This post is much less about carrying something forward, and more just my thoughts on William Shakespeare
Shakespeare is a writer. I guess he's a pretty good writer, but to me the significance sort of ends there. Sure there's a bunch of claims about how he was intelligent or gifted or super-human, but I just consider him a writer; better than most other writers, but not in a category all by himself. So with this mindset it baffles me why so many people dread or fear Shakespeare, I mean I can understand dreading or fearing reading in general because sometimes that can be a hefty task, but the all-too-common irrational fear of Shakespeare doesn't make sense to me. I think my initiation to the world of Sakespeare and his writing helped me surpass the hatred that other people feel for the Bard, but when you get down to it, he's just a writer.
The first time I engaged Shakespeare's writing, it was sort of a "baptism by fire" situation where there wasn't a whole lot of time to get worked up about old English, and tragic story lines, etc. It was more just my eight grade English teacher comin in one day and saying "here's an excerpt from Romeo and Juliet, we'll spend a few days (which turned into weeks) reading and discussing it, and then we'll move on. There was no formal "introduction" and no dumb "effects of Shakespeare in the modern world assignments" (which unfortunately exist abundantly), we just had Shakespeare thrown in our faces the same way every other piece of literature is thrown in our faces. This of all things is probably what I'll carry forward from the "Shakespeare process" (the process people go through to overcome their fears of Will), the way someone's perspective can be completely changed by just portraying him (or anyone for that mather) as insigficant. I didn't really have any preconceived notions about Shakespeare, but if I had I think they'd dissipate after giving Shakespeare a simple title, or rather lack of title. He's a writer! What more do you want? I mean clearly there was something about him that was a little enhanced, or more pronounced than other writers, and the only reason I say this is because of how long his writing has endured. That's one of the few "specialities" that I really appreciate about Shakespeare.
There must be some reason why we're still reading his writing in school today, five hundred years after he died. I mean I guess you could say someone who wrote that many plays and poems was bound to have one meaningful one, but I've never been someone who's impressed by statistics, and more than one of Shakespeare's works has carried popularity through five centuries. I think this can be attributed to the one thing that I credit Shakespeare with being truly magnificent at, which is capturing human thought and emotion. He can convey real thoughts or feelings, that we may or may not experience at some point in our lives, and make them universal for everyone, better than any other author I've read. This is probably one of the main reasons why I don't have a problem with Shakespeare, because his writing, old as it is, speaks to human emotion and holds value and substance even in the modern day. Analyzing Shakespeare's writing has made me realize the things that I look for in "good writing", these being relatability (how well the reader can connect with the writer), life lessons or 'moral of the story', and how well the author can manipulate characters to make them come to life and appear real. Scoring high in those three categories classify someone as a "good writer" by my standards, and Shakespeare is pretty high up there in all aspects of my criteria, so I'm not dreading or fearing King Lear, in fact I have high expectations for it. Hopefully it'll meet these expectations, because it's always good to read some really good writing
October 30, 2011
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Thursday, October 20, 2011
An Inconvenient Truth: Success
I want to be successful. I've wanted to be successful ever since I knew that there was a possibility that I won't be. I think we all want to be successful, yes? But at what cost? I've never seen "success" as a negative thing, and I probably shouldn't; to me achieving success is reaching a point where you've accomplished something that you want to do and are happy with the outcome. Lately though, I've thought about success in a different way, what I refer to as "popular success", where you've achieved something that not only you want, but that 'benefits society', or some cliché like that. And when I think about success this way, I think about it in a much more negative way, like, "what will I have to sacrifice to achieve success?"
A lot of this thought has been prompted by looking into the future, and thinking about stuff like "where do I see myself in 20 years?" Frankly, I don't know. I don't know where I see myself in 5 years, or even 5 days. I don't know what I want to do with my life, how I want to spend my time, reach my goals, or even what goals I want to set. I have a (rather short) list of criteria for my life no matter how I choose to spend it: 1. Enjoy my life and truly like how I live each day 2. Be an all around 'good person' to people around me. That's it. I just want to be good to myself and the people around me. Based off of this it seems like I have an infinite amount of ways to achieve "success", but if I don't truly enjoy what I'm doing then it's not really being successful.
