Can Hamlet Change?

As I might have mentioned once or twice in previous posts, Hamlet can be interpreted in many different ways. Basically, it could be anything. If you were to listen to this radio program you would know exactly what I mean.

Hamlet in prison. It's not just Hamlet in prison, though: it's prisoners in prison performing Hamlet in prison! Yay!

It's funny to think about how murderers are acting as murderers. A moment where, for once, seeming is equal to being.

As murderers, our fellow inmates can make connections from the play to their own lives, making the experience of performing in Hamlet all the more interesting and self-reflecting. They can relate the acting with what they have each done in the past.

While these people perform, they are not themselves, but rather the actual characters from Hamlet. Sort of like a vacation from reality. However, when the play is over, inevitably, they return to their reality in jail.

This reminds me of the comparison between American prisons and prisons somewhere in Europe (I forget where it was. I think it was Norway.).

In America, the point of prison is to punish one for his deeds, spending some crap-quality time in there. Your inmates beat you for being the 'new guy', your bed is harder than concrete (or is concrete), the walls and toilet is as dirty as they can be, and the food resembles the stuff that come out of your... Uh... Closet. You get my point.
On the other hand, the Norwegian prison is like a five star hotel: Ping pong, bubble baths, Marvel comic books, your own Angry Birds plush pillow, and most importantly, hamburgers. This is because the point of these prisons is to change the person. To prepare them to be released into society once more.

Some interesting fact here: In the US, many released criminals end up going back. There was a word for that. I believe it was 'recidivist'. While jail is supposedly supposed to make criminals 'better' in the sense that they actually learn from their mistakes and don't do such a thing again, it just seems to happen again and again. What might be wrong?

In Norway, however, things are quite the opposite. Enough said.

Unfortunately, this story takes place in America. However, this story was different. These prisoners were given a chance, although it might not have been intended, to change their lives and walk forward. Hamlet actually seemed to be a step forward for everyone. The prisoners themselves admitted to how important it was for them to have an opportunity to act Hamlet out, and how without it, their life would have had a bit less of a spark.

Hamlet had changed these people.

Now the real question is whether Hamlet (the character) can change himself.
I'll figure it out soon enough.

Anyways, if in the near future, you happen to meet an ex-criminal that continually quotes Hamlet...

...you'll know.

Shove That 'Crazy' Up Your -

To be or not to be. That is the question.
However, in the reader's perspective, it's more of a 'to do or not to do'.
Either way, Hamlet is a very weird, possibly crazy, undecided man, whose every action and throught seem to drive us towards the conclusion: He is mad.
Or is he?

Hypothetical situation coming up!
One of your pet goldfish died yesterday. It hasn't been too long since little Jimmy went to goldfish heaven (as in, the sewers). Then, one day, when you come back from school, you see Jimmy, floating in the air, glowing bright green. Jimmy then tells you that Timmy, the fish next door, snuck into the house and poured boiling water into the fishbowl, so that he could make out with your other goldfish, Wendy. He asks you to avenge him, and then disappears. You think you might be hallucinating, but then you look back, and see your mom, who also tells you that she saw the same thing. Something doesn't really add up here, but whatever. There are more important matters! To think that Timmy is now making out with Wendy... That's horrible!

...and that is how Hamlet felt.
Hamlet isn't crazy. He's just been going through something that, hopefully, no one else had even gone through. Therefore, his actions and thoughts are not ones that you would see usually, and this leads us to think that he is insane.
If a person came and told you that he saw a flying purple highlighter pen with eyes as big as whales and apple-sized oreos falling out of its tip, you would either think it's a joke, or that the person is crazy. 'Highlighters can't be purple!' you'd think.
Now, what if the same story was told, but through the news, and scientists all around the world have proven that this is very possible, you wouldn't say anything about it. In fact, you might believe in the story yourself.

Get it? 'Play'? Hahaha, oh, I really need to stop this.

How about this: define 'crazy'.
Basically, 'crazy' in our society is a nonconformist that went a bit too far.
In other 'normal' peoples' terms, Hamlet is crazy, but there is no way to tell whether he actually is. 'Crazy' is just another man-made idea. Taking into consideration his rather unique turn of events in life and all the burdens he has been given to take till the end, it is no wonder that he is 'crazy'. But the fact that he is still human makes him 'normal'. Much more 'normal' than most of YOU PEOPLE reading this right now.
Who spends his/her time reading someone else's response to Hamlet? Hahahaha. Haha. Ha...

