that is just a sure way to ruin the movie. Beowulf is not a complicated character. He's an ideal Saxon leader, with incredible strength and courage, and perhaps not so much strength in his head.
            I have not even touched on the Grendel's Damn (a damn is the mother of a certain animal). In the movie, I hear she is an unclad woman in high heels. Umm... What makes you think she is even a human? I mean her son steals thirty or so men and eats them (Humans may be able to be cannabalistic but even canibals have a limit to how much they can eat). I got more of the impression that she was a humanesque beast. She does live underwater and hoards treasures there. Besides they did not even have high heels than and certainly not ones that you can swim in. As far as the rest goes... it just sounds  unAnglo Saxon. But I've never watched it so I don't know for sure.

About the name...

             Many times in life one finds oneself asking herself deep and mysterious questions about life and death and why in the world did I give my blog this name?  I mean it sounds just a little pretentious (or obnoxious, I have not made up my mind yet).Yeah, I chose it pretty much because I liked the sound of it and the blog title 'this too shall pass' was already taken. Admittedly I am not particularly talented in any type of lamentations.  Nor have I as of yet,  abandoned the blog. Addmitedly I have to wonder why would someone create a blog in order to abandon it.
          That may be a reason why no one had taken this name yet.
           I've never tried to write anything that could be classified as a lamentation, I believe. Well except a depressing farie tale that I wrote the day before my spanish final, which I really ought to have been studing for instead. Laments are much easier to write then romantic poetry. I have written one, but it contains a rather unfortunate line in it.
             "Your intelligence shines in your eyes as it melts out your ears"
                  Okay maybe I could have tried a little harder. Okay maybe I could have tried, still  I think you can appreciate the difficulties involved in romance writing.
                I think I would be safer staying away from all forms of poetry. Maybe I can handle Dr Suess, oh and anglo saxon poetry. Which surprisingly enough have many similarities.
                Both can be hard to understand and both are written for people with a tendency towards ADHD. Uhhh... Ahhh.... another battle scene.. Yeah! And another! You mean that you didn't think that the biblical Judith was bloody enough?  No we need another battle scene hacked on at the end. It is so brillant.
           Someone should write a book something like a 'Psychologist in King Alfred's Court'. By the way the Anglo Saxons would completely win.
           Now do you realize why I say I should be kept away from poetry?
             
          

If you want to look intellectual...

     If you want to look intellectual say you love Shakespeare. Or you can quote the overused "to be or not to be" or "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo". You can say that he was the height of all English thought and etc.  Well it's not that I don't like Shakespeare, I do (well more of a love/hate relationship, but you get the point). But the fact is, he made me like his writings despite myself. I was determined not to like his work, mostly because everyone else liked it (Hey, I never claimed to be perfectly logical)    
            But to say that  he is the best English writer seems like a gross overstatement. Maybe he was the best playwright (maybe), he has brilliant poetry, he can be funny and a little crude (more than a little), and has brilliant poetry, and some really good characters. I think however that the source and summit of all of Shakespeare's works are his insults. Those alone make Shakespeare worth reading. Anything with sweet Jack Falstaff and Hal together is just brilliant.
           However, going back to the gross overstatements, it is nearly impossible to compare Shakespeare to something like Middlemarch. One is a novel and the other is a play, what is better, well the authors intent is different in both works. Middlemarch may be the most brilliantly structured novel in the English Language, Shakespeare steals his stories from all over and his plot lines are not particularly impressive.
           In other words I think that a person should analyze a few works of Shakespeare before they determine if he is brilliant or not. Do I understand everything of Shakespeare? No, I always have had a hard time deciphering his works, although reading it out loud helps out quite a bit.
           Actually I find Chaucer a little more easy to understand, oddly enough.

Moving On.....

           Although it would perhaps be possible to keep on about the origins of novels for I don't know a month, I think I will move on, because the majority of readers have not read stuff like Pamela. Which people of the time loved. I personally know that it is not particularly well-written, although the parody written of it (Shamela) almost makes it worthwhile. Never mind that. Actually I have no idea what to write about.
            Well for school I had to read and watch The Dollhouse by Ibsen. It was amazing. I can hardly understand how in the world the man can make selfishness look so noble! She became truly herself by leaving her three children and her husband. One of the characters in the play said of helping other people out that she would never make that mistake again (she'd never make the mistake of helping anyone else again). And within the context of the play she was 'justified'.  It's like 'what!'. Let's think this through ( or is that against becoming truly yourself?) By that type of reasoning you can say that anything in heck is justified. You can justify spray painting the prime ministers car, kidnapping and murder by this philosophy. I mean what if  murder always made me feel more completely myself than anything else. Would I be repressed because the government exerts it's cruel dictatorship against me and punishes me for a natural and healthy expressions of my true self hood? It can also justify a person's writing an obnoxious blog. Sort of like this.... Well at least I am not hurting anyone by it, well at least I am not scarring anyone for life (I hope, oh dear).
                Again moving on.....
             One of the more interesting arguments that people had was that the play was against the norms in the day that it was written. In other words it had deeper meaning because it was against the conventions of that day. Well... whether or not it was against the conventions does not make it right or wrong. Besides the conventions have changed and now everyone is for 'free love'. 
               Love is free?
          Well when people give out stuff for free that means that they do not really want it usually.I mean the only stuff we get for free is cheap, easily broken items, that are not even worth the space they take up in the trash can.
              I think that  I want to spend something on love in that case.

