yellow-red-blue by wassily kandinsky

Although I kind of dismissed seeing profound meaning in abstract art in a previous blog post, I do think it’s more interesting to come up with stories for something without any limitations. The title of this piece reminds me of a Portugal. The Man song that I listened to probably every day a few summers ago titled “Purple Yellow Red and Blue“, so they’re almost identical. To get in the creative spirit, I spent a few minutes just staring at this painting with the song in the background, and came up with this.

The painting has a clear distinction between the left and right sides. On the left, the composition is sharp, clean-cut, rectangular and bright; on the right, dark colors, soft shapes, skewed perspectives and uneven lines are used. If I learned anything in Graphic Design class, it’s that yellow is an abrasive color, and sharp lines are unsettling to viewers. Blue and softer shapes work in just the opposite way: they convey feelings of comfort and make a viewer feel more at-ease. In this painting, I see a strained relationship between a parent and a child, likely a teenager. The alarmingly yellow figure complete with sharp lines shooting from its body is a parent that is throwing a door open to his or her child’s room, perhaps to yell at them to do some chores, help out, or get their grades up. The child’s side of the room is cluttered with games (I see two Rubix cubes and a chess board), and the imperfect, warped shapes display the creativity of a child. The separation between this parent and child through the types of shapes used creates a feeling of blandness (strikingly boring if that makes sense), surrounding the adult and creativity and excitement surrounding the developing child. The typical perfect lines, rectangles and circles on the adult side reflect the life of a cubicle office worker who wears a white shirt and grey slacks, whereas the child still is figuring out how to be his own person, and isn’t afraid to challenge the norm.

The best thing about abstract art, in my opinion, is that this is just one of the thousands of stories that can be told just by a few shapes and colors. Unfortunately, when I see something in abstract art (as with the white and gold/black and blue dress) I have a very hard time trying to unsee it, or to see something new. I’d like to know what else people can see in this painting, because I’m sure it’ll be such a different story than what I see.

we don’t want to play a man’s game

Shakespeare often uses female characters to make subtle (or not-so-subtle) assertions about the roles assigned to women in their society and the ways  in which they are treated. What does Shakespeare say about women through Gertrude and Ophelia?

During our panel discussions, I found that this topic about Ophelia and Gertrude is actually pretty interesting, so here’s my take on what Shakespeare was trying to say with the two of them. I think that although both of the women don’t do much in the play but die, they reflect a society with which good ol’ Billy Shakes did not agree. (I’m sorry I just said Billy Shakes, but I think that’s probably what his friends called him.)

It’s up for speculation whether or not Shakespeare cared about gender equality, but I tend to believe that he did. It’s clear to me that he didn’t place Ophelia and Gertrude in such submissive roles so that they could be praised by the audience for being submissive—its so that they can be examples of female liberation once they break free from their oppressor’s grip. Obviously, it’s a sad ending, but it seems to me that both of the women took control in their deaths because they were not in control of their own lives.

I’m pretty interested in the deaths in Hamlet; after all, it’s a tragedy, and each character’s death has a distinct meaning. I’m going to touch on the suicide question here too because I think that suicide and the two women are heavily intertwined. To me, both Gertrude and Ophelia’s deaths are somewhat unclear—were they honest suicides or were they just accidents? An important distinction is to be made between these two, but for the sake of my argument, it works best if we consider that both Ophelia and Gertrude did end their own lives. In Act 4, Gertrude enters, bringing the grim news of Ophelia’s death, and describes her “As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element. But long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death” (IV.vii.176-181). Ophelia is said to be seemingly unknowing of her own peril, and that she was pulled to her death under the creek’s surface. For this reason, I see her death as extremely passive. She has been passive for her entire life, replying to Hamlet only with “No, my lord”, “Ay, my lord”, or most unfortunately “I think nothing, my lord” (III.ii.101-105). Making her sound like a servant, she responds to her brother and father with similar respect in Act I. So it is fitting that Ophelia would be passive in death as she was in life. If she recognized that she was about to drown, then her suicide would be submissive, but still it would be her decision. In my view of the play, Ophelia’s death was her liberation from a bleak world in which she was valued only for her purity.

The moment when Gertrude drinks from the cup, whether or not it was a premeditated suicide, was certainly an act of defiance against her husband. Claudius demands her not to drink from the poisoned cup, to which she responds “I will, my lord; I pray you pardon me” (V.ii.269). I absolutely love this line, but it only has the powerful impact if I consider her death as a suicide. If this was actually an accident, it would seem that Shakespeare was trying to convey the message of “don’t try to break social norms, or you’ll die”…or something to that effect. With my view of Shakespeare as something like an early feminist, this doesn’t seem quite right. Gertrude, with dignity, elegance and class, basically tells Claudius “#%&@ you”, and ends her life. It’s almost beautiful, but certainly hardcore. Here lies the difference between Ophelia and Gertrude: Ophelia is passive in her death, and Gertrude is active in hers.

