I know how to Stop the slender madness finally once and for all
Friday, March 2, 2012
woweee real true power now
SlenderSworder is a way more real power than we expected. Almost as much to being Poxanneilataur he killed HABITs evilcastlegiant with a single bighit. hoping to be he doesnt turn that around on with us now.
"Kino, a poor Indian/Mexican pearl diver, enjoys a simple life with his wife Juana and their baby, Coyotito. The baby, bitten by a scorpion, falls ill, and the doctors refuse to treat him. Things look up when Kino discovers a huge, beautiful pearl one day. Incredulous, Kino howls with joy, and suddenly everyone in La Paz is interested in his family and his pearl. Greed contaminates their once simple way of life, as Kino fitfully tries to get 50,000 pesos for a pearl that the dealers only wish to pay one thousand for. The pearl leads Kino to corruption, slitting a man's throat who attempted to take the pearl from him, and eventually the price of the pearl is more higher than they imagined--it is paid in the blood of Coyotito. In redemption and sorrow, Kino returns to La Paz and throws the pearl back to the ocean." Angela Allan, Resident Scholar
"The Pearl, which takes place in La Paz, Mexico, begins with a description of the seemingly idyllic family life of Kino, his wife Juana and their infant son, Coyotito. Kino watches as Coyotito sleeps, but sees a scorpion crawl down the rope that holds the hanging box where Coyotito lies. Kino attempts to catch the scorpion, but Coyotito bumps the rope and the scorpion falls on him. Although Kino kills the scorpion, it still stings Coyotito. Juana and Kino, accompanied by their neighbors, go to see the local doctor, who refuses to treat Coyotito because Kino cannot pay.
Kino and Juana leave the doctors and take Coyotito down near the sea, where Juana uses a seaweed poultice on Coyotito's shoulder, which is now swollen. Kino dives for oysters from his canoe, attempting to find pearls. He finds a very large oyster which, when Kino opens it, yields an immense pearl. Kino puts back his head and howls, causing the other pearl divers to look up and race toward Kino's canoe.
The news that Kino has found an immense pearl travels fast through La Paz. The doctor who refused to treat Coyotito decides to visit Kino. Kino's neighbors begin to feel bitter toward him for his good fortune, but neither Kino nor Juana realize this feeling they have engendered. Juan Tomas, the brother of Kino, asks him what he will do with his money, and he envisions getting married to Juana in a church and dressing Coyotito in a yachting cap and sailor suit. He claims that he will send Coyotito to school and buy a rifle for himself. The local priest visits and tells Kino to remember to give thanks and to pray for guidance. The doctor also visits, and although Coyotito seems to be healing, the doctor insists that Coyotito still faces danger and treats him. Kino tells the doctor that he will pay him once he sells his pearl, and the doctor attempts to discern where the pearl is located (Kino has buried it in the corner of his hut). That night, a thief attempts to break into Kino's hut, but Kino drives him away. Juana tells Kino that the pearl will destroy them, but Kino insists that the pearl is their one chance and that tomorrow they will sell it.
Kino's neighbors wonder what they would do if they had found the pearl, and suggest giving it as a present to the Pope, buying Masses for the souls of his family, and distributing it among the poor of La Paz. Kino goes to sell his pearl, accompanied by his neighbors, but the pearl dealer only offers a thousand pesos when Kino believes that he deserves fifty thousand. Although other dealers inspect the pearl and give similar prices, Kino refuses their offer and decides to go to the capital to sell it there. That night, Kino is attacked by more thieves, and Juana once again reminds Kino that the pearl is evil. However, Kino vows that he will not be cheated, for he is a man.
Later that night, Juana attempts to take the pearl and throw it into the ocean, but Kino finds her and beats her for doing so. While outside, a group of men accost Kino and knock the pearl from his hand. Juana watches from a distance, and sees Kino approach her, limping with another man whose throat Kino has slit. Juana finds the pearl, and they decide that they must go away even if the murder was in self-defense. Kino finds that his canoe has been damaged and their house was torn up and the outside set afire. Kino and Juana stay with Juan Tomas and his wife, Apolonia, where they hide for the next day before setting out for the capital that night.
Kino and Juana travel that night, and rest during the day. When Kino believes that he is being followed, the two hide and Kino sees several bighorn sheep trackers who pass by him. Kino and Juana escape into the mountains, where Juana and Coyotito hide in the cave while Kino, taking his clothes off so that no one will see his white clothing. The trackers think that they hear something when they hear Coyotito crying, but decide that it is merely a coyote pup. After a tracker shoots in the direction of the cries, Kino attacks the three trackers, killing all three of them. Kino can hear nothing but the cry of death, for he soon realizes that Coyotito is dead from that first shot. Juana and Kino return to La Paz. Kino carries a rifle stolen from the one of the trackers he killed, while Juana carries the dead Coyotito. The two approach the gulf, and Kino, who now sees the image of Coyotito with his head blown off in the pearl, throws it into the ocean.
" Sara, Resident Scholar
"The Pearl is about Kino, Juana and Coyotito. They live in La Paz Mexico in a small shack. They live in the lower class of society, and are not wealthy by any means. And though they are content with their lives, Coyotito, Kino's son gets stung by a Scorpion. Kino goes to find the doctor but finds since he is poor the doctor won't see his son. He decides he needs to go pearl diving to find a pearl to sell to the doctor in exchange for medicine. When Kino finds "the pearl of the world" everybody seems to notice, and people take advantage of the situation. People try to steal the pearl and put his family in danger. After Kino kills a man, he, his wife and his son are forced to leave La Paz. These turn of events that should've brought Kino and his family up in society, actually brings them down and what was supposed to help his son, ends up killing him. " melanie, Resident Scholar
"The pearl is a book written by John Steinbeck .It tells the story of Kino, a poor Indian fisherman. Kino, his wife Juana, and his son Coyotito live in a small hut made of brush in a poor village town in La Paz, Mexico . One day Coyotito is stung on the shoulder by a poisonous scorpion. Kino, Juana, and their neighbors take Coyotito to the local doctor. The doctor refuses to treat Coyotito because Kino is too poor to pay. Kino became very angry because of the doctor's refusal. The next afternoon Kino decides to go fishing for oysters in search of a pearl. He then finds a large oyster and opens it. Inside the oyster Kino uncovers a giant pearl. Kino then becomes very excited thinking that the pearl will make him become very rich. The villagers quickly learn of Kino's finding of the pearl and become very jealous of him. The same night a thief attempts to steal the pearl and attacks Kino.
Juana convinces Kino that the pearl is evil and will destroy them. The next day Kino goes to town to try and sell the pearl. Kino believes that the pearl is worth 50,000 pesos, but a pearl dealer insists that the pearl is only worth 1,000 pesos. Kino feels he is being cheated and decides to go to the capital city to sell the pearl. That night Kino is attacked by more thieves. Juana once again tries to convince Kino that the pearl will destroy them. Juana tries to throw the pearl into the ocean later that night. Kino finds Juana before the pearl is thrown into the ocean and beats her. Outside a group of men try to knock the pearl out of Kino's hand. Kino then slits one of the men's throat.
