Lindsey's (Leefy's) Blog!

English III was quite the class. We had our high moments and our lows, which were filled with yells and whispers. We read many books and poems and analyzed the heck out of everything. Sounds like a typical English class, right? Oh no my friends, that is not it at all.

I would like to start off with the topic of Mrs. Duke herself. To say the least, she is one of the most interesting people I have ever met. My main piece of advice to give to you all is to please respect the woman! She is your teacher, so you should respect her like any other teacher. The reason I say this is because we  had an issue with respect and self awareness in our classes this year, and I don’t want y’all to have these issues because they’re no fun! Mrs. Duke is super cool, she will laugh at your jokes (if they are funny), she has great stories (ask her about chick-fila), and she knows EVERYTHING about English. I’m not saying this to suck up to her, I swear. I am telling y’all this because it is VITAL that you utilize her knowledge for your own benefit. The people who don’t, well, they are flat out dumb. Be above average, respect Mrs. Duke and use her crazy tactics!

The next piece of advice I’ll give y’all is this: read. I am perfectly aware that 99.9% of y’all will not follow this piece of advice 100% of the time. But, please try to follow this advice 99.9% of the time. If everyone reads, there will be a successful class. Also, you won’t have to listen to Mrs. Duke’s sad disappointed voice, or her angry yells (NOT fun). Junior year is so rough, I’ll tell you straight up, but if you do your work to the best you can you will succeed in the end.

The last academic thing I’ll tell you is to BLOG. At first you are going to be filled with confusion and rage. “Why do we have to do these stupid blogs?”, you’ll ask yourself. I will tell you the answer. Blogs are great because you learn from yourself and from your peers. As you are typing about that current subject matter in the class, many times you will have revelations about the topic and say “AH HAH!” awkwardly to yourself in the middle of the night. Alone. (Yeah, I say this from experience). I know some people who haven’t blogged since OCTOBER. IT IS MAY RIGHT NOW. These people have F’s. You do not want an F. Your parents do not pay $15,000 a year for you to go to EHS to FAIL. Also don’t wait until monday night to blog (like me right now) because it will bite you in the booty.

Finally I would like to ask y’all to be nice to each other. The most important thing I have learned from Mrs. Duke is that accepting people for who they are will make life so much smoother and better for everyone. Do you want to go through life being known as the obnoxious kid who everyone gets annoyed by? If you do, you need some help. Be aware of other people and what is going on in their lives. Don’t go and yell in someone’s face if they are obviously having a bad day, and don’t talk back to Mrs. Duke if you KNOW she is going through a rough time. Please respect each other and just be accepting to one another. It’s a basic lesson in life, so please take the time to learn it.

Good luck guys! Y’all will do great if you try!

P.S. Mrs. Duke does not eat babies.

It starts off with Ros and Guil being confused about where they are, of course. They are always so confused about everything and analyzing everything, even there whereabouts. At first they think they are dead, so I thought they were dead.But then I realized they weren’t dead when they realized that they are on a boat, so IIII realized they were on a boat. I think Stoppard was trying to achieve this whole “going with the feeling of the characters”. If the characters are confused, it makes the audience confused. If they aren’t confused then the audience isn’t confused. TaDA!

Ok, so they are on the boat to bring Hamlet to England. As usual, they do not know why. Then they act as if they are the king and Ros and Guil are approaching the king with the letter and Hamlet. So during this they read the actual letter. The letter (which is very dumb on the king’s part) reveals their true plan (to kill Hamlet). BUT WAIT. After the pirates come, the letter’s contents change to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern….WHAT?!?!?!?!? How on earth can a letter just magically change? Perhaps this is the supernatural element…but I don’t think so. It was so weird.

So then Rosencrantz and Guildenstern just disappear. They are gone. Which I guess is death because when you die you virtually disappear. I guess it makes sense….still very weird.

We see a lot of interchangeability between Ros&Guil in this section.The King gives them the same amount of money, making them equals. Also they talk about how the king couldn’t discriminate between them, which is true. I’m pretty sure they are BASICALLY the same.

Guild FINALLY picks up on page 104 how Ros always repeats what Guil says just in a different format and says it’s annoying…which it is.

My favorite part was when Guildenstern talked about how you can’t fear death because you don’t know what it is. “Don’t fear what you don’t know”. ‘

On page 111 we see Hamlet actually writing the letters he is going to send to Haratio and Claudius. I think maybe Hamlet planned for the pirates to raid the ship so he could get back to Denmark. I don’t know how he could have planned this without modern technology and such, but it’s an idea.