 

As boring as Gertrude and Ophelia can be as characters in the play compared to Hamlet or Claudius, I really have a soft spot for these women, and I think it’s neat to explore how they are used as subtle symbols of female liberation.

 

abstract

When I was a kid, I used to be simply fascinated by abstract art—probably because all I could do was scribble shapes and lines all over a paper with my super cool 120 pack of crayons or Microsoft paint. Here’s what my masterpieces looked like (I still have hundreds of these on my computer from 2007).

Erica Branham, Young, Wild, Free. MS Paint, 677 x 442 px. 

I still have an appreciation for abstract art, but I don’t understand it at all. Aesthetically, I adore art that doesn’t look like anything, but I can’t help but think it’s silly when people try to give Jackson Pollock’s art some profound meaning. It all just looks so chaotic to me, but I think that more traditional art, such as Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, conveys chaos and art in a more sophisticated manner. Obviously, I’m missing the point about Pollock’s work, because I see no real reason why his seemingly random streaks of paint have resulted in fame when there are so many artists out there with greater technical skill who are overlooked. This all sounds very negative, but that’s not the point. I’m a big fan of art, and for the longest time I wanted to become an artist, but I guess I just don’t get abstract art, which doesn’t discount the fact that Jackson Pollock is a legitimate artist or that people enjoy his work.

That being said, I think that Nancy Sullivan’s poem “Number 1 by Jackson Pollock (1948)” captures the feeling of the painting very well. She explores the painting as a unique piece that has no symbolic meaning, “No similes here. Nothing but paint.” I think that the poem’s final two lines are the essence of  abstract art, and I really liked them. She writes “How to realize his question/Let alone his answer?” which kind of gave me that aha-moment when I read it. Maybe abstract art is confusing so that we can draw personal conclusions from its ambiguity.

on being sentimental & lacking time

For myself and most of my friends, senior year just sucks. I figured that this was going to be the easiest year of high school, but I guess I made things worse for myself by taking hard classes. As a result, I feel like I have no time to do much of anything that I enjoy except squeeze in an episode of The Office before starting my homework. This year is pretty bittersweet, as I’m sure any other senior can tell you—the excitement of college starting just around the corner runs parallel to the sadness and nostalgia that comes from literally counting down the days to graduation and the days until you stop seeing all the students and teachers you’ve grown up with.

I’m an incredibly sentimental person. I keep a shoe box in a drawer filled with notes that my friends folded up and slipped into my locker in middle school, I saved the receipts and ticket stubs of when I went on my first few dates with Ras, I took home a collection of pebbles and seashells from when I visited France, I keep journals for my future self to read and glimpse back into my teenage thoughts, and I keep a huge (mostly empty) photo album for my years in high school. One of my favorite things to do is look through my mom’s old photo albums she kept when she was a teenager, and I don’t want to have to flip through a slideshow on a clunky laptop when looking back at my memories. Being so sentimental and becoming emotionally attached to photos, I get really nervous about where my photos will end up in the long run considering the digital age we live in. To ease my worries, I’ve started my own photo album.

Unfortunately, I only have half of the album filled because during freshman and sophomore year, I actually had the time to sort through my favorite photos and get hundreds printed at a time at Walgreen’s. For the past two years, I’ve been just trying to get enough sleep to function at school the next day, and I’m certainly not going to sacrifice an hour or so of my already limited sleep to dive into this process. I’m hoping that once school slows down (if it ever does—I’m not feeling hopeful lately) I can print out photos from the past two years and complete my four year long project to physically preserve my memories to enjoy decades from now.

I feel like I’m missing something

The so-called “Bad Quarto” of Hamlet confuses me. I don’t quite see how it’s bad—I feel like I’m missing something. I expected to be pretty amused by how badly the first draft was, but I feel so underwhelmed. While I read it, I just didn’t catch what was so drastically different to make it so miserable. Disclaimer: I’m not really a Shakespeare kind of gal at all, so I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if this is trash compared to his usual writing. The language itself is so different and difficult for me to understand that this looks exactly the same to me.

Of course, I noticed little differences, but nothing that dramatically affected the plot or quality of the play as a whole. Most of the changes I’ve noticed are in the shorter, single lines of quick dialogue that don’t amount to much rather than glaring differences in the longer passages that give more information to the story. The first significant difference I’ve seen is in Act I Scene 1 l. 112 when Horatio is giving a speech waiting for the ghost to appear, and in the final version of Hamlet, the ghost enters in line 125, but in the Bad Quarto, the ghost enters around line 100 (I’m using the final version of Hamlet for line numbers), and cuts short Horatio’s next twenty or so lines.