But seriously, to be honest, Hamlet seems a bit cra- um, different.

Instinct Strikes Back

Bam! Star Wars.
But that is not why we are here.

In the course of life, it's normal for people to have conflicts. After all, we are by no means perfect beings (and we know such things would probably not exist). Conflicts are, of course, meant to be resolved. Hopefully. And how do we do that?

Let me answer that question with a question. When you're faced with a dilemma, do you resolve it using logic, or do you stick with your gut feeling?
That didn't really answer the question did it.

Anyways, some people tend to stick to instinct, while others might think things through carefully, calculating every single probability. What's so fascinating about Hamlet from Hamlet is that he seems to have a mixture of both. He thinks things through, maybe a bit too 'through', but he does it nevertheless. He thinks of his actions, his consequences, and so on. He reaches conclusions that he must take certain actions, and he seems to be quite sure of these decisions at the moment, but when the actual time comes, he simply cannot. There's something else at work.


This is where instinct comes into play (Get it? Play? *laughs*). Hamlet's human instinct, in the end, doesn't allow Hamlet to do things according to plan, leaving the conflict the way it was, or sometimes, leaves it worse than in was before.

That is, in my opinion, the source of Hamlet's character: Two distinct forces clashing in his head, creating thunderstorms and muffin eating ponies that bite a part of the brain off, only to tape it back again with superglue (which obviously leads to Hamlet's uncertainty). He's back to the place he started at, except that he has now lost the map.


This is weird, because Hamlet knows what he has to do. Hamlet knows that he should kill Claudius, and that is what he intends to do. He knows, and yet does not do. He always seems to be delaying his task more and more, excuses running out of his mouth like people trying to get off a plane all at once.

Hamlet always has a reason for his failure and just lets the occasion fly over his head, but in reality, this might be the same thing as those excuses you make when you don't do your homework. You technically did do your homework, in that you made it one sentence into the essay. You didn't lie, but you didn't mention that you didn't even finish the homework.

Same situation here. What Hamlet says is, or could be, partially true. However, somewhere deep inside, there is something else causing the uncertainty.
And boom. Instinct has struck again.

Don't Think Too Much About It

Firstly, I want to briefly mention how the man in the picture on the left looks similar to my English teacher. Might be just me. Just saying.


Recently there's been just so many things to do (and to not do). I've just had so much stuff to do and so much stuff on my mind.
You know who else has a lot of stuff on his mind? Hamlet. From Hamlet.

We all know who Shakespeare is, right?
That guy you always hear of. That guy you think of when 'literature' is mentioned. We are here to talk about one of his best known works: Hamlet.

...and you know what they say: You can't spell Hamlet without Ham!

Quick summary of what I have read so far:
Hamlet is the son of the king. The king recently died. The queen has a rather hasty marriage with the king's brother, Claudius, and Hamlet is very sad/angry/depressed/suspecting of this. He meets his father in the form of a ghost, who tells Hamlet that Claudius had killed him (the king).

Anyways, I can't really say much about the play yet, as I'm not even close to finishing one-third of the play, but through all the different versions of the scenes of Hamlet that I have seen through YouTube and other whickawhacka stuff like that, I can say that interpretations can vary. A lot. In fact, Shakespeare left so much room for interpretation, especially for Hamlet's character, that different versions can vary infinitely. Hamlet could be a shy guy living in the Middle Ages, an angry emo in modern Russia, or a crazy piece of [carrot] living in the post-zombie-apocalypse world of Buttpoopia in the year 2766. According to a man (or woman, no way to tell) called Sigmund Freud, Hamlet could basically represent a man "whose power of direct action is paralysed by an excessive development of his intellect. According to another view, the dramatist has tried to portray a pathologically irresolute character which might be classified as neurasthenic."

Quick break here!
Neurasthenic [noo'r-uh's-then-ik] : pertaining to or suffering from neurasthenia
...Yup, that helped a lot. Thank you, Dictionary.com!

Anyways, this neurasthenia is apparently characterized by extreme lassitude and inability to cope with any but the most trivial tasks. That sort of does become what Hamlet seems to be, right? He has so much on his mind and yet he keeps it all for himself, incapable of taking any real action... yet.
According to Sigmund Freud, "the hate which should drive him on to revenge is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish." Hamlet just thinks too much (either that or I just don't think enough).

