Letters…

                  Ok so here is the Pamela post and all Pamela related stories ie: Shamela and Anti-Pamela. Maybe this entry is too late to be marked I don’t know but I am gonna go ahead and get it out there anyway. One of the reasons why I never wrote anything in the first place is I really did not know what to say about Pamela. It along with the other stories comprise over 600 pages of letter writting. Granted with the parodies they are making fun of the style, it was in a sense, more of the same.

                  Oh before I go any further I did get to go see 2012 and it indeed turned out very similar to what I was expecting, but worth the money to see it in the theatre. So back to the task at hand. I really didn’t want to come and write this blog entry and make it some big whine & cheese festival. Looking back on past entries it looks like I am some negative person with how I look at the books. That’s not true though I found faults with the other books, I did enjoy them. Take for example Robinson Crusoe, it is a really good story, and I enjoyed his character. With Pamela though, I couldn’t find a connection from myself to Pamela, Mr B or what have you. The structure didn’t help me either, I didn’t like reading letters over and over. To me a letter in a book seems like it should be seperate in a sense, maybe something that is referred to, but by having it as the constant means of narration was just too much. I know that Prof. Jones really likes this book (as far as I can tell) but it was too big and too much of the same to make me keep my interest.

                  The rags to riches love stories from this era have always been a turn off for me. I’ve never read Pride and Predjudice or Sense and Sensibility, but the plot loosely seems similar in that a poor girl ends up having some rich dude fall for her. I CAN’T STAND these types of narrative, I can’t even watch them and that only lasts a couple hours. By the way, those caps were’t me shouting so much as being used for emphasis, gotta reserve the italics when referring to actual works. As far as the parodies go, You kind of have to appreciate the source piece to enjoy it being parodied, at least thats how I feel. Like Star Wars and Spaceballs, if you don’t like Star Wars, you probably won’t appreciate Spaceballs as much.

                 Apparently back when this book came out it was all the rage, so maybe I have just been spoiled by my generation of action movies and complex stories. Reading it now though it plays like a 5 hour You’ve Got Mail and honestly who wants that, it’s just too much. Stories about romance don’t need to be epic in length, at least for my demographic. I couldn’t imagine hanging out with a group of my friends discussing this book,nor can I imagine someone my age discussing this book with friends when it was a new novel, but I guess they did.

                  I’m trying to figure out a closing bit for this entry but what can I say? Maybe I should give props to it if it spawned all those other similar stories, just to recognize where that style of story came from but I can’t verify that assumption. It was too much letter writting about a relationship that seemed unoriginal to me. I think I have one more blog post in me before Friday, hopefully I can get it to count towards my grade and not just write it for my health. Till then.

Some short story stuff

                 With just having finished my essay a few days ago, I figured I had better take some time to do some more blog posts before the end of the term. In the essay I wrote, I focused on the short stories that were assisgned from about a month ago and I had never written any blog posts about them so I decided no w would be a good time. Probably the thing that really jumped out at me when I was reading and rereading some of the stories were Sarah Wilkinson’s pieces. Not only were they very sinilar in the title, but characters and plot were also very close. Certainly they were their own stories but it’s kind of like Roland Emmerich. Sure the guy makes great popcorn movies but ultimately they turn out the same. Independence Day, cities are destroyed (by aliens), Americans unite to save the what is left of the planet. Day After Tomorrow, cities are destroyed (by mother nature), Americans unite to save what is left. 2012 I haven’t seen yet, and I am actually going to go see it tonight but I assume it ends (and likely begins) the same way.  I wish I had the time to go look up and read some of Wilkinson’s other work to see if all her stories are about a young woman being courted, who is then attacked by a villain, and then ends up being saved by a ghost. Sure some of this is classic stuff now (except maybe being saved by a ghost, not exactly a common plot device today), but because it’s the same author and it was quite some time ago, it looks like a bit of a rehash. Maybe she needed money or something I dunno. Like Emmerich though I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy the stories they were well done and were both good reads, I am just stating something I noticed about them.