Kino and Juana decide to go away because Kino has committed murder even though in their view it was in self-defense. Kino and Juana set out on their journey to the capital city. On their journey Kino believes they are being followed so Kino and Juana hide in the mountains. Juana and Coyotito hide in the cave. Kino goes to find who's following them. When Kino leaves Coyotito starts to cry. The followers assume that Coyotito's cry is a coyote pup. One of the followers shoot in the direction of Coyotito's cry. Kino attacks the followers and kills all three of them. As Kino returns to his wife and son in the cave he discovers that Coyotito is dead. Tragically, the first shot fired by one of the followers killed Coyotito. The next afternoon Kino and Juana return to the village carrying the rifle, the pearl, and their dead son Coyotito. They go to the ocean and throw the pearl into the ocean. " Nikia , Resident Scholar
" Kino is a poor Indian pearl diver. When his baby, Coyotito, is stung by a scorpion, he fears that he may not make it. One day, when diving, he finds a huge pearl he knows to be worth a lot of money. At first, to him and his wife Juana, the pearl seems like a blessing. But as the book progresses, it's greatness is questioned. After he finds the pearl, life for Kino and his family becomes more complicated. Juana wants to destroy the pearl, but Kino doesn't let her. When a dangerous group of attackers try to kill Kino and his family for the pearl, they find themselves fighting for their lives. "
"Haper Lee's semi autobiographical Pulitzer prize winner is a superb account of bigotry and injustice set in 1930's Alabama." Becky Palmer, Resident Scholar
"This 1961 Pulitzer Prize winning book makes you wish that Harper Lee had published other books, but if you're only going to publish one, To Kill A Mockingbird sure is the way to go. Told through the eyes of Jean Louise Finch, better known as Scout, the story is basically a study of racial prejudice in the South before the Civil Rights era. It is a well-plotted story with lots of action, but what makes it so special is the brilliant characterization. Once you meet Scout Finch, her brother Jem, and her father Atticus Finch who is the unsung hero of the novel, you will never forget them. A book worthy of the "Classic" label it has been given." Bill Brumlow, Resident Scholar
"To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the best accounts of the hysteria that racial hatred and false accusations could create in the deep South prior to the 1980s. The tireless efforts of Atticus to save the falsely accused black man are set in a tone to draw the reader into sympathy, surprisingly, with both the victim and his accusers. A classic that deserves the title." Kelly Whiting, Resident Scholar
"Scout and her brother Jem are just playful kids when their father is assigned to the case of a black man raping a white woman. They had never been affected by one of Atticus' cases before, and are surprised to have this one impact their lives. And, though Scout is growing up enough to realize the labels society places on people of different race and social status--and enough to have her aunt scolding her about her tomboyish behvior, she learns a lot more about life when this case comes about." Sarrah, Resident Scholar
" A girl and her brother go through their youth being kids but discover a new friend and try to understand and right injustices. They learn something new about other people in town as well as the justice system and their new friend." Yasmin Miranda, Resident Scholar
"To Kill A Mockingbird is a story of awakening - awakening to a not so perfect world. The narrator, six year old Jean Louise Finch (Scout) lives in a world that is shattered by her realization that racism and class discrimination are rampant in her town and will effect her family. Her lawyer father, Atticus seems to be one of the few righteous inhabitants of Maycomb and sets about defending a black man charged with a crime he did not commit. " Shel, Resident Scholar
"Scout and her brother Jem wittness first hand that the world isn't always fair when their father defends a black man for a crime he didn't commit. Throughout the book, Scout and Jem both grow as individuals. " Kristian Herron, Resident Scholar
"The novel is about three years in the life of the Finch family: Atticus and his son Jem and daughter Scout. They live in the town of Maycomb in Alabama, where whites are in control and blacks are second-class citizens.
Atticus is a lawyer and the central incident of the novel is when he defends a black man, Tom Robinson, against the charge of raping a white girl.
" Andrew Haine, Resident Scholar
"Two children, Scout and Jem Finch are dragged into a racial battle with their father. Their father, Atticus Finch defends a black man in court. The black man is accused of raping a white girl. This event in fact never happened. The black man, Tom Robinson was shot to death in prison before his final trial. This does not stop the attacks on the Finch Family. The two children are attacked on there way home from an evening school function, and Jem sustained serious arm injury." Natalie , Resident Scholar
"To Kill A Mockingbird is told through the eyes of a six-year-old tomboy named Scout Finch. Her father, Atticus, is an attorney- at- law and defends a black man named Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping a white young woman. Atticus is an extraordinary lawyer, and the verdict is very surprising. This plot, however, is not the only action happening in the novel. Down the street from Scout and her older brother jem, lives the Radleys. Arthur(Boo) Radley got in trouble with the law at a young age and has not been seen outside of his house since. The children are very curious about his man, and try various techniques to get him to come out. " Kristina Murray, Resident Scholar
"The story Begins as Jean-Louise Finch or "Scout" for short, begins recounting the events in her childhood which eventually led up to her older brother Jem's broken arm. Scout lives with her brother Jem, her widowed father Atticus (a lawyer) and their African-American nanny Calpurnia in the quite county of Maycomb, Alabama. It is the middle of the great depression, yet in comparaison to others, they're doing considerabley well. One summer Jem and Scout meet a boy named Dill, a visitor from out of town, and with his company they go on great adventures and pick up a new fascination with an old, spooky house down the street called the Radley place, but more specifically....a fascination with an odd character that dwells inside.
Finally, controversy hits the sleepy town of Maycomb. Even through the pro-white protest, Atticus, Scout's father, accepts to defend local black man Tom Robinson, accused of raping Mayella Ewell. Mayella Ewell is the daughter of Bob Ewell, a very simple man with a less than respectable reputation. The trial isn't the only event rocking maycomb though. A potential murder and a strange encounter follow closely behind. " Sarah, Resident Scholar
The story of Atlas Shrugged takes place in the United States at an unspecified future time. Dagny Taggart, vice president in charge of operations for Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, seeks to rebuild the crumbling track of the Rio Norte Line that serves Ellis Wyatt's oil fields and the booming industrial areas of Colorado. The country is in a downward economic spiral with businesses closing and men out of work. Other countries in the world have become socialist Peoples' States and are destitute. Colorado, based on Wyatt's innovative method of extracting oil from shale, is the last great industrial center on earth. Dagny intends to provide Colorado the train service it requires, but her brother James Taggart, president of Taggart Transcontinental, tries to block her from getting new rails from Rearden Steel, the last reliable steel manufacturer. James wants to do business with the inefficient Associated Steel, which is run by his friend Orren Boyle. Dagny wants the new rail to be made of Rearden Metal, a new alloy that Hank Rearden developed after ten years of experiment. Because the metal has never been tried and has been denounced by metallurgists, James won't accept responsibility for using it. Dagny, who studied engineering in college, has seen the results of Rearden's tests. She accepts the responsibility and orders the rails made of Rearden Metal.
Worsening the economic depression in the U.S. is the unexplained phenomenon of talented men retiring and disappearing. For example, Owen Kellogg, a bright young Taggart employee for whom Dagny had great hopes, tells her that he is leaving the railroad. McNamara, a contractor who was supposed to rebuild the Rio Norte Line, retires unexpectedly. As more great men disappear, the American people become increasingly pessimistic. Dagny dislikes the new phrase that has crept into the language and signifies people's sense of futility and despair. Nobody knows the origin or exact meaning of the question "Who is John Galt?," but people use the unanswerable question to express their sense of hopelessness. Dagny rejects the widespread pessimism and finds a new contractor for the Rio Norte Line.
The crisis for Taggart Transcontinental worsens when the railroad's San Sebastian Line proves to be worthless and is nationalized by the Mexican government. The line, which cost millions of dollars, was supposed to provide freight service for the San Sebastian Mines, a new venture by Francisco d'Anconia, the wealthiest copper industrialist in the world. Francisco was Dagny's childhood friend and her former lover, but she now regards him as a worthless playboy. In this latest venture, d'Anconia has steered investors completely wrong, causing huge financial losses and a general sense of unrest.
James Taggart, in an attempt to recover the railroad's losses on the San Sebastian Line, uses his political friendships to influence the vote of the National Alliance of Railroads. The Alliance passes what's known as the "Anti-dog-eat-dog rule," prohibiting "cutthroat" competition. The rule puts the superb Phoenix-Durango Railroad, Taggart Transcontinental's competitor for the Colorado freight traffic, out of business. With the Phoenix-Durango line gone, Dagny must rebuild the Rio Norte Line quickly.
Dagny asks Francisco, who is in New York, what his purpose was in building the worthless Mexican mines. He tells her that it was to damage d'Anconia Copper and Taggart Transcontinental, as well as to cause secondary destructive consequences. Dagny is dumbfounded, unable to reconcile such a destructive purpose from the brilliant, productive industrialist Francisco was just ten years earlier. Not long after this conversation, Francisco appears at a celebration for Hank Rearden's wedding anniversary. Rearden's wife Lillian, his mother, and his brother are nonproductive freeloaders who believe that the strong are morally obliged to support the weak. Rearden no longer loves and cannot respect them, but he pities their weakness and carries them on his back. Francisco meets Rearden for the first time and warns him that the freeloaders have a weapon that they are using against him. Rearden questions why Francisco has come to the party, but Francisco says that he merely wished to become acquainted with Rearden. He won't explain his presence any further.