Think. Think. Think. Act-
Oh wait, I'm not prepared. More think.
Should I? Hesitate. Hesitate. Oh, whatever. Act.
Regret. Now what? Think. Welcome to Hamlet.
It's like as if the emotions are flying up into the sky and bursting spontaneously like fireworks, only that instead of brilliant, pretty lights, there's more emotions (and occasionally, blood).

There's a certain action we, readers, expect from Hamlet. Yet, Hamlet is never certain.

For now, I'll just cut it off here. I'm way too early in the play to actually know much about Hamlet's character. I think I'll just end this with a quote from our friendly Freud: "...all genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single motive and more than a single impulse in the poet's mind, and are open to more than a single interpretation."

Korean Hamlet!

The End of The Road

As we conclude the book The Road, let us talk about a fitting theme.

Death.

Everyone tries their best to not encounter Death. Everyone tries to avoid Death.

Everyone eventually fails. Everyone dies, and this is precisely why people in general are so afraid of dying, or rather, afraid because they don't know what happens next.

We are naturally scared of the fact that our life could just end. There must be something else to it, right? Maybe. Possibly. We wouldn't know until we died ourselves.

If you think about it, many people start believing in religions to not fear death. To believe that there is something after this life, that there exists another life, another chance, another hope...

Then the question comes up: what would it feel like to die? Will it suck? Will I basically be non-existant for the rest of eternity, for infinity? That's so sad and creepy!

Now, think about this: before anyone came to life, we were basically inexistant for an eternity too (since time goes all the way back and all the way forward). For billions, trillions, zillions, and multiquadrillions of years, you did not exist.

Did it suck to be inexistant for so long? Well, not really.

This is getting too deep and slightly emo so let me insert a random quote.

"Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first."

Holy fun, that looks delicious and moist.

Now back to the real stuff.

When asked the question whether The Road had a deeper significance, Cormac McCarthy said that it's just a story of a father and a son and nothing more. Maybe life is quite similar. Life is a story. A story in which YOU are the main character. Life is a road. A road in which ou continue on, not knowing what you'll find next. Whether you stop or not, the road stretches far towards the horizon. You might never find out what's farther along the road or what's at the end of the road, or for that matter, whether the road has an end.

While you're on the road, make the story worthwile.
Have fun. Enjoy life! Go out there and [ C E N S O R E D ]!

I spy a Jae. Oh wait, they're all Jaes!

Just make sure not to stray from the road though. You're pretty much screwed if you do.

Also, the next post will probably be less deep/emo.

It Used to Be

The last paragraph of The Road could be described as out of place.

Here it is:
"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

Hmm. It's clearly there for a purpose. It definitely doesn't match up with the style of the rest of the book, and uses significantly vivid adjectives that are not used in any other part of the book (with the exception of dreams). I'll get back to the dream thing.

Well, the trout could be nature, what used to be, what is not anymore. From here we can also infer that the apocalypse was an environmental collapse.

Before men arrived to this world, earth had its own beauty, its own mystery, its own life.
Then we came, and used everything and destroyed everything until things became things "which could not be put back." Now, all these glorious things are but a dream, only to be remembered, only as things that once used to be there but have now been transformed into ashes.


The Road ends with yet another dream, only that this dream isn't a dream. It's real.
Or at least it used to be.

Road Rant

I would just like to know how the father and the sun survived so long without the sun or a steady supply of food. I mean, they started travelling to the south months, maybe years after the actual apocalypse. Did they live on canned food? Oh, that must be it. Canned food makes everything better.

I personally would not have the will or motivation to just survive for that long, especially when there are no company other than your son. Speaking of the son, isn't it weird to think that this kid will learn in terms of surviving rather than the calculus and stuff we learn in school? I wonder if that's a bad thing or a good thing. Probably the latter.

Anyways, I would not survive. I would rather seek immediate comfort, even if that way out were to be death. Actually, now to think of it, maybe not. I wouldn't know until I were in a post-apocalyptic situation, which will probably not happen. Right?
WRONG.

Many parts of the book seem to imply that there had been an ecological collapse (whether it was caused by the apocalypse or the apocalypse was caused by the collapse, we do not know). Sadly, this collapse is actually happening in the world right now.
Look out your window. If you don't have a window, you're missing out on the fun.
Do you see all the grass, the trees, the mountains, the volcano, and the whatever-is-outside-your-window? It might not be there in the next couple of years.


Maybe McCarthy wanted to show us through his simple language and story that the kind of situation shown in The Road could be not just a fictional world, but a real future.

