Reflection

The problem with writing reflections is that I get the song from Mulan stuck in my head which then leads to more Disney songs. Then finally leads to a huge train wreck of annoying Disney songs (in my mind of course). The second week into a semester is one of the best because you've had a week to get back in the flow of school and in your new classes you have actually began to do work (hopefully). Also a new semester means new beginnings yet you rarely realize that until the second week because you are mostly likely a sleepwalking zombie wishing it was still winter break. Like in LA we have started a new unit on tragic heroes which are always fun because you always know that the main character(s) are going end up dead/maimed/heartbroken so you have a happy ending to look forward to.   If you didn't realize I was being sarcastic in the last sentence then you need to go out and find your sense of humor because it's probably lost, lonely and missing the warm recesses of your brain. Greek tragedies are cool because they are like a time capsule that captures the culture of the society and when you compare today's values and beliefs you can see that they really haven't changed over a thousand years or so. That can either be good or bad depending on how you look at it. All in all the week was good and I'm optimist that the next one will be even better. Oh and just in case you don't know what a train wreck of Disney songs sounds like I have included one for your listening pleasure.

 

Oedipus Rex Inventory

Oedipus Rex

Oedipus the King

Oedipus the person is very interesting because he is the prince of Thebes and becomes the king of Thebes by marrying his mother (the queen) by accident. Granted his parents tried to kill him, so he was adopted by another royal couple and didn't know that the Queen of Thebes was his mother. As a person Oedipus can be very arrogant which can be seen when he tries to cheat fate by running away and also just how he talks to people in the play.

The play Oedipus Rex is an Athenian tragedy written by Sophocles. Though it was written and first performed in 430 B.C.E it is still performed and taught today. Oedipus Rex is one of a three part series of plays that follow Oedipus and his family and they were thought it be first performed at the Dionysian dramatic festival in Athens. Oedipus Rex is Sophocles most famous play.

The myth about Oedipus Rex is trying to teach people that they cannot cheat the fates no matter how hard you try. Once Oedipus' parents receive a disturbing prophecy that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his  mother. They try to kill him as a baby but he is rescued and given to another royal couple. Once Oedipus learns of the prophecy, when he is older, he runs away to avoid harming his adopted parents. While he is on the run he has a corral with a man and ends up killing him unaware that the man is his real father. Then he goes to Thebes and frees the people of the Sphinx and it is suggested that he marries the widow queen who is his mother. Showing that you cannot cheat your fate.

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher who was originally trained in medicine but then when to Athens to attend Plato's Academy where he was a brilliant student but disagreed with some of Plato's ideas. So after Plato's death he went and tutored Alexander the Great who was a Macedonian prince. After Alexander conquered Athens Aristotle returned to start he own school but had to flee because Athenians were unhappy with Macedonian rule and wanted to kill Aristotle. Aristotle studied and wrote about many topics including biology and philosophy. 

Tragedy in Greek theater are plays that origanally started as religious cermonies to honour the gods. It soon evolved into a form of entertainment that taught the general public to not cross the gods and/or fate. Other Greek tragedies dealt with basic human questions such as "Why are we here" and "What separates humans from animals". No matter what point the tragedy was trying to drive home they never had happy ends and it was common to kill off the main character or all the main characters except for one so then the story can be past on. 

Hubris is using violence to humiliate and degrade someone and it can also mean being very prideful and self conceited. To the ancient Greeks hubris was not a good thing and is a fatal flaw that led to the tragic downfall of many Greek heroes in myth. In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus thought that he could outsmart the fates but he thought he was all that but in the end his hubris brought his downfall. 

 Dramatic Irony is where the reader or audience know more than the character(s) about their tragic fate(s). Therefore the audience knows that the play is going to have a really unhappy ending sometimes from the first few lines of the play or piece of literature. This forces the audience to watch the tragic downfall of characters a the while feeling guilty that you cannot save they from fate. 

Sophocles is a Athenian playwright who wrote Oedipus Rex and Antigone among others. He competed almost 30 times in the Dionysian dramatic festival and is thought to have written around 120 dramas for the festival. Of all of his works only 7 survived completely intact and 400 lines of another play survived yet the rest is gone. He died in Athens when he was 90 years old.

Tiresias is a blind prophet of Apollo who tells Oedipus that he killed the former king and brought plagues upon the kingdom. According to myth Teiresias was blinding by gods for revealing their secrets and then once while he was walking he came across a pair of snakes and hit them with his stick. Hera didn't like this so he turn him into a women and then seven years later he came across the same pair of snakes and igorned them so he was turned back into a man.

