Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. – Albert Camus
Respond to the presentation by Eva Olsson in a post of 300-500 words. Choose your focus from some idea or image from her presentation.
Consider other focus questions or other topics related to character building.
Consider sources from the “Holocaust Literature” thread in the forums.
Be personal, reflective, philosophical, engaging.
Although you may not yet have read or seen Macbeth, you will soon recognize some familiar conflicts and issues, for you have seen them on television and in films, you have read about them in newspapers and magazines. In the play, there are conflicts between heroism and villainy, good and evil, loyalty and treachery, ambition and morality. In addition, there are conflicting loyalties – to king, country, family. You will recognize the murder mystery theme as well as the murderer’s attempts to conceal and lie and cover up, as his fear and desperation grow. You may recognize the ideas that life without love, friendship, and self-respect is meaningless or that guilt can be overwhelming.
We have all become familiar with the consequences of political upheaval, civil and foreign wars, with the grim reality that innocent people – especially children – suffer during such times. Even in our own times, we have seen that civil liberties such as freedom of speech and freedom from arbitrary arrest or execution are quickly eroded by dictatorships.
Even though the play deals with much that is familiar, it leads you to consider some new and unusual ideas, and to learn more about yourself and others. Perhaps you may not expect that a murderer would have a vivid and poetic imagination or that he would, even in defeat, demonstrate conscience and courage. You might not expect that an apparently strong, practical, and determined woman would act in such contradiction to her real nature that madness and violent suicide are the consequence.
To focus your response to Macbeth, you might want to think, write, and talk about some of the following issues. They will lead you to important perceptions – of the play’s characters, of yourself, and of others
“The Weird Sisters present nouns rather than verbs. They put titles on Macbeth without telling what actions he must carry out to attain those titles. It is Lady Macbeth who supplies the verbs.” – Susan Snyder – American Professor of English and critic
“To bite at the apple is a fearful thing … Macbeth has a wife whom the chronicle calls Grouch. This Eve tempts this Adam. Once Macbeth has taken the first bite, he is lost. The first thing that Adam produced with Eve is Cain; the first thing Macbeth accomplishes with Grouch is Murder.” – Victor Hugo (1802 – 1885), French novelist, author of Les Miserables
“How then, is the hero to be kept from playing the villain’s role …? The murder, for one thing, is not committed on the stage, though in Elizabethan tragedy it nearly always is. Macbeth, with so little reason, cannot be permitted to kill before our eyes an old man, his sovereign, his guest, his greatest benefactor.” – Elmer Edgar Stoll (1874 – 1959) Shakespeare critic
_________
Sources:
Shakespeare, William. “Macbeth” Ed. Margaret Kortes. Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.
Complete text at www.opensourceshakespeare.org
Macbeth eNotes
“We all sympathize with Hamlet, and that is understandable, because almost every one of us recognizes in the prince our own characteristics.” – Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) Russian novelist and playwright.
Hamlet raises many questions that you may recognize from your own life. Thinking about some of these issues will make your experience of the play more interesting and rewarding. Discuss one of the following questions in your blog. Write about any ideas you find interesting or thought-provoking.
