Month: October 2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heV8tjuRa7ydg

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version

The “honest rendition starts around 2:00 but she tries out many different voices to best portray Whitman.

The stanza that I really enjoyed reading was stanze 38. In this stanza, Whitman realizes how much he was moping around. He is usually super optimistic but the thoughts of imprisonment was threatening to take that away from him. When he says “unusual mistake,” which seems to be him sitting around and complaining about his problems. He then tries to forget the people who mocked him, as well has the people who were mocked and tortured beside him. Trying to brush off what just happened, he compares himself to Jesus Christ with “my own crucifixion and bloody crowning,” and when “fastenings roll from me” when he rises again. Rejuvenated, he continues his journey over the land and salutes the students of the world. Eleves means student in French.

In this video, Curtia Torbet acts out the first two – four lines of the poem with the voice dumbfounded, pressed, anger, whispered, emotional, and honest. She is able to act out the verse beautifully, and even got so emotional that she cried. What is interesting about actors and actresses is that when they put themselves in someone else’s shoes, their actual persona dissipates and what is seen on stage or on screen is someone else altogether.  Audiences never really realize how difficult the job is. The vulnerability of portraying an entirely different person and their emotions to the point of reality is quite terrifying.

This commentary of Don Quixote was done by Wisecrack of Thug Notes. He first goes through a short summary of the book, and then he analyzes the major events of the story. Quejano gets super obsessed with chivalry and knights. He spent all of his time reading books about it and eventually lost his mind. He decides to do what the majority of his books are about and wants to right all the world’s wrong. He got beat up a lot and a bunch of people burn his books to try and stop his antics. That doesn’t really work out because he picks up Sancho and travels around and even fights windmills. Dante eventually gives up Don Quixote and dies quietly.

One of the major themes about Don Quixote is deception. Throughout the book, Sancho constantly got out of things that he didn’t want to do by messing with his head. The Duke and the Duchess fooled both Don Quixote and Sancho, and Carasco managed to fool Don Quixote twice by dressing up and calling himself a knight. The book also emphasized how quickly life can change and how it’s always going to end. For example,  Sancho is able to govern his “kingdom” for a short while but realizes that it really isn’t his thing. The very next day, he falls into a pit. There is no on there to help him out of the pit. Even though Don Quixote isnt “real,” savante was able to bring a lot of good characteristics such as integrity, persistence, and loyalty to the world.