  

Fate governed all in the Ancient Greek culture. Nobody could change their fates not even the gods and this is reflected in greek tragedies. The Greeks also had monster/god things called the Fates or Moiria who decide how long each person shall live. At the end of a person's life the Fates cut their life string ending their life. 

Greek Theater was more a religious ceremony to honour the god Dionysus then entertainment and was performed in an open air venue. The plays that were performed were almost always tragedies and only had three actors and a chorus. The plays were funded by the polis and was only performed once. Below is a picture of the Theater of Dionysus in Athens, Greece. 

Benedictio Orbis

Baraka is a magical journey that takes you around the world and shows you the wonders and ills of the planet we call home. The film relates to world literature because they both share the common goal of making people aware of other people and cultures. Baraka is awesome because it reaches a different audience than world literature because sadly not everyone loves reading but the vast majority of people love watching movies. The film relates to 1st semester because it shows us images of oppression and horror going on in the world around us that you would have to be a Roger to ignore. Also the inspires people to care and not be the apathetic to wonder and sometimes the horror of the world around us. Some of the images that the film uses to stir this compassion and wonderment were the scenes of nature like slow-mos of cloud patterns and cute mediative monkeys in hot springs. Also the scenes showing religious and spiritual ceremonies were strangely touching. Then later in the film they show nature and peoples' ways of life being destroyed and your brain jumps back to the scene of the mediative monkey and the various touching ceremonies. Which in turn makes you feel strangely protective of the nature and ways of life around you and around the world. One of the most impactful images for me was the factory farming of the chicks on the conveyor belt. Just the coldness in which living things are treated in that scene sticks in your mind because to the people run that factory those living chicks are just a product and are just money. The images that I thought were moving differed from Brussat's images because she focused on the people and the contrast between them were as I focused more on the wonder of nature and how humans as a whole are impacting it.

The movement and sound in the film Baraka impact the overall meaning because the music impacts the mood of the images that are shown. Like in the film when the crater that spewing out lava is shown there is really intense music that is suppose to make you feel almost fearful of the earth's power to destroy. Yet if they had paired the lava with Into the Universe with Morgan Freeman-esque music then you would have been more awed by nature's great power than fearful. Also how the city and urban scenes are paired with fast paced music so that you feel the hustle and bustle of the city and the rural or nature scenes are paired with peaceful, zen type music. As for movement it is much the same principal because the nature scenes are sometimes slow-motion or a time-lapse for cloud patterns and the night sky. The city scenes are sometimes also time-lapse yet they give feeling of stress as you see thousands of people moving swiftly from point A to point B as quickly as possible with little notice to their surroundings. The conflicting uses of time-laspe in this film efficiently show the polar opposites of our planet. Also the complete lack of talking in this film makes each image completely objective so that each person can develop their own opinion. Which is rather strange in today's world because it seems that every film, person, newscast and song is forcing it's opinion on you and it trying to sway you one way or another. This film is different though because it is just trying to sway you towards compassion for the world around you. I seriously doubt that they film makers care where you find the moving moment in the film as long is there is one and as long as you are swayed towards empathy. Also in the beginning title there is a almost complete eclipse yet almost at the end the same eclipse is shown ending and revealing the light. Which I believe is the purpose of this film to take people who are in the darkness of apathy and show them the light of empathy. 

     

Lord of the Flies Reflection

The ending of Lord of the Flies is rather melancholy because first Piggy is killed then Jack and all the other boys end up hunting Ralph down with the intent to kill him. Yes they do get rescue and yes Ralph doesn't end up getting killed by Jack's tribe but the adults who rescued them don't have a clue what when on and how the boys reacted to it. The way you can tell this is because when the Navel Officer finds them he asks them if they were playing war and ask how many were dead, kidding. But of course the reader and the boys know that the war wasn't fake and that they killed two other boys not to mention the third dead which they fail to mention which is the boy with the birthmark on his face. Also in the beginning of the end of the book when Ralph and Piggy go to try and retrieve Piggy's glasses from Jack the author no longer refers to the boys of Jack's tribe by name instead they are all called savages. Which shows that the transition from boys to savages is complete and also that they are one collective beast instead of individual humans. At the very end of the book when the Navel Officer shows up the reader ends up seeing, for the first time, the boys through an adult's eyes. It is at that point that you remember that these boys are only 6 to 12 years old and they are killing each other and killing things in savage ways. The way the Navel Officer describes Jack is also really interesting because he asks who's in charge "A little boy, who wore the remains of an extraordinary black cap on his red hair and who carried the remains of a pair of spectacles at his waist, started forward then changed his mind and stood still." (Golding 207). This is a very interesting quote because throughout the whole book I at least viewed Jack as this intimidating guy who kills things for the fun of it but in fact he is a scared little boy with mud on his face and pointed stick. Also when the Officer learns that there are no adults he says "Fun and games," (Golding 206)  even though the boys savagely killed two boys, almost killed another and set a whole island on fire in the process. Yes it definitely sounds like fun. Also in what sick game would have that outcome...tag?! "However makes it to the tree last gets savagely beaten and thrown over a cliff into the sea! Now who wants to play this fun, completely normal game?". Then to add insult to injury when the boys start to cry because they have practically went to hell and back the officer turns away to let them pull themselves. These reasons are mostly likely why Ralph refers to the officer's heart as dark (Golding 208) because instead of the kids who were killing each other being the savages, the officer is because he is withholding comfort and understanding from those who needed it most. Overall the ending to Lord of the Flies was good, disturbing but definitely good.

