Krap! I'm Old.

I saw the play, and then read the play. I understood it much better, I was able to picture the words while reading and to sense the emotions that are meant to written in italics. It is a short play, almost just one scene, and in that one scene, a whole life is portrayed.

The first line of a play, of a book, of a movie, is, obviously, very important. Krapp’s Last Tape has an interesting first line:

“A late evening in the future”

In italics, which means that it is a description of the scenery or the plot where and when the scene is taking place. Notice that there a three words that imply the end, “late” is not on time, is after a certain time. When you are late for an appointment you are some minutes or hours after the desired time. When you are late in age is that you no longer are young, or is past the desired age. Late in a day, is near the end of the day, usually at night when the day is over and a new day is coming. Evening is the time of the day closer to the end. It is the time before the night that is the closure. The evening happens after the sun has gone down, it is dark, like the stage where Krapp is. And since it is a “late evening” it is darker. There is a second part to this late evening, it is in the future. This is the interesting part. How can you do a play and expect to perform it in the future? It might mean that some things have not happened yet because the future is a skip of time to move forward in history. Or it is a projection of what the day of his sixty-ninth birthday will be like. Based on the tapes and experiences and evolution he has had in his life, that are manifested on the tapes. This first sentence is ironic, it is the beginning of a play, but it entails an after, an end.

And with this pre disposition I keep on reading. I encounter that, as I had said in my previous blog, this Krapp is disturbed, and more so reading it because it talks more of some of his obsessive behaviors, there are three bananas instead of one, and the keys and obviously the expressions that the actor should be acting that might not be so accurate since it is hard to act an emotion, its subjective. He goes to the past, listening to his tapes and in the future realizes his mistakes and curses that he has now, or will, figure that out and not then. #$”!!”#$? Krap! #$% and throws the metal boxes where this record of pathetic years are stored.

It is recurrent in almost, if not all, novels, plays, movies, or poems that I read, the pursuit of happiness, I’ve blogged several times about it, I referred to the movie with this title talking about The Road by Cormac McCarthy. “'Flagging pursuit of happiness. Unattainable laxation. Sneers at what he calls his youth and thanks to God that it's over.'” He was, or is, or stopped being, in that pursuit of happiness and in this future he gives up and finds out that it is indeed an “unattainable laxation” and he is turning sixty nine and did not obtain it. I don’t think he thanks god that his youth is over, he laments it, otherwise he would not find himself in the state he finds himself and less so listening to his past. That is why he adds after a (Pause) “False ring there.” He wishes to go back and is infinitely unhappy with his present, therefore with his future.

Driving Himself Crazy

This old man, Krapp, is immensely disorientated, desolated, nostalgic, and most of all mentally perturbed. There is a lot of silence in the performance, its not surprising since there is only one actor and the tape that he plays on stage. This silences, along with the emptiness of the stage and the body language of the actor, Patrick Magee, reflect the disappointment of life that the character realizes he had been living for the last sixty nine years. It is his own blankness and desperation that has lead him to insanity. Undeniably he is crazy or on the way to craziness, his movements and face expressions demonstrate the contrary to sanity. The title of the piece Krapp’s Last Tape is indeed the ending scene of a man. Within whom Samuel Beckett might see himself or identifies with the feeling of blankness that Krapp is feeling.

There is a bit, if not absolute of obsessive behavior in Krapp. The way he takes the bananas, looks at them as if asking himself what they are (0:53 Part I) and pills them, both, and eats them while he wonders at uneven pace back and forth in front of his desk. More so the way he walks all the way to the wall to go in a straight line toward the doors where he gets the metal boxes and tape recorder that he will listen to for the rest of the play. He does this several times doing exactly the same path to go through the doors, which is schematic and repetitive. The same way his life has been. So schematic that he has been recording his life for a long time every birthday, and he listens to the tapes and reminds himself that he has been a failure and that his “best years are gone” (6:48 Part IV). And yet he still records another one for this sixty-ninth birthday. This obsessive behavior has to be an indication of Beckett’s own behavior.

What impressed me the most was the disturbed face that the actor does not drop. His movements are those of an old man, but, as I said before a mentally sick old man. He listens to the tapes extremely concentrated and distressed, he is listening to himself so there is meta fiction in the play. He is driving himself crazy.

