YOU ARE ALL CRAZY!

 Annie Zachery said

My elementary school was a one-room school with all grades, one through eight. There were about thirty students. We would walk two and a half miles to school by cutting through the woods. On rainy days, my father would load us up in the wagon and carry us to school. Elementary school was split up during the year due to sharecropping, and it took two years to complete one grade. The county was so poor that our parents would have to pay the teacher to teach straight through cotton-picking time. I was almost disenchanted with school in the seventh grade. There were two students in my class, myself, and a young man. The young man did not go during the pay period and at the end of the year, he passed to the eighth grade right along with me, and I had continued in school all year. I thought this was very unfair.

This was kind of like the conditions of Grant’s Wiggin’s school.  His students had to work a large portion of the year, and did not get a full education.  This was a society where there was segregation and black students were sent to schools with low funding.  Grant’s and Annie Zachery’s had elementary school students who had very poor quality conditions.

US troops should me removed from Iraq.  The United States has no reason to be there.  We found no weapons, there is no real dictator ship, Sadam will be executed, and there is a democracy.  The only excuse for being there is to make sure the democracy is secure.

Ryan said

 If our country focused its energy and effort from Iraq to a situation that’s really in need, productive things would happen.

This is true.  Sudan obviously needs more attention and we need to focus on the genocide in Dafur.  If we keep up with how we are doing now, and keep playing “Big Brother ” with Iraq, things will get bad.  It may not go as far as Vietnam, but there will eventually be a draft.

But the bigger question is, if we are going to leave Iraq, When should we do it?

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/01/feedback.iraq.plan/index.html

I recently watched Stuart Burge’s Julius Caesar. The director did not do anything to make this play interesting.  This was made in the early 70’s.  Charlton Heston as Antony, Jason Robards as Brutus and John Gielgud as Julius caesar.  The screen play was all in 1600’s english.  This movie was very much like the book.  The movie was overall very poor.  The fighting scene was not very impressive even though it was made in the 70’s.  The Throne of blood probably had better action scenesOverall this movie was pretty poorly made and slightly difficult to follow.

After reading and watching three adaptations of The Scottish Play it is easy to see that all three are very different. The three adaptations ultimately revised Shakespeare’s play to try to fit it into their own culture.  The names were obviously changed to fit their particular culture.  There were other ways that the authors for these three adaptations changed the Scottish Play to fit their culture.  For example, in the Throne of Blood, Japanese temples were used as
Duncan’s castle.  The difference between The Scottish Play and The Throne of blood was that a war was going on through out the movie.  What was also different was that Lady Washizu tries to convince Washizu to kill “Banquo” and “Duncan” at the same time.  Also, the scene where a messenger tells Washizu that he was not able to do his job in killing Miki’s son, Washizu killed him.  Unlike in the Scottish Play, Macbeth never did. This made the Lady Macbeth character more insane than the Lady Macbeth in The Scottish Play.  The Travesties were written in rhymes which ruined the entire play.  What was interesting and twisted about this play was that everyone comes back at the end.  Out of the three abstract adaptations, I think I liked the African uMbatha only because it was less weird than the others.  This was the most recent adaptation we’ve read and theoretically, it was an adaptation easiest to follow. The basic plots for all three adaptations were all similar in that abstract characters (or character) give(s) prophecies to “Macbeth” who ultimately kills the king. 

I wonder why these authors thought creating an adaptation of the Scottish Play would be interesting to modern viewers.