Although public opinion and an incompetent contractor are working against them, Dagny and Rearden build the Rio Norte Line. Rearden designs an innovative bridge for the line that takes advantage of the properties that his new metal possesses. The State Science Institute, a government research organization, tries to bribe and threaten Rearden to keep his metal off the market, but he won't give in. The Institute then issues a statement devoid of factual evidence that alleges possible weaknesses in the structure of Rearden Metal. Taggart stock crashes, the contractor quits, and the railroad union forbids its employees to work on the Rio Norte Line. When Dr. Robert Stadler, a brilliant theoretical scientist in whose name the State Science Institute was founded, refuses to publicly defend Rearden Metal even though he knows its value, Dagny makes a decision. She tells her brother that she will take a leave of absence, form her own company, and build the Rio Norte Line on her own. She signs a contract saying that when the line is successfully completed, she'll turn it back over to Taggart Transcontinental. Dagny chooses to name it the John Galt Line in defiance of the general pessimism that surrounds her.
Rearden and the leading businessmen of Colorado invest in the John Galt Line. Rearden feels a strong sexual attraction to Dagny but, because he regards sex as a demeaning impulse, doesn't act on his attraction. The government passes the Equalization of Opportunity Bill that prevents an individual from owning companies in different fields. The bill prohibits Rearden from owning the mines that supply him with the raw materials he needs to make Rearden Metal. However, Rearden creates a new design for the John Galt Line's Rearden Metal Bridge, realizing that if he combines a truss with an arch, it will enable him to maximize the best qualities of the new metal.
Dagny completes construction of the Line ahead of schedule. She and Rearden ride in the engine cab on the Line's first train run, which is a resounding success. Rearden and Dagny have dinner at Ellis Wyatt's home to celebrate. After dinner, Dagny and Rearden make love for the first time. The next day, Rearden is contemptuous of them both for what he considers their low urges, but Dagny is radiantly happy. She rejects Rearden's estimate, knowing that their sexual attraction is based on mutual admiration for each other's noblest qualities.
Dagny and Rearden go on vacation together, driving around the country looking at abandoned factories. At the ruins of the Twentieth Century Motor Company's factory in Wisconsin, they find the remnant of a motor with the potential to change the world. The motor was able to draw static electricity from the atmosphere and convert it to usable energy, but now it is destroyed.
Realizing how much the motor would benefit the transportation industry, Dagny vows to find the inventor. At the same time, she must fight against new proposed legislation. Various economic pressure groups, seeking to cash in on the industrial success of Colorado, want the government to force the successful companies to share their profits. Dagny knows that the legislation would put Wyatt Oil and the other Colorado companies out of business, destroy the Rio Norte Line, and remove the profit she needs to rebuild the rest of the transcontinental rail system, but she's powerless to prevent the legislation.
Dagny continues her nationwide quest to find the inventor of the motor, and she finally finds the widow of the engineer who ran the automobile company's research department. The widow tells Dagny that a young scientist working for her husband invented the motor. She doesn't know his name, but she provides a clue that leads Dagny to a cook in an isolated Wyoming diner. The cook tells Dagny to forget the inventor of the motor because he won't be found until he chooses. Dagny is shocked to discover that the cook is Hugh Akston, the world's greatest living philosopher. She goes to Cheyenne and discovers that Wesley Mouch, the new economic coordinator of the country, has issued a series of directives that will result in the strangling of Colorado's industrial success. Dagny rushes to Colorado but arrives too late. Ellis Wyatt, in defiance of the government's edict, set fire to his oil wells and retired.
Months later, the situation in Colorado continues to deteriorate. With the Wyatt oil wells out of business, the economy struggles. Several of the other major industrialists have retired and disappeared; nobody knows where they've gone. Dagny is forced to cut trains on the Colorado schedule. The one bright spot of her work is her continued search for the inventor of the motor. She speaks to Robert Stadler who recommends a young scientist, Quentin Daniels of the Utah Institute of Technology, as a man capable of undertaking the motor's reconstruction.
The State Science Institute orders 10,000 tons of Rearden Metal for a top-secret project, but Rearden refuses to sell it to them. Rearden sells to Ken Danagger, the country's best producer of coal, an amount of Rearden Metal that the law deems illegal. Meanwhile, at the reception for James Taggart's wedding, Francisco d'Anconia publicly defends the morality of producing wealth. Rearden overhears what Francisco says and finds himself increasingly drawn to this supposedly worthless playboy. The day following the reception, Rearden's wife discovers that he's having an affair, but she doesn't know with whom. A manipulator who seeks control over her husband, Lillian uses guilt as a weapon against him.
Dr. Ferris of the State Science Institute tells Rearden that he knows of the illegal sale to Ken Danagger and will take Rearden to trial if he refuses to sell the Institute the metal it needs. Rearden refuses, and the government brings charges against himself and Danagger. Dagny, in the meantime, has become convinced that a destroyer is loose in the world — some evil creature that is deliberately luring away the brains of the world for a purpose she cannot understand. Her diligent assistant, Eddie Willers, knows that Dagny's fears are justified. He eats his meals in the workers' cafeteria, where he has befriended a nameless worker. Eddie tells the worker about Dagny's fear that Danagger is next in line for the destroyer — that he'll be the next to retire and disappear. Dagny races to Pittsburgh to meet with Danagger to convince him to stay, but she's too late. Someone has already met with Danagger and convinced him to retire. In a mood of joyous serenity, Danagger tells Dagny that nothing could convince him to remain. The next day, he disappears.
Francisco visits Rearden and empathizes with the pain he has endured because of the invention of Rearden Metal. Francisco begins to ask Rearden what could make such suffering worthwhile when an accident strikes one of Rearden's furnaces. Francisco and Rearden race to the scene and work arduously to make the necessary repairs. Afterward, when Rearden asks him to finish his question, Francisco says that he knows the answer and departs.
At his trial, Rearden states that he doesn't recognize his deal with Danagger as a criminal action and, consequently, doesn't recognize the court's right to try him. He says that a man has the right to own the product of his effort and to trade it voluntarily with others. The government has no moral basis for outlawing the voluntary exchange of goods and services. The government, he says, has the power to seize his metal by force, and they have the power to compel him at the point of a gun. But he won't cooperate with their demands, and he won't pretend that the process is civil. If the government wishes to deal with men by compulsion, it must do so openly. Rearden states that he won't help the government pretend that his trial is anything but the initiation of a forced seizure of his metal. He says that he's proud of his metal, he's proud of his mills, he's proud of every penny that he's earned by his own hard work, and he'll not cooperate by voluntarily yielding one cent that is his. Rearden says that the government will have to seize his money and products by force, just like the robber it is. At this point, the crowd bursts into applause. The judges recognize the truth of what Rearden says and refuse to stand before the American people as open thieves. In the end, they fine Rearden and suspend the sentence.
Because of the new economic restrictions, the major Colorado industrialists have all retired and disappeared. Freight traffic has dwindled, and Taggart Transcontinental has been forced to shut down the Rio Norte Line. The railroad is in terrible condition: It is losing money, the government has convinced James Taggart to grant wage raises, and there is ominous talk that the railroad will be forced to cut shipping rates. At the same time, Wesley Mouch is desperate for Rearden to cooperate with the increasingly dictatorial government. Because Rearden came to Taggart's wedding celebration, Mouch believes that Taggart can influence Rearden. Mouch implies that a trade is possible: If Taggart can convince Rearden to cooperate, Mouch will prevent the government from forcing a cut in shipping rates. Taggart appeals to Lillian for help, and Lillian discovers that Dagny Taggart is her husband's lover.
In response to devastating economic conditions, the government passes the radical Directive 10-289, which requires that all workers stay at their current jobs, all businesses remain open, and all patents and inventions be voluntarily turned over to the government. When she hears the news, Dagny resigns from the railroad. Rearden doesn't resign from Rearden Steel, however, because he has two weeks to sign the certificate turning his metal over to the government, and he wants to be there to refuse when the time is up. Dr. Floyd Ferris of the State Science Institute comes to Rearden and says that the government has evidence of his affair with Dagny Taggart and will make it public — dragging Dagny's name through the gutter — if he refuses to sign over his metal. Rearden now knows that his desire for Dagny is the highest virtue he possesses and is free of all guilt regarding it, but he's a man who pays his own way. He knows that he should have divorced Lillian long ago and openly declared his love for Dagny. His guilt and error gave his enemies this weapon. He must pay for his own error and not allow Dagny to suffer, so he signs.