Would you like that? [ YES NO ]

If you selected 'NO', we have something in common and we should be friends.
If you said 'YES', well... I suggest you visit a therapist. Or a psychologist. Or a priest.

So, um...
Protect the earth. Save paper. No more tests.

McCarthyism

After seeing a couple of interviews between Cormac McCarthy and Oprah, I could tell much more about the author himself and his thoughts as he wrote The Road.

Let us start by noting that there are no quotation marks or semicolons. To say the truth, I thought that the abscence of these certain punctuation marks meant something.

Not really.

McCarthy simply sort of 'learned' in his youth that punctuation marks were there to make a text easier. This is precisely the reason quotation marks and semicolons are inexistant, the reason why colons are rare, and the reason commas are uncommon. However, we do see a lot of periods.

Speaking of semicolons, I'm not allowed to use one on a blog post. My English teacher does not want us to use semicolons yet; however, I believe otherwise.
Actually I don't believe otherwise. I just wanted to use it once. WOOHOO!! REBELLION!


Anyways, according to McCarthy, this book was written without actually planning out the plot. He just continued writing the next part if he thought it was good. I actually liked the idea of that, since it matched up pretty well with what happens in The Road itself. No one knows what they're going to find next, but they keep going, stepping on only the firm rocks on the river.
That was a metaphor by the way, in case it just flew over you head.

So what makes McCarthy the great author he is now?
Hmm. I sort of get what the answer should sound like, but I can't come up with a mot juste for it.
I think we need a new word.

Forever Uncertain

Warning: The following blog post will not be logical. Also, it contains SPOILERS.


As anyone reads The Road, one can't help but think, "What is it that took place on earth for it to just die like that?!"
Let us take a few details from the book. The ashes fall like snow, one can't see the sun anymore, there are almost no traces of non-human life, and even the humans are pretty much not there for the most part. Was it a nuclear catastrophe? Was it a volcano? Was it maybe just an ecological collapse caused by the increasing acidity in the ocean?

The answer is that we'll never know. Just as the future is uncertain, the past is also uncertain. Only the present matters. Just like Christmas.

The father and the son always prepared for the future, having a pistol ready at all times in case they needed a quick and easy way out *coughSUICIDEcough*. However, when the time came, the father couldn't do anything. Even on the verge of imminent death, and even under the promise made before stating that he would never leave the son alone in the world, the man doesn't (or can't) shoot his son. You can't know the future until it hits you. It's the now. It's always the now. It has always been and always will be. Now.

Speaking of futures, did you know that there is no future tense in terms of grammar? Technically, there's only the past tense and the present tense. The future tense is just a modification of the present tense. I learned that somewhere, but I don't know where.


Anyways, after the boy wakes up one day to find that the father's body was "stiff and cold," the boy sobs for a while, until some people show up. Of course, after all that the man and the son had gone through, the son doesn't trust them yet.

"How do I know you're one of the good guys?
You don't. You'll have to take a shot.
Are you carrying the fire?
Am I what?
Carrying the fire.
You're kind of weirded out, aren't you?
No.
Just a little.
Yeah.
That's okay."

Just like that, the boy joins the other 'good guys' and decides to leave the dead body of his dad behind. Leaving the past behind, heading towards an uncertain future.

Is There Hope?

You're stranded at sea.
Having barely escaped from the devastating crash the boat had with a jagged reef rock, you now sit on a lifeboat, relieved that the dark blue sea had not swallowed and claimed your life.
Upon checking your belongings, you find a wet pair of socks, a battery-dead cellphone, a couple of cereal bars left uneaten, and a flaregun.

Oh, goody! You have a flaregun! Now you'll surely survive! Lucky you!

You shoot the only flare you brought in the gun. The shot zooms across the air, drawing an arc across the moonlit sky, until it ultimately detonates with a brilliant flash. You smile.
One hour... The light fades.
Two hours... Your smile fades.
Three hours... You're worried.
Four hours... CRAP.

That awkward moment when you know you're screwed.
That feeling you get when you know that no one is coming.


When the boy in The Road gets curious as to what the flaregun is supposed to do, the father decides that there's nothing else better to do with it: They're not going to be saved, and no one's going to be seeing it (hopefully).
Once the artificial fire lit up in the air, the boy starts to ask:
"They couldnt see it very far, could they Papa?
Who?
Anybody.
No. Not far.
If you wanted to show where you were.
You mean like to the good guys?
Yes. Or anybody that you wanted them to know where you were.
Like who?
I dont know.
Like God?
Yeah. Maybe somebody like that." (246)

No one will help them now.
They have been abandoned, not to be helped by others, not even God.
There are no more good guys. There is no God.
People are, ironically, "angry at God for not existing." (C.S. Lewis)
In all this darkness and desolation, the fire continues to live.
The fire, the hope, being carried by the father and the son.
Is there still hope?
Yes.

