Sucsess!

I've finished our group's website!.... sort of. The main page is here (http://teamthreespring08.googlepages.com/home), but there's still a few details needed. We're missing two people's individual pages I'm still pretty sure, and a few "touch-up" details just to make it a bit less cut-and-dry, like people adding subtitles to their individual pages. I'll still be sure to e-mail the actual link when it's fully packaged and ready, but for the most part, my part of this project is done (just in time too - I've got two mid-terms and three essays on my plate, not to mention a bunch of stories to read).

As for our reading, I'm quite interested in T.S. Eliot now. Like I said on our class forums, I was first exposed to him when doing research into Charles Baudelaire and all the works / people he may have inspired, and that influenced my first opinion of him, but now I've read some of his full works, and I've got to say... I don't think I've ever been more confused. I'd like to do our final essay over one of his works, but there's just so much to consider, so many possible topics, yet so few that haven't been done already, and that's just over his one poem The Wasteland. I'll try and have some topics picked out no later than Sunday so I can work on it all week (well, that is, when I'm not going mad with studying for mid-terms).

Project Progression

I've started my web page for my class finally this week, and there's certainly been quite the experience in pulling it together.

First of all, I was scared to death by the spectacular failure that is the UCO email system when it suddenly decided to send ALL the semester’s mail into my inbox at once. Seriously, up until now I hadn't received a single post receipt, a single post notification, or anything - I had just been checking the latest forums every day. So, not only did this aggravate me as I struggled to clean out my massive inbox, but I soon discovered that my group had already started the web page project. Despite dinner being ready in 5 minutes, I dropped what I was doing and ran to the forum for my group to post. Immediately I got started on the project, and, thankfully, finished the rough draft in the first night (I just have to actually post it now). It may have taken the rest of my evening, but I got it done. Then, I actually checked my team's website (which took me a while to figure out how to log in...) only to discover only one other person actually has their page up... oh well.

When I actually started doing research, I hit a snag too. I wanted to do a timeline of Frankenstein, starting with a history of Galvanism, but for the life of me I couldn't remember what Galvanism was called. I was half-tempted to go see my old Senior English teacher at Edmond North and asking for her notes on it (that's where I first learned about it when we read Frankenstein). I was forced to go to information source to information source, and, of course, eventually found my way to wikipedia to figure it out. They do have an effective searching system to say the least, with the whole percentage of relevance to your searching words. Well, I tried typing in "animate dead," and only 4 pages came up. One of them was the official page for John McCain... huh. Maybe that's how he's still up and alive?

Now, though, with three assignments out in my Foundations class, two in Ethnic American Literature, the project in this class and our final essay not too far around the corner, I think I've officially hit my first "overload" of the semester. By the end of the week I'm going to try and have my webpage done (hence is why this blog entry isn't exactly that deep - I don't want to spend too much time on it).

"Go away Pip nobody likes you!"

I remember reading Great Expectations for the first time when I was a Freshman in High School... and I hated it. I could never quite put my finger on why, but after re-reading it I think I understand my own feelings towards it a bit more. I do like some of the beginning and most of the end, but I just really don't like Pip as a character in the middle parts of the story. He's just too snobby. I know he has his boughts of guilt and kindness, but in the grander scheme of things, I guess when I first read this story I not only had trouble relating to Pip, but started to dislike him in the middle, longer parts of the novel. Like with any work where I don't like the protaganist, I quickly just tossed it into the deeper parts of my mind and forgot about most of it. Now, after discussing it with some of my peers, it turns out I'm not the only one that dislikes it for the same reasons - Pip's character and the somewhat dryness in the second part of Pip's great expectations. One of them even commented that it's not Dickenson's "best work."

I did get a little curious after reading it and began scowering the internet for information from the character Pip in South Park. I found a list of signs that you're too obsessed with him that I just thought I'd share some of the better ones with the internet.

