Othello

The very beggining of the play is the battle between affections in the minor love triangle of Othello-Desdemona-Ricardo. The creation of alliances and the basic diplomacy takes place covertly, Iago is playing to Ricardo's hopes and fears; Ricardo wants to know that the undercover operations will pay off as promised in Desdemona's love for him. There are spies and tactical strikes, as well as backstabbings and treachery. War, in Othello, can be loosely defined as the absence of peace or order. In this sense, every act of Iago's is an act of War: waking Brabantio, Uriah Heeping whenever speaking to Othello, and then sinking the poison in throught the sugar: causing mayhem in the beautiful love between the Moor and Desdemona.
The tale of Othello the dark, rough warrior and Desemona the fair, cultured pearl of Venice is the classic story of the Lady and the Tramp. Not only is it poignant, it is the thorn in Iago's side. Everything that is as it should be must be twisted to suit him, and the happiness of the newlyweds is about to go onto the chopping block.
Iago's First Acts of War are exquisite, and often looked over. In fact, he does a crucial piece of work in the scene between Othello ad the Dukes, though he is not present. The Moor may have been accepted and respected as a warrior, but the Dukes of Venice all recognised that he wouldn't be a suitable match for a daughter of theirs. Iago, having set Brabantio hard against him, had merely to wait as Othello used his charms on the Council. After they reluctantly let the affair go to attend to state matters, Othello had used his eloquence card; it was spent. Mild resentment was sure to set in to the Venetians, as Iago (a very jealous man) knew well.
Iago's means of securing his desires are as different from Othello's methods as Waterloo from World War One; and the difference is just as devastating. Just as in the historical transistion from what war had used to mean to what it means now, Iago had a far better hand than Othello, and far fewer rules. Othello was as unprepared and unsuspecting of the new form of warfare as was Europe, and suffered the blows as heavily.

My shot in the dark.

Abigail Saenger- Literary Critique

The woman who were’nt natural born

1. Pilate has no navel, and is therefore feared by those around her.

2. Pilate’s place in society is essential and paradoxical to her connections to her paste, present, and future.

3. Pilate is the archetype of the medicine woman, living an almost hermit life and never at the center of society. She was also orphaned, and then afterwards separated from her brother, her closest living relation. Through the separation, however, she became more in touch with Macon’s past, through a postmortem relationship with her father, connecting her more deeply with Macon’s root and core, as well as her own.

4.
“Clear as day, her father said, ‘Sing. Sing,’ and later he leaned in at the window and said, ‘You can’t just fly off and leave a body.’
Pilate understood all of what he had told her (. . .) she knew he was telling her to go back to Pennsylvania and collect what was left of the man she and Macon had murdered. (The fact that she had struck no blow was irrelevant. She was part of her brother’s act, because, then, she and he were one)” (Morrison, 147).

5. Macon connects to people in a superficial way, by controlling their futures; Pilate connects to people in a real way, by knowing their pasts.

6. Pilate can never be fully understood as a character unless every one of her actions is taken together, which makes for confusing interpretation. Her role for Milkman, especially in Part II, is to provide a path into the family past. She gave him clues; the song she sang Hagar to sleep with tied the stories and pieces of stories together for Milkman. An interesting humanity is her mistaking her father's words for an order, rather than her mother's name. She connects past and present and future.

J. Alfred Prufrock

Skeleton Key

I did a sick, sick thing to my love.
My lack of loyalty, it swallowed her up.
And she cooks me food.
She squirmed and turned like a skeleton key.

She left her man unattended to me.
Don't call me that.
Don't claim you love me
cause you know that ain't true.

And you're finally free
to twist and turn like a skeleton key.

You've gotta let me know.
You've gotta let me know.


I did a horrible thing to that girl.
I bread my misery and drowned it in her.
And she got me high,
And I hardly noticed there were tears in her eyes.

And I miss you less and less everyday.
This stream of whisky helps to wash you away.

And it's clear to see,
You're nothing special.
You're a skeleton key.