Dagny has retreated to a hunting lodge in the mountains that she inherited from her father. She's trying to decide what to do with the rest of her life when word reaches her that a train wreck of enormous proportions has destroyed the famed Taggart Tunnel through the heart of the Rockies, making all transcontinental traffic impossible on the main track. She rushes back to New York to resume her duties, and she reroutes all transcontinental traffic. She receives a letter from Quentin Daniels telling her that, because of Directive 10-289, he's quitting. Dagny plans to go west to inspect the track and to talk to Daniels.
On the train ride west, Dagny rescues a hobo who is riding the rails. He used to work for the Twentieth Century Motor Company. He tells her that the company put into practice the communist slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," a scheme that resulted in enslaving the able to the unable. The first man to quit was a young engineer, who walked out of a mass meeting saying that he would put an end to this once and for all by "stopping the motor of the world." The bum tells her that as the years passed and they saw factories close, production drop, and great minds retire and disappear, they began to wonder if the young engineer, whose name was John Galt, succeeded.
On her trip west, Dagny's train is stalled when the crew abandons it. She finds an airplane and continues on to Utah to find Daniels, but she learns at the airport that Daniels left with a visitor in a beautiful plane. Realizing that the visitor is the "destroyer," she gives chase, flying among the most inaccessible peaks of the Rockies. Her plane crashes.
Dagny finds herself in Atlantis, the hidden valley to which the great minds have gone to escape the persecution of a dictatorial government. She finds that John Galt does exist and that he's the man she's been seeking in two ways: He is both the inventor of the motor and the "destroyer," the man draining the brains of the world. All the great men she admires are here — inventors, industrialists, philosophers, scientists, and artists. Dagny learns that the brains are on strike. They refuse to think, create, and work in a world that forces them to sacrifice themselves to society. They're on strike against the creed of self-sacrifice, in favor of a man's right to his own life.
Dagny falls in love with Galt, who has loved and watched her for years. But Dagny is a scab, the most dangerous enemy of the strike, and Galt won't touch her — yet. Dagny has the choice to join the strike and remain in the valley or go back to her railroad and the collapsing outside world. She is torn, but she refuses to give up the railroad and returns. Although Galt's friends don't want him to expose himself to the danger, he returns as well, so he can be near at hand when Dagny decides she's had enough.
When she returns, Dagny finds that the government has nationalized the railroad industry and controls it under a Railroad Unification Plan. Dagny can no longer make business decisions based on matters of production and profit; she is subject to the arbitrary whims of the dictators. The government wants Dagny to make a reassuring speech to the public on the radio and threatens her with the revelation of her affair with Rearden. On the air, Dagny proudly states that she was Rearden's lover and that he signed his metal over to the government only because of a blackmail threat. Before being cut off the air, Dagny succeeds in warning the American people about the ruthless dictatorship that the United States government is becoming.
Because of the government's socialist policies, the collapse of the U. S. economy is imminent. Francisco d'Anconia destroys his holdings and disappears because his properties worldwide are about to be nationalized. He leaves the "looters" — the parasites who feed off the producers — nothing, wiping out millions of dollars belonging to corrupt American investors like James Taggart. Meanwhile, politicians use their economic power to create their own personal empires. In one such scheme, the Taggart freight cars needed to haul the Minnesota wheat harvest to market are diverted to a project run by the relatives of powerful politicians. The wheat rots at the Taggart stations, the farmers riot, farms shut down (as do many of the companies providing them with equipment), people lose their jobs, and severe food shortages result.
During an emergency breakdown at the Taggart Terminal in New York City, Dagny finds that John Galt is one of the railroad's unskilled laborers. She sees him in the crowd of men ready to carry out her commands. After completing her task, Dagny walks into the abandoned tunnels, knowing that Galt will follow. They make love for the first time, and he then returns to his mindless labor.
The government smuggles its men into Rearden's mills, pretending that they're steelworkers. The union of steelworkers asks for a raise, but the government refuses, making it sound as if the refusal comes from Rearden. When Rearden rejects the Steel Unification Plan the government wants to spring on him, they use the thugs they've slipped into his mills to start a riot. The pretense of protecting Rearden is the government's excuse for taking over his mills. But Francisco d'Anconia, under an assumed name, has taken a job at Rearden's mills. He organizes the workers, and they successfully defend the mills against the government's thugs. Afterward, Francisco tells Rearden the rest of the things he wants him to know. Rearden retires, disappears, and joins the strike.
Mr. Thompson, the head of state, is set to address the nation regarding its dire economic conditions. But before he begins to speak, he is preempted, cut off the air by a motor of incalculable power. John Galt addresses the nation instead. Galt informs citizens that the men of the mind are on strike, that they require freedom of thought and action, and that they refuse to work under the dictatorship in power. The thinkers won't return, Galt says, until human society recognizes an individual's right to live his own life. Only when the moral code of self-sacrifice is rejected will the thinkers be free to create, and only then will they return.
The government rulers are desperate. Frantically, they seek John Galt. They want him to become economic dictator of the country so the men of the mind will come back and save the government, but Galt refuses. Realizing that Dagny thinks the same way that Galt does, the government has her followed. Mr. Thompson makes clear to Dagny that certain members of the government fear and hate Galt, and that if they find him first, they may kill him. Terrified, Dagny goes to Galt's apartment to see if he's still alive. The government's men follow her and take Galt into custody, and the rulers attempt to convince Galt to take charge of the country's economy. He refuses. They torture him, yet still he refuses. In the end, the strikers come to his rescue. Francisco and Rearden, joined now by Dagny, assault the grounds of the State Science Institute where Galt is held captive. They kill some guards and incapacitate others, release Galt, and return to the valley. Dagny and Galt are united. Shortly after, the final collapse of the looters' regime occurs, and the men of the mind are free to return to the world.
Odyssesus (Isn't that cool how his name goes w/ the book??!!) is coming home from the Trojan War **Illiad** and is lost at sea. He sees many things, mostly bad. And ends up loosing his entire crew. He is protected by the Goddess Athene." Alli, Resident Scholar
"It is around 1200BC by our reckoning, and on the Greek island of Ithaca the Lady Penelope and her almost grown-up son, Telemachus, have increasing fears. The Trojan War took ten years, and the Greeks won. But ten years later the cunning Odysseus, greatest of the war-heroes, has still not returned home to his lands and his place in society. He is missing presumed dead, and a hundred rich suitors are now encamped in his palace, eating them out of house and home, all the time hoping for the hand of the rich and beautiful Penelope in marriage. Odysseus has had more adventures on the long journey home than he did during the war (told in 'The Iliad'). Telemachus decides to take ship himself to find his father, or confirm him dead.
We pick up his voyage of adventure when he is almost home, just as a sea storm is tragically released by his own men, who open a magical sack he holds onboard which contains the four winds and is enabling them to sail easily and safely west. Most of the rest of the story is artfully told in flashback by Odysseus as he narrates to his hosts how he was shipwrecked, and eventually loses all his men on the second weary voyage home. For three years on the high seas he and his men encounter and mostly survive The Lotus Eaters, the giant Cyclops, Circe the enchantress, the Underworld, the Sirens, and the twin monsters Scylla and Charybdis. Seven he spends trapped on the island of the amorous nymph Calypso until he is released. Eventually Odysseus returns to Ithaca all alone, in disguise as a filthy beggar and unsure if he will find his home intact or his friends and household faithful. He meets his own son, who has inherited his father's strength and spirit, but lacks experience. Now he too has returned and is spoiling for a fight with the arrogant suitors in the family homestead. Together they plot revenge on the greedy nobles and hope to restore the family fortune." Michael JR Jose, Resident Scholar
Long ago, in the early 1990s, I was given a long piece of coursework for English Lit. at school: we had to compare and contrast two works of the same genre. Naturally, I chose science fiction. Being a bit of a speed-reader, doing the sane thing and just contrasting two books would have taken about a week, so I decided to be a bit more ambitious and went for two series of books: Isaac Asimov's six-volume Foundation series (the seventh and last was out but I hadn't read it), which I'd just read for fun anyway, and another series which I'd just started reading after randomly finding the first book in a library. That book was called The Invaders Plan and was the first volume in a 'dekalogy' (the writer's term) called Mission Earth. Its author was one L. Ron Hubbard.
As a result, I had committed myself to what remains one of the most harrowing literary experiences of my life: approximately four thousand pages of some of the worst writing in any genre I've ever read. And I've read Kevin J. Anderson.
To backtrack, L. Ron Hubbard had originally been a somewhat-successful author of SF and horror novels, novellas and short stories back in the Golden Age of science fiction. Then, famously, he'd hit upon the idea of inventing a new religion, Scientology, complete with a detailed and coherent, if completely bizarre, mythology. He was catapulted to immense wealth and had no need to write any more.
