Oedipus... What are you DOING?! ...Oedipus... STAHP!!!!

     I borrowed the title of this blog post from my best friend's skype status. She is in an honors world literature class while I am in a regular world literature class, but we are reading the same thing. Oedipus.
    I am certain that most of you have read Oedipus or at least know a little bit of what it is about. I will try not to spoil the ending for you all. That is a treat you must read for yourself. I liked Oedipus in it being a play aspect, but I really did not prefer it otherwise because it was so disgusting and disturbing.
    If you do not know the story of Oedipus or the background behind it, I shall tell you now; beginning with the history of Sophocles and plays. The play Oedipus was written by the great playwright Sophocles. He wrote about 23 plays and he would enter them into a contest to be performed at the wine festival of Dionysus. He never won worse than second place. Considering that I never win anything, I am proud of old Soph. Plays were mandatory things, they were obligations. One HAD to attend plays because they were for the moral education of the audience. If I told my grandfather that he would say,"Darn right, those greeks were unmoral!" They were meant to be entertaining too though. They would show them in the afternoon and there would be two to three plays. When the audience went to see these plays they would already know the backstory behind the play and that solved any confusion right there.
   Before the play Oedipus begins there is a story that goes behind it. We all know that he married his mother and killed his father right? Well if you did not, that is what happens. Gross. I know. But what happens before that? Well, here we are. Jacosta, the mother of Oedipus(also queen of Thebes), received the prophecy that her son would kill his father and marry his mother. She thought that was terrible, so what does she do? She sends him away with a shepherd to leave him on Mount Cithaeron to die. They also put a metal rod through his ankles so he cannot escape. Really, though, he is a baby. How would he escape? The shepherd takes the baby Oedipus with the stake through his ankle to Mount Cithaeron and he is prepared to leave him there to die but a messenger from Corinth takes the baby instead, because King Polybus and Queen Merope of Corinth cannot have children and he plans to give them the child instead of the shepherd having to leave baby Oedipus to die. So, the messenger takes the baby to the king and queen. They pull the metal stake out of his ankles and he walks with a limp for the rest of his life.
   Later in life, Oedipus is told the same prophecy that was given to his birth mother. That he will kill his father and marry his mother. He is afraid, so he leaves Corinth. He does not want to kill his father OR marry his mother. He is actually rather afraid of her. He gives up the claim to the throne and he leaves for Thebes. Along the way, he meets an important man(his birth father) and he kills him. First part of the prophecy- check! Then when he enters Thebes there is a great plague occurring and many people are dying because they cannot solve the riddle of the Sphinx. Not the sphinx in Egypt, the sphinx who tells riddles and if you cannot get them right curses you, or eats you, maybe both.

This is the riddle:

What goes on four legs in the morning, 
on two legs at noon, 
and on three legs in the evening?

   I will let you all figure this out for yourselves and I am hoping you will be able to, since even I have heard of this one before. 

  He solves this riddle and the citizens of Thebes whisk him away to make him their king and they let him marry the queen. Second part of the prophecy- check! Check, check, and check
   After this there is a lot more to the story but it would give away the ending of it so I will not tell you. You will just have to read Oedipus on your own and marvel in the disgusting glory of it all. Seriously though, if you do not read it, I will not blame you. It is one weird play. 

Um... what? Just for funsies

If this did not say The Two Towers on it, what kind of book do you think this would be? I have heard Gay Romance novel from many, many people now.
Need something to ease tension? Whip this book out, it makes everyone laugh.

Edgar Allan Poe

   I realized that I am running out of morning to give you all a post here. I promised I would type one out for you all and that is just what I shall do!
   I have been a reader of Edgar Allan Poe's works for about five years now(maybe less?) and I absolutely love them. Although I have read most of his well known works and strayed away from the lesser known ones, I would still like to believe that I love him as equally as other Poe lovers do. My friends can attest to this as I have read The Tell Tale Heart to them when I am bored and want an audience.
   The first time I had a taste of Poe's works was when I was in seventh grade, I was twelve. A neighboring high school was putting on a halloween production of well known short stories that were acted out. The first one that was shown was The Tell Tale Heart and to be honest, it scared the living daylights out of me because they pretended to dismember someone. After that play we went back to school and my english teacher made us read The Tell Tale Heart itself and I liked it much better.
   Wednesday evening I had the opportunity to go to the Chillicothe Library and watch a one man play called The Shadow of the Raven, put on by professional actor Duffy Hudson. He was a really cool guy to say in the least (I even got his autograph!).

