WHY HOMEWORK?! WHY?

So I would like to say (mostly for effect) that Paradise Lost is unlike anything that I have ever read before…but that would be untrue.
“What Julia, you're SO smart that you simply read stuff like this?! Pretentious little…”
No no! Let me finish. I have had a similar reading experience before…when I was in first grade.

What?
I know, I know. But listen…before I was in prestigious Hood college classes, such as this one, I was in the lowest reading group in first grade. Why? Because I was small and didn't speak up much.
Nice.
But anyway...I was in kindergarten a YEAR before my town got our shiny new primary school, and instead was in a tiny school with grades K-5 (yes…with kids ages five to eleven).

Not only this, but the teachers were in a transition period between the cramped school we were at and the fancy smancy new school in progress, making the them distracted a best.

“You snooze, you loose” is a horrible saying to use when referring to an educational environment, but that's exactly how it was. Sure my teachers were nice, sure I learned about dinosaurs and how to count by fives, but I had a character trait (and still do)  that isn't appreciated as much as it should be: shyness.
I didn't call out in class enough, which made my teachers come to the logical conclusion that I was slow (logically).

I was kept at a low level in first grade and never spoke up in class (because you know, I was six), and it wasn't until my father marched into a parent teacher conference, with my mother hanging nervously on his sleeve and silently begging him to not yell at the kind, young, fresh-out-of-college teacher, that I was boosted up to the highest reading group overnight.

Go mom and dad, right?! Wrong. As I said, I was six, and a smart little thing.I had it good. My afternoon consisted of twenty minutes of “see Spot run” and an hour and a half of SpongeBob and Rugrats. I now had to read “Look how Spot runs to the fence after the ball,” a painful process that always took over an hour, reading word by word by word. It was the first time I was challenged, but what was the point? Rugrats was on and it was time for my chocolate milk. (Seriously mom.)


Fast forward fourteen years (and zoom past the pains of puberty) and here I am, with the cynical arrogance of a liberal arts student. I've read Faulkner, ya know? Well then I get Paradise Lost…I look at the first page…

And oh my gosh, I'm back in first grade again…

Feeling frustrated, trying desperately to cut corners of this text that cannot be read without time, and a great deal of respect.
Respect. It's humbling reading something that is genuinely above your level of comprehension, isn't it?
Humbling and aggravating…
Because my show is still on, and I still want my chocolate milk.

The S Word!

Oh, sex. Yep, I said it. The three letter word that nobody is comfortable with…and to seems as though Shakespeare liked to use this natural discomfort to his advantage in his plays, particularly unconventional sex (if that's a thing). I'm talking about Romeo and Juliet (young lovers), Othello (interracial lovers), and of course, this play (lovers that decided to have sex before marriage…of all things!).

But sex today seems quite different than it would be back then (other than you know…the basic stuff). From what I remember from some history class of the past, there wasn't a reliable form of contraception until the 20th century…and unless it's a myth, people back then could only hope to use lemon wedges and dung (is that seriously true?).



Aaaaaanywaaaay…

When considering Isabella’s situation, we need to remember that her situation doesn't exactly consist of the “one night stand” we are familiar with today. If allowing some predatory man put his sweaty self on her wasn't bad enough, she'd have to deal with the after effects of her time with him.
Isabella wouldn't just have to deal with shame, she'd have to deal with the result of that shame: a child.
How on earth would Isabella be a nun then?
How would the child live? With no father? Or worse, with Angelo as a father, but a mother who is shamed.

This is why I'm shocked at the selfishness of Claudio.
He's not asking his sister to just deal with a five minute nasty-fest (an act that can cause psychological pain in itself), but the possibility of having a child with a man who has no intention of keeping her around when he is done with her.
He would be asking her to carry the child of her rapist (if the idea of “rape” resembled our idea of it today), which could result in the literal ending of her life.

In fact, Claudio seems different from any honorable man we are used to seeing. Which leads me to ask…is he a protagonist at all? He is the man who is supposedly wronged, but does he do anything to redeem himself in our eyes? Is Juliet ever going to come back in the story? Isn't she pregnant? You'd think that'd be a pretty big plot point!

Oh, sex. Sex started this madness, and has been advancing the plot ever since. Will sex finish the plot? Will sex (or moreover lust) finish Angelo? What will become of Claudio, our not-so-white-night?
Will Isabella remain the heroine we see her to be?

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I Miss Chaucer!

Hello! I'm sure many of you are reading this and expecting I talk about Utopia, not just due to the fact that a Utopia posting would be on schedule, but maybe because you wanted to see what your classmate thought of such a difficult reading? (I hope it isn't just me who has found Utopia so intimidating. Because let me admit it…I really, really do.)

 

Anyway…I guess what I'm trying to say is that well…I won't be speaking about the Utopia reading. Not yet. At least, not about the content directly. To be honest, I'm still trying to muddle through it, gaping at the sentences that you'd think would be run-on sentences, but are somehow grammatically correct. I'm groaning at the sight of such generous use of semi-colons, and wondering why on earth he doesn't just use the incredibly practical period. But whatever. As I'm sputtering out what are probably fragmented sentences, More is showcasing his broad knowledge of grammatical structure. Is it awful that I find him pretentious for it? Because truly…even if writing is more flowery in older texts, why would anyone go out of his way to use a more difficult form of grammar unless he is trying to showcase his own intelligence?

 

STOP.

I suppose the question I have is…is this one of the first uses of prose in literature? Is this what it was like to write a novel in the 16^th century? I can't even say this is prose in its infancy, because at any rate, it seems that prose has regressed on the evolutionary timeline. This form of prose is intricate, and almost seems to be a code in need of breaking.

Is this true?

And I…I…I miss Chaucer! I miss him like a sixth grader misses elementary school (or was that just me). I'm not sure his language was much easier (well, I found it to be, now that I think about it) but that once translated, what he was saying was more relatable. Funny, if you will.

 

I'm sure there's some simple answer to the plot of Utopia and that I'm making an ass of myself, but upon reading the first page I was bombarded with leviathan sentences about kings, friends of kings, and something about an agreement about land or money or whatever  kings worry about. The philosopher we meet, Hyrholday is apparently an “expert in nonsense,” which confuses me more because I was hoping the philosopher would help me understand the plot more.  It's similar to The Pardoner in Canterbury Tales, who straight up told us he would be telling us a lie.

I Googled "nonsense." I got Darth Vader with a Brita filter. Okay.

 

However, there's a character that Chaucer created that makes me miss Canterbury Tales and tempts me to read more of it. Who else than the Wife of Bath? Oh, how I miss her. She was a character ahead of her time. A woman who was both sexually powerful and intelligent, a strong, clever woman who was snuck into 15^th century literature when women were not yet thought of as such. How realistic she was to me. And oh, how I hope that there will be a character as likable as her in Utopia.

WOB...AKA Scarlet O' Hara to me

 

Dr. MB said that other students have loved it, so I will keep an open mind. That being said, the book is looking at me menacingly as I write. I suppose I better give it another go…