In the late 1970s Hubbard seems to have apparently decided that he wanted some literary acclaim as well (perhaps fearing that Scientology would be the only thing in his obituary). He wrote Battlefield Earth, about aliens invading and occupying the Earth for a thousand years, reducing humanity to the Stone Age, before they were driven off by nuke-armed cavemen flying fighter jets. The book became an immense success, despite its total lack of readability, and seems to have encouraged Hubbard to write a much bigger story: Mission Earth. This was written as a looooong single novel, but divided into ten volumes by the publishers (the publishing house owned by Scientology), possibly out of artistic respect for the author's vision of the story, but probably because it meant they made more money. The first novel, The Invaders Plan, was published in October 1985 and the following nine appeared at regular intervals until the last book was published in September 1987. That Hubbard wrote such a huge story in just three years seems implausible, leading to accusations of ghostwriting, but some former Scientologists and editors have backed up the idea that he did write the whole thing, though his editor did move some material round and write a new introduction and ending to each volume to make them stand alone better.
Mission Earth's plot is somewhat straightforward: the Voltar Empire has decided to add Earth to its expanding sphere of influence. The invasion is not scheduled for another century, but the Empire discovers that the people of Earth are experimenting with more and more powerful nuclear weapons, and the Cold War between the USA and the USSR (the story is set in a contemporary period, so mid-1980s Earth) is in danger of going hot. Since Earth will make a vital supply depot on the Empire's invasion route, they decide they must prevent Earth's self-destruction by sending an engineer, Jettero Heller, to investigate and if possible defuse the situation.
Unfortunately, the Empire's intelligence-gathering organisation, the CIA (the Coordinated Information Apparatus), has been running various illegal and underhanded operations on Earth for generations, most notably importing illegal drugs back to Voltar as an attempt to unseat the ruling government in favour of the CIA's director, Lombar Hisst. Panicking that these plans are about to be unmasked by the unknowing Heller, Hisst assigns one of his best agents, Soltan Gris, to undermine and disrupt Heller's plans no matter the cost.
This is where Mission Earth briefly - very briefly - threatens to get interesting. The bulk of the story - the first seven and a half volumes - are told from Gris's POV, that of the villain. Using a CIA base near Ankara, Turkey and posing as a fellow agent sent to help Heller, Gris attempts to stop Heller's plan from succeeding, either by sabotaging his operations or by trying to kill him directly. Effectively the story is a long farce as Gris's attempts to defeat Heller repeatedly blow up in his face, with Heller's plan sailing on serenely with him continuing to believe that Gris is a good guy. Eventually Heller realises that Earth should be spared invasion and encourages the development of new sources of power and renewable energy, earning the enmity of the powerful Rockecenter family (Hubbard was, perhaps, not the subtlest of satirists), who, it is revealed, control Earth's sources of oil and are unhappy with Heller's attempts to give free energy to the whole planet (by creating a black hole in orbit and tapping the energy of its singularity). To this end the Rockecenters assign a public relations genius to destroy Heller's reputation, a plan which nearly succeeds until Heller, aided somewhat randomly by the Mafia, turns the tables and successfully rescues the Earth from oblivion. He also discovers that Gris is his true enemy and has him incarcerated. The last two volumes are set back on Voltar as Heller attempts to stop Hisst's plan from conquering the Empire coming to pass.
On the surface this is a fairly random but not entirely valueless story. Old-school, yes, but with some potential for exploring themes about nuclear self-destruction, the problem of dwindling energy supplies and the corruption of power, whilst having the main villain as the central POV character for 75% of its length is an unusual and potentially fascinating move.
Hubbard, of course, doesn't actually fulfil any of this potential. Instead, the series mounts a sustained, shock-and-awe assault on the reader's intelligence, taste and suspension of disbelief that is awesome to behold (though thoroughly unpleasant to experience). With Battlefield Earth, by virtue of its far-future setting, Hubbard was unable to really do much in the way of satire or commentary on modern American values. With Mission Earth, mostly set in contemporary New York City (with occasional jaunts to Turkey and other locations), he was able to let rip with both barrels. As a result, we get lengthy digressions on how rock music turns people into effeminate gays, how lesbians are just frigid women in need of 'real men' to show them who's boss (in a stomach-churning sequence, Gris imprisons two lesbians, tortures them with a cheese grater and chili powder, and they end up falling passionately in love with him), how drugs are the root of all evil and how most foreigners are shifty criminals who are not to be trusted. Whilst Hubbard doesn't mention Scientology directly, he goes on at some length about the evils of psychology and psychiatry, one of the pillars of that belief system. Ironically, he does give immense credence to the power of public relations and image-building, and how people can believe the most self-evidently delusional tripe if it's sold the right way.
So, the series is effectively a very basic, pulpy old-school SF adventure decked out with more torture porn, homophobia, sexism and racism that you can shake a stick at. It was greeted with full-blown disbelief from both the general SF and literary communities, though bizarrely a few people (like Orson Scott Card, who really should have known better) did give it good reviews. The series also managed to briefly damage the credibility of the Hugo Awards, when Scientology block-voting got the second volume, Black Genesis, onto the shortlist for Best Novel in 1987. This was the same year as William Gibson's Count Zero and Bob Shaw's The Ragged Astronauts, genuine classics of the genre. At Worldcon that year (fortunately held in the UK, preventing too many hardcore Scientologists from attending and voting) tensions ran high as a number of SF novelists and fans alike were heard muttering darkly about the quality and integrity of the books. For their part the few attending Scientologists, mourning Hubbard's death a year earlier, were taking any slight against the book as an assault on Hubbard's memory, leading to at least one alleged bar-room heated argument over the matter.
Eventually, Orson Scott Card made up for his earlier error of judgement by going ahead and winning for Speaker for the Dead, restoring sanity to the world.
At 14 Mission Earth was a bit of an eye-opener, I can tell you, and in retrospect I perhaps should have given up after the fourth or fifth book (when the rape scenes were kicking in with full force), but a sense of honesty propelled me through reading the whole series. When I handed in my 2,000-word essay it talked about the challenges of writing a long SF series and what ideas could be handled in the medium, but it could generally be summed up as one sentence:
"Helen, the wife of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, has been kidnapped by Paris, the evil prince of Troy. In anger, Helen's son the almost invulnerable hero Achilles wages war on King Priam, Paris' father, and the city of Troy. All of Greece is swept into war with Troy, including some of the world's greatest warriors, kings, and holy men. Achilles and his friends fight to rescue Helen and destroy the Trojans, and after ten years, they succeed, but not without disaster." Daniel, Resident Scholar
"The Iliad is the first book in Western literature, told c.720BC, it is set during the Trojan War c.1200BC. The noble Achilles, most powerful of the Greeks, has been serving in the war against the Trojans for nearly ten years. Originally it may have been about rescuing the beautiful queen Helen who was stolen away, but now it is about the wounded pride and hot rage of Achilles. After being publicly insulted by his leader King Agamemnon, in fury he refuses to fight any further and withdraws his troops. He demands compensation for the insult or, unless the battle goes so badly against the Greeks that all their ships are in danger of being burnt, he will not lead his elite troops into battle.
The war does start to go against the Greeks. Although the cunning Odysseus leads a daring night-time commando raid into the heart of the enemy camp, the tide is turning and King Agamemnon sees that he must make amends with Achilles. But Achilles is now hardened in his anger and will not take the compensation. He calls the whole war a pointless sham and accuses the king of speaking with forked tongue. Unwisely he allows his best friend Patroclus to wear his magical armor and lead his troops into battle. Tragically, the Trojan hero Hector kills him and the armor is captured. Only now Achilles swings into action, not for the glory of the Greeks, but to avenge his friend's death. Inside the Trojan city we see scenes of family life and feel pity for the wives and children as they helplessly watch the men don armor and go out to battle for the last time. Outside is the mighty Achilles, for though it cost him everything, he will have his vengeance and win the undying glory of a hero of battle. And he is still remembered even to this day.