                                                           ( Nevermore! Duffy Hudson) 

   This play was portrayed as the last few days of Edgar Allan Poe's life. Duffy acted it out brilliantly. He came in, disheveled and acting as if he was mentally unstable, which is what Poe may have been like in the last few days of his life.
   The play completely en-captured me into the life of Poe and I learned some things that I had not known before I had seen this play. Poe was most likely an alcoholic but he never took any kind of drugs except for once after the death of his wife Virginia, who died of consumption. He also may have died from a large brain tumor. We know this now because when his corpse was exhumed twenty-five years after his death, the man doing the exhuming thought he found a rock or a clump of mud in Poe's skull. He shook it around trying to dislodge it and it was too big to come out. They suspect that it indeed was a tumor.  The man who put this play on, Duffy Hudson(look him up on google, he is awesome!), was very learned in Poe knowledge and he was a fountain of it. His renditions of The Raven, The Tell Tale Heart, and Annabel Lee(which happens to be one of my favorite poems by Poe) were exactly how I imagined Edgar Allan Poe to have recited them in front of his audiences when he first published The Raven.
   Duffy told us that Edgar was most likely bipolar because of his high-highs and low-lows. Because of this and how he grew up he was able to write how he did in which my mom said,"I should start treating you like crap." in which I responded to her,"Things like that don't happen twice mother." He also told us that Poe was a fiery person with an incredible personality. If I had known Edgar Allan Poe, I think I would have been great friends with him. People with fiery personalities tend to be good friends, you can ask any theater person.
   That is all I have to say about Edgar Allan Poe until around Halloween but I will post about other things before then.
 

You Guys Are Probably Getting Tired of Me Talking About This

   I have a lot of pent up feelings about Lord of the Rings; and most of them are complaints. I finally finished up The Fellowship last night at around nine o'clock pm. I was so happy and I could not get over the fact that I had finished the book a second time and that I had finished it in less time than I had taken the first go around!
  Today I was sitting in my Lord of the Rings class and the teacher said that he did not have any reading assigned for the weekend and Tom Anderson and myself nothing short of rejoiced about this. I asked,"There are books besides Lord of the Rings? I can read something... else?" I am so excited.
   My plan for this weekend and this coming week is to finish up The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke and start on the second installment in the Inheritance series. That is my plan and I am going to stick to it. I am so happy that I do not have to read Lord of the Rings for eight days. That might seem like a really short time, but to me it is not. I have spent three weeks reading Lord of the Rings, so I deserve a break to read some easy going literature.
   Guys, guys, guys, be ready for an awesome Edgar Allan Poe post tomorrow morning.

I Don't Know

   I feel that it is my obligation to write out well thought out and well-formed blog entries for you all, since I know that there is someone reading this. I just really do not know what to write about today. I have a really good blog post coming for you guys on Saturday but I do not want to give you guys just filler crud! What kind of books would you all like to hear about? I think that the only authors I can write well about are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Tolkien, and smaller authors that most people have not heard about.
   My wish for this blog is that it could be a full time occupation, maybe something that I can be paid for in the future. I really love writing to you all and I wish that more of you actually read what I wrote. That would mean the world to me, that my voice could be heard. Even if it is not heard here, I will try other places too. So, all in all, if you read my blog be prepared for an awesome blog post about Edgar Allan Poe on Saturday morning.

Lord of the Rings Part 2 and some other things...

