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soooo my thoughts are things fall apart are rather surface level, i apologize. with a novel like this it takes me a little to process exactly whats happening and the lecture today left me thinking even more about the book!

for one, it was quite confusing at first and i was constantly having to look back to make sure who this person or this person was. there were so many characters! it was so hard to keep track of them, haha, i ended up drawing a little relations chart so i could get it all worked out and less confused.

even with jon’s explanation on how achebe and conrad are connected, im still kind of struggling to see the full connections. at first i thought that achebe was a direct response to conrad, but now that ive read the text it doesnt actually stand out as much as i thought.

one thing i did notice about the book is that there are a lot of little scenes that happen in the book and it just leaves me wondering why it happened, like ezinma being taken and her mother following and okonokwo i THINK just took her home? or did he take both of them home?  it also jumped between timelines a lot, like explaining how okonkwo would persevere and provide for his father and then it would immediately jump to the “current” season and i wouldn’t get until after the chapter ended that almost 20 or 30 something years have passed. so much confusion! man, maybe im just super bad at picking up on these things. i feel like ill end up reading this book again before the in class essay anyway, so i hope the seminars help me figure some stuff out.

nicole

hello friends we are almost done arts one and we get to finish it off with some quicker readings! not gonna lie, i was pretty excited to see that this book was pretty short…

either way, i was actually really excited to read this book because ever since master and the margarita (which is by far my favourite text from this year!) ive been looking forward to more fiction over the rest of the year! i enjoyed the kingdom of this world and northanger abbey, but it was just nice to do more fictional works before the end of the year. i really liked reading heart of darkness because it really reminded me of the more gritty adventuring works that i used to read in social studies in high school! i’ve always liked fictional stories in historical contexts! i’ve actually never read much to do with the ivory trade, so it was nice to be able to read something about it.

i personally found it hard to sympathize with kurtz throughout the book, especially near the end when his poor fiancee was lied to about her name being his last words to hide the truth. it also seemed to me that marlow did this because of  how certain she was that he loved her and he kind of passed it off as her being detached from reality when really, wouldnt it be less her fault and more kurtz’s fault for deceiving her and making her believe that he loved her…

i dont know, thats a pretty specific part of the book to think about! but yeah, there’s my thoughts on conrad’s text! to be honest im kind of confused about how this relates to the theme and de beauvoir, so hopefully those questions will be answered during the seminars!!

nicole

ok first of all let me just admit that i really dropped the ball this week haha. i was about to dig into paine but then got the various emails about the wollstonecraft reading and panicked and thought that we had suddenly switched and started reading that instead. SO ill make a much better blog post on rights of man when ive actually read more of it so my questions arent just based on the lecture, haha.

there are quite a few things i like about thomas paine already!

1. i like how he chose to use common language. it shows that he didnt care what type of education or background somebody had, as long as they can read theyll be able to understand his pamphlets. which is good for me because i admit i can have some trouble deciphering, lets say, decorated language, so that makes me excited to continue reading this

2. revolutionaries are awesome. its awesome to read about them but reading primary sources of revolutionaries are like getting into their heads and knowing exactly what their thoughts are. its way too easy to just read about them but really reading their works is so interesting.

3. look at those lips. hes up to something you know he is

4. what i noticed was that this book is surprisingly cheap! thats really cool to me. anyone would be able to buy this book because of how cheap it is, you dont have to be rich to be able to read it! so not only does it to cater to everyone of all sorts of educational backgrounds (as long as you can read, at least) but anyone could purchase it, regardless of wealth or lack thereof. which makes me wonder, sorry if i missed this during lecture today, but did you have to pay or something to read his pamphlets in the 1700/1800s?

anyway. like i said, a better post when ive finished the book! unless this post is fine as it is, haha.

nicole

i supposed there were two questions that rang in my head throughout my reading of this book

1. “wait, wouldn’t freud’s case of hysteria and this book link better in terms of essay topics?’