                 I really enjoyed rereading A Relation of the Apparition of Mrs Veal, mostly for the conversation that was had between the 2 characters, as well as the Sixth Sense-ish ending. The first time I read it, I really didn’t give it the attention it deserved, but after reading it again I can honestly say I liked it.

                 I’ll be sure to post something else tonight, probably about all the Pamela stuff since I haven’t written anything yet, I’ll have to see what I can muster up though as it wasn’t eaxctly my favorite part of the course, by that I mean it was my least favorite section of the course. Well until then blog and blog readers.

Time to play catch-up

                  Well it sure doesn’t seem like a month since the last time I wrote on here but I guess it has been. I think for this post I’m going to talk about Rasselas, I haven’t written anything about Pamela or the other epistolary novels, but honestly there were enough pages filled with boring letters in the first book let alone 2 other novels written the same way that I just didn’t know what to write. I’ll certainly get around to them before the semester ends, but I have to cook up some ideas of how to go about discussing them. When I began reading Rasselas I was pretty excited, with the opening description of Happy Valley it seemed like I was getting into a book that I could really enjoy like Crusoe, but unfortunatly it didn’t stay that way.

                 When Christopher and I were working on our project together, this concept of Orientalism was fairly interesting and we enjoyed our time researching, acting, and putting the movie together. The book however was in a sense anti-climatic when compared to the ideas given on Orientalism, at least according to what we found. As soon as the adventure of the Prince, Princess and the Poet got underway it was finished. The rest of their adventuring was more of an intellectual sense and that’s kind of boring. It seems like Rasselas, for all his gusto, kind of forgot what motivated him to leave Happy Valley. He was so excited about what Imlac had told him with his many adventures, but when he got to his first large city that was good enough for him and the exploring stopped.

                        I don’t want to turn this into a plot summary (although the plot is fairly paper thin) but Cairo seems to have been filled with intellectuals who want to essentially talk about how to find lasting happiness in life. Now don’t get me wrong, the idea can certainly lead to interesting conversation, and I would be totally up for the discussion with some people some time, but it doesn’t exactly make for an engaging story. This may be due to the extremely elevated language used by the characters during their conversations. I honestly felt like Johnson pulled out all the stops and included every quote he had ever come across that had to do with the philosophical discussions carried on by the characters in the novel. Or maybe I am wrong and the man is an absolute genius, by not only writting the book in a week, but coming up with all the stuff in their off the top of his floppy wigged head.

                     The book wasn’t all bad, the bit with the abduction and the Arabs in the desert had potential but fell flat when the abductors were gentlemen and happened to be no threat at all. I did appreciate the Prince’s thirst for knowledge, one that was not easily quenched, something I do feel is missing from the attributes of many an individual. There were even some lines of text that I thought were very clever in their execution. The biggest problem was a lot of the stuff in the book could have just been included in a text book or something, the plot had no real bearing on what was actually happening to the characters and was just used as a vehicle to get these various ideas across. I guess it could be that the concept of the novel was a new one and the concept that they were to entertain as opposed to educate may not have set in yet. Overall not a terrible book, but I doubt I’d have the urge to ever pick it up again.

And the moral of the story is…

So I hadn’t written about Fantomina yet because I didn’t know what to write. When I read a book or watch a movie and sometimes even when I listen to songs I want to know or understand what the author is trying to tell me. With this book I was left confused.  What in the world is the moral of the story? It kind of felt like a really round about way to have a mother’s warning, “Don’t put yourself out there looking for sex or else men will take advantage of you then if it is discovered what you did, off to the nunnery with you”. Of course it is from a time when parents used scare tactics to try and control their children but is that really what the author was trying to convey?