Confidence In Branagh

Wow.
I felt like watching the trailer of Troy for the first time in the movies and telling my mom “Omg mama we have to watch this movie” and later, seven years later, I happen to be watching it again because I’m studying Ancient Greek’s mythology and history. I have watched Troy so many times that I cant remember but it do remember that it did sparked my first interest to history, which has not ceased till now. I feel that this movie is going to be as cool as Troy is, and as Branagh says it is “part of cultural life” (5:26). I have not read Hamlet but I do have and idea of what it is about, and not because I had a class that taught me so but because I’ve heard it and I know about it just as I know that in England the cars are the other way around.

So what do I expect? I expect a movie that I will understand, fluently, of Shakespeare because to say the truth I did not fully understood Macbeth and I know it was a great produced movie, but the English was difficult and the scenes were not interesting. I expect a captivating movie, full of suspense, action scenes, love scenes, and the outstanding Hamlet scenes that most be shown. It is indeed a “tip top cast” (3:06) and so much can be expected from them. Kate Winslet is for me, the best actress among many and I don’t doubt her ability to perform in a major film like this one. That will be passed on from generation to generation, and will be without a doubt remembered. What I really hope is for the film to instill the love and appreciation that most feel for a play like Hamlet, and only by hearing Branagh talk about the play and talk about Shakespeare it did create a curiosity in me to get to know it better, know the essence of its beauty and art, I have confidence in Branagh.

Closed The Book

And I closed the book. I have to confess I was coward enough, or brave enough, to share a tear. I am asked to blog about the book, and I’ve decided to write how I felt while reading it. I won’t talk about literary devices or figurative language or symbolism. I was touched by the book, and I think a great part of being a reader is having some kind of relationship with the book and therefore with the author. I did create a bond with the book, and that doesn’t happen often unless it is a book I decided to pick up and read and not an assignment for a class, which is what The Road was. And I will tell you why.

There are basically two characters, the man and the boy. That’s it, there are no mayor events nor complicated plots or undecipherable paradigms, but yet the simple setting is so profound (and I feel a little nerd saying this) that McCarthy’s word choice and sentence structure involves the merit of #1 National Bestseller. As a matter of fact, I decided, for the first time to read The Road while I was at the gym (I had not done that before because the gym for me it’s a time to relax and forget about school) and my trainer told me that he had slept throughout the whole movie. I tried to picture it and I guess it is very slow and boring, full of artistic shots where one flying piece of paper with the wind represents the loneliness and despair that the protagonists are experimenting, and those are the kinds of movies that few people enjoy, and I guess my trainer is right to fall asleep, he has not read the book.

Naturally while any reader reads any book, the previous knowledge and experiences start connecting automatically with the piece of text that is being read. The front cover of the book reminded me of Steve Conrad’s movie The Pursuit of Happiness (2006) which has a similar cover, a man holding hands left with a boy that appears to be his son. Going through miserable times. Yet there is not point of comparison to the level of miserable that each of them are going through. Chris Gardner (Will Smith) has a deficit of money and finds himself in bankruptcy, while The Man from The Road has a deficit of life and money doesn’t even get in the picture. But the paternal love is present and is the force that makes both the Man and Chris Gardener keep on fighting everyday, differently, but to survive. In a scene Gardener tells his son “Don’t ever let somebody tell you you can’t do something. Not even me, alright?”, in The Road, when the Man is dying they have a comparable dialogue
“I want to be with you.
You cant.
Please.
You cant. You have to carry the fire.
I don’t know how to.
Yes you do.” (pg. 278)
In different circumstances love is the key factor, as cliché as it may sound. We keep on watching, hearing, reading about love. And we will keep on knowing about it.

The next connection I made was, coincidentally, to a movie also with Will Smith, I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence) where a plague has killed all humanity and Robert Neville (Smith) is the last man on earth, with a dog. He is all alone, and scared to be attacked that is the similitude with The Road, being scared of being attacked, always paranoid and alert. There is even a dog in The Road “They listened. Then in the distance he heard a dog bark.” (pg.82) they stay with him for a while but it didn’t last long. But it is the loneliness that both the movie and the book share, alone on earth not knowing whether they would wake up the next morning. Robert is afraid of the monsters that the plague that killed everybody infected the ones that survived, and The Man is afraid of the “bad guys”.