This is a long and complex book but the key chapters for the action are 1, 6, 9, 16, 18, 22, and 24. Good translations abound but Robert Fitzgerald's in the Oxford World Classics series is a good read with handy notes and maps. If you need to get serious Robert M. Willcock's, 'A companion to the Iliad' is the way to go." Michael JR Jose, Resident Scholar
In Search of Lost Time is notorious for its length. Its six volumes stretch over 3,700 pages, with individual sentences clocking in at almost three pages (the longest sentence is 847 words long in the original French). Proust himself is known as an eccentric who slept all day in a cork-lined room and wrote obsessively about himself at night. So why even bother starting with Swann's Way, when the narrator spends fifty pages just lying in bed thinking?
Some people start to read Proust thinking that it is the literary equivalent of climbing a mountain or running a marathon: something that is horrible at the time but great to boast about afterwards; or rather, something that gives you a real sense of achievement. The last part is certainly true, but the best-kept secret about Proust is that once you get into it, it's actually good: enjoyable, funny, easy to read, and full of memorable characters. Everyone has had a Proustian moment: experiencing a smell, taste or sight which unexpectedly sets off long-forgotten memories.
Proust is, in fact, the perfect antidote to modern life. Everything around us is boiled down to its shortest form for our shorter attention spans, from 140-character tweets to sixty second news bulletins on the T.V., radio and internet. Proust forces you to slow down, to notice things about the world that get missed out of these edited highlights. The experience of reading In Search of Lost Time is different to reading any other book: you become immersed in an unique world which will change the way you view everything else. The patience and concentration required to work your way through some of the longer sentences is rewarded by the ideas with which Proust stuffs every page: thoughts about art, memory, love, and childhood.
Swann's Way is a brilliant introduction to the rest of the Search, introducing the themes of love, jealous, time and memory which will be elaborated in the other five volumes and full of eccentric characters such as Madame Verdurin, who collapses in ecstasy over her favourite music, and Françoise, who weeps over the suffering of people she doesn't know and torments those she does. It is also a fascinating guide to the early years of the Belle Époque, when Paris was full of writers, artists, musicians and ideas.
"À la recherche du temps perdu is the constant attempt to charge an entire lifetime with the utmost awareness." Walter Benjamin, The Image of Proust
"Proust's great novel is like a beautiful garden filled with delights but hidden behind a forbidden wall..." Patrick Alexander, author of Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time
"Getting to know Proust is not the acquisition of a bundle of facts, it is familiarity with a world of the imagination in which one gradually comes to feel at home." Richard Bales, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Proust
"Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 after causing a nationwide controversy, this novel relates the saga of a poor extended family of tenant farmers called the Joads, who are driven by the Midwestern dustbowl and the Depression from Oklahoma to the promise of a better life in California. But members of the family die or are otherwise lost on the way, the prospects are no better out West, and nascent unionizers and police clash violently. (When film producer Darryl Zanuck proposed to make a movie of the book -- directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda and John Carradine -- he hired private detectives to verify the details of the disheartening plot; they told him the truth was even worse.) Steinbeck's writing is Biblically majestic, a triumph of the spirit." David Loftus, Resident Scholar
"Main character gets out of jail, finds his family farm destroyed, finds his family living with his uncle, they have to leave Oklahoma to go to California and try to make a living out of it. Good part of the book about the road trip to California, all their miseries, misfortunes. They get in California to find it's no better what they had." Martin Deschenes, Resident Scholar
"Steinbeck's "Grapes" is probably the most well-known of a slew of communist tracts masquerading as novels from the depression era. It is a powerful work because Steinbeck knew what he was writing about and could bring it home to his readers by adroitly manipulating the novel's contextual circumstances to create the emotions he wanted in his readers. This is the basic reason all novels of sociel commentary are useless as rational arguments - Dickens was a master at the same game." Kelly Whiting, Resident Scholar
"This is a classic, epic story of the treacherous trek for survival against the odds, of the Joad family. As their homes are turned into dustbowls, and capitalist businesses move in to take over small farming interests, the people of Oklahoma are wooed west to the rich pickings of California by cold hearted big businessman offering false hopes of free and happy new lives for the couragous, beleagured 'Okies'. What unfolds is a heartrending, inspiring and totally overwhelming tale of human survival and political questioning with ultimately spiritual overtones." James Mulligan, Resident Scholar
"This guy gets out of jail and goes home only to discover his family is moving because they are geting pushed off their land during the Great Depression. They exhaust themselves trying to get to California, where they have heard there is work. Once there, they discover that things are not going to look up." Belle, Resident Scholar
"The Grapes of Wrath is the story of a family who is struck by the great depression, and travels to California with the hope of a new life. They encounter many problems and dissapointments, and struggle with poverty and the threat of starvation. It is hard to find a job, and they live day by day, with only a glimmer of hope. This book is somewhat depressing, and really illustrates what the dust bowl was like." Katie, Resident Scholar
"Two men, George and Lenny, form a strong friendship, one man assuming the role of father-figure for the other, who has a child-like mentality but a brute strength that needs to be kept in check. Their quest in life is simple - to become settled and self-sufficient and to end their roaming lifestyle. However, George, the father-figure, is forced to face the reality of Lenny's mental instability/physical strength; he takes on the responsiblity of preventing further hurt/death by ending his friend's life, and thus ending his dream for their future." J.L. McEachen, Resident Scholar
"George and Lenny have a dream. They want to save enough of the money that they earn as migrant field hands to buy their own farm and become their own bosses. George will be able to settle down without having to spend all his time and energy looking out for his huge cousin, Lenny, who is retarded, and Lenny will be able to do as he pleases without causing them trouble. They are hired to help pick the crop on a farm. The pint-size foreman, Curley, a sadistic, former boxer, who is unsure of his manhood and of his ability to satisfy his wife, doesn't like Lenny from the start, and George warns Lenny to stay clear of both Curley and his wife. One of the other workers gives Lenny a newborn puppy, which stays in the barn with its mother. After Curley picks a fight with Lenny and Lenny breaks Curley's hand, Curley goes to the hospital and Lenny seeks to comfort himself by stroking his puppy, which he has unknowingly killed. Curley's wife enters the barn and flirts with Lenny. She lets him pet her hair, as he had petted the puppy, but he won't release her hair when she tries to pull away. Frightened, she screams, and Lenny, trying to silence her, accidentally breaks her neck. Curley returns, and he and his men hunt for Lenny. George suspects that Lenny will go to a nearby creek. George finds him there, and kills him quickly and mercifully so that Lenny won't fall into the hands of the sadistic Curley. This is a short and enjoyable, if somewhat sentimental, novel, that illustrates the difficulty of the uneducated poor and their attempt to better their lives. It also condemns the harsh brutality of farm owners who cared nothing for the men by whose sweat and blood they obtained and retained the profits from their farms." Gary Pullman, Resident Scholar
" The novel Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is a tale of friendship, dreams, and violence. Set in Steinbeck's childhood home near the Salinas River of California, the main characters are George Milton and Lennie Small. The two are as different as can be: George is small and quick of mind while Lennie is an enormous man with the mind of a child. Yet together, they are a family.
As the novel opens, George and Lennie are once again on their way to work as hired ranch hands. The status quo for tramps is people who travel for work and have no future beyond working for someone else every month. But George and Lennie are working toward something. They have a dream of owning a few acres, having a home to call their own, and being the masters of their own fate. For Lennie, his childish mind delights at the prospect of tending rabbits and stroking their fur. For now, the six hundred dollars needed to attain their dream seems years away. But, at the ranch they meet Candy, an old man, who adds 350 bucks when he joins them in planning to purchase the land and suddenly the dream is within reach.
Although George's life would be less complicated if he didn't have to take care of Lennie, he can never leave him. George tries to teach Lennie how to behave in a way that is acceptable to society. As they approach the job site, George warns Lennie not to say a word and let George do all the talking At the ranch, they meet the boss's son, Curley who is a cruel little man Curley despises men of large girth and focuses on Lennie as his victim. One time in a rage, he comes to the bunkhouse and picks a fight with Lennie. As Curley rains blows on Lennie, George commands Lennie to defend himself. Lennie does not know his own strength and crushes Curley¡¦s hand. Another source of worry to George is Curley¡¦s wife. She is lonely for companionship yet all the men view her as a tart and her conduct as flirtatious. But in the end, George cannot protect Lennie from the explosive events that follow and must act out of love.