Because pet rocks are awesome.

...Nine hours... It has been so long since you had a sip of water.
You're just so thirsty... You're begging for some water, some Gatorade, some tea, some kind of liquid to quench your thirst.
You're slowly losing hope...
But then you see something glistening in the horizon.
You see a light coming towards you from a distance.

There is still hope.
There is always hope.

Appreciation

Life isn't appreciated.
At least it's not until it's long gone.
We just don't appreciate some things in life.
The soda, the house, the carpet, the lightbulb, the book:
We don't really see their importance until it's just too late.
Only after everything is gone, we can see the significance of it.

We always have water. We always have beds. We always have air.

We have light. We have people. We have toilets. We have everything.
There are some things we're so used to always having around, just tiny
things that seem unimportant, but are actually the most important of all...
We'll only see them once they're gone. Only when it's all burnt down to
ashes will we see it, what it used to be, what it was, the appreciation.
When the only things left on the road are ashes and death,
everything is just worth more. When you only have each other
to trust in, and only the road to guide you, nothing matters
anymore, or rather, everything matters. In a world where
life is scarce and death is banal, one just appreciates life
more for the pure beauty and glory it used to be.

So should we just appreciate a bit more? Maybe.
Sometimes, second chances never come again.
Just remember that some day, things will just
"not be made right again." (287)

A little
appreciation
wouldn't
hurt.

Just Okay

As the father and son travel throughout The Road, the two have these little conversations between them. One of such conversation involved them talking about who were the good guys:
"Are we still the good guys?
Yes. We're still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.
Okay." (77)

But then think about it: In whoever's perspective, you are the good guy. You're always the good guy. Maybe the other person think's he or she is a good guy too. Then who is the good guy? No one is. Maybe everyone is. There are no good and bad guys. In the end, everyone wants to survive, only that they have different roads to get there. One might be ethically or morally or [something]ly better than the other, but then these are standards that we humans made. I hardly think it applies to a post-apocalyptic situation in which society has collapsed. Everyone's just out there, eating whatever it is they find (canned beans, corpses, Twinkies, and whatever nasty things you have on mind), and our two main characters are not that much different.
I just realized I have no idea what I'm talking about.
It's late at night and we all know our minds are much more cloudy at night for three reasons: One, we want to sleep. Two, we are lazy. Three, we are human.
Oh, actually, the third one sums up one and two, so we only have one reason. Yay for conciseness.

ARGH. I strayed from the path of 'homework done correctly' again.
Sorry. Back to The Road.

I have noticed how most of the conversations between father and son end with "Okay." The son always listens to what the father has to say, always believing him. Are those the bad guys? Yes. Okay. What was that? An earthquake. Okay. Are we gonna die? Yes, but not now. Okay. Go to sleep now. Okay. Stay right here. Okay. Okay? Okay.

The child, who represents the final hope, the last bit of humanity and innocence, believes whatever the father tells him. In this world that McCarthy has created, people just don't know what to believe anymore, or rather, there is nothing left to believe in. There are no beliefs. There is no 'why' for life, there is no 'because' for life... Life just is.

And it just keeps on going.


Okay?


Okay.

Show and Don't Tell

The Road isn't a Shakespeare novel. It is also definitely not Clockwork Orange. What I'm trying to say is that the words are not that difficult, which is probably why it got so famous and widely known in a short time. However, I really have to say, the descriptions are great. It makes me feel like I'm actually in the middle of all that gray.

When I say that the words are not difficult, I'm not saying that there are no new words. In fact, there are many new words that are quite descriptive. Yet, somehow, most of these words appear familiar, and they make sense within context. Here are some of the words:

knapsack - basically a bag. a fancy way of saying backpack.

ligaments - connective tissue... (Eww, gorey!)

litany - prayer with responses that are the same for a number in succession

basalt - the dark, dense igneous rock of a lava flow or minor intrusion

escarpment - a long, precipitous, clifflike ridge of land, rock, etc.

slogged - to walk or plod heavily

cannonading - to attack continuously with or as if with cannon

rachitic - inflammation of the spine

(On a side note, we can sort of infer that the 'father' character used to be a doctor before the apocalypse. He seems to be very well-knowledged and knows specific medical information... stuff like frontal lobes and apparantly rachitics.)