The next huge difference is at the very beginning of Act 1 Scene 2 when Claudius is telling everyone about how sad he is over his brother’s death. In the final version of Hamlet, this section is 39 lines long, making his fake-mourning much more believable. However, in the Bad Quarto, it’s only ten lines that show much less emotion. Actually, all of scene 2 seems to be shortened significantly. I can see how this can be considered bad for the plot and overall quality of Hamlet because so much information is simply left out.

michaell caffio

To be honest, this was a pretty interesting assignment. If you know anything about me, you know that I’m really into typography, font and design, so getting to peek into the design world of Shakespeare’s time was fascinating. The first thing I noticed was on the first page, when Iago says that Othello gave Cassio, a Florentine a promotion. The spelling of this name wasn’t what I’m used to seeing—Michael was spelled as “Michaell” and Cassio looked much more like “Caffio” because of the way the letter s was shaped in this type. But even more interesting to me is that the s‘s in the manuscript didn’t always look like an integral symbol (∫). Scanning through the website, I noticed it varies whether or not a word includes the stylized s. On page 314, one line reads “Wherein I ∫poke of mo∫f di∫a∫trous chances” and contains both the modern s and the stylized s.

I can’t seem to figure out if there’s a pattern or not for when to use which s (I’ve looked through plenty of pages, and each contains lines that have both characters), but the same kind of thing occurs with the characters v and u, depending on which manuscript you look at.  This is almost more curious to me because each manuscript I’ve seen has the ∫ instead of s at times, but only a few, including the one from Brandies University, exchanges a u for a v.  Just like the s issue, this swapping of letters doesn’t happen in every occurrence of the letter. However, on page 317, Iago says “Sir, would ∫he giue you ∫omuch of her lippes, As of her tongue ∫he oft be∫towes on me, You would haue enough.” This character swapping is very strange to read, and even stranger to try to sort out as a Shakespeare amateur. Also found in that line, the spelling of the words lips and so much are just slightly off, reflecting how languages change over time. On that same page, Emilia’s name is printed, but the E in her name looks so different that I barely recognized it at first. It is the symbol Æ, but in a embellished font that makes it look much more flowery.  Overall, I really thought it was neat to look over these manuscripts and try to figure out these stylistic differences. 

bossypants & getting in someone’s pants

I’ve kept Tina Fey’s book Bossypants on my bookshelf and on my books-to-read list for around three years, and while I still haven’t committed and finished it, sarcastic remarks are plentiful throughout it (obviously, it’s Tina Fey). While some examples of sarcasm are more appropriate for a school blog than others, they’re all witty and excellent. In the chapter  “All Girls Must Be Everything,” Tina gives us her take on beauty standards that women have to put up with. She sarcastically lists every quality about her body that directly contradicts western beauty standards, but prefaces the list by saying it is “a personal inventory of all my healthy body parts for which I am grateful” (Fey 24).The whole list functions to dismiss and reveal how ridiculous female beauty standards are, and it’s pretty amusing.

Less interestingly (in my opinion), approximately one million puns can be found in Shakespeare’s works. Did he invent them? Probably. In Act II of Othello, Iago replies “If she be black,and thereto have wit/ She’ll find a white that shall her blackness fit” to Desdemona upon her asking what would happen if a woman were unattractive physically but smart (Shakespeare 2.1.132-133). The pun is that “white” and “wight” (meaning a man), sound the same. His reply is actually that a woman can always find a man to sleep with her. Honest Iago, you’re so charming (an example of sarcasm, if you didn’t like Tina Fey’s take on it).

oxymoron and paradox

For my first example of an oxymoron, I chose to look in Invisible Man by Ralph Waldo Ellison (my favorite book we read last year). In the very first few pages of the novel, the invisible man says  that he can “see the darkness of lightness” (Ellison 6).  This whole book had a lot of oxymorons concerning visibility and darkness, actually. In Romeo and Juliet, there’s this entire passage filled with oxymorons.

Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
O anything, from nothing first create,
O heavy lightness! Serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
(Shakespeare, Act 1. Scene 1. 175-182)

Okay, so all of my examples are coming from books I read last year (except Romeo and Juliet), but hey, at least I enjoyed some books we were forced to read. This first paradox comes from a close second for my favorite English III book is Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. In chapter 12 (one of those weird in-between chapters that didn’t directly focus on the Joads), a character says “[California] ain’t that big. The whole United States ain’t that big. It ain’t that big. It ain’t big enough. There ain’t room enough for you an’ me, for your kind an’ my kind, for rich and poor together all in one country, for thieves and honest men. For hunger and fat,” which certainly fit the requirements for a paradox to me (Steinbeck 80). Clearly both California and the entire United States are large enough to hold a couple of people, but once the voice explains that the rich and poor and hungry and fat can’t ever truly coexist, it makes sense. Next there’s a pretty significant paradox in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain in Chapter 18: “I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft,” (Twain 126). The paradox within this passage is the comparison of the raft to a home; of course, Huck hadn’t really had a proper home, so this makes sense given his personal circumstances. To Huck, home was just a place of comfort with someone he loved (Jim).