2. “wait, i know this is a history of sexuality but it was written almost 40 years ago. how different is it now?”

unfortunately due to the terrible headaches ive had through the wisdom teeth surgery and the post-op meds im still only partway through the book, i admit it, but those two questions have still stayed. to be honest i dont really understand a lot of what its trying to get at, but i really want to relate it to current times… and to be honest, his writing style is kind of dry and could do with some spicing up. it is a very mixed-feelings reading that i am having right now, and hopefully watching christina’s lecture will help with my understanding later on!

anyway, theres one thing that ive noticed that have stayed the same throughout this history and between this book being written and now and they are that sex is completely taboo in some ways and overly celebrated in others. there are so many huge double standards and oddly different things that are assumed and accepted in our everyday lives. like, why is masturbation a widely accepted thing for men but not for women? but women can be oversexualized in our culture but as soon as men are oversexualized men get all uncomfortable with it?

i have a lot of feelings about sexuality that i cannot hope to condense into a blog post under 300 words. i apologize! im sure ill have a lot to say during seminars about this, haha.

nicole

well um

i have always been really interested in dream analysis, particularly because i tend to lucid dream really often. most of my dreams are really vivid and im able to control most of them to some extent! it goes from being aware that it is a dream to being able to control some aspects of the dream to being able to control the dream in its entirety, so freud’s dream analysis is interesting to me. i always heard about how freud tends to link everything happening in dreams to masturbation or penis envy or wanting to have sex with their mother, but i figured it was just an entire generalization or an inside joke. i never really fully understood to what extent it would actually be true. i was not prepared.

either way, i found that i could read freud’s writing really easily, which surprised me because i could understand most of what he was saying but not what words he was saying. i had a lot of questions about the certain terms but they were answered pretty well from the lecture!

im still kind of confused exactly who dora was attracted to, though. was she attracted to herr k and just repressed it, was she attracted to her father and repressed it? what about frau k? freud just mentioned about dora being attracted to so many different people but they didn’t necessarily contradict each other and they werent exactly super related to each other or mentioned again either.

how puzzling. im looking forward to the seminars this week, though!

-nicole

ok first of all i swear i finished this last night and just noticed now that i saved it as a draft and i didnt publish it. my bad. i fully admit my mistake, that was stupid, haha.

so im going to go through what i wrote earlier and kind of add on some thoughts that i had today during seminar! hooray.

TIME TO TURN ON THE FRENCH KEYBOARD.

i admit now that i read césaire and walcott the night before, back to back, and there may be flaws in this blog post because i keep getting them mixed up. my brain is still kind of scrambled from a minor concussion i had last week, too. so bear with me, words are not easy to articulate for me right now!

disclaimers aside, i found that césaire and walcott’s plays were pretty similar in many aspects, but really different in others. they both end in the death of henri christophe, but i felt like the character of christophe was portrayed differently in each play. i definitely felt like christophe was more of a sympathetic character, especially since the play is titled the tragedy of king christophe whereas walcott’s play is titled just henri christophe.  that was pretty interesting to me.

now that seamus kindly pointed out to me that christophe was pretty sympathetic in walcott’s play as well, i noticed that they portray him as sympathetic in different ways. for example, in césaire’s play, christophe is shown as this king that doesnt really know what hes doing but hes trying his best and he makes a mistake and then he kills himself. but in walcott’s, he is sympathetic because he makes a plan with pétion to kill the former king (which by the way, i am confused at, i expand this later) and he calls off the assassination but it happens anyway and hes full of regret, and he cant take that back.

compare this to what happens in carpentier, where christophe is shown as this ruthless tyrant that seized power and seized the chance to rule and doesnt care who gets taken away to prison, if they are not at the same level as him, they are his slaves now. or something. either way its a much more different perspective!

im also confused about one thing with walcott’s play though. where did dessalines come from?? i was under the impression that king henri christophe was the first king of haiti. did i miss something, was dessalines a white person or a black person i dont even know. was he actually the king? or was he a white general or a white king, i am so unclear on this please help me haha.

and why is dessalines totally unmentioned in every other text about the haitian revolution? is he a made up character or was he real? i must investigate.

