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!