Jeff’s AP Blog

1. I think they try to solve the problem because of the first statement of the book “Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.” People don’t need to bring up so many different things that they think god wants because there is no truth with the religion and therefore they would have no grounds or reason to advocate to people about things like sin and abortion because they make up their own things that make themselves happy. The people of Bokononism also are supposed to believe that they can’t understand anything that goes around them anyways, which would be basically against their religion to advocate that something someone is doing is wrong because they can’t fully understand it. Also if they are supposedly supposed to be doing gods work all the time unknowingly, wouldn’t they knowingly be doing something if they were to do the religious dogmatism.

2. Felix mocks it by basically being ignorant or well not caring to anything going around him because its just the way he was in the world and with everyone around him. People may think that evil in things is a problem because it supposedly causes all of the bad things that happen in the world, but he wasn’t an evil man at all if anything he was indifferent to everything which makes him basically neutral therefore not considered evil. If anything the biggest problem with him was his indifference because it caused such a major impact on his kids and everything around him. His lack of a conscience when he made the Ice-Nine and the Atom bomb were something that were considered evil, but since by his indifference he wasn’t evil he was just creating them to create them it caused problems for the whole entire world and well basically the end of it.

3. I think that well… first off that it was odd that Felix didn’t show up for his son’s graduation even though he more than likely specifically said to Frank that he would show up and that first off shows that even though he was a man of science he lied to his son and is the opposite of the truths that it is supposed to reveal. I also think that it is funny that Dr. Breed tries to force his belief that if everyone were to believe in science and have faith in science and follow it or whatever then there would be no problems. But, they caused so many problems by using the science, which basically meant he was telling  lies that it was a safe thing to have full faith in science and not cause problems with place all across the world.

4. I think the hundred martyrs to democracy is ironic because of the mere thought of it. The island in itself is basically like a communism because of the governmental control over the whole of the island and also the effort to try to get everyone an equal amount of money at one point. This of course is the opposite of democracy and so its very odd that they say that they were for democracy because of the communist values that are intact. The island doesn’t even value a vote of everyone its almost like a dictatorship in a way because they have one person who makes basically all the money and has all the power.

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I finally watched the Ethan Hawke version all i can say is that, it was sure a journey, although not entirely a likable one besides how over dramatic he makes some things, which made me laugh because he looked idiotic. It was odd how everything was so sad, although it does match the books first connotation as sadness, although going deeper into the book one can find lots of humor within the way Hamlet speaks, but I didn’t feel like Ethan Hawke was able to portray that humor well and it made the play seem as if it had been sucked dry of life and that people should fall asleep during the movie instead of watching it.

Personally I don’t think that they should have had it in modern day because based off of the movie Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio, the movie was just awful and honestly made me want to puke because not only did they look ridiculous, but the way that they talked made it seem even worse because you would think that they would translate it to regular english, but that must have been much to hard for them and thats how i felt the Ethan Hawke version of Hamlet was except for the fact that he was able to portray the language better. I wouldn’t recommend this version just because its so ridiculous, but it shows a new view point and thats good enough I guess.

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I recently watched the movie Hamlet that starred Mel Gibson by Franco Zeffirelli in 1990. The beginning of the movie was kind of odd because it showed Hamlet mourning his dead fathers body and he poured dirt over him, which was not something that I figured someone would do especially since the king was not buried he was just sealed in a casket.  Another scene that struck me in the movie was the ghost scene, in the book it said that they left the room completely and it turned it into a new perspective because they just go up into one of the towers of the building instead of outside into the wilderness like the movie by Branagh suggests that they did. An effect that Mel Gibson brought to the movie was that a preconception of mine was that he was a bit crazy himself and he exemplified that perfectly through his acting of hamlet within the scenes that he is supposedly mad and not in his right mind. The most surprising scene, atleast to me was when Ophelia appeared basically in the same state Hamlet faked to be in, but she was incredibly distraught and sickly looking and was very much insane at that state. I feel that the movie overall was a great representation of the key concepts of Hamlet, which are suicide, insanity, and incestry.

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Mule

As Janie’s grandmother said in the beginning of the book  Black women are “de mules of de world” or something like that and it basically means that women take on all of the things that men don’t want to do or for example the white slave-owners wife who saw that Janie’s grandmother was carrying her husbands baby, but she didn’t take into account that it wasn’t her own choice. Although that wouldn’t have had any affect on the wife’s mood towards her.

Buzzard

Usually speculated as something that picks up the scraps after something has been killed or died on its own. The imagery of the buzzards eating the dead mule can be paralleled with say the town being the buzzards and after Janie’s husband has died they all try to pick up what he has left, which would be Janie because she owns everything that he had and so she, as a whole is all that he ever owned now. Which brings me to the conclusion that people might try to pick her apart.

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The pieces of writing that I found most helpful in my writing process were the student essays. They provided an eloquent look upon devices, points of view, and thematic ideas and inferences in the novella Heart of Darkness and pressing problems in Africa. I thoroughly enjoyed the European ego representation of the three separate stations, the “foggy knowledge”, and the extortion of Africa. The other articles and essays although not near as interesting, show the hardships that Africa and The people of the Vietnam War endured. I already knew most of what went on during Vietnam because of Mr. Meyer’s great AP US history class and the history channel.

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