they’ll tell the story of tonight

I think it’s safe to say that the only music I’ve listened to on my own in the past three months (seriously) has been the Hamilton rap musical soundtrack by the lyrically brilliant Lin-Manuel Miranda. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Hamilton is an absolute phenomenon of our generation—let me explain why.

I’d venture to say that learning about the American Revolution and the birth of American democracy can feel incredibly distant and unexciting to many as it is taught in many history classes, but Hamilton brings us (especially young people) to relate the story of our “ten dollar founding father without a father”. The story of Hamilton is told through a series of clever raps, which truly commands both attention and appreciation from listeners. In my opinion, the most special characteristic of Hamilton is that no major characters except for King George III are white unlike their eighteenth century counterparts. Having racial diversity in a production that includes some of the most admirable people in American history allows for more than just white kids to identify with George Washington (played by Christopher Jackson) or Thomas Jefferson (Daveed Diggs, an angel) and get interested in the American story.

Hamilton is very political in nature as the story includes how to create the American government, and provides relevant commentary on immigration, government size and foreign policy. Alexander Hamilton is an immigrant from a Caribbean island, and the Marquis de Lafayette is a French immigrant who, with Hamilton, ultimately save the revolution (see: “Immigrants-we get the job done” in Yorktown). When Lafayette is first introduced in Aaron Burr, Sir, it is clear that he is struggling with the language, then proceeds to have the fastest rap in the whole musical during Guns and Ships, which displays immigrant excellence (Hamilton also exemplifies this throughout nearly the entire show).

Throughout the second act, the debates between Federalists (Hamilton) and Democratic Republicans (Jefferson, Madison) are brilliantly written as rap battles between Hamilton and Jefferson mediated by President Washington. Cabinet Battle #1 deals with the establishment of the national bank and Cabinet Battle #2 debates the American involvement in the French Revolution. Each explains both sides of the argument through witty verses as well as giving insight into the great contrast in personalities and political views of the two founding fathers.

I could go on about the things I love about Hamilton (including excellent female characters, scandals, the fateful duel between Hamilton and Burr, heartbreaking reprises, beautiful songs dedicated to the founders’ children, unparalleled vocals…) for probably eight more paragraphs, but it would be more beneficial to just leave a link so you can listen to the forty-five tracks of pure genius. Seriously, if you love yourself, listen to this soundtrack. 

heavy threads

“Heavy Threads” by Hazel Hall

When the dawn unfolds like a bolt of ribbon
Thrown through my window,
I know that hours of light
Are about to thrust themselves into me
Like omnivorous needles into listless cloth,
Threaded with the heavy colours of the sun.
They seem altogether too eager,
To embroider this thing of mine,
My Day,
Into the strict patterns of an altar cloth;
Or at least to stitch it into a useful garment.
But I know they will do nothing of the kind.
They will prick away,
And when they are through with it
It will look like the patch quilt my grandmother made
When she was learning to sew.

Honestly, I have a seriously hard time with poetry. I think it’s nice to read and I can appreciate how poets string together words into something noticeably beautiful, but I have a decent amount of trouble trying to extract any meaning from it. That being said, I’m not going to analyze this; I’m just going to react. I picked out this poem because its title reminded me of wearing big heavy sweaters in the fall and that probably ranks in my top 100 favorite things, but the poem isn’t really about that. It’s about light—something I can be thankful for that literally brightens up my day.

The speaker in the poem watches as strings of light knit themselves haphazardly into a messy cloth, which I think is an excellent mental image. It reminds me of playfulness and the excitement I had as a child upon waking up to the sun shining through my window. The words used throughout the poem are highly negative, which I also really like because I like to think that the speaker and I feel the same way when we wake up in the morning. Writing that out actually made me feel a little sad—shouldn’t I be happy to wake up to the brilliant light and find that I’ve been given another day?

I also like the idea in the poem that light guides our days. It makes sense: the sunlight wakes me up by shining through my window, it encourages me to do something important during the hours when the sky is light. And I do always feel a little happier when I walk through a patch of sunlight peeking through the trees or clouds.

I’m really not sure if I missed the point with this poem, but I liked it. I’m feeling a little scatterbrained tonight. I’m drained, unmotivated, and it’s dark outside—the dreariest, most hopeless time of day. Maybe tomorrow  morning’s light will help.