Novels Continued

                       Two part blog enteries, what will they think of next, sliced bread?
          Right back to novels. Well another book that Daniel Defoe wrote (he wrote Robinson Crusoe) is Moll Flanders. I had thought that the Puritans were stuffy until I read this book. Now I realize that they were just a bit of a hypocrites. I mean that book is riske. It is about all of the adventures of a woman of morally ambigious character. Fine she is not morally ambigious, she just lacks morals of any sort. Well fine, but do we need to go into every single detail of her love life. Yes apperantly we did. I personally prefered the part were she turned to crime. It was better than her wierd marriages and afairs.  Anyway people were reading it for her conversion and thier own moral edification. Yes, well... the last five pages of the book were about her sortof conversion. The rest is about well her crimes and so on. How much edification can it really give you anyway?
           I got more moral edification watching "The Nightmare Before Christmas", which I think has a far deeper meaning that anyone gives it credit for. Well maybe not but it I can easily find messages in it that I have a feeling the authors did not intend. Obviously I have been in far too many college English classes. Let us find meaning in a text that proably does not mean this but we want it to anyway, so we will make it mean it.  Well maybe it is not quite that simple.
              Oh and I wanted to talk about Pamela and even better Shamela.  Oh well until tommorrow or whenever I write next.

novel beginings

      Okay really dorky title. But it does give a hint of what I am writing about today. I am considering all the proto-novels that I have read. Guess what, I dislike every single one of them. I love novels and I am glad I read the earliest novels, but I mean seriously the first novels were written by and for a bunch of middle class puritan snobs (and before you ask, I'm not a puritan, I'm just a middle class snob).
         Firstly there is the ever famous Robinson Crusoe I hate that book with a passion to great to be expressed by words (but that's never stopped me from trying). First of all it is preachy, in the most annoying way possible. Secondly no matter how much the Crusoe thinks he has changed, and goes on about his own wickedness earlier on, he hasn't really changed he just got wealthier and more self righteous. Also all of his religion faith, belief was focused upon himself, solely. So he was a jerk. And then there was the prosperity gospel going on. When he was good he was successful and when he was bad he wasn't. But it goes even deeper than that, when he was successful that meant he was good and when he was not successful that means that he was being bad. Finally, it was also just boring.
         Oh dear, I seem to have run out of time. Germino!

Of technology and the lack thereof

        Well I have not written for awhile. I have a few papers almost due (well sort of, but I like getting ahead). Actually I have been wondering about something my mass communication teacher pointed out. There are movies, books, music, and well a great deal of other stuff that is considered great works of art. But what about computer games? I wonder is it possible to make a computer game a great work of art (by computer games I of course mean both computer games and video games).  I mean I have never really played much (any?) of either.
        I almost want to try to do that. But I am going to try to stay with literature, and the more traditional art forms I think (wow.. did I just suggest that movies are a traditional art form?). Mostly because of my general unfamiliarity of all technology.
       I mean why in the world does anyone need the internet on their cell phone? I much rather be able to type a paper on my cell phone (oh wait I don't have one). Or why do we need to have an entire new language for texting?
          Next they will put computer games on calculators (actually that would be kind of neat, not sure if math teachers would be particularily pleased). You see the interesting thing about media now seems to be that it consists not of really inventing new things nor of really improving things. Its more of putting technology we already have and than converting it to something else. Now you can see the movies on the internet, read books on your tv (well you know what i mean), internet on to your cell phone. But those things have already existed before, it's just they did not exist together.