I also compared The Road with 1984, even though in 1984 it was an absolute organized and disciplined society, they are being watched all the time by Big Brother and the protagonist, jut like the Man, wants to go against the authority that is controlling the society. The existence of greater authority or force that controls the few humans still alive in The Road is not so explicit, but there is one.
“I think we should take a look. We just have to be careful. If it’s a commune they’ll have barricades. But it may just be refugees.
Like us.
Yes. Like us.” (pg. 79)
There is a division between the “good guys” who are the characters, and the “bad guy” who is the rest, and these seem to have “barricades” that they fear. But I got the impression that these bad guys seem to have a sect, a disciplined and oppressed group of people and they have the world, or what is left of it, under their control, the control that the Man and Winston Smith (from 1984) are fleeing, scared.

But among the other few connection I made I found myself with two main factors that are repeatedly present in the novel: fear and love. These two are often linked together, more so is love and suffering, as I said when I talked about The Knight’s Tale from Canterbury’s Tales from Chaucer. And as old as Canterbury’s Tales is and as contemporary The Road is, they both are tales and both are about a journey and both talk about fear, or suffering, and love. And so does Michael Ondaatje in Coming Through Slaughter, with Buddy in love with Nora and fearing his own insanity, and so does F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby with the love triangle, or more less square, between Tom, Daisy, Gatsby and Myrtle, and the fear that Daisy and Gatsby feel about Tom and the whole thing ends up in suffering.

So the Man dies, and I cry. Because I have felt love and I have felt feel and maybe not so much suffering but something similar, and I felt sorry for the boy and I felt sorry for McCarthy for writing this story. And I felt sorry for myself because I cried reading words. Words that led me to all the connections I made and to file one more book in my brain.

The Son's Tale

I really don’t know how we got till here
All I Know is that I feel a great fear
Of the bad guys and the ones that are sad
They scream “help” and we can’t help, I feel bad
I also fear that my Papa and I 5
Will stop going south and suddenly die.
He says we won’t, but I think that he lies.
I’ve seen a dog and some little mice,
And a little boy, just like I, poor boy
So scared he was, so far away from joy. 10
But I had to leave him there, all alone.
Papa said “there’s nothin’ we could’ve done”
Papa is so wise and he is so good,
Even when he is not in the right mood.
I try to be a good son, I prefer 15
That I don’t make him suffer more than her
She was mean to go away, suddenly.
I remember her existence only
But he remembers her entirely
In his thoughts and mind he should not ever rely 20
I have heard him weep over her at night
He always says what she did was not right.
Sometimes I hope that to us she comes back
Oh! Another person we would not lack.
We are only the two of us, that’s it. 25
And any interaction we omit
There is no one left to trust Papa says,
As long as I have him, it is okay.

The road seems to never end, keeps going.
I keep on walking behind, unknowing. 30
Where we are heading, but I trust his will
All this misery is with his goodwill
I do know that we are not the bad guys,
I also know that there are no allies.
Because everybody else aren’t nice. 35
There’s nobody left, to be precise.
We are carrying a gun all the time
Papa has shot it, and is not a crime
He won’t ever let anybody touch me
That’s why to be vigilant is the key. 40
We are going to die soon, I know that
We cannot stay for so long in combat.
I am so so skinny and so hungry
And not finding food makes him so angry.
In abandoned houses there is food 45
Sometimes bad sometimes good.
I got sick once with fever and cold
Very tight Papa had me withhold
He got so worried he thought I would die
I think a tear he dropped from his eye. 50
And later I got better thanks to God
Are you okay? Papa said, I would nod.

And so on goes my tale, day and night.
Waking everyday looking for a bite
It has not ended yet I hope it does 55
This happy life is not the way it goes.
I dream of a world of joy and delight
And not of this world of eternal night.

Seems To Be

I have to confess that I really didn’t see the point of The Great Gatsby while reading it. I thought it was boring and I didn’t understand the story very well and much less why I was assigned to read it. I found myself distracted and “half asleep” like Sonya Chung did when she was 13 years old and read the novel for the first time. And when I surprised myself in that state I would re read the page annoyed but did find some sense to the sentences I was skimming through the page. I am sure I never understood it because after reading this blog entry by Chung and after the little discussions we have had in class, it all makes sense now. Something similar happened to me last summer while reading Dante’s Inferno, but that time I was very close to committing suicide because I read a whole book and had not understood a verse of it (not a paragraph because I now know it was a poem). When I got to class and we took time discussing it, it was like when somebody explains to you a joke that everybody laughed out but you didn’t because you didn’t get it. I laughed along.