The player on page 115 says “Life is a gamble, at terrible odds” I liked this. It goes again with the theme of fate. Speaking of fate, I think Ros and Guil maybe just “dissapear” because it is their fate to die and it doesn’t matter how, all that matters is that they do.

Interesting play. Quite postmodern. So confusing!

Heyyy Playerrrs!!! (get it? players? hahaha…sorry I’m in a weird mood)

What’s new? Oh nothing, I’m confused as usual. On page 81, the player I think is describing what is going on in Hamlet, which doesn’t make sense. This play is about the behind the scenes of Hamlet and Ros’ and Guild’s characters when they aren’t on stage. So…how would they be able to just sum up what happens like the player does on page 81 if they are going at the same pace as the play Hamlet? So basically (hopefully Mrs. Duke sees this) PAGE 81 is where the confusion begins for me.

On page 80, the player makes a really cool definition of “tragedy”. He says: “The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.” Once again we see this ambiance of “obviousness” from the characters in Ros and Guild are Dead. They make everything seem so upfront. They are basically saying well DUH that happened because of what a tragedy is.

Lascivious note of the day: “The poisoner mounts his throne” page 80…figure it out yourselves.

On page 79 Rosencrantz says “that didn’t look like love to me” right after Ophelia and Hamlet have their giant falling out in front of them. Well, that is from their perspective. Their perspective is limited to what Shakespeare let them see in his original play. This means they don’t get to see the full body of their relationship because they only got to see what Shakespeare let them. So, from a limited point of view one could say that Hamlet doesn’t love Ophelia, but from a broader point of view (from the reader) we see that there is actual love.

Random notes:

On page 74 Ros and Guil are listening to Hamlets “To be or not to be” speech. Ophelia walks in as Hamlet as finishing it up with “…be all my sins remembered”

On page 85 Ros and Guil discuss direction again

Also on page 85, Guil makes a reference to how their characters are interchangeable by saying “getting our names wrong”

On page 86 Guil makes a reference to his and Ros’ impending death by saying “I hope more tears are shed for us”

Dramatic bowing on page 91

Again, Guil notices they aren’t going to be alive much longer on page 95 “If we’ll ever come back” Ros: “We don’t want to come back”

So for about the first half of the reading I was really confused. I didn’t really see the connections between this play and Hamlet AT ALL.

On page 57, Rosencrantz says “Denmark is a prison…”. I have read this a lot of times during this play. I think he is saying this because there is no way out because they are stuck in Denmark because they are characters in a play set in Denmark. That may be going out on a limb, but that’s what came to mind. On page 58ish they begin talking about the direction of the wind and north,south, east, and west. They seemed very disoriented and confused.  Then Rosencrantz straight up says “there isn’t any wind”, which makes sense considering they are on a stage.

Ok so on page 59 there were DEFINITELY some homosexual undertones and no one can say there weren’t! Let me just quote this for you:

G: “…lick your toe and wave it around a bit

R: No, you’d have to lick it for me

Pause

G: I’m prepared to let the whole matter drop

R: Or I could lick yours of course.

G: No thank you.

R: I’ll even wave it around for you.

G:What in God’s name is the matter with you?

R: Just being friendly”

OK. So EWWWWWWW. “wave it around for you” “lick it for you” “just being friendly. Again, I could be completely wrong but it’s looking like Stoppard was getting a tad LASCIVIOUS with his language here. I’m pretty sure they weren’t talking about toes!It’s just like how Hamlet was talking to Ophelia about how he wanted to “lay his head in her lap” and play “countrymen”. If you catch my drift!

On page 60 Rosencrantz just randomly yells “Fire!” and says he was practicing his free speech. This is kind of sarcastic and quite postmodern. I think many people today do this, they take advantage of their freedoms. I’m not sure why, but Rosencrantz just randomly decided to practice his free speech but he recongnizes that he is misusing it. He is taking a postmodern issue and addressing it in a post modern way. Super cooooooooool!

And what would this play be without its life lessons!? We hear some very wise words for Guildenstern “we cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us…” which also means to forget the past. This could be relevant to Hamlet. Perhaps Hamlet should forget the past, but of course that is easier said than done. We see another life lesson when the player says “uncertainty is a normal state”. (pg 66) This is true. There really is no such thing as “normal”. But one thing is for sure, we are always uncertain. It is when there are those moments that we are certain and know too much that the “norm” is broken.On page 70 Ros and Guil discuss death and how awful it would be to be stuck in a box and not even know your inthe box because you’re dead. I agree, that would suck. Then Ros goes on to say “would you rather be alive or dead?” This is relevant because it reminded me of the the “To be or not to be” speech that Hamlet makes.

Then on page 67 Ros and Guil discuss that Hamlet isn’t mad but he is moody but then they get confused in their conversation and lose the whole purpose of it, as usual.

