Elaby's LiveJournal - 57 Academics

In the book I'm reading for my Folklore class, there's a chapter on the meaning of "text." Aside from being so abstract that it makes my brain juices curdle, there was a neat quote about virtual reality.

"...examples are multi-player game sites in which World Wide Web surfers take on the attributes of various characters and interact through role-playing. Channeling their energies into virtual reality, where cyberpunk ideology reigns, this virtual class challenges the hegemonic discourse without risk..." (Titon, in Feintuch, 90).

So THAT'S what we're doing as we roleplay. Challenging hegemonic discourse without risk. I'm not being sarcastic here, either... Seriously, in my experience, people who roleplay make characters that embody things they wish they were or something wish they could express freely (like being gay, for just one example) but are unable to by the constraints of their society. This isn't to say that all roleplayers with gay characters are secretly repressing their gayness (gimme a break e_e) but that usually, they're able to express something in some aspect of their character that they don't feel comfortable expressing in real life.

Er. Going back to my homework now ^^;;

I just read the funniest little excerpt from a hoogely long Wordsworth poem. It went something like this.

Romantic Poets: Yo, anybody who wants to be in the Romantic Poet Club has to go to the Alps. It's sublime, man. Everybody's doing it.
Wordsworth: Hey, I'm a poet! I think I'll go to the Alps too!
Wordsworth: *be's a good dooby poet and goes to Italy, hooks up with some other travelers, stays at an inn*
Wordsworth: Yay, gonna cross the Alps today! Here we go! Doot de doo... *walks*
Wordsworth: *walks* Man, some of these paths are a little steep and rocky. Oh well. Oop, dip in the path. There, it goes back up again. Yep. Wonder when I'm going to get to the Alps. Hey, Peasant Boy! Could you point me in the direction of the Most Sublime Alps, please?
Peasant: You just crossed 'em.
Wordsworth: !!!!
Wordsworth: *goes and writes a poem about his feeling of anticlimax*

Bweehee.

I'm already sick of writing papers, and this is my first one ¬_¬

Okay, so I'm not THAT sick of it. I should feel lucky that this is actually something I'm interested in, as opposed to when I get to write about Edward Said. Though who's to say I wouldn't be interested in his writing if I could figure out what the heck he was talking about?

I am actually interested in the subject.

I have managed to quote Brian Froud and Alan Lee's book Faeries twice in this essay. Rock.

Augh O.o;; I just broke my dreamcatcher. It was all about to snap and I touched it to try to bend it back into shape... oops. It still looks right, though. *eyes it warily*

This is a pointless post. Pointless post, pointless post! That's a tongue-twister.

Okay, I'm reminded why I like this stuff.

In the earliest instance of fannish behavior that I've come across, Charles Lamb wrote to Coleridge about Burger's ballad "Lenore":

"Have you read the Ballad called 'Leonora' in the second Number of the 'Monthly Magazine'? If you have !!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

That's fourteen exclaimation points, folks. And it's this "rec" that made Coleridge, and then Wordsworth, read this and write things like "The Thorn," which I wrote a paper about a couple years ago.

Fandom never ends.

Somebody promise to smack me if I ever decide to do an involved project on comedies again. Why, oh why, didn't I pick something tragic to work on? At least then I actually have some grip on what current people think about such things. I feel rather cut off from mass opinion of comedy that doesn't involve sarcasm or inside jokes.

Oy VEY, these critics need to get a grip. If I have to hear one more person say that a change in comedic approach will be the downfall of all theatre (and eventually, human existence! Run for cover now, 'cause the sky, she be a-fallin'!) I'm going to scream.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: literary critics are on acid.

Well, I just finished watching the second Jane Eyre movie I've ever
seen. It confirms the fact that BBC productions are often better than
ones released in the theatre.

Here's the IMDB record for the first one I saw, with Samantha Morton, aka Agatha the Precog from Minority Report - Jane Eyre (TV 1997)

And here's the record for the one I just watched, directed by Franco Zeffirelli and with, um, some chick as Jane - Jane Eyre (1996)

The
thing about the Zeffirelli version was that it had really nifty
supporting cast. Mrs. Fairfax was played by Joan Plowright, who is in everything.
Holy crap, she SO played Viola AND Sebastian in a 1969 TV version of
Twelfth Night. Wannit. Also, St. John Rivers was played by Horatio Hornblower's own Major Edrington.
But, this being a real movie-type deal, they did a ton of really wacky
stuff with the plot to make it more OMGDRAMATIC. For example, when Jane
was a chibi at the boarding school, some random girl didn't have to cut
her hair - Helen Burns, the only other important kid, had to. And Jane
did too for, like, solidarity purposes or something. And the teacher in
the book who was mean because the headmistress, and the very kind
headmistress in the book became just a lowly teacher.

St. John,
amused as I was about him being Edrington, showed up way before he was
supposed to, and you never found out that he was Jane's cousin. Jane
didn't wander off into the moors and collapse nearly dead after she ran
away from Rochester, she returned to her now-deceased aunt's house,
which... I firmly believe she would have never gone back to.

Mostly
I was giving it the old raised eyebrow because the girl who played Jane
was really rather ugly, and while I know Jane isn't supposed to be
pretty... my petty human vanity made me go "bwah!" She's British by
birth, I guess, and by accent in this movie, but all the movies she's
in have been French except one or two. Anna Paquin played young Jane,
and was very good. Did you know she does the voice of Sheeta in the dub
of Laputa?

