Horns by:Joe Hill

This story  was somewhat disappointing because of its familiarity. The hero blamed for a crime he didn’t commit; discovering the real murderer; exacting revenge against that murderer; the tale of youths falling in love; learning why Merrin was killed in the first place,  the subplots in “Horns” are fairly conventional, aside from Ig suddenly developing devil-like abilities. Even the execution, while skillfully handled, was largely formulaic right down to the flashbacks, foreshadowing and other well-used plot devices.

Creatively, I loved the idea of the hero using abilities usually associated with evil, especially the ‘horns’ which caused people to confess their darkest urges—their worst and most shameful impulses—and asking permission to commit more. The only problem I had with this concept is that I felt the abilities that Ig develops and the many references Joe makes to Satan over the course of the novel were a bit too cliché like being able to learn all of a person’s guilty secrets upon skin contact, commanding snakes, wielding a pitchfork as a weapon, ‘luck of the devil’, 666, the gift of tongues, “The Devil Inside”, Asmodeus, ‘devil in a blue dress’, and so on. Comparatively, while “Horns” is another well-written and entertaining novel, I felt it lacked the surprise twists and jaw-dropping moments. Nevertheless, I immensely enjoyed reading “Horns” and believe the novel will only add to Joe Hill's growing legacy...

The Stranger by: Albert Camus

The Stranger by Albert Camus is a super short novel, but its substance is heavy.  The main character, Meursault, unsympathetically attends his mother’s funeral, begins an immoral relationship with a female co-worker the next day, becomes involved in his debauched neighbor’s problems, and ends up murdering a man without reasonable motive. The Stranger is appealing, specifically because it highlights philosophical ideas that express why we are where we are today as a society.  As much as I appreciated the opportunity to read The Stranger, I completely disagree with this philosophy. To begin, Meursault is honest about the way he views everything; I value that.  But he does not seem human: he is without emotion or empathy; is animalistic in his thoughts; and is disconnected from people.  I wondered if he was not a little mentally challenged or childlike. I suppose his story would be acceptable if my speculations were true; but the problem is that this is his attitude.  He does not judge between what is right and what is evil.  He thinks society ineptly seeks logical meaning behind man’s behavior and purpose; yet, he thinks there is no explanation for either.  Society cannot know if there is truly a purpose to life; therefore, there is no reason to care.  Man is like nature, and nature does not care either. 

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Li Mu Bai is a legendary martial artist whose attempts to find enlightenment have left him disillusioned. He gives away his famous sword, the Green Destiny, to signal a move into a new, nonviolent life. His courier is Shu Lien, another well-known fighter who’s been pining away for him for years. Shu Lien becomes friendly with the aristocratic young Jen, who is secretly a superior swords woman, the lover of the desert bandit Lo, and a disciple of the vicious middle-aged female criminal Jade Fox. From this setup, the film details the theft of the Green Destiny, the romantic and political intrigues that ensue, and the major characters’ life quests: Jen for love and power, Li Mui Bai for peace, Shu Lien for Li Mui Bai, Jade Fox for revenge against all men, and Lo for Jen.

The film has a elegant look that works in its favor to transport the viewer to its setting of ancient China. But this rich pictorialism has a down side: Lee (Director) seems to be so in love with his compositions and conceits that the film slows to a crawl in some sequences. A particular offender in this regard is a seemingly endless diversion in the desert, where the love affair between Lo the bandit and Jen the captured lady begins. Lee exploits the bleak beauty of this setting (shot in the Gobi desert and the Taklamakan Plateau north of Tibet) but eventually loses the viewer in the interminable love scenes.

More successful — indeed, the film’s major draw — are the stunningly executed fight scenes. Crouching Tiger keeps all the details clear, giving full play to these skilled performers’ leaps and thrusts and always interspering high-angle shots for context. Michelle Yeoh executes her typical stunningly economical moves, while Cheng Pei Pei is her opposite, relying more on brute strength and raw power to conquer her enemies. Most impressive is Zhang Ziyi. Her dazzling gymnastics put her immediately in the company of legendary predecessors in the field like Angela Mao Ying.

THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER, Dylan Thomas

THEME: The poem is mostly talking about life, death, and the way time connects the two. Nature and humanity are also compared and contrasted a good deal.

Stanza 1: Time is the "force that through the green fuse drives the flower", but time doesn't just nudge or push the flower into the open--it forces it. Time is aggressive in this poem. Also, the flower's middle is a "green fuse"--not a stem, stalk, or tube, but a fuse as if it were a stick of dynamite. Time also "blasts the roots of trees", which could mean that it makes them grow or that time sends tree roots slamming through the dirt like shrapnel. Time destroys by pushing life along at such a pace that the living things are worn out and broken by the pace of their development--at the end of stanza 1, the speaker tries to talk to a "crooked rose"and mentions how his own youth is "bent".