You've gotta let me know.
You've gotta let me know.
You've gotta let me know.
You've gotta let me know.

-Margot and the Nuclear So and So's


There is nothing like the time I decide someone needs my love. It tears at me. I have to take care of them. I am their only safety net. It is total nonsense.

There is someone. I have baked them cookies, critiqued their artwork, drawn them what they asked for on a whim. I would turn the conversation from them if it was negative towards them. I would do anything to make it easier for them... not that it is hard. The Person never notices. It is not in their nature... it is in mine to be cursed.

Sweet asshole sums it up. How can it be malicious if it is unwitting? How can someone be so blind?

How can I be so blind to do it all? Terri says: You will find someone, someday, who needs you and appreciates your giving. But I am spilling over now. And it hurts. Especially since it's anything but altruistic. I NEED to give. It's not to make you happy, it's to make me happy that you be happy... hopefully it doesn't make sense to you.

Terri says: Wait.

What about my life that is spilling over?

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-

And then the unforgiving knife that is twisted from behind into your lungs, when you catch your breath looking over you shoulder and see the outline, the long elegant fingers, the mindless mannerisms, the way their hair falls. It is too much to bear.


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky...

WE is the cruelest word.


We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Would it be better, then, not to drown; to hold onto neverland? What is it that makes the unreal so tantalizing, that kills when we face true nature? Humanity is not loveable, perhaps.


Ain't no sunshine when she's gone,
it's not warm when she's away.

Wrapped up, I could never imagine the tearing perforation that would rip through were they to unexist.

Amo, ergo sum. Or is it the unbinding of our selves?

Moose

"Hurry." The man in the blue jumpsuit jumped into his vehicle and pulled away from the hospital, the woman in the back checking bandages and morphine shots. The street quickly became pregnant with sirens as the three ambulances pushed towards Thallow Flats. High on the telephone wires, a raven cocked his head. The sky boiled.

At the Flats, there was a small girl on the ground. There was a boy leaning over her, with a bleeding face. There was a man, old and shocked, and a sobbing gashed woman with a hopelessly crushed man beside her. There where tears.

The paramedics circle d slowly, as if to protect everyone from worse than had already happened. They lit on the fallen people like healing sparrows; moved here and over there.

Bridgette looked up, saw Moose, then saw the boy she had named Moose after.

"You came back," she said, confused. It hurt a little to say anything.

"I didn't want to. You're different now." The boy's smiling face was like smoke. Brie could see the sky clearly through his chest. She smiled, and closed her eyes.

"I'm still glad you came back."

She fell back asleep, and the man in the blue jumpsuit slid her onto the white stretcher and into the blinking ambulance, where the woman was waiting with oxygen masks.

List

enemy uniform
cigarettes
zippo
foreign currencies
loads of kevlar
morphine
extra socks
ts elliot complete collection
bible
something HE gave me

Ain't no Passing Craze

Brie surfaced from the smooth bathwater, blinking and shaking the drops from her hair. She was awake now, just barely, and as new to the happenings as a bear in march--it had all continued without her, while she had her own hazy dreams and half-existance. She was losing her part of it all.

I had been ill for nearly a week now, and just after the new job appointment, too. I lift Moose onto my shoulder and survey the room I hadn't realized I was in for so long. It smells like children's Tylenol ($8.35 at the pharmacy, I have betrayed my employer) and sweet toasted lavendar sachets, which I had been making daily at the Root Shop before this time of... flu? It was unclear. All that I remember was my father calming down and bringing water; unexpected relief, and getting up and laying down.

But the city hadn't just stopped because I wasn't in it. I look out the window now, I can see that what I had been waiting for for so long has finally arrived. I need to get out of this room now, today, this week, so that I can be a part of... well, whatever it is, it can wait till after my Great Grains.

Brie watched from the rooftops, and the sun died slowly. Her ciggarette dissappeared in the half-light that made everything blend--the lights were darker, the darkness dimly glowing. There was a woman walking, and she was a free person. She could tell.

The woman walked to the Tavern.