The Great Gatsby appears then to be magnificent. If I remember right, there were some things that I did find interesting. Like the scene when Daisy, Tom, Gatsby, Nick and Jordan are at a suite in the Plaza Hotel and they are discussing many different things that seem to have nothing to do with the other and the whole discussion and things that are happening confuse the reader, just as the characters are confused, and this happens to be the beginning of the climax of the novel when Gatsby argues, violently, with Tom over Daisy’s love. And then the yellow car kills Myrtle. “The other car, the one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yards beyond, and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her think dark blood with the dust.” (pg. 137) Any more description? They are indeed “luminous sentences” as Sonya Chung points out. What a shame that I missed them. No kidding, I would like to reread The Great Gastby some day, not soon, but some day.

Rules Broken

The way I was taught to write “don’t” “didn’t” “can’t” and any other abbreviations is with an apostrophe as a sign of the conjunction of two different words.
Examples:
Do + not = don’t
Did + not = didn’t
Can + not = can’t
Among other abbreviations that also include a apostrophe ‘ in between. But, Cormac McCarthy does not follow the rule. You usually break rules for two reasons: You want to be a rebel and go against any norm just because you want attention, or you simply don’t care. Putting the situation in context, I think both characters don’t care anymore. They’ve been through enough, their only concern is to survive. Find food, shelter, not the apostrophe in “don’t”. Of corse “the man” and “the child” have nothing to do with the apostrophe or their own narration, but McCarthy does. And he has transmitted that sense to me, a reader (duuh). In the circumstances that the characters are living, those details don’t matter. Plus, I believe, that they are hiding from a bigger mass of people “the bad guys” (pg. 92), therefore, they are rebels, they go against what an authority is implying. Refuges. So they have the urge to go against the rules, just like McCarthy is doing.

I also learned that dialogues have quotations “” or an – to indicate that two people, or more, in a story, are talking. That is the usual standards for writing in English. But I’ve seen exceptions; however every author is the creator of the novel and can do with it what he pleases. There are no apostrophes and no quotations, for any dialogue. Why? There is no need actually. Up to page 115, there haven’t been more than two persons in a dialogue. There is no place for confusion. And there is no concern to distinguish or use the proper punctuation for a dialogue in the story.
“Are they gone, Papa?
Yes, they’re gone.
Did you seen them?
Yes.
Were they the bad guys?”
(pg. 92)
Did you understand?

Short.

The sentences are short. And concise. As if they were in a hurry. Or not in the mood. He is sad and desperate. With his boy. Poor kid wonders if he is going to die. Maybe the short stories are his fast thoughts. Among many thoughts. That trouble his mind in his already troubled life. They are homeless. “They went back up the hill and made their camp in the dry dirt under the rocks and the man sat with his arms around the boy trying to warm him.” (pg. 9) Now im desperate, just like them. The short sentences make me uncertain, just like them. Like the ideas are cut in the middle, a stop in the journey, an inconvenience. I live in the 21st century, just like them. And I see people like them all the time. They most live a life of short sentences. Of short moments. A series of short moments that make up a lifetime. Scared moments that make the adrenaline influence the thoughts and go faster. Shorter. That make you run along The Road. Run in short fast steps. “Okay.” (pg. 10-11-36-43-52-60-77…)

Is This A Joke?

I’ve noticed a bit of contradiction in all the tales. More in the characters themselves than in their stories. The Knight was so knighty that most of what he said was not true, it was obviously exaggerated and taken to a level of fantasy. The Miller claims to have a tale as good as the Knight’s Tale and it a grotesque and low class. The Wife of Bath is very much a contradiction, she gets all tangled up in her beliefs and her role as a wife, of five husbands. And The Pardoner seems to be the top of hypocrisy. There is a lot of irony, the famous and so beloved irony.

For definition a pardoner is “: a medieval preacher delegated to raise money for religious works by soliciting offerings and granting indulgences” and “: one that pardons”. Delegated to raise money, yet NOT to keep the money. It is the one that pardons, and in order to pardon, or forgive a person, in my beliefs, you shouldn’t do what you are forgiving. In other words, if I forgive Pepita for lying to me, I should not lie, because then I would not have to forgive her because I do it myself. Get me? But IRONICALLY in the Prologue the pardoner, without any shame admits his relics are fake, the ones he sells and the ones that all the pilgrim believe to have healing powers. But not only he is a liar, but greedy. Greedy people can others to get a profit. “By this gaude have I wonne, yeer by yeer, An hundred mark sith I was pardoner. “ (The Prologue, lines 389-390) AND HE ADMITS IT! This tale is an exaggeration of irony, it is hipocrecy “sin aguero” (a Colombian expression to describe something that was done without shame).

