Monday, March 26, 2007

Corazon Salvaje



I only saw the showing of this soap opera that was on friday, because I couldn't make it on Sunday. I walked in a few minutes late, just as the dad was dying, and the first thing that I thought as I was sitting down was, "If this was on TV, I would turn it off."....but then, I realized that if I could ignore the cheesy music and everything else that was cheesy, then I would actually watch it for the spanish, because I could understand their spanish really well. I think it would be a good way to improve my spanish, and the love story between (is it Jaime?) and the Juan de Diablo guy was interesting enough to tolerate for awhile.... I don't think I would ever try to follow it. Soap operas in general bother me. They're too desperate. Besides, I 'm not home often enough to follow everyday. It 's bad enough that my favorite show is once a week and I have to plan to be home to watch it. Anyways, even if I did have a lot of time, I can't see myself going out of my way to watch it, or even watch it at all for anything other than the reason that I mentioned above.

The other thing that I want to point out is the music......I don't understand why all cheesy music like that, in all shows that I've seen with sappy moments has the same instrumentation. Why do they always have the synthesizer and oboe? Why is oboe the only real instrument used? Sometimes they have strings, but in the except that we saw on friday, I only heard synth strings and oboe. It's true that oboe has a cheesy sound to it, but that's only when it's used for stuff like this. In orchestral music, it adds a nice and unique colour. ........ok, that was the music comment from the music major.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

dies anos con Mafalda



I'm not sure if I'm going to have a lot to say about this. It seems like an average comic book (except for Archie comics, which I like entirely)...There are some parts that I like and some parts that I dislike.

-Some of the comics stand out to me and really make me laugh: these ones didn't appear very often, and in some of the 'chapters', I couldn't really find any. Also, I found that these ones didn’t have a lot of text. I don’t like reading a lot when ‘reading comics.’ For the most part in short strips like this one, I skim them as quickly as possible and look for the joke first (and then study it carefully after), and look at the pictures. I tend to skip the ones that have a lot of text.

- Some of them seemed interesting at first (I think these ones mainly all started by having no text for the first few boxes, so I thought that I would like them), but then I didn’t understand the last box where the text supposedly explained the joke. I just didn’t get them. Maybe this has a bit to do with the language and the culture of Argentina, and it contains content that foreigners wouldn’t completely understand.

-As I said above, I don’t like reading the boxes with lots of text. It’s visually distracting. But also, some of the strips that had no text made no sense, like the one at the bottom of page 181.

-Oo..I like how there are different ‘chapters’ to mark different themes. I think that this is creative.



I don't really know if I would call it bad, just because I’m not particularly interested in every (or most of the strips). I generally don’t read comics other than what I see in the newspaper and Archie comics (which I really like)….but I really don’t like comics like Spiderman and Superman…I like comics that have jokes. It feels weird writing about a comic book for a class. I think it’s cool and a good experience to read comics in a different language, but as this specific book was pretty expensive, I most likely would never buy another one.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Los Siete Locos 2

I don't understand:

Jon said in class on friday that "a book asks to be read." (or something like that)

My question is (which is elaborated a bit on the lecture as well): Why are books boring then?

Why do authors make books complex?...or in the case of Los Siete Locos, why are the ideas interesting but something about the writing is so confusing that our class has pretty much voted that it's boring? If authors choose to write, and choose to create that that "asks to be read," then shouldn't they try harder? I guess this is what the course it about. Authors who may be trying, (or trying to do something new or different), but don't succeed because they're just bad writers. But there's more to that. I know Allende isn't a bad writer. She can't be. Eva Luna is bad, but at least one of Allende's bestsellers must be good writing. Even people who may not like the ideas of her books might see that her use of language is good. (it's seperating two parts of writing: language and ideas, but I'll talk about that later) I just don't believe that she would be that famous if people thought that all of her books are either all good or all bad. SO, was she not trying as hard when writing the books that the majority of her readers think badly of? Was she just trying something different so that the books call out to be read by the rest of the readers? Was she trying to please them, and by doing that letting down her 'usual readers' if any???
I know I'm supposed to be talking about Los Siete Locos, but I'm just using Allende as an example.

I thought at first that the beginning of chapter three wasn't as "difficult" to read as the first two chapters, but it seems to be exactly the same. I find it difficult to connect with the book. As mentioned before, it's easy to seperate the ideas with the language. LIke it says on the back of the book, apparently people have read the book and thought that the ideas were interesting, but the writing was bad. I'm not sure how I feel. I think that the idea in the beginning of the book is interesting, how he stole money because he needed to improve his life, but he ended up spending it fast and not using it to advance in life, like buying himself some new clothes. I'm not sure if he ended up improving himself in the end, because I find it difficult to connect with the language of the book. I should watch the movie.

Sunday, March 4, 2007

Roberto Arlt: Los Siete Locos-first half



Before I start……This book is soooooo boring. I can’t take it. I actually caught myself almost falling asleep every few paragraphs, and I eventually figured out that if I wanted to get past the first few sections, I would have to skim. It turned out that I ended up just reading the dialogues, and I have to say that not too much had happened as I reached the dialogue with el astrologo (I mean…we learn at the very beginning that he stole some money, and that he has to pay it back, and then I skipped a whole bunch…not on purpose…and then he talks about paying the money back) I probably missed a lot more than I think, but I wouldn’t know. I really wish I was more interested, so that I wouldn’t fall asleep and maybe understand more of the ongoing action. That way, I’d be able to make a proper judgement of what I read instead of saying “I didn’t get it….he makes no sense”…which is true, but I don’t like complaining to get out of stuff. This is what I kept thinking while I was reading…or trying to. As a more serious point, I really don’t quite understand what Arlt is doing structure-wise. I don’t understand why there is a new titled section every few pages. I don’t understand what Arlt is getting at plot-wise…although it seems interesting, but it’s written badly, and I can’t quite grasp the point.

I guess before I put a book down and call it bad, I want to understand it completely. I want to believe that the author has tried his or her best, and that I’ve believed in it’s potential….and then I can put it down…unless it’s Eva Luna…that was just bad from the beginning. I guess I just need a lecture on Los Siete Locos to understand a bit more of what’s going on, because I’m lost. One last thing….is this a movie? I think it would be better as a movie, because it’s hard for me to imagine what’s going on, and I think that the structure would suit a film…but not a Hollywood type film. It would have to be a serious film with subtitles, but I may be completely off, and maybe there’s absolutely nothing interesting about the book.