One day, Lennie accidentally brings about the death of Curley's wife. Lennie is stroking her hair when she begins screaming. Lennie cannot conceive to let go and unintentionally breaks her neck as he covers her mouth to silence her. An angry mob lead by Curley commences to hunt for Lennie, intent on killing him. George finds Lennie near the Salinas River which is their meeting place should there be any trouble. Lennie anticipates George to be upset but he responds His voice choked with emotion, George bades Lennie to look toward the river and imagine their dream coming to reality. He wants Lennie to envision a place where there is no cruelty and Lennie can be accepted as himself. George discerns that if Lennie were to be caught, Curley would make certain to cause Lennie pain and anguish. This time George cannot protect Lennie. Out of mercy, George kills Lennie, drawing his strength from the love they share for one another. " Joanna , Resident Scholar
The Travels of Marco Polo, translated by William Marsden (Norton, £10.99)
When this edition of the book dropped through the letterbox, I was mildly intrigued. When a reissue of the Penguin Classics edition followed a couple of days later, I took it as a recommendation from providence. This is, after all, one of the great unread ancient European books. Our own national contribution to the genre is the Domesday Book, which is also now published by Penguin; but Polo's Travels offer, unlike Domesday, the conventional pleasures of reading, in spades.
I imagine that more people have read Calvino's Invisible Cities than Polo's Travels. In Calvino's book, Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan of various imaginary cities he has visited - all of them, if you wish, in some way versions of his own home town, Venice. So in a sense we feel we have "read" Marco Polo already, when all we have done is seen his reflection, an upside-down image in a lagoon. (Which I suspect was precisely Calvino's intent, or one of them.) Here, then, is the original image: and it is just as remarkable.
Here are provinces where, for three hours of the day, the inhabitants immerse themselves up to their chins in water so as to escape the effects of a blistering, suffocating wind. Here are lakes of fire, worshipped by descendants of the Magi; here is the first western mention of the Old Man of the Mountains, who trained his assassins to welcome death by drugging them and then allowing them to experience all the pleasures of Paradise. Here are mountains so high that fires fail to cook food properly; here are eagles trained to kill wolves.
Here, too, is the province of Peyn, where, if the husband is absent from home for 20 days (by no means a rare occurrence in a region where the nearest town was typically five days away), the wife had a right to take another; even more enticingly, here is the district of Kamul, where the men not only are "addicted to pleasure, and attend to little else than playing upon instruments, singing, dancing, reading, writing... and the pursuit, in short, of every kind of amusement", but also offer their wives and all female relations to any strangers seeking accommodation, while they leave the house. When the local ruler, Mangu Kaan, discovered and banned the practice, crops failed, and, with the abrupt cessation of visits from outside, the area's entire income dried up. When the locals begged Kaan to reconsider, he replied: "Since you appear so anxious to persist in your own shame, let it be granted." By the time Marco Polo arrived, things were back to normal. Likewise, ambassadors to the great Khan's court were offered a different courtesan each night. Polo was away from home for 26 years, and stayed with Khan for 17 of them.
I have gone for the much older translation rather than Ronald Latham's 1958 Penguin version. The latter is more complete and, strictly speaking, more useful - Polo's text exists in numerous versions, and it's not always easy to tell what was put in later - but the Norton edition (which is a 1930 scrubbing and polishing of William Marsden's 1818 translation) not only has nice illustrations, it has an excellent introduction by Manuel Komroff, a more colourful and engaging style, and wonderful notes. Example: the people of Kashcar "are a wretched and sordid race, eating badly and drinking worse". Footnote: "Their manners have not improved. See Ancient Khotan, Sir Aurel Stein." Other notes attest to the veracity of some of Polo's more astonishing claims, including tricks that would appear to be beyond any contemporary scientist or magician. (Why should I become a Christian, asked Khan, when Christians "do not possess the faculty of performing anything miraculous"?)
Polo's travels endured so long in the imagination that, 500 years later, Coleridge was inspired to use some of their details in a work of visionary intensity. They coloured all subsequent imaginings of China until 1948 - and may do once again. This is a world of almost inconceivable possibility - and the remarkable thing about it is that so much of it turns out to have been true. Besides, how can you fail to love a travel book which, from time to time, gives up looking for marvels and declares: "Nothing else occurs here that is worthy of remark"?
This review explores how Shakespeare structured this story and brought it to life.
Romeo and Juliet opens with a prologue announcing the story's star-crossed young lovers will die and their deaths reconcile their warring clans. Shakespeare opens his story by boldly announcing the climax of its plot. How can he get away with this? Because the better the storyteller, the stronger their understanding that a story is a journey. That a well-told story makes every step of that journey engaging and dramatic, more than the sum of its parts. Shakespeare can do what most inexperienced writers would be loathe to do -- give away his ending -- because what makes his story satisfying is a separate issue from the mechanical working out of its plot.
Further, by telling the audience the story's outcome, Shakespeare gives the story a poignancy it would lack otherwise. Knowing the lovers will die makes their every step toward that fate more deeply felt. This speaks to that issue of drama being not only the anticipation of action, but the feelings and thoughts that anticipation arouses.
Act One
Scene One
Act one opens with some of the men of Capulet clan meeting on the street men of the Montague clan. A brawl erupts, citizens join in, and the heads of the houses of Capulet and Montague come upon the scene. The Prince of the City arrives. His judgment, if there is more fighting, those guilty face death.
The dramatic purpose of this scene is to introduce that the families are bound together by an ancient blood feud that has grown to a lethal hatred. The scene does this through a measured introduction of characters that always gives the audience time to assimilate who a particular character is, their personality, and their relationships to other characters.
On a story level, because this story is about a conflict between love and hate, introducing the hate that fuels the story's action also sets the story into motion.
In the aftermath of the brawl, a question arises to the whereabouts of Romeo, a young Montague. It comes out that Romeo has been shedding tears and avoiding his kinsmen, but why is unclear. It is left to Benvolio to discover the cause of Romeo's distress.
Story note, the play opens with some hotly contested action that sets up the retribution further conflict will bring. There's clearly something at stake if anyone from either household engages in more brawling. Second, Romeo is mentioned in a way that it's made clear before his arrival he has issues he's dealing with. Because it's made clear he has an issue to resolve, he is a character who is "ripe" even before he appears. The story's audience anticipates some outcome to Romeo's issues.
Romeo enters as the others exit. It comes out quite quickly that Romeo is lovesick. "Out of her favor where I am in love."
Story note, the dramatic purpose here isn't to withhold that Romeo is lovesick.
Scene Two
The Senior Capulet enters, mentioning the ban on any further fighting and that it should be easy to uphold. Note how Capulet's words will come back to haunt him. During this scene, Count Paris reminds Capulet of his desire to wed Juliet, not quite fourteen. Capulet wishes that Juliet be older before she weds, but Paris presses his suit. Capulet invites him to a party that night, and they exit.
Story note, our introduction to Juliet offers a sense of who she is. Further, that Juliet's life is at a moment of potential transition, i.e., she's a "ripe" character.
Enter Benvolio and Romeo, still caught up in his love sickness. They immediately come upon a servingman sent out by Capulet to announce the party to those on a list he cannot read. He asks Romeo to read the list. It comes out that Rosaline, for whom Romeo pines, has been invited to this party. The servingman, grateful to Romeo for reading the list, invites him to the party as long as he's not a Montague.
Benvolio suggests Romeo go, that seeing some of the town's other beauties aid his recovery from his infatuation with Rosaline.
Romeo answers, defending Rosaline,
"One fairer than my love? The all-seeing sun Ne'er saw her march since first the world begun."
Story note, note the speed and ease with which the author has set up Romeo to attend this party. He's even prodded into it by Benvolio. Since to advance the story means bringing together its principals, Shakespeare designs the play to make that happen.
Through these opening scenes the author maintains a measured, brisk, pace that introduces the principles and their issues. He now begins bringing them together in a way that escalates the story's dramatic tension. Romeo going to a party at the Capulet's is inherently dangerous.
Scene 3
This scene opens with Lady Capulet, Juliet's nurse, and Juliet. The nurse is a folksy, humorous character. She ends a long answer to a simple question with the hope she live long enough to see Juliet marry. That becomes the lead in for Lady Capulet to broach her parents desire she consider marrying Paris. Juliet's answer,
"I'll look to like, if looking liking move.
But no more deep will I endart mine eye Than your consent gives strength to make it fly."
They exit to attend the party.
Story note, again the measured, brisk pace of introducing characters and their issues.
Scene 4
When Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio enter the party, it is a masquerade, which means they do not have to announce who they are, nor are their faces visible. Romeo and Mercutio pause to talk about dreams, then Romeo says,
"I fear too early, for my mind misgives, Some consequence yet hanging in the stars."