And that is only the Prologue. Then comes the Tale. The ending reminded me of Romeo and Juliet, after the two fellows kill their friend to get a bigger share of the gold, they To take the botel ther the poyson was, And drank, and yaf his felawe drynke also, For which anon they storven bothe two. (The Pardoner’s Tale, lines 886-888). The difference is that in Romeo and Juliet, they die for love and passion for the other one, in this tale, they die of greed. Exactly about what the pardoner preaches about. The story is a good story, it resembles the stories of the bible or the stories that our mothers used to read to us for us to learn virtues and morals, and consequences to our actions. I think The Pardoner did not have that kind of mother, he lacks those moral stories, yet he is incredibly skillful to mesmerize the pilgrims with his forgiveness and ethic lectures.

A Deplorable Person

My conclusion,
Lenore is lost, lost and dead, he wants to see her again, so badly that he imagines her . Lenore is the name the angels call her, for no living person has a name by the angels, so she must be dead. He asks the Raven, who obviously is the death, if he has the chance to see Lenore “within the distant Aiden”, that is his last desire. He is in his death bed, “nevermore” will he live again, at least not as a sane person. The Raven is just informing him, that Lenore is, indeed, lost, and he is lost as well.
“Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door— “
(Edgar Allen Poe, 9)
He is no longer a living human being, he himself admits it. He is just a soul that …
“And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!” (E.A.P 18)
He is accepting slowly that he is becoming a deplorable person , in grief and agony for his lost Lenore, remembering her and forgetting her.

A Little Confused

I am not sure what this Wife is trying to transmit. She starts by justifying that she has had five husbands. She talks about Jacob and Abraham having many wives and God encouraging procreation. She talks about virginity and how to have sex is not a sin, and she supports all her arguments from the Bible, and they all seem to be valid “Al nys but conseil to virginitee.” (Prologue, line 82) She argues that, indeed God talks about virginity as something divine and pure and recommendable, it is only an advice and that therefore she is in all her right to marry whoever and how many she desires and obviously sleep with who ever she wants to. But she, such a gentle and… classy… wife was not sinful but clever and a wise wife.

But, why is she so persuasive in justifying her actions if she knew she was innocent, or pure of sin? This kind of argumentation and use of rhetoric is usually applied by people that feel that are guilty and need excuses for their actions. I imagine a murderer telling a judge why his crime should be justified. The murderer may very likely be sure that what he did was completely valid, and that he should not be accused for committing a crime. The judge and everybody else know he is guilty, and he himself may know too, but the arguments can even be plausible. The Wife is a lustful, gold-digger, gossiper and clever women indeed.

I feel a little sorry for her. She is not aware that what she is saying is not really making people be amazed by how right she is and how intelligent but feel pity for her, and maybe that is what she wants, to have pity. While telling her tale, by her own, she gets tangled up and contradicts herself. She talks about how money and pleasing a wife is so important and then, talking about her 5th husband, which appears to be the one she loved, the only one she loved, she seems to not care so much about his status, “My fifthe housbonde -- God his soule blesse! --Which that I took for love, and no richesse,” (Prologue, lines 525-526) So… she is confused.

The tale is her reality. It is a fixed, edited, and dramatized version of her real story. The Wife is just like the queen, she seems to have it all, she appears to be the master on marriage and on how to handle a man to get what she wants, but she doesn’t. The answer to the queen’s question, what the knight finds out, “"Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee As wel over hir housbond as hir love, And for to been in maistrie hym above.” (Tale, lines 1038-1040) is what she needs! She wants to have control! Not to be the one controlled, she depends on men, and gossip, and money. She is poor and lonely. Her only way to be satisfied is taking advantage that she is a women, her sexuality and manipulation. She has become a pro in rhetoric, it is her necessity. The whole prologue is rhetoric, justifying her actions.

I feel a little sorry for her. Her intense desire to have control demonstrates that in that time, wives were no more than…housewifes. Wives were below the man, and this Wife refused to be.