Measure for measure

Measure for measure

I had never read anything from Shakespeare before last night, you can call me uncultured, but i never saw the point and never was forced to do it for school before. i think his texts probably were amazing 200 years ago, when English wasn’t as modern and simplified as it is today… but now it’s way off. i don’t see the point of reading something i can barely understand. it’s like reading a story in german when you don’t know german… well to me reading a story in old english is the same thing. i’d rather use my time to read something i can actually understand instead of showing off to other people by reading stuff i need to use a dictionary for every word. but anyway… i guess i read one of the easiest ones of his, because it wasn’t actually THAT hard to understand. i got the main idea.. which was the point i think. and we also only had an excerpt to read, which was about 15 pages long. it was a story about someone being condemned, so we had to read it for my humanities/social studies class. and i’m not criticizing his work, i just think it’s not very appropriate for our century.

and since i have an intensive summer course, we have about 30 pages to read a night in our course textbook, and every class we have a quiz on the reading just so the teacher knows we actually do the reading assigned, and today we had one on the Shakespeare story, of course. once we’re done with the quiz, the teacher always picks them up, and then redistribute them randomly so we can correct them together. so you usually correct somebody else’s quiz.

the first question of the quiz was: ” name two of the characters in the play.” and the person i was correcting wrote ” angelo, isabella, duke, claudio, lucio, juliet and i could name so many more… ” at first i only saw that she wrote many names, so i thought “good for her..” and then i see that little comment she wrote after the names. how hilarious! how vain! the teacher clearly asked for two names, and she wrote down six of them, but also.. included some conceited comment as well. i thought it was pretty funny. i wrote “WHAT?” super big next to her answer. as big as her ego, and big enough so she notices it!

so you guessed, it’s still all about school, and work and work! the good news is i’ve been working on a project, and won’t tell you now what exactly it is because i want to keep it secret for a while, and basically until my ideas are a little bit more clear. i will be working intensively on it for the next month, and then i’ll be able to tell you all about it! i might not be able to wait that long, i love to share my ideas, so yeah, we’ll see.

oh, and in my humanities class we have a 1500 words paper due for friday. the point of the paper is to relate an ethical issue or a few ethical issues to the program we were in during college. i was in arts and culture… so it’s kinda hard to think of ethical issues related to art. well, there’s a few! but it’s still harder than let’s say if you were in science, or social studies. but i went and talked to the teacher after class today, and she was being very helpful. at first i was planning on doing it on copyright issues (which is one of my favorite topic, i’ve used it in papers before, you probably know if you’ve been reading this blog for a while) but then i was worried that the paper would end up being too informative rather than argumentative. when i was talking to her we ended up concluding that it would be better for me to do it on censorship! why didn’t i think about this before! such a smart idea. censorship is one of the most fascinating topics. especially when you compare different countries, and cultures. so i’ll do it on that. i have four days left to do it, not bad! and if i hand it in next monday instead of friday i will only lose five marks. not too bad either for three extra days!

and yes, if you didn’t guess already, that is a picture of shakespeare that i found using the amazing and lovely Google.

Posten on alexevans.net by Alex Evans