         I've found that I have only written about what I like, which my younger sister would proably think that I am giving the wrong impression of myself. Apparently, I'm always criticising, everything. Well I guess I may have high expectations of art.
       Anyway for school I have read a newer book The Things They Carried it was complete rubbish. Well not quite the author had a fairly engaging writing style (not brilliant but good), and he did some interesting things within the book.
         During the first few chapters I found that I was not enjoying the book. At first I just assumed that I did not like war stories. Than I realized that was not it. I mean I enjoy reading Anglo Saxon literature, to them everything is a battle or needs a battle somewhere within the context of the story. I also enjoyed various other wartime literature, such as the Coldtz Story.
          Ever since I was a young girl I had a healthy dislike of fluff. Of sappy romances. That is what that the story was, no it was not a sappy romance, it was depressing fluff. The entire reason the book was written was to convey the emotion of war. There was no meaning behind, there was a questioning of truth to the story,I must admit, but it is truth of the most juvenile kind. The conclusion of the questioning was about a persons own personal or emotional truth, as being the only kind. So it just goes back to his trying to make you feel.
        The story (it's not a novel, by any stretch of the definition) told the most bizarre stories in the hope that the audience would be appalled and feel what war feels like. Well I have read more bizarre and gory stories than that, so it did not have the same effect on me as it would on others.
        In other words I was not impressed.

Movies or books?

         I was not to sure what I wanted to write about today, my decision laid somewhere inbetween books or movies. I eventually decided to write about both. Well sort of....
         Some of my favorite books they have made into movies, for instance Sherlock Holmes. I'm not talking about the new movie, I've never seen that. Actually, I'm referring to the Basil Rathbone movies. I thought he was a very good Holmes, maybe a little too much on the nice side, but still pretty close. Whereas all the newer Sherlock Holmes (and by newer I mean in colour) He is too mean by far. Don't get me wrong Holmes could be mean and was on many occasions. But in those movies he was just consistently mean and neurotic. Holmes was not so much mean as unemotional and dry. He could be even nice. Like when he panicked when Watson was shot in "The Three Garriebs"actually he was mean there too, but someone had just shot his friend. My point is I do not usually like newer adaptions.
           Oh, and speaking of Watson (I was speaking of Watson, somewhere in the last paragraph), Nigel Bruce was absolutely terrible as Watson. Watson was not a doddering old man. He had fairly good intelligence, and he had a good education (he was a doctor after all) and a limited imagination. He was by no means a sparkling wit or anything of the like, but a good stolid British man. I must admit however, I do like Nigel Bruce's Watson to a certain extent. He was a terrible Watson, but he was likeable as a dumb side kick, and there are moments I can accept him as Watson, more or less, well maybe once, and that was only during the radio series.
         My new blog does not seem to be living up to it's name.

Greetings

           Well here I am, writing on my new blog. I am attempting to become a professional (or at least a paid) story writer. I enjoy books and movies and enjoy analysing them even more. So that will in all likelyhood be a great deal of what I will be writing about.
            One of the more pressing issues in my life is how do you write a fairytale? It has been preying on my mind. Anyway I have come up with what I think are a good deal of the rules needed to be followed to make a good fairytale.
            One is the fairytale can not have any specific setting. It can be a general setting such as medieval times or mordern times or Anglo Saxon Britan but it can not be set in new york city ( I am a rebel and I refuse to capatlize New York) in the year 124 BC. Besides thats being impossible, it is too specific. You can set  in England somewhere sometime in the 12th centery. It's all just supposed to be vague. Occasionally a person can get away with breaking this rule, but very rarely.
             Perhaps the most definite rule I can find is a certain simplicity of storyline and of morals. A character can be unmoral, but they are, wether they are a good guy or bad guy, they have to obey the rules. Maybe just barely or only technically but they still have to obey the rules. For instance if the devil makes a promise the devil keeps the promise, same for anyone. Or if there is a challenge in the story the person has to follow that challenge no matter what. But it's usually just the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law.
             I also just mentioned above the simplicity of the storyline. There is only one conflict and not usually a deep psychological conflict, more of a solid physical conflict. A person is trying to escape from death, a person wants to become rich, or marry a prince or so on and so forth.
              Numbers are important in fairytales. Mostly three (you need no examples here I hope) or seven (seven dwarves, swans, brothers, annoying hot dog eating men, oh wait). There is sometimes 12 (princesses, dancing flamingoes... oh whatever). Still numbers are important. Oh and why does everything happen on the sevententh birthday? I mean it could at least be the day after.
             And it has a happy ending, if it does it's generally just a moral story that the puritans told to scare children. Personally I think that most of america's (there I am being rebellious again... or just lazy) problems come from the philosphy of the puritans. Nevermind that now though. the fairytale may be an odd sort of happy ending like the little mermaid, were because she sacrifices herself and dies she is not turned to sea foam but does get to go purgatory for roughly three hundred years instead and then goes to heaven. So there is always hope at the end of a fairytale.
          Oh and in general fairytales are bizarre. Usually along the lines of seriously who thought of that anyway?