Tempest Artwork

The first link I looked at was Greenaway's. I have to say, it was a little dissappointing. Not the ideas described or the criticism, the pictures. They make it look so old and outdated. I like all the things about each character I imagined on my own and would definitely prefer not to watch the movie. After checking out the American Repitory Theater website, I think I would enjoy going to see the play. I also enjoy that it described Caliban as a deformed creature. As I listened to the play initially, I definitely thought he was a really weird cat. When he is described as a moon-calf, I had vague memories of a kids story where the cow is jumping over the moon, and something about a cat... ok, I really don't know, but I also went to the Adaptation website. I thought that was pretty cool and would have been helpful to read along with the play. It was easy to read, but also added a lot more details which change the plays perspective. I was disappointed when I looked at the different pictures of Ariel and she was portrayed as a man. My favorite picture was by Henry Townsend, and she is a little fairy, as I had imagined. She laying in vines, so she appears small and feminine, just as I had imagined.

The Tempest

I found the audiobook of The Tempest to be incredibly helpful. It is definately harder to focus when reading the text online as opposed to on paper, so it was cool to hear the different characters voices. I found it interesting when we discussed the sex of the fairy, Ariel, in class. The audiobook portrays her to be very feminine, but I thought the name was very suggestive that Ariel was a woman as well. I don't know exact dates, but it seems like Ariel may have been acted out by a man because women simply weren't accepted as actresses back then. Who knows, but I imagined her to be a gentle little fairy, a lot like Tinkerbell. :) Listening to the play made it much easier to understand what was going on, and even though the play went in a couple circles, it was a cool story.

Literary Theory

In my search for various literary theories, I thought it would be most beneficial for me to learn about feminism and found it to be very interesting. I actually worked with a girl that was all about feminism and was surprised to learn that the actual theory isn't about women being against men. In simple terms, feminism is the belief in social, political and economic equality of the sexes, and the movement organised around the belief that gender should not be the pre-determinant factor shaping a person's social identity, or socio-political or economic rights (Wikipedia). I read Heidi's blog and began to see where feminism came out throughout the book. In most of the stories, girls like Doris and Rita are oblivious to certain aspectsof life; they learn and grow stronger throughout each story. The most intersting thing I discovered about Marxism was Marx's arguing that men have dominated women just as the capitalist class has dominated workers. He contributed to the feminist movement as well as some underlying themes in An Island Like You. The story that came to my mind when reading about Marxism was The One Who Watches, when Luis Cintron became so worried about his own class consciousness (the self-awareness of a social class and its capacity to act in its own rational interests) that he didn't realize how much his fathers company had meant to him.

A view from both sides

Aljazeera

I found it quite disturbing looking at the news of the Middle East. We can say that Americans have become numb to the war, but that entails us not paying attention to it. The people of the Middle East are surrounded by news of the war everyday and pay very much attention to what is happening, I'm sure, but they have become numb to the actual people that are dying. Numerous articles show horrifying pictures of dead bodies, floating in water, covered in burns, or lying dead in the street, covered in blood. How the people can watch and read about the events taking place with such detail everyday is beyond explaination. Perhaps our media needs to show us in more detial what is happening for more people to take a stand instead of sheltering us so much. CNN's big story is a tape of men being shot at, which is shocking, but the story doesn't even show if the men were killed and mentions they cannot identify who the men are. How does this compare to their news??

War is all around us!

In a relaxing Wednesday evening with minimal ON Demand choices, Leesh and I decided to watch Munich. The story revolves around the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany. The whole time, I was thinking about ways to relate the events to what was going on in class. Finally, one of the five men hired to kill those responsible for the events in Munich asked the other if he thought about the reality of what they were hired to do. The other man responded that he couldn't, and in the next scene, the man asking the question killed himself. Sorry to ruin the movie if you haven't seen it, but from that point, the other man was haunted by what he was doing, and it made me start to see why so many people easily look over the war that is happening. I clicked on Yahoo to find that 70 Americans have in died in October alone, which is the highest in nearly 2 years. I read on to find that we are killing nearly 43 Iraqi CIVILLIANS every day. I just don't understand how these things are happening on such a level yet so many people are so numb to it. Polls show 64% of people to be against the war, so why is there no progress towards ending it??
October Death Tolls

War Poetry

Reading Shooting an Elephant helped me understand how so many of the men that fought for our country have felt. We are told that fighting for your country is so glorious and it saves so many lives, but we never have to hear about all the helpless lives that have been lost in the battle. Everyday in the war that we are in, helpless families are being killed, and it is unsafe to even walk the streets. We hear something about the war almost everyday, and sometimes, we hear about the Americans that have lost their lives in fighting about our country, but it's so hard to get people to care beacause it is so far away. People are too busy with their own lives to see the unfortunate people losing their lives and to take a stand on this pointless war. Reading all the peotry written by the men and women that have experienced it first really makes me wish more people cared and wonder what I can do to end all the foolishness.

WAR!!

John Mayer Waiting On The World To Change

me and all my friends
we're all misunderstood
they say we stand for nothing and
there's no way we ever could
now we see everything that's going wrong
with the world and those who lead it
we just feel like we don't have the means
to rise above and beat it

so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

it's hard to beat the system
when we're standing at a distance
so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change
now if we had the power
to bring our neighbors home from war
they would have never missed a Christmas
no more ribbons on their door
and when you trust your television
what you get is what you got
cause when they own the information, oh
they can bend it all they want

that's why we're waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

it's not that we don't care,
we just know that the fight ain't fair
so we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

and we're still waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting waiting on the world to change
one day our generation
is gonna rule the population
so we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change