Then, there were words that didn't exist such as:

roofingtin - the tin that a roof is made out of, I presume?

fireblackened - self-explanatory...

sweatblackened - also slightly self-explanatory?

Anyways, the word choices used by Cormac McCarthy is simple yet deep. He always finds a way to describe a scene, whether it be the ashes falling like snow, an abandoned old shack, a dark opaque waterfall, or a guy with a bullet hole in his frontal lobe. He manages to do what most people (myself included) cannot do when writing a piece of writing: Showing and not telling. Basically, when writing literary work, we want to 'show' in a way that the book can appeal to the reader in all five senses.

Just saying. Haha. This book could serve as a great example for descriptive descriptions (no, that is not redundant), a good model for literary writing. I would personally want more colors, if you know what I mean. This book is too gray. Life could always do with some extra colors.

Nothing on the Road

♬ I walk a lonely road ♬
♬ The only one that I have ever known ♬
♬ Don't know where it goes ♬
♬ But it's only me, I walk alone... ♬

(Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Green Day)

Cormac McCarthy's 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road is an interesting one so far. For one, it has already been made into a movie (which I haven't seen yet, to make the reading just a bit more enjoyable!), and it has become a book not uncommon in schools. It must be pretty darn awesome to get that much attention.

The Road is the story of a father and his son in post-apocalyptic America, travelling to the warmer south to not die in the winter. The dark, cold setting is quite depressing, and God is questioned several times by the protagonists. There is nothing left in the barren wastelands except occasional canned food. The main characters carry a revolver to suicide with when worst comes to worst, and the only thing they really have is each other.
I seriously do not know anything else. That is all I know. What do I mean?

So far, I do not know how the world ended up as the destroyed mass of ashes and debris as it is now. I do not know what time of the year it is (although the 'father' assumes it to be about October). I do not know what these two are afraid of encountering in their journey. I don't even know the names of the two main characters. We only know that there is a road, and it is meant to be followed, in the hopes that there might be something at the end of it. Period.

Yet, in the middle of all this despair, there is but one source of innocence: the son. It's just nice to see the kid asking the dad about the soda they happenned to find, nice to see the little bits and pieces of life that hasn't been destroyed. According to the father, the son was "all that stood between him and death." (29) At least, for me, it helped me relax and catch my breath in between all the desolation.

I'll get back on The Road soon.

Cutting Through Carrots

Coming Through Slaughter frequently has off-beats, awkward shards of text placed in weird place such as the following: "The woman is cutting carrots... If she thinks what she is doing she will lose control. He knows that the only way to catch a fly for instance is to move the hand without the brain telling it to move fast, interfering." (p.31)

After reading through the book and coming upon this part again, I found this seemingly random part not as random. In fact, the whole book, which seemed to be arranged in a rather 'drunk' fashion, was not random at all.

I'll get back to that statement in a second. For now, let us concentrate on the carrots.

Actually, never mind. Let me talk about Buddy Bolden's lifestyle.
Buddy, both a barber and a jazz player, is a very eccentric man. He seems to be the kind of guy that would be able to swoosh off whatever hits his face, whether it be a break-up, a death, or a pie.


Anydope, Buddy is always in the 'now', with no concerns for the future or recognition of the past. According to Crawley, "he doesn't talk about his past... he's only concerned with the next ten minutes of his life."
Everyone who had known Buddy would agree that if one hasn't "heard him play some place where the weather for instance could change the next series of notes - then you should never have heard him at all." (p.37) Well, he doesn't seem to be a planner, does he? I couldn't have described him better than Frank Lewis did: "He was never recorded."

Back to the carrots.
It is only when one does not think about things deeply that they can manage to do it.
One cannot cut carrots if one is too intent on the act of cutting. You know how you always mess up on the things you think you're going to mess up? Well, think less.
So why did Buddy lose control?

*insert smooth jazz music*


Speaking of jazz, let's get back to how the book's form is actually not random. Putting it simply, the whole book is jazz. The seemingly random bits and pieces form what closely resembles jazz music. It's like as if the chorus is Webb's search and the verses are Bolden stuff. Throughout the novel, the story just seems to fluctuate as if it were musical notes. The song doesn't make sense until the song is over, until you finally get that time to organize and think about whatever you just heard.

Oh, great. Now I have to think about how to wrap this blog post up.
Um...