   Today I will tell you all the story that I saved for another day; which will be today.
   When I was young, and ignorant to say in the least,  the second LotR movie and the third LotR movies came out. At each of these events my dad would re-read each book, that is just how it was.
   Me, being well... me, thought that the books came out right before the movies did and that the author was still alive, haha funny right? Well I was wrong. The books came out way before the movies ever did and my dad was just re-reading them for the sake of doing just that. So, little 9 year old me thought that the books were newly published and that Tolkien was still alive. Well, all I can say is that I was wrong. I do wish that Tolkien were still alive and well though. There is so much that we could all learn from him, even if it is just spending a few minutes in his presence or perhaps a whole day.
   These books seem to have taken over my life. I read Lord of the Rings every evening after I come home from school and then I am much too tired to read anything else. It is just so much detail and prose to take in all at one time. There are so many other books that I want to read at the same time and I just do not have the availability to do so! On the bus ride up to Northern Illinois University I did get some of Sherlock Holmes read. I started reading A Study in Scarlet, which is actually pretty good. I watched the BBC show Sherlock before I started to read the published story and I must say that the BBC did a fantastic job of creating the Sherlock Holmes that lived in my head for the past three years.
   Tonight I will be taking a break from LotR for about two hours and I will be seeing The Shadow of the Raven at the Chillicothe library. It is a one man play put on by a man who portrays Edgar Allan Poe. I am so excited about this and I will probably post about Edgar Allan Poe later on this week. I have nothing bad to say about Edgar Allan Poe, well um, maybe one or two bad things, but the good things outweigh the bad.
  I leave you today with this blog post and I hope you have as fantastic of a day as I do.

Lord of the Rings

   If any of you know me particularly well, you will have taken note that I love Lord of the Rings. Not just one of the books, all three; also loving The Hobbit. These are novels that I would quickly recommend to anyone that had any sort of attention span and loved authors that include details... about EVERYTHING. That is one of the things I love about Tolkien. He gives you detail about every little piece of information in the story and those places where he does not include the extra prose? He puts it in the appendices which you can find at the end of the third installment of the trilogy, or at the back of your trusty Lord of the Rings Collection. I for one, have three individual books and do not tote them around with me so when I need to look at the appendices(which I have never really done) and I only have The Fellowship of the Ring on hand and my appendices are at the back of my The Return of the King, I am out of luck.
   I am very lucky to be taking a Lord of the Rings class this trimester at school and when I say I am lucky, I am incredibly lucky to be taking part in this. I have already read through all of the books once(and am reading them again even though I do not like to re-read books) and am actually pretty excited to be reading them again. They get better with every reading it seems like and I seem to understand the mind of Tolkien a little better and what he really meant to put into his works. I never would have thought back in eighth grade when I read The Hobbit that The Lord of the Rings would be such a huge part of my life though and that it would have such a huge impact on me as a person. I remember in eighth grade when Mrs. Donahue handed us little paperback(or maybe they were hardback) covers of the book and I was not excited to read these books at all. I thought it would be this horrible work of fiction, because the author was so... old. Turns out though, he was not old, he was dead. Whoopsies! I grew to love the book though over the course of a month that we read it in and when everyone else stopped reading it at the end, I kept on reading and guess who got the best grade in that class? Oh yeah, that was me. At that point in my life, I just thought that it was a good piece of fiction. I was definitely not planning on reading the LotR trilogy.
    I started reading the trilogy at the beginning of my freshman year of high school, I am now a senior, and I thought that it was possibly the best book I had ever read. I had not reached the second book of the trilogy yet though(there are technically six books, I had just started the second) and I was not expecting what was about to happen. I made it two chapters into the second part of the Fellowship and I just stopped. Dead in my tracks. Just stopped. I had reached the chapter that was titled The Council of Elrond. This may perhaps be the longest chapter in any of the books and it is about 40 pages of the elves, men, dwarves, and hobbits deciding what they are going to do with this ring. I lost my interest there. Plus, I stopped for the fact that I had lost all of the reading time I had because the dreaded assigned reading had started up. Later during my freshman year I decided to come back to the book, after never thinking I would. The book just called to me. It urged me to go find it in the library again, pick it up once more. So, little fourteen year old me picked that book back up again and I poured over and analyzed ever single page of The Fellowship of the Ring. I had to relinquish the school's copy but my father gave me his copy(it's almost antique) and I finished the book on the last day of school.
   After not wanting to read it for so many years because my dad liked it, I am happy that I finally picked up the book and said yes to it. I have another funny story about this, but it will have to wait for another day. :)