Stanza 2: Time moves the waters, too, in the same rough way that it produces plant growth. The water doesn't flow on its own power over the rocks; it is driven right through the rocks. The running water is compared to the speaker's own blood flow, but the same force of time that makes water and blood burst along their paths, also dries river beds and solidifies human veins. The speaker feels time draining him like a vampire, like it drains the mountain springs.

Stanza 3: For the first time, the speaker address the role of the Divine in the processes of Time. Unfortunately, though the divine presence can heal destruction, it also brings about death eventually.  I'll be honest and admit that I have no idea what "the hangman's lime" line means. Obviously it's something to do with death, but if you Google "the hangman's lime" you'll find Wesleyan's poetry magazine, and if you try to do other hanging-related web searches, you get disturbing results. So. Draw your own conclusions on that one.

Stanza 4: This stanza is a puzzler, because while time is leaching "at the fountainhead" of something--life?--love is dripping something and easing it's own sores with fallen blood. The blood of  life. Time drains Life, and Love is satisfied by the bits of Life that fall upon it.


Final Couplet: Well, we've got lovey words like "lover" and "sheet" in these two lines, but both romantic images are directly tied to death. The lover is in a tomb and the sheet seems to be a funeral shroud that the speaker envisions for himself. What a devastating poem. It's absolutely beautiful, but it doesn't offer hope about the future. Death is eminent. Time will drive you, force you, and explode you in a direction you don't want to go--straight toward the grave.

Civilian and Soldier ~Wole Soyinka

The basic theme of ‘Civilian and Soldier’ is war. The poem itself captures a crucial moment in war when a civilian is brutally shot by a soldier. It explores the dilemma of a soldier trying to shoot a civilian. The civilian, who is the narrator, imagines the soldier’s brutality–his willingness or unwillingness to carry out the order of his superiors and kill the civilian. 

-lines 1-6

In this first stanza the confrontation between the civilian and the soldier is established. The civilian went on to imagine the instructions the soldier must have gotten, his confusion as to his function as a soldier. This hesitation to shoot can be liberally (and rightly) predicated upon the fact that the soldier may also have civilian relatives. At the point where the soldier ‘brought the gun to bear’ on the civilian, the civilian reiterates the central dilemma of war–the pointlessness of the senseless killings.

-lines 19-27

Here the civilian states a strange thing: he says that if given the same opportunity as the soldier, he would make his life better (‘But I will shoot you clean and fair’), by feeding him and giving him many other good things. War is a strange business: sometimes civilians helps soldiers, feed them, nurse the wounded ones back to health while the war rages; later on, the same soldiers whom the civilians fed may be the very ones to shoot them in the battlefield. Now shouldn’t you ask yourself: what is war really about? For Soyinka, the man dies all who refuse to protest in the face of tyranny.

Love After Love Derek Walcott

After a harsh, emotionally exhausting breakup, everyone’s question is always the same: “When will I stop feeling like hell?”  The answer is as follows: whenever you learn to love yourself.  People come and people leave; the trick to remaining happy is knowing yourself and understanding your heart. Derek Walcott made me remember countless high school dramas and social encounters that leave the heart throbbing and screaming for help. But truly, there comes a time in everyone’s life, man or woman, when we have to realize that the only time to really feel love again is when we learn to love the person we are.”Each will smile at the other’s welcome,” states, when you realize that the person looking back at you in the mirror is actually not such a failure at  love and life after all, you will then welcome the confidence and security that follow.  What is life without tears and mumbled curse words for those who have shown us how little we care for ourselves? Through every fight and disagreement, every pointless argument, we find out who we are. As humans, we learn over time to adapt to situations and stay away from those which may bring us pain, but why is it that people always revisit the opportunity of loving again?  Because we have to feel something to live; and often, feeling something means learning from ourselves everyday.  When Walcott states that you should “take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, and the desperate notes;” he means to show you that you must delete all those things in your life that bring back the person you were, and adapt to the person you want to be.

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

Not for the first time, I committed the sin of seeing the film before reading the book. I doubt I’m alone in having seen Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather before reading Mario Puzo’s wonderful novel. The adaptation is impeccable with scenes and dialogue lifted effortlessly from the pages of Puzo’s book, which adds a lot more depth to the story of the Corleone family with the eventual fall of Vito Corleone and the rise of his son, Michael, as head of the family. One or two elements seemed needless but the overall story is a delightful read as we live with the Corleone family through one of the biggest crises in their history, and look at how they strive to bounce back mercilessly against the rival families in New York. A fast-paced, relentless and great read.