EIGHT: Adaptation.

            When I found out we were watching a movie in class I was really excited because I love watching movies and it's probably something I spend a little too much of my time doing. Anyways, the movie that we watched was Adaptation. It's about the screenplay writer Charlie Kaufman making an adaptation of Susan Orlean's book, The Orchid Thief. He struggles with writer's block as he wants to make a true and honest film about orchids instead of a cliché Hollywood movie. I think in the movie, Charlie's twin brother, Donald, is meant to represent that cliché side.
            The movie was kind of a satire on the whole conventional Hollywood movie. I think it was pretty clear when everyone thought in their heads "She's going to kill him", then burst out laughing when she actually said it. But it didn't start that way. In the beginning, it was Charlie struggling to be original and make his version of the movie but once he goes to the screenwriting seminar and invites Donald to New York, everything changes. It becomes the cliché movie he was trying to avoid. I'm not exactly sure about what this movie says about writing but I think there will always be a difficult process to it. It always needs inspiration and a storyline. You can't just write a story where "nothing much happens." However, you don't always need the typical, overdone conventions of a Hollywood film. Some of my favourite movies are more independent films where they do struggle, like Charlie mentioned, but they also change and have those epiphany's. It's impossible to write a story about nothing.
            Overall, I think I did enjoy this movie. I think if I just watched it as a movie, my first impression would be that I didn't like it but after thinking about it, it does make sense to me. I liked how confusing it was; not so much in the movie itself (and it was confusing at times) but how it was written by Charlie Kaufman about Charlie Kaufman with Donald Kaufman, who doesn't actually exist. I often do like a movie where I like the actors too, ie. Tilda Swinton, Meryl Streep, Maggie Gyllenhaal. I don't exactly know if my interpretation of Adaption. is correct but that's what I got out of it. Charlie tried to make an original adaptation of a book but in the end had to adapt himself to the typical norms of a Hollywood movie.
            And Nicolas Cage wasn't bad too, I guess.

SEVEN: My Snobby Spoken Word Analysis

            The spoken word performance that I have chosen is called An Origin Story by Sarah Kay and Phil Kaye. It was kind of hard to find a spoken word piece that I actually really liked. There was one where I thought the way it was written was interesting because it was in French and English but the topic was a little inappropriate for a school blog...so anyways. 

            So as you may or may not have noticed they have really similar last names. And that is pretty much what the spoken word is about. Their scarily similar lives. I thought it was a little cheesy, but I guess it's not entirely their faults. I guess the way they set it up was effective. They'd take turns back and forth and once a big similarity or something important came up they'd say it at the same time. I think it was also mean to be humourous which is also effective. One thing I did like was that they made it clear that they would never ever become a couple. I think if they did end up together it would be a little too much for me. So then there was the name-dropping of famous duos like Lennon & McCartney, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, etc. This was effective because the parallelism made it clear that they were "BFF's". Which was pretty much the idea of the spoken word so that's cool. 

            So basically, I do think that there was some effectiveness as far as the structure of the spoken word, however, personally it wasn't really for me. But coincidences can be fun so I didn't completely hate it. 

SIX: Maybe I Could Be An Author

            Hah. Jokes. I don't think I could be an author. If I had any plans, I don't think being an author would be part of them. I'm way too impatient and novels take time. Months. Years. I can't work on something for more than a week. But then again, Teresa Toten never thought that she would be an author. Growing up she didn't even have books. Surprisingly, I really enjoyed her presentation. When I first heard that an author was coming to our school to talk to us I thought, "Teresa Toten? I've never heard of her, it'll probably be boring." But what do I know anyway? She presented us with the idea of embracing failure. That was a pretty interesting concept, I thought. I also liked that with every novel of hers that she spoke about, she mentioned that she thought they were failures. I felt like I could sort of relate to that because with almost every big assignment I've done so far, in this class and others, I'm almost never satisfied with them. I always say, "It's so bad," and it annoys all of my friends and it kind of annoys me too, but I never know any other way to express how I feel about that assignment because I've never felt 100% confident with what I've produced, even though I may get a decent mark on it.
            There was a certain charisma about her as she'd wander around the room and the way she'd whisper certain words as she read us parts of her novel. I also thought it was sad that she had only those few photos of her childhood, because these days you have albums and albums filled, stashed away in your basement. Or at least my family does. But I guess it also makes them more special, and also it's a lot easier to manage them. As in, you don't have to ransack your basement just to find a picture of yourself at age 3, eating a popsicle.
            I like to pretend that I'm too good for YA novels but come on, you can't escape them. Although, The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B didn't sound too bad. So, Teresa Toten was pretty cool. She had an interesting story. She was a straight-forward, honest human being. She had endured traumatic events in her past and yet there she was, standing before us, in her bright orange sweater and uggs.
         