5. You know every episode Pip has been in, even if he only sat in the background of the classroom.
9. You've tried to sue Curazon and Glazer (director and writer of the new Great Expectations movie) in Charles Dickens name for their plagirisim of the movie.
19. You've memorized every line Pip has ever said.
20. You get worried when Pip doesn't appear in an episode.
23. You petition for some other characters from Great Expectations to join the cast
39. You've petitoned for them to put a picture of the South Park Pip on the book cover to Great Expectations.
42. You cried when you heard Pip was an orphan
6. You warmed up for the school play try-outs by acting out Pip scenes...
7. And this somehow lands you the role of a snobby parent.
33. You start to notice similarities between Pip and Charlie Brown. (Oh, come on, don't tell me you don't see it.)

And they went on and on...

Lastly, I just found the introduction to the actual episode of South Park Great Expectations, which is amazingly accurate to the storyline for the first half or so of the episode (but hey, it was a 30 minute show, they had to have screwed up a 300+ page novel in that short of time)
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/player.jhtml?ml_video=103993&poppedFrom=_partners_yahoo_playvideo.jhtml&partner=yahoo&partnersearch=yahoo.video&_requestid=561941

Enter Victorian

We've only read four works from the Victorian age so far, but I've already noticed a significant difference between it and the Romantic age. The primary of these differences being that all the poems we read this week, at least in moral or meaning, seem to be a bit more obvious, or less ambiguous than the past works we've read. In Say Over Again, it's someone asking to hear the words "I love you" (or something to the extent of that) over and over again, and that they want the person to mean it. The ambiguity / interpretation of this poem seems to be the state of the relationship that the "lovers" (if they even are lovers) in this poem have with each other.

My Last Duchess is an even better example of this, because this poem takes a fairly direct shot at aristocracy and even love, but the ambiguity of the poem lies in what really happened to his wife.

Most of all, The Woman's Cause is Man's seemed to me more like an essay or philosophical scribbling someone wrote down that just happened to be in poetic form than a highly debated poem. Its form is so good, as a matter of fact, I'm not sure I'd be able to say the same thing with the same effect in prose (and believe me, I've tried to write such things about equality and the nature of man).

I don't know if it's my own skill in interpretation that has been improving, if the works really are getting more direct, or a combination of the two, but one thing is for certain - I'm going to be keeping my eyes on the rest of the poetry from the Victorian age to see if this occurs again, and also perhaps troll some other poetry to check my own skill of interpretation.

Stay tuned...

Could We or Should We? - Thinking upon the "creatures" of today

One of the posts I made this week was about Frankenstein in today's world, and how, in recent years, it might actually be returning to its more original storyline. Not only is it more and more people that I talk to seem to know that Frankenstein has been misrepresented, but with the movie-turned-musical Young Frankenstein now playing on Broadway, a story much closer to the actual novel Frankenstein has emerged in popular culture, and not a moment too soon.

Personally, I've classified Frankenstein on my "must read" list for society in general. It is a good story that involves the reader emotionally and logically, and it applies to many present-day issues. Not long ago, I believe I heard something about the nation of Chile distributing selected works of literature across their nation to increase literacy, but for unknown, crazy reasons they chose to distribute Kafka's Metamorphoses. I can't say much to the Chilean culture or how that would be as relevant, but I just feel that a novel like Frankenstein could do wonders for both literacy and intellect. The book does, after all, relate to most any form of science that is currently controversial or otherwise debated. Shelley's novel would almost force involvement on the issue, because in simply deciding how you feel about the characters in the story involves some introspection on matters of what life is and how it is defined, which is probably the core question at the root of stem-cell research and abortion, not to mention other social problems like parenthood.

In the end, there's always one quote that comes to mind whenever I read this story:

"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

The question of "should we," over the question of "could we" is the one question that is at the heart of all science and experimentation, and could help answer many questions humanity has, just as it could have answered Victor Frankenstein's questions about nature, life and death.