       

The Lord of the Flies

The symbols that have emerged so far in Lord of the Flies are numerous considering the fact that everything in the book is a symbol. Some of the more interesting ones being that obviously Simon is religion which makes sense because upon learning about the beast he comes to the conclusion that the beast is not real. Instead the beast is inside everyone therefore it is not something you can hunt and kill. This mirrors what many religions say to their followers in the fact that Simon is saying that to change the world around you, you must first change yourself. Also the conch symbolizes control because when Jack was trying to replace Ralph as chief, he blew the conch and he used it to try and show his power over other people. Also when Jack's clan raids Ralph's for fire some of the boys go to protect the conch because that is the symbol of power and they thought that Jack was going to try and steal it. Another symbol that is used in the book is butterflies prancing around which symbolizes peace and harmony. These butterflies, of course, are only ever metioned being in Simon's secret place which means that his place is the only place of peace and harmony on the island which isn't good. When Jack's clan slay the pig in Simon's place the book describes how the butterflies are dancing when the clan first gets there. But as soon as they start slaying the pig, the butterflies leave therefore the only place of peace and harmony on the island was destroyed.      

The Matter of Brains

(FYI it based sometime in the future)

Every time I step in the operating room a pit forms in my stomach. It's not because I'm nervous,  I have no reason to be considering that I'm one of the best neurosurgeons in the world. Though it took a few years at this job to pin down cause of this pit, I believe I have. The reason I dread going into work each day is remorse. Remorse that the new technology and techniques that use to save lives is being used for such a vain and shallow purpose. About thirty years ago a procedure to safely transplant human brains into another body with few side effects was developed. Right after it past the human tests and was approved by the FDA it was used to save the lives of those who fell victim to tragic accidents who had no other hope of survival. Yet as the years past and more and more people were saved by this method, the aristocracy found a new purpose for it, to extend their life way beyond the norm. The way they can do this is if their body is dying then they simple go and find a new, younger body and have their brains transplanted into their new body. This is endless cycle means that the rich can never die and rule over the poor for as long as they wish. As if living for as long as you wish were not enough, the rich had to take it a step further and change bodies if they thought that their old body didn't meet society's standards of beauty. Creeped out yet? I probably should be creepy out by this or a least a little disturbed but body switching has become a norm in society and it's hard to be disturbed by it. If you haven't guessed it already I'm the head surgeon at the biggest body-switching clinics in the world. Do I think body-switch for eternal life and beauty is moral wrong? Yes a little bit but if you get a paycheck as big as mine you learn to play along with things...  

Learn to Fly

So this week I decided to do something a little different. Instead of a creative writing piece or a rant about society I going to analyze a song. Said song is Settle by Two Door Cinema Club which I believe is saying that you only have a finite numbers of days so use them to try your hardest and really do your best. Yes I know that it sounds like a Hallmark card but still some of the most cheesy things can be helpful in their own way. Also near the beginning of the song it says "I can see all the things arresting me but I control, I control". Which I took as meaning that no matter what you control your own destiny, no matter the outside forces are you are ultimately responsible for the outcome of your life. That being said the "city" in the song "that drags you in" is not taking responsibility for your actions and push the blame for your mediocre life on to someone or something else. What also backs this up is that in the song the city is refereed to as "drenched in sin" so when you refuse to accept your mistakes and blame other people then you will keep blaming other people and your life will not exactly be a happy one. I'm not saying that self-conceited jerks don't get "far" in life because sadly they usually do. But you can have everything in the world and still not be happy.