Plus the characters are pretty screwed up. Beauplaisir or Beautiful Pleasure rapes the girl (whatever her real name is) then she decides she wants to be with him. And she does this by continually disguising herself and putting herself in his path. I’m just not a fan of “love” stories in general, and I use that term very loosely in relation to the novel. Really the novel is more of a lust story, because Beauplaisir keeps getting bored of her, so obviously he isn’t in love, he may not even really like her that much. I’m sure other people could read the story and see it in a different light, but sometimes there are just stories I come across that don’t click for me and this is one of them.

From a historical perspective however there is some feminine progression going on here since the woman is the persuer instead of the man. Not a new idea for the time period but perhaps new to be portrayed openly in accessible literature. That’s all well and good for womendom back then but to me reading it now, I saw this novel more as a gateway to all those terrible “novels” found in grocery stores that have bad paintings of Fabio on the front cover (don’t hate me if you really like this story).

Some musings

So yesterday was an interesting day. Found out my rent was going up, hit a pot hole so big it not only flattened my tire, but dented my rim enough that I am going to have to buy a new one. Then I started thinking about Robinson Crusoe and I realized, he had it easy. That’s right I said easy. I mean he shipwrecks on an island which probably wasn’t the greatest experience ever, but after that it’s virtually smooth sailing (pun not intended nor do I endorse people using puns ever). So the guy has to fend for himself for 20 some years or what have you, then finally makes a friend and has him around for a few more years to help out. Crusoe gets sick…once in almost 3 decades, thats a breeze. Sure it was rough going when he did get sick thinking he was going to die and everything but after a week or so whatever he had worked itself out and he was right as rain again. When he first crashes his boat seems to have a never ending supply of metal for him to use as tools and to build with, wood, a ton of food, proper tools etc. He eventually gets a field of corn and has a whole trip of goats he can eat or make new duds out of. By the end of his time on the island he’s playing King of the Castle with a couple natives and a Spaniard. When he escapes, he finds out he’s wealthy and lives happily ever after (until his sequel which I am going to assume makes sure everything works out for him).

What did he ever have to worry about on the island? He spent 2 decades completely alone, never had to worry about getting to work on time, paying bills not to mention chores that would have had no place on the island like vacuuming or painting his cave a new shade of mauve or something. There were the cannibals but he had a few guns, so what did he have to worry about? Bows and arrows at best and maybe their grumbling stomachs too.

Now I am not wishing that I could end up in his situation, I wouldn’t want to leave my wife behind. But if I wasn’t married, I don’t think it’d bother me too much. Some people save up their whole lives to go to a tropical island for a couple weeks, Robinson Crusoe was able to go to a tropical island for almost thirty years, for free. Think about that for a bit.

Xury the Original Sidekick

I have yet to read any other students’ blogs in the course I am currently taking where we were all tasked with writting something in regard to Robinson Crusoe. I figured the young Islamic partner of Robinson in the book was a territory I could somewhat explore without infringing on any of the ideas that may have been presented by another student.

Well when I began reading “Robinson Crusoe” I thought of how interesting it must have been for people of the time to pick up and read this book and discover that it was unlike what they may have experienced before with regard to literature. Being one of, if not the first English language novel, the book would have been a very unique entity. When I actually picked up the book, I figured right away he’d be shipwrecked and end up telling us for 200 pages how his life went on alone. I was pleased for those 30 pages or so, that contained Xury, a loyal friend to Robinson.

Since this book is potentially one of the first of its kind, Xury must have some claim on being the original sidekick. I haven’t done research on the topic, but it seems plausable. Some of his predominant characteristics, seem to be displayed in sidekicks in book and film. For starters he has a broken language structure kind of like Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Xury is also very loyal, and willing to help Robinson by offering important advice, perhaps things the protagonist claims he would not of thought himself.

Obviously this little blurb doesn’t offer much in the way of critique or analyzation regarding the novel, but I’ll be sure to include that in the next few days.

Testing

This is me just testing how a comment comes up on my blog.