One really interesting point thatRos makes is that we don’t remember that defining moment in our childhood where we realize that we as humans must die. I have wondered this myself before. You would think that it would be some definining moment in our lives, but I can bet you that no one remembers this. His suggestion that we are born with “an intuition of mortality” is unique and I agree. Fish are born knowing how to swim and they know they have to eat to live, so why wouldn’t we be able to realize that we are going to die?

WHOAH. DEEP STUFF RIGHT THERE.

Paraphrase:

To act or not to act- that is the question I keep asking myself

Maybe in my head it is more manly to suffer through the pain of it all

To use weapons against my bad luck

Or to fight against all of my troubles

And by fighting them I will end them. I will die and sleep-

I will be no more- this sleep called death is how we end

It hurts to feel my heart beat every second

I really wish to die

If I die, I will dream

Because in death is where the dreams are

When our souls leave our corpses

There is a pause, for respect

makes us put up with unhappiness for such a long time

for those who live through all the pains of life

The fighter is wrong

The hurts of unrequited love

The insolence of those in office

Those who wait are patient

But then when we die we dread what comes after

We don’t know what comes next

No one comes back

Our conscience makes us cowards

The natural color of seeing things clearly is made fuzzy by the conscious

I cannot act

Wait! Ophelia, remember all of my sins.

Exigence: Hamlet says this speech because he is in such a great depression about his father’s murder and he is questioning the value of his own life.

Audience: The audience for Hamlet’s speech is himself. I think he is talking to himself (since it is a soliloquy) and trying to straighten out his thoughts.This allows him to completely be honest with himself so he doesn’t have to adjust himself to an audience. His secondary audience is Ophelia. I think this is true because at the end he addresses her.

Purpose: The purpose of this speech is to reveal Hamlet’s freshest thoughts on the situation. We see that he is becoming more unstable as the play goes on, and this passage reveals that. His thoughts are irrational and sporadic.

Appeals:

Ethos: He is talking about his own emotions. Even with the first line he blatantly states “To be or not to be” which shows he is questioning his own life. He also talks about how peaceful death would be because it is a world of dreams and unknown places such as heaven. He also talks about how life is hard to live and sometimes it would be easier to just give up.

Pathos: He talks about how is conscience controls his emotions and how it can make a coward out of people because it tells them that what they are doing is wrong. The audience (those watching the play) begins to feel bad for Hamlet because they see how much of a struggle it is for him to live each day, and how much the news of his father’s murder shocked him. “The heartache and the thousand natural shocks” shows how aware he is of his own subconcious heartbeats.

Logos: The speech appeals to logic because we can see Hamlet’s state of mind. Perhaps he is going crazy for real now. We see his “normal” state slowly diminishing.

Figures of speech, imagery, diction, and syntax:

Hamlet talks about how it is more noble to everyone to suffer throughout life which makes us question our standard of nobility. He uses imagery when he says “a sea of troubles” and this makes all of his worries seem so much wider than what they actually are. The sea is a vast area of darkness and this portrays his thoughts. When he talks about his heartbeat it almost seems as he thinks of it as violent “Thousand natural shocks”. Because that is what a heartbeat is, it is a bunch of shocks. He compares death to a sleep. Where you dream dreams, but death is just a prolonged sleep where the dreams take you to heaven.

My thoughts: I think Hamlet is becoming more unstable as the play goes on. When we can clearly see what is going on in his mind it is sort of troubling. We see that he is questioning the meaning of his own life and whether or not it is worth living which depicts a state of manic madness. I think Hamlet is being engulfed by all of his emotions and he doesn’t know what do with them so he wants to give up. He isn’t crazy though. He can sort out his thoughts and realize what is rational and what isn’t.

The first thing I picked up on in this section of my reading was the odd amount of bowing that was taking place. I think that Stoppard is kind of mocking the fact that they have to bow to those of respectful statuses. We can see where Ros&Guild fit in in the social hierarchy. They are equal enough to the King to have casual and serious conversations, but then again they also bow to him.  On page 39 Guil makes sort of random theory of life. It seemed out of context; he said : “The only beginning is birth and the only end is death-if you can’t count on that, what can you count on?” Right before he said this him and Ros were having a conversation about consistency and how they wish that was occuring.

On page 40 Rosencrantz picks up on the fact that there is something beyond Hamlet’s father’s death that is bothering Hamlet. I think this is very important to the plot. This is post-modern because we see a different viewpoint on the situation. Then Ros and Guil go on to have a game of questions, which I find to be post-modern. Then they begin to catch on page 49 that there is something that isn’t quite right with Cornelius’ situation. It is important to notice this because this could give the tragedy of Hamlet an alternate ending.