“We feel not only the virtues, but the weaknesses of Hamlet as our own.” – Henry MacKenzie (1745-1831), Scottish author
“Hamlet is the most baffling of the great plays. It is the tragedy of a man and an action continually baffled by wisdom. The man is too wise … The task set by the dead is a simple one. All tasks are simple to the simple-minded. To the delicate and complex mind so much of life is bound up with every act that any violent act involves not only a large personal sacrifice of ideal, but a tearing up of the roots of half the order of the world.” – John Masefield (1878 – 1967), British poet laureate
“Polonius is a man bred in courts, exercised in business, stored with observations, confident in his knowledge, proud of his eloquence, and declining into dotage.” – Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784), British essayist, biographer, and developer of the first English dictionary
“It has been stated that Hamlet is the only one of Shakespeare’s characters who could have written the plays of his creator.” – Betty Bealey (1913 -2008)
“Hamlet again is an example of the removed thinker who is cut off – better who has cut himself off – from human affairs, from life. Who ever thinks of Hamlet as possessing a body? Hamlet is pure mind, a dynamo of thought whirring in the void. He never stopped to put his hand in the garbage can. He is Prince of Idleness, an addict of thought and futile speculation.” – Henry Miller (1891 – 1980), American novelist
“Hamlet! Hamlet! When I think of his moving wild speech, in which resounds the groaning of the whole numbed universe, there breaks from my soul not one reproach, not one sigh … That soul is then so utterly oppressed by woe that it fears to grasp the woe entire, lest it lacerate itself.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881), Russian novelist
“Hamlet’s will … is paralyzed. He seeks to move in one direction and is hauled in another. One moment he sinks into the abyss. The next, he rises above the clouds. His feet seek the ground, but find only air….” – Stephen Leacock (1869 – 1944) Canadian author and humorist
“Hamlet is loathsome and repugnant. The fact that he is eloquent has nothing to do with him being obnoxious. He’s an aging playboy. The only time he gets animated is when he bosses around the players, telling them how to do their business.” – Charles Marowitz (b. 1934), American director, playwright, and critic
“Despite the initial view we get of Hamlet’s abhorrence of deception, he tries to dupe everyone else in the play.” – Michael M. Cohen (b. 1943), British Shakespeare critic
“This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind.” – Sir Laurence Olivier (1907 – 1989), British actor/director
“Hamlet is like a sponge. If he is not played in a stylized or antiquated manner, he immediately soaks up the entire contemporary scene unto himself. It is the most unique of all plays that have ever been written, because of its porosity.” – Jan Kott (1914 – 2001), Polish political activist, critic and theoretician of the theatre
“Shakespeare wrote of Hamlet as if Hamlet he were; and having, in the first instance, imagined his hero excited to partial insanity by the disclosures of the ghost – he (the poet) felt that it was natural he should be impelled to exaggerate the insanity.” – Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849), American poet, short story writer, and novelist
“Hamlet, this tragedy of maniacs. this Royal Bedlam, in which every character is either crazy or criminal, in which feigned madness is added to real madness and in which the grave itself furnishes the stage with the skull of a fool ….” – François René de Chateaubriand (1768 – 1848), French poet and essayist
“Character … is destiny. But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet’s having married Ophelia, and got through life with a reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody sarcasms toward the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law.” – George Eliot (1819 – 1880), British novelist
“The most maligned man in history, one whose memory I propose not only to defend but to extol, is the man who complained that Hamlet was a boring play full of quotations, thereby proving the soundness of his literary instinct. Honour to this anonymous critic, whose sensitive though unlettered brain. stunned into apathy as one well-known phrase after another came booming accross the footlights ….” – Dame Ethel Smyth (1958 – 1944), English composer and a leader of the women’s suffrage movement
“Hamlet is a great story. It’s got some great things in it. I mean there’s something like eight violent deaths, there’s murder, there’s adultery, there’s a ghost, a madwoman, poisoning, revenge, sword fights. It’s a pretty good story.” – Mel Gibson, American actor
______________
Sources:
Hamlet Etext
Hamlet_eText
Hamlet Study Guide
Hamlet_eNotes
So, I figured I should share how I recovered a document, an important essay exam, during an “it-must-be-sun-spots” random lock-up of Microsoft Word 2008 on an iMac.
Symptoms:
Spinning beach ball while otherwise routinely typing in Microsoft Word 2008 on an iMac or Macbook.Steps I used to recover:
After following these steps, the user was then able to copy the text into a new Word document and carry on.
Write a scary story in which you explore at least one the following terrors:
short_story_rubric
Remember seeing the stage play of The Woman in Black last year at Lakeland College?