Sherlock Holmes

    If you saw what the title of this post was, you know what is on my mind right now. I have been a fan of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for a very long time now, well relatively it is a long time. I have been a huge fanatic for about three years now and I finally invested in two complete volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories for my birthday. I had already read some of the stories before I bought these books, the reason for me being a fan, and I finally got a chance to read one of his novels. I probably should have started out with A Study in Scarlet, but I did not. I wanted to read The Hound of Baskervilles, so I did. It was very creepy and just to my liking. There was just enough of a fear factor to keep me reading. I would have read it anyway though, so that was fine.
   On rainy days like today I would prefer curling up with a Sherlock Holmes book rather than going to school. I keep telling myself,"Just a few more hours, get your Lord of the Rings reading done, and then you can read Sherlock Holmes tonight after you get your LotR questions done." I need some not-so-complex British literature this evening. That would make my day just perfect.
  Dear reader, I hope your day is better than mine.

Name Change

   Hello everyone, I know it has been a bit since I last got on here but I am about to change the amount of times I come here. I will try to start posting on here more frequently to tell you all about my writing and reading adventures, because who doesn't want to know about my life?
   If you dear reader have not noticed, I have changed the name of my blog from Crazy Musician Also Writes Literature to Crazy Musician Does Literature. I do not want to be known as someone who only writes and I do not want to be known as someone who does not read good literature. Not only do I want to tell you all about my writing feats, but I also want to tell you all about the books I read and give good(or bad) reviews on them.
   Since I last spoke to you all, I read the book Looking for Alaska and bits and pieces of the Princess Diaries series. I also became a believer in graphic novels and comic books. I too turned SEVENTEEN! I do not know what I was expecting once I became seventeen, but I definitely notice a change.
   I will begin my review on Looking Alaska and then get back to the train of thought that I was on a few minutes ago.
   Looking for Alaska is a wonderful novel by the author John Green and it features the characters: Miles Halter, Alaska Young, and Chip Martin as the primary characters. The story starts out as a slow one but it introduces the reader to Miles Halter's life. He is a loner, no real friends. At the beginning of the story Miles' parents throw him a going away party before he goes to Culver Creek Preparatory School. He says," I go to seek the Great Perhaps." as quoted by Francois Rabelais, a great french thinker. One he arrives at Culver Creek, the school his father went to(I forgot to mention that), he makes a friend out of Chip Martin; also known as the colonel. He is a short guy with an even shorter temper(not to be too cliche). The Colonel is one of my favorite characters. Out of the three primary characters, I prefer the Colonel out of all three. Miles, receives the nickname Pudge, and then he meets Alaska Young; the character that this story is centered on.
   Alaska, in my opinion, is a very flighty girl who is incredibly promiscuous. When we first meet her in the book she talks about one of her exploits with a boy. Miles becomes friends with Alaska very quickly and they become incredibly close.
  This book was not one of my favorite books, mostly because the amount of amatory references that it included(if you want to know what that means, look it up), but do not get me wrong. John Green is a magnificent author and I wish that I had half of the writing skills that he has. It was just not my cup of tea, albeit it was enjoyable at some points.
  The other genre that I delved into at the end of the summer was graphic novels and comic books. Graphic novels are like comic books of epic proportions. Comic books are about 20 pages, whereas graphic novels are 40-50 pages in length and can be included in a series.
  The day before my birthday I went to my friend's house and we read comic books all afternoon. I read four comics that were about this mutant girl named Firestar who can manipulate micro waves and fly. She is pretty cool. My other friend got me a New Avengers graphic novel for my birthday and I was in love. With the graphic novel that is. They are a little violent, but it like a good action movie. I am loving the New Avengers. I hope to get more graphic novels. Oh! I almost forgot the Amazing Spidergirl series that I read before my birthday as well. I think that the Amazing Spider is a very good read, so if you can get your hands on them, do so!
   Today I found two sites, I almost forgot to mention these too. My brain is somewhere besides this blog. One page was called The Book  Seer. It is where you type in the name of a book that you just read and the author, only if you have liked that book and author of course, and it gives you more ideas of what to read that are similar to that book that you have just read. I also found a page that had 100 adjectives. It might not be of use to you all but I like it a lot and I plan to write them down in my composition book in preparation for NaNoWriMo(which I will explain later if you do not know what it is). I will see you all very, very soon!