Ok, so I’m ALOT confused as to what is going on. In the beginning they ros and guild are flipping a coin that always lands on heads. They discuss why this is and talk about the odds of it and how it could be luck or fate. I thought that was a cool idea. It is interesting to think of luck as a product of fate. It seemed like they were saying that luck is already put into your fate, so you can’t be a lucky person, well you can, if that is your fate. So is it the coins fate to always land on heads, or is it guild and ros’ fate to have the coin always land on heads?

I don’t understand who the player is. I’m assuming that he is a member of a group of actors, but I’m really not sure. I know from prior knowledge that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are characters in Hamlet. I’m thinking that the author chose to take this characters, place them in modern time, and create a story based around Shakespeare’s original characters, but with a twist.

In the end of my reading, Ophelia and Hamlet entered along with Cornelius. When this happened I began to think that this was going to be kind of an abridged version of Hamlet from the viewpoints of Ros and Guild, but I’m not sure.

I feel like I should know right of the bat what drama is. I mean it seems pretty obvious when you hear the word DRAMA, that it is something over the top. So that’s what I think drama is, “overthetopness”. If you are putting on play, then you have to be over the top with your movements and facial expressions so the audience can see. So that is drama. If some girl in your grade is making a big deal about something (over the top) then that is drama. So basically drama is a title for overthetopness.

Shakespeare wrote some of the best dramas. It’s because they are full of “overthetopness”! People die dramatic deaths, people love dramatic loves, etc. There always seems to be some conflict, which I think is a very important element to drama. Without the conflict, there is nothing to be dramatic about. It is also important that the conflict is basically life or death or something involving that. Life and death are two contradictory concepts that seem to cause a lot of drama! When these 2 contrasting elements are used together in conflict, there tends to be alot of “overthetopness”.

In conclusion

Drama=overthetopness which in turn becomes conflict

Life.

What is it? I don’t know. Why are we here? I don’t know. Does any of it matter? I don’t know.

What I do know is that we only “live life once” (unless you believe in an reincarnation). People often mutter this phrase nonchalantly. Listen to it. We.Only.Live.Life.Once. There is no other chance. THIS  right now is your life. Whether you like it or not, it’s the only one you’re given. You have to go with the flow of it, fight your battles, and stand up for what you believe in because there is no other chance you are going to get.

Let’s say you die tomorrow, like actually tomorrow.Now what? Well that depends on your beliefs. But one thing is true, you are dead. You aren’t on earth anymore. You are either in heaven, or hell or nothingness, it doesn’t really matter where; all that matters is that you aren’t living anymore. So if you died, would you be happy with what you have done? Would you be content with the earth and its citizens and just leave it? Who would you leave behind? Have you loved with your whole heart? Will you be remembered as an honest person? Will you have tried your hardest?

All of these questions are questions that we should ask ourselves everyday. In reality, none of the answers to the many questions of the world really matter. Questions like:

Why is the earth round? Why is the sky blue? What is 2+2? Will Mrs. Duke like my English paper? What is the speed of light? What should I eat for dinner?

The questions that matter are the ones that we ask ourselves and each other to make each other better people. We should look out for each other and make sure that we and everyone else are “living their life to the fullest.”That’s another phrase people throw around: “live life to the fullest”. No one really abides by these lines I guess, because we are all too scared. Pretend there is a guy that you’ve liked forever, but you’ve never said anything. Well, you should probably tell him because who knows? You could die tomorrow, next week, in a year, or 100 years from now. Let it all out while you can. You don’t want to leave this place with things left unsaid. Don’t be scared. Live.Your.Life.the.Way.You.Want. Because it’s YOURS.We only have a maximum of 120 years to live (that’s the maximum life for a human body, they can’t survive after that point), and most people die way before that. So basically what I’m trying to say is, say what you need to say and do what you need to do, because we’ve only got 100 years to live (maybe).

My english paper will be good. I am studying the archetypes of the women in the Wife of Bath. It’ll be cool I swear. It is a different idea and it’s nice, as Mrs. Duke told me thanks Mrs. Duke. I can’t wait to type up it’s awesomeness. I’m examning Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes involving the fatal woman. I guess it’s pretty unique because no one else as utilized this theory with the fatal woman. All of the women in the story and prologue can be connected to the fatal woman, which is the Wife of Bath.

I hope my paper is the level of awesomeness that it can get published. I am trynig to write in a way that is different than any other ways I’ve ever written. Also, I can’t wait to be done with it because it requires a lot of thinking. I guess that is necessary to have a good paper, thinking, but my brain hurts. (see my free post). Go papers!