The inconvenient, perhaps even unfortunate, truth that I've realized is that success isn't guaranteed. Of course there are many ways to define success, and maybe through someone else's eyes everyone finds their own form of success, but it seems like my version of success isn't granted to everybody. I don't know, and I'm not going to know exactly how the rest of my life will pan out, what I'll do for a living, if it will actually be for a living, what will motivate me. I used to think that all this was lain out for me and all I had to do was follow the right path, but apparently I have to create my own. Sure there's a lot of freedom with this, but then I have to start worrying about the two types of success, the one where I accept my life and the one where everyone else does too. What if I want to be filmmaker? Or drop out of school? Or become a prizefighter? Can I do that? I probably can, but will I be successful? Will I be satisfied, and will everyone around me, at least to some extent, also be satisfied? This is the part that I'm having trouble coming to terms with; I simply don't know.
I don't know where I'm going in life after high school, much less how I'll get there, and even less if I'll be happy where I end up. I wish all I had to do was stay on the straight and narrow to find my way and be successful, but it looks like I'm going to have to carve my own path. Something that sounds all nice and cliché, the only problem being I have no idea what I want it to look like. Maybe it's too early to get caught up in all this figuring out, maybe I still have time to enjoy my relatively simple style of living before I get bogged down with all this deciding and guessing and uncertainty. Nothing is set in stone, and I suppose I can always change my life at any given moment to reach success, but even that seems like a very laborious and pessimistic way to look at my future. Come to think of it, I consider myself successful now, I'm pretty happy with my life now, and as far as I can tell the people around me don't seem to have a problem with it. I don't think I got to this point by planning for the future and plotting out everything I'll do for the next few years. That seems to be my best way to achieve success, just keep doing what I've been doing for the past 15 years, and if that's really the secret to reaching success, then maybe everything will work out after all
October 20, 2011
The inconvenient, perhaps even unfortunate, truth that I've realized is that success isn't guaranteed. Of course there are many ways to define success, and maybe through someone else's eyes everyone finds their own form of success, but it seems like my version of success isn't granted to everybody. I don't know, and I'm not going to know exactly how the rest of my life will pan out, what I'll do for a living, if it will actually be for a living, what will motivate me. I used to think that all this was lain out for me and all I had to do was follow the right path, but apparently I have to create my own. Sure there's a lot of freedom with this, but then I have to start worrying about the two types of success, the one where I accept my life and the one where everyone else does too. What if I want to be filmmaker? Or drop out of school? Or become a prizefighter? Can I do that? I probably can, but will I be successful? Will I be satisfied, and will everyone around me, at least to some extent, also be satisfied? This is the part that I'm having trouble coming to terms with; I simply don't know.
I don't know where I'm going in life after high school, much less how I'll get there, and even less if I'll be happy where I end up. I wish all I had to do was stay on the straight and narrow to find my way and be successful, but it looks like I'm going to have to carve my own path. Something that sounds all nice and cliché, the only problem being I have no idea what I want it to look like. Maybe it's too early to get caught up in all this figuring out, maybe I still have time to enjoy my relatively simple style of living before I get bogged down with all this deciding and guessing and uncertainty. Nothing is set in stone, and I suppose I can always change my life at any given moment to reach success, but even that seems like a very laborious and pessimistic way to look at my future. Come to think of it, I consider myself successful now, I'm pretty happy with my life now, and as far as I can tell the people around me don't seem to have a problem with it. I don't think I got to this point by planning for the future and plotting out everything I'll do for the next few years. That seems to be my best way to achieve success, just keep doing what I've been doing for the past 15 years, and if that's really the secret to reaching success, then maybe everything will work out after all
October 20, 2011
Monday, October 10, 2011
Captured Thought: Getting Scared
Kids hate getting scared. Right? I mean they should, it's "a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, or pain." It's not a happy experience to be afraid, and there have been countless brain studies and psychological test that warn us about the harmful effects of be extensively or unnaturally afraid of something. Why then did I, and still do, get a kick out of getting scared? Not in huge doses, but I get some weird thrill out of feeling a little afraid or uneasy about something.