-nicole

first of all im really happy with this book becausr i absolutely love history and im planning on majoring in it and oh my gosh the insight in this book is awesome. im pretty sure half the class will think this book is super boring ahaha

its just. i love trouillots argument about the line of fiction and history!!! its so true too, a lot of situations come up in the news talking about new circumstances for an old war or secret treaties or an extreme bias in a past source. bias is super important to consider when studying any piece of history and i seriously love learning and finding the context of any primary source to find out what they really mean, their situation and stuff!

im lookin forward to the llecture tonight hehehe

-nicole

first of all, my apologies were not attending lecture today! i woke up and felt really sick and decided that stuffing myself into crowded buses for 2 hours and then a lecture hall for 2 hours would not be good idea, haha. hopefully the lecture comes out on video soon so i can watch it, though!

so… i think ive found myself a pattern where i really dislike philosophers. first plato, and now hobbes… i just cant really understand their trains of thought (HA) or understand their points, really.

halfway through i realized that hobbes is really just laying his ideas down and then he started to explain them and expand on them.

but what im really confused at is why does he say that something will stay in motion until something else stops it, and then later says that nature… cannot dictate the laws of the world… when that motion is a nature of law and physics… and then he says that a sovereign must dictate laws of the world…

yet he is dictating laws of the world so hobbes are you saying that you should be king

i dont understand you oh my gosh.

-nicole

seriously though, i would love to have some sort of magical adventure where i can travel and do magic and just do AWESOME things. itd be so cool to be like a witch or something, yeah!!

but after reading doctor faustus i… am not sure how to feel. like with antigone, im not sure what the theme was? i mean, he became greedy, he wanted more than just what the regular world had to offer to him, so he did that deal with the devil for 24 years, trade amazing magics!! for his soul

but like… did he expect for the deal to just be forgotten? and just not happen? theres some moral to this story like… dont be greedy or youll have to pay the consequences?

also wow that is a gruesome way to go, being pulled to hell and having someone just find your limbs… gross

looking forward to the lecture tomorrow so i can actually make sense of all this!

-nicole

so to give a brief context for this, i have had a 4 month dramatic feud that i was not interested in being in, and it has just ended today with me cutting off all ties with the other person. it was for the best, but talking to her and listening to what she had to say actually related to my thesis!

i was going to do prompt 8, “the blind must walk where others lead.” what significance might this line have for the play as a whole?

my thesis was going to play upon two common phrases, justice is blind (kreon), love is blind (antigone), but i thought of another thing that i could use for my thesis after that fight, pride. i found the phrase ‘pride is blinding’, which i was going to link to kreon. this entire paper will be a kreon analysis/appreciation in the end… but think of it, that sounds so pretty!

love is blind, justice is blind, but pride is blinding

to love is to be blind, you fall in love and you become blinded by love, when you are in love you are blind

antigone is blinded by her love for polyneices so she does reckless things like defy the edict and the king, disown her own sister, confront the king about her actions

justice is blind, lady justice sees it how it is, she is unbiased, she is just, she is fair, she sees the situation with no bias, it doesnt matter who you are, justice doesnt see connections, relationships, familial ties, or any of that, with lady justice you could be a lowly beggar or you could be a ruler, if you commit a crime, you will be dealt the same punishment

kreon was blinded by justice, he wanted polyneices to suffer post mortem because of his attack on the state, nevertheless the fact that eteokles had his rule for far too long, polyneices attacked the state and thats what matters, he deserves to be punished, antigone defied his edict, she must be punished, she is one of two sisters left in the family but he doesnt care, she broke his law and she deserves the punishment

pride is blinding, when you think about it when you start to become confident and proud you focus on yourself and that isn’t a bad thing, focus on yourself, get yourself places, feel proud of your accomplishments, but don’t get too proud and don’t get cocky, because thats when you start to get self absorbed, sooner or later youre so absorbed in yourself, bathed in pride, that youre blind to the world, you have no concern for others, just yourself

and when you get pulled down from your high horse, you get stubborn, like

how dare you teiresias tell me that i am the reason the state is sick, how could i be the cause of this, my decisions and rulings are just (see?) and it will all work out my way-

i feel like this is the start of a good paper. hope you enjoyed that… “prose”. i mean thats a very rough outline of what my paper will be like, but as long as i can get my evidences and stuff detailed out tonight before i go to sleep ill be able to write a good paper tomorrow!

…and then play pokemon x.

-nicole