The Woman in Black (2012)
Well, the release of the film version is just around the corner – February 3rd, 2012.
(That guy playing the lead … looks eerily familiar)
At some point in this post I wanted you to watch a video demonstrations called simply, “The Monkey Business Illusion.” But instead of risking you scrolling down, playing right away, and missing whatever else I’ve written between here and there, let’s get the video out of the way now. But come back and read what I have written after the video plays.
One of my students(Kevin C.) brought “The Monkey Business Illusion” video to my attention during a discussion of the materialist philosopher, Democritus. How did we get to talking about gorillas? I’m not certain, but that we were talking about how our perceptions of nature – not just the little things, but the big things too – can be tricked. Until our attention is focused on a particular change or transformation, we do not see it occurring. If we are only looking for the material causes in nature, we will find them, but our perceptions will be limited by our attention span. Just as in the video, we miss not only the altering of little details, but huge events are occurring and we simply miss them – yet they are right there, like the invisible gorilla – mocking us when we discover our foolishness in not noticing changes the first time around.
Now, at almost the same time I was typing up a couple creative writing ideas on the topic of technology when another student(Cassandra O.) came to to tell me about her Dad and an email “faux pas“. Her dad had almost sent an email without spell-checking it and to his chagrin discovered he came close to sending out a message to his staff in which he had a “u” where he should have had “you”. We both agreed that in the “old days” before email/texting, a handwritten or typewritten memo would have never contained such a trivial but monumentally embarrassing typo. But the “u” was there, he had typed it and it bothered him when he saw it – like the invisible gorilla – mocking him.
So, here are the topics I have been thinking about when I put these ideas into collision:
Whatever topic you write about please take some time to address the following question as well: Is technology making us more perceptive of the world around us or is it just getting in the way of seeing the things that matter most?
Piano Mirror Illusion by Shigeo Fukuda
Write an essay about the choices people make and about how they make their decisions.
Hint: Be sure to take into account 9-25 particular details from one story to develop your argument. Your essay should be in the form of a Five Paragraph Essay. Focus your main idea and subtopics on Decisions.
First and second assignments:
30-1, 30-2, and 30-4 do the following:
Third assignment:
30-1 do the following:
30-2 do the following:
30-4 do the following:
Fourth assignment:
30-1, 30-2, and 30-4 do the following:
Hint: consider the focus questions for this course.
30-1
“Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake.” (Act 4 Scene 4, from Hamlet’s “How all occasions do inform against me” soliloquy)
Discuss the ideas developed by William Shakespeare in Hamlet about the ways in which individuals struggle to restore honour and certainty.
In your planning and writing, consider the following instructions:
• Carefully consider your controlling idea(thesis) and how you will create a strong unifying effect in your response.
• As you develop your ideas, support them with appropriate, relevant, and meaningful examples.
• Organize your discussion so that your ideas are clearly and effectively presented.
• Grapple with the intricacies of the human condition and the fundamentals of human existence, quibble about ideas related to certainty(vs doubt) and honour(vs character).
30-2
Write a short story about a character who has lost a close family member and seeks revenge but is unable to because of some sort of doubt.
In your planning and writing, consider the following instructions:
• Carefully consider your setting, characters, and main conflict.
• Add more conflict when things appear too easily solved, but don’t solve the main conflict.
• Have your character change how they feel about the idea of revenge they held early in your story.
• End your story with tragedy.
• Connect to the ideas developed by William Shakespeare in Hamlet and your own ideas and experiences.
30-4
Reflect on a moment when you received some unexpected news and thought, “This news will change my life?” As you think back, to what extent did it change your life?
In your planning and writing, consider the following instructions:
• Carefully consider how you will create a strong unifying effect in your response.
• As you develop your ideas, support them with appropriate, relevant, and meaningful examples.
• Organize your discussion so that your ideas are clearly and effectively presented.
• Connect to your own interests, experiences, values ideas. Share personal anecdotes.
Homework Updates
PDF