Let me define this "getting scared" thing really quick, I am a complete wimp when it comes to things like horror movies, haunted houses, and thrill rides; but since I was eleven years old I've gotten some excitement out of more subtle things, like reading the plots to horror stories or watching those 'ghost hunting" shows. Yeah, I was a weird kid. In fact, I'm still weird kid, because I do the same exact things nowadays. But, why? For the longest time I couldn't figure out what attracted me to the script of Psycho or Steven King novels. I thought maybe I was just a grim person, or maybe these "thrills" were filling the void left by my dislike of real thrill rides and things of that nature, but these didn't really fit my normally upbeat character.
It took me a while to realize that all these fear based things that, for some reason, excited me, were all texts or stories or plot lines; something I could read. What was really attracting me to these thrills wasn't the idea of getting scared and frightened, it was the idea of someone creating an entire world that has the power to scare or excite a person. It was more the discovery of a completely new world that gave me a thrill and really fascinated me. I eventually came to the conclusion that it didn't particularly have to be a story centered around horror or fear that captivated my attention, but it just so happened that these settings seem to be the easiest to create a world from. When a writer, or producer, or moviemaker wants to take the consumer somewhere they've never seen before, a great catalyst for this is fear, which I found boiled to two main reasons. When a writer is focused on writing fear, it's very easy to illicit an emotional response from their reader, because fear usually builds on a person's psyche, and plays with their emotions, drawing their attention much more easily. This coupled with the fact that horror doesn't really have to follow the same rules as other fiction, because it's purpose is to provide pure entertainment with no "lesson", allowing it to create a completely organic world more freely, giving readers more to explore.
It's the discovery of a new, perhaps twisted or unnerving, world created by these authors and artists that really interests and excites my mind in themes like fear and horror. The way they play with people's emotions is also interesting to me, but the exploration of something completely made up is actually really cool, especially when what's made up could be real. The way fear-based stories let you delve into the mind of someone else, both the characters and the authors, who all usually have very strong and bold characters, is what makes me want to read horror movie plots and read Steven King. What you can discover from these vast, yet, organic worlds that pertains to a person's character, or how we think, or why, and a whole bunch of other deep questions is why getting scared can be exciting... every once in a while. Believe me, I really do have a "normally upbeat character" though
October 10, 2011
Let me define this "getting scared" thing really quick, I am a complete wimp when it comes to things like horror movies, haunted houses, and thrill rides; but since I was eleven years old I've gotten some excitement out of more subtle things, like reading the plots to horror stories or watching those 'ghost hunting" shows. Yeah, I was a weird kid. In fact, I'm still weird kid, because I do the same exact things nowadays. But, why? For the longest time I couldn't figure out what attracted me to the script of Psycho or Steven King novels. I thought maybe I was just a grim person, or maybe these "thrills" were filling the void left by my dislike of real thrill rides and things of that nature, but these didn't really fit my normally upbeat character.
It took me a while to realize that all these fear based things that, for some reason, excited me, were all texts or stories or plot lines; something I could read. What was really attracting me to these thrills wasn't the idea of getting scared and frightened, it was the idea of someone creating an entire world that has the power to scare or excite a person. It was more the discovery of a completely new world that gave me a thrill and really fascinated me. I eventually came to the conclusion that it didn't particularly have to be a story centered around horror or fear that captivated my attention, but it just so happened that these settings seem to be the easiest to create a world from. When a writer, or producer, or moviemaker wants to take the consumer somewhere they've never seen before, a great catalyst for this is fear, which I found boiled to two main reasons. When a writer is focused on writing fear, it's very easy to illicit an emotional response from their reader, because fear usually builds on a person's psyche, and plays with their emotions, drawing their attention much more easily. This coupled with the fact that horror doesn't really have to follow the same rules as other fiction, because it's purpose is to provide pure entertainment with no "lesson", allowing it to create a completely organic world more freely, giving readers more to explore.
It's the discovery of a new, perhaps twisted or unnerving, world created by these authors and artists that really interests and excites my mind in themes like fear and horror. The way they play with people's emotions is also interesting to me, but the exploration of something completely made up is actually really cool, especially when what's made up could be real. The way fear-based stories let you delve into the mind of someone else, both the characters and the authors, who all usually have very strong and bold characters, is what makes me want to read horror movie plots and read Steven King. What you can discover from these vast, yet, organic worlds that pertains to a person's character, or how we think, or why, and a whole bunch of other deep questions is why getting scared can be exciting... every once in a while. Believe me, I really do have a "normally upbeat character" though
October 10, 2011
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