I was enthralled. The lights from the city were spread out, and I could almost have applied the "patient etherized on a table" to that sky. I watched; and waited.

Come on, Chemicals

Brie had already filled out the application, in her careful scrawl. She gave old man Root his pen back, and turned and ran.

BRIE: I walked precisely down the street, inhaling the dust off the community garden, and crossed over churchside before I pulled out Moose and the squarish Walkman. The words were perfect, I wanted nothing more.

Except, maybe, a ciggarette. In the words of Oscar Wilde's Lord Henry, "The ciggarette is the perfect kind of prefect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?"

I coughed, stopped, crossed the street again.

Then I saw it. Beautiful. It was like the whole town- derelict, melencholy, dark and glimmering. I posed theatrically, then turned to find the fire escape.

Aretha rolled the charcoal in her fingers, feeling the old trees that had gone from beauty to beauty. She looked lazily up and sighted to the horizon, measuring four marks from top to bottom of Thallow Flats, and then one from side to side. It was a horrid old building, in reality, but that was art; taking horrid old things and capturing their soul, until they seemed almost beautiful.

ARETHA: I looked up from my sketch, my seat on the gabled roof of the Theatre. The sun was going down and the sun was cutting straight over the buildings and into my face. I glanced down to the shaded street, and saw a girl; from the flats, perhaps, or maybe not. She walked and stopped, looking up in a slow motion like the sun rise, and her face dawned similarly. She was looking at the building underneath me. As if it were an archangel, or something brighter.

And then Brie looked up.

BRIE: It was my new place. It was "back home", it was for me. It was a high-glorious shelter, a safe perch. I found the fire escape on the east side, and began to climb.

I need a Lover with Soul Power

Brie turned slightly in the stool and slid the glass to the other side of the countertop. She looked carefully back at the bartender, over the flipped-up collarof her sheepskin jacket, before sliding down over the orange vellum and fighting her way through the heavy Irish lemonwood out to the crusty city, with the cleansing chill, that frosts over all the filth and cans and cats and corpses. It was nearly time for dinner.

I wasn't really getting anywhere, on my feet, in my thinning shoes and stuffy stockings. The streets passed like warped time, and they barely registered before the feeling. It came over the world, with such force that I turned to watch the epiphanies dawn in people's eyes. No epiphanies. Dull knife faces.

The bitter cold was tears in my eyes when a warm flood came to my face from the bookshop. I let myself be pulled in and quietly felt the sun in the rank flourescence of the store. The store's smell filled me.

The man at the counter looked at me from over his computer. There was familiarity in the gesture as there was familiarity in his eyes. I turned on a heel and hid behind the books.

I left the bookstore sneezing. The street was getting a burgundy-anguished colour, a colour for seeing out a window, not for walking in. I ducked into the next door I saw, to look for a phone or something. I had hated the moors at night, and I didn't want to find out what night in a town felt like.

Inside was a large countertop; further back, rows of wooden shelves with jars and mysterious things. I liked it right away.

Rain Down from a Great Height

Fingering the small furball in her pocket, she stabbed at the ground floor button and stared wonderingly at the elevator doors till the lobby floor opened before her. Her rat, impatient to be free, streaked from her pocket and tucked itself between her nape and her hood. She left through the front doors.

I walk quickly, to warm myself up and because my head is starting to hurt already. I am carrying way too much stuff too be comfortable- a laundry bag, quarters. It is going to be a pivotal day. I can taste it in the rain left in the air from yesterday.

I stop first at the laundromat, depositing quarters and dumping week after weeks worth of laundry into the machines. They look as if they were hungry. I glare at them.

Next is the Tavern. The bartender there is new, I don't know his name. But he looks my age. I would like to know how he got the job as young as he is. It doesn't matter, anyways. I give my money to the vending machine and it spits out the precious sandy coloured box-- the Camels. I post myself at the long wooden counter, order a cranberry tonic, and pack the ciggs. Another day, and I got through it. But I wait, because I know the day is not all the way unfolded yet. Something's going to happen.