Also, they cast William Hurt as Rochester O.o And
while I don't have anything against William Hurt in particular... he
was completely passionless and had zero presence in this movie. He also
was lacking the whole dark-eyed thing, and his hair was rather light.
But nobody ever sticks to how people are described in the book. The
other Rochester, while ugly as hell, was incredibly charismatic and
passionate and had all the presence you could want. He was apparently
also in Oscar and Lucinda, which is one of the weirdest movies I've
ever seen. Had Ralph Fiennes in.

So, there we go. We also got
to see Bertha Mason's demise, but she didn't set herself on fire...
which defeats, like, half the symbolism in the entire book.

I love not having class ^_^ Time to do some dishes.

Jane Eyre (book) = SO COOL.

Jane Eyre (character) = Superstitious, independent, able to stand up for herself but not arrogant. Entirely satisfying.

Mr. Rochester = *SWOON*

Elaby's little gothic-romantic heart = Very Happy

I love this book.

Jane was a weird, melancholy, ghosts-and-fairies child, and she's grown up into a still endearingly superstitious, wanderlust-inclined, seriously trying to not be a romantic adult. She holds her own perfectly, is not a silly cow, and holds it together in trying situations. She knows her station but she doesn't let herself get trampled on. She is indignant when she should be.

Best thing about this book: Just when you think there's going to be an Annoyingly Beautiful and Arrogant Upperclass Rival, the plot is redeemed by there being much obvious reciprocation in Jane's feelings for Mr. Rochester.

*dances the dance of the happy lit student*

Percy Bysshe Shelley had THE most morbidly interesting life ever.

Besides writing poetry with names like Ozymandias, he was expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet on aetheism and challenged a practice at Eton which, in my book, is described as "the tyrannical system of 'fagging,' whereby upperclassmen had the privilege of abusing their juniors." British schools, I tell you... anyway, it doesn't stop there. He got eloped with a sixteen year old when he was eighteen and got her pregnant, but tired of her and eloped AGAIN with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Then his first... woman... bore him ANOTHER child, but declined to join the "menage" of Mary, Mary's cousin, and himself as "platonic sister." Mary bore him a child who died, and then he had an affair with Mary's afforementioned cousin... and he and Mary had another child, who lived. Well, lived a little.

Now that Mary's cousin was (mad, bad, and dangerous to know) Lord Byron's lover, the whole lot of them moved to Switzerland. Mary's half-sister committed suicide after finding out that she was illegitimate, and Shelley's first lover drowned herself after becoming pregnant and being rejected by a new lover. Shelley and Mary had another daughter who died, and then their living son (age three) died... they buried him in Rome, in the same cemetary Keats and eventually Shelley himself would be buried in, a place he called "an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place". And then they had another kid. And then Mary became pregnant AGAIN (fifth time in six years, poor woman) and Shelley fell in love with some woman named Jane.

This is so exciting.

And there's more!

Shelley was acquainted with Keats, and was under the impression that he died from scathing poetry reviews (whereas he actually died of tuberculosis.) He liked Keats's work, and when Shelley drowned in a storm, the only way his friends identified his "ravaged corpse" (I love this anthology) was by the 1820 volume of Keats's poetry in his pocket, which they knew he'd taken with him. They cremated him on a mountaintop, very pagany since none of these poets seemed to be Christian (or stayed that way for long), and his heart was hardened by calcium and didn't burn. So they gave it to Mary, who wrapped it in a copy of the elegy Shelley wrote for Keats, against his critics, and kept it in her desk.

That's love O_o Do you not expect this from the woman who wrote Frakenstein?

Part of that elegy, Adonais, was read by Mick Jagger at a concert in Hyde Park, to commemorate the death of a former band member. It also contains the lines:

"I weep for Adonais - he is dead!
Oh weep for Adonais..."

Bringing to mind the classic Star Trek episode "Who Weeps for Adonis" - which Adonais, according to my footnote, is derived from.

I say, damn, that's cool. His poetry, however, does not exactly grab me.

^^;;

It has come to my attention, through the works of William Wordsworth, although not through his poetry but through his prose, most specifically that prose which tries to justify or explain the modes and techniques of his poetry, that a sentence, through no fault of its own, grammatical or otherwise, even in the midst of the most interesting topic, will become, through the extrapolation of the meaning of said sentence and owing to the paths that further explanation take us down, although still important and meaningful, completely and utterly incomprehensible.

Try reading five pages of that after a dozen poems that are a thousand times more interesting than the man's explanation of them.

What's with Lucy? She's in about six of his poems, dies every time, but never at the same age. I'm really interested. I want to write my paper on it, but I fear I won't be able to come up with an actual explanation of it.

This monitor is so bad that I can't see the writing on the journal update page. Kingsbury computers really make me appreciative of my own.

I'll divulge upon my weird dreams later. Helping my father in his revolutionist campaign against Saddam Husein (please tell me I spelled that right) and killing Rasputin with a rusty katana always makes for an interesting night.

Tiiiiiired O_o

I was reading Amber (again) and there was this part... where Corwin meets a woman in this desolate place where there are lakes. And she's first described as having wild eyes, and she says, "You must be hungry, Knight at arms." She gave him food and wanted him to wile pleasureably away the hours that remain (end of the world's coming, don't you know, you can see it coming over those mountains) and when he says no, she doesn't seem to mind. And Corwin responds, "I must confess that I fully expected you to invite me to a private party which would result in me alone and palely loitering on the cold side of some hill sometime hense were I to accept."

*quotes* "Then I closed her eyes with kisses four, so as not to break the charm, and I went and mounted Star ((that's his horse)). The sedge was not withered, but he was right about the no birds. Hell of a way to run a railroad, though."

At this point, elaby goes "... O_o Who's 'he'?"

So.

La Belle Dame sans Merci
John Keats
(1795--1821)

( Read more... )

Damn. Amber is SO COOL. As if they didn't have enough neat things already. Random Keats allusions.