Is there such a thing as being 'too informal' on a blog? I wonder if 'Blog Etiquette' is a thing. Ok cool.

FIVE: Poetry Collection Evaluation

            Writing my poetry collection was not the easiest thing I've ever done. It wasn't exactly the hardest, but it got a little tedious. 

            My first poem was called Winter's Ward. This one was actually the easiest one for me. It was kind of weird, I was sitting and I couldn't think of anything to write about and then all of a sudden the idea popped up in my head. Out of nowhere. I can't even remember what I was thinking about before I thought of it. A poem about someone describing a scene that resembles a cold winter but really, this person is in a straight-jacket in one of those white padded rooms. I wasn't actually sure if those kinds of rooms existed or if they still use straight-jackets but it seemed like something I had seen in a movie. I decided to write it as a sonnet because I find it's much easier to write a poem if there's a specific structure to follow. I actually think I did quite well on this poem. I like to think that I'm pretty good at counting to ten, so it wasn't too hard to keep all of my syllables within limit. Although, I do think that when I was writing it I should have been thinking about the meter, as the Iambic Pentameter doesn't actually work for the whole poem. I think this poem came as a pleasant surprise, because the rest of my poems did not come as easily.

            My next poems were a set of three Haiku's. I'm not going to lie, I really had no idea what I was doing with these ones. I didn't want to waste more time than I already had, spending hours thinking of a really good idea so I would just go along with the first thing that came to mind, in hopes that I could somehow turn them in to something. The titles are: Katrina, Chicken Eat Chicken, and Blindfolds. Again, I think I got the structure of the haiku pretty well. However, I still didn't pay enough attention to a metre. Having written these poems, I was really just hoping that anyone who read it would kind of just make their own interpretation. Like, "Oh, is this about hurricane Katrina?" or "Is he a chicken?" things like that. For anyone who ever reads them under the impression that they are supposed to be linked together, I apologize in advance. They really aren't that meaningful. But hey, at least it made you think.

                Oh, the dreaded Character poem. This is the poem I spent the longest on. It is also my very least favourite poem out of the entire collection. I dislike it more than the Haiku's that I don't even understand. It wasn't writing it that took a long time, it was choosing a character and figuring out what a character poem even was. For some reason, I just really had a hard time wrapping my head around how to write this poem. I started with Baby Bear from Goldilocks and the Three Bears, to one of Cinderella's stepsisters and then after a whole night of trying to figure this out, I ended up choosing Arista; some random sister of Ariel's from The Little Mermaid that nobody even knows. I think it was that with the character poem, it doesn't have a structure, or specific amount of syllables for me to follow. As I was writing this "Arista" poem, it didn't even feel like I was writing a poem. It really just felt like I was some jealous sister ranting in my journal. I think the reason I struggled with this poem so much was because I just really didn't like what I was writing. So basically, there really isn't anything about this poem that stands out to me. I did notice that used parallelism for three lines and short sentences but other than that, I'm just glad that I didn't end with that poem.

            My final poem of the collection was a Sound poem. I chose the title Running Out. Probably because I was literally running out of time with this poetry collection, but also because everyone knows that I generally have a little thing with time. So for this poem, since I was aiming for sound and there's no specific syllable count, I wrote the lines saying them out loud. As far as rhyme, it followed an a,b,a,b rhyme scheme except for the first stanza. 

            In the end, I of course wasn't completely satisfied with the poems I had formed into a collection. Like everything else I've written in this course. However, I am impressed with that weird metaphor thing that I came up with, with the cold winter representing the insane asylum. So there's that.