Something about this moment troubles him, but he goes forward.
Story note, to have Romeo and company pause before entering the party allows the drama over what will happen to build for the audience.
Scene 5
Capulet welcomes Romeo and company to the party. Romeo sees Juliet and exclaims,
"O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!"
Story note, Romeo falling in love with Juliet is the purpose of this scene, so it is not delayed. The question now becomes, what will be the outcome of this?
Many writers struggle because they build up to a moment of dramatic tension and then cut away. Shakespeare begins a scene with dramatic tension and quickly works to heighten that tension to a higher release point. It's a subtle point to understand, but a major fault for inexperienced writers is cutting away too early from the tension they create.
Tybalt, who crossed swords with Benvolio in scene one, hears Romeo's voice and sends for his sword. The elder Capulet orders Tybalt to stand aside, and even praises Romeo. Again, an act that will come back to haunt him. Tybalt protests, but Capulet rebukes him and orders him to not upset the party.
Romeo takes Juliet's hand and speaks to her,
"If I profane with my unworthiest hand, This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss."
Story note, it is the purpose of the scene to show how quickly and deeply Romeo falls in love with Juliet. It is not delayed, nor does it happen off stage.
Juliet is quickly swayed by Romeo's passion. Juliet,
"Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hands too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this; For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
Romeo kisses Juliet, then again.
Juliet's nurse calls her away, and Romeo learns from the nurse that Juliet is of the house of Capulet. Romeo,
"O dear account! My life is my foe's debt."
Again, the author maintains his brisk pace of setting up and advancing the story.
Juliet, on learning Romeo's identify, speaks,
"My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late! Prodigious birth it is to me That I must love a loathed enemy."
This is the end of act one. All the major elements are in place. The hatred of the Montagues and Capulets. That Romeo is lovesick and in love with the idea of love. The fate of what will befall the next person to disturb the peace. And now Romeo and Juliet in love. The curtain closes on a note of high drama and feeling. The storyteller has brought the audience to this height of feeling by potently and directly putting into play the elements of the story. Very little is withheld for some far off plot effect or revelation. What's important to setting up and advancing this story has been presented in a clear, dramatic way with poetic grace and wit.
In a script written by a struggling storyteller, one could imagine the brawl that opens Romeo and Juliet being the climax of act one. Because Shakespeare had a clear sense of his story and how to escalate its drama, he doesn't delay setting out the conflict that fuels it. In this story, if Shakespeare writes that one character doesn't like another, one can surmise they will meet in either that scene or the next. Because of this arrangement of the story's elements, the play's audience develops a sense of trust the author won't introduce characters for no clear dramatic purpose, introduce information but delay its import.
When Romeo is introduced, he is already lovesick, and very poetic and direct about it. What he's feeling isn't withheld to create a revelation at the end of act one. Because it defines Romeo, it comes out in his opening scene. Further, the dramatic purpose of his introduction isn't to make a statement about the kind of character he is. It's to show a young man in the anguish of first love that will quickly be tested. This speaks again to that issue of trust that develops between a writer like Shakespeare and his audience, because one trust Shakespeare to move the story forward dramatically.
Further, Shakespeare writes every moment of every scene to bring out its drama, texture and poetic richness. If a character is angry, they speak of that; lovesick, they speak of their heavy heart; vengeful, they speak of the joys of vengeance. Each moment he creates heightens the drama of that particular moment. The struggling writer is forever doing what I call "describing the furniture." Describing characters, events, environments as if from rote, while the dramatic richness of what should be the heightened moments of a scene are held back for some revelation or plot effect. Shakespeare is both a master of the moment, the scene, the act, the story. He presents passionate, feeling characters in full flower, not as seeds set to bloom late in the fall.
this story is 3 years after (yes it's a horrible mis-spelling)samus killed a space pirate with a missile to the open asked g.f.t.(galactic federation trooper) Fred , "damn , why did the space pirates wage war with us?""I dunno , i'm still in shock that you can talk".Fred answered."whatever".said samus as she blasted a ing through the head."i just want to know how they did this , with all the ing and st".then she gave the move out and destroy killed 2 s.p.s(space pirate) with shots to the chest and 7 ing with head then dived behind said, "wait here."she then took all the energy in her suit and blasted it into enemy ranks , a huge explosion destroy them power drained out of her power suit and she fainted.
2 hours later , landing we got her back!said admiral Dane."samus get the fk back in the fight , new reinforcements power suit is recharged over there."he pointed to a went to the room , unlocked the door and saw her put a hazard shield and 4 energy tanks on it , she put it on."thanks", she said , and dashed Dane thought out loud , for what?...space pirate major Gen'lox said, working perfectly , he turned to the sergeant next to him and said , blow her.
aether command basesamus was running down the hall , she turned and ran through the door , as soon as she got through the door all hell was released on went flying 30 feet into the air and hit the ground she woke up she saw her power suit was covered in massive laser burns , "it must have been an inside blast from my suit because i would still be able to move if it came from outside."she she saw a giant berserker lord towering over was talking in it's horrible clacks and clicks language. her barely working suit translated it. "brilliant plan master , putting in energy tanks with bombs in them."said the berserker lord. "wait she just woke up!"he raised his giant fist and an energy blade came out of his punched down and all of a sudden her suit recharged. she jumped out of the way and b.l.'s arm got stuck in the ground."damn you to fking hell!" screamed samus as she launched a barrage of missiles at his head.a crack appeared on his head armor. he ripped his blade out of the ground and slashed samus with lost 50 stumbled backward."st"she then switched to nova and fired a barrage of nova beam armor on his head cracked and broke fired a bunch of purple orbs from his shot them with precision landed in his open mouth and some landed in his exposed coughed up blood and fell switched to imperialist and shot his open brain 7 called into command post and said , "target annihilated" "great come back to command base we'vie got a new mission for you."admiral Dane answered. End
Chapter 1 (Samus' POV) She couldn't hear anything over her heavy breathing. She took a turn. She saw a 3-way path.
"Which way shan?" Samus asked.
Shan was another chozo-raised warrior. He was 2 years younger than samus. He was found by the chozo on a destroyed planet when he was 2 months old. He has a weird suit called the life suit. It's white and green. The shoulder parts on the suit look like the power suit's , but the rest of the suit looks like the varia suit. She never met him until 6 months ago. The reason for that is because he was raised on the other side of the planet.
"Take the left." Shan answered. "Thanks." Samus said. "I'm gonna get you Ridley" She took the left path. She was on a private mission. This time Ridley was gonna die. She saw a room with Ridley's H.Q. written over the door. She blasted the hinges. The giant door fell over. Inside was a giant cave. In the center was Ridley. She jumped onto his back and held the blaster to his head.
She said , "Die (censored) bastard!
He said , "Wait I was corrupted"
She hesitated. Ridley wasn't much of a liar. But , corrupted or not , he killed her parents. She still just couldn't decide what to do. She slightly let down her guard. That's when it happened. Something hit her neck. She fell over. She felt a strange burning sensation. Instantly her energy drained down to 0.
Right before she fainted she heard Ridley say , "Gotcha"
She fainted. When she awoke she was in a strange room. It looked like a hospital room. She looked at her suit and gasped. It looked slightly like Sylux's suit. It was black and red. Her suit powered back up.
Across the HUD it said , "New suit upgrade acquired , death suit on line"
"Death suit ..." She said.
She got up and pain sliced her side. "Broken ribs." She thought. She felt the sensation again , the HUD said , "Death powers activated"
She glowed with a black and red aura. Secret compartments opened on her arm cannon. One was glowing black and the other red. She floated.
Shan called in. He said , "Heard about the suit , they say a beast made it out of your varia , they call it the death suit"
She cut him off , She said , "Hold on , life and death , cool , what happened." She was surprised , her voice was regular , with a slight demonic touch.
"Well , you were in Ridley's hands , a thousand feet in the air , so we shot him and he released you." He answered."But the retrieval system missed , your energy took most of the impact , but not all of it , which is why you have 3 broken ribs" "Not anymore , the death suit fixed them , send me your coordinates"
He told her that he was in the waiting room of the hospital. So she was in the hospital. She soared down the hallway. She was surprised Her HUD said she was going at 70 mph. She got to the waiting room. She saw Shan.
She said , "I hate hospitals , let's get out of here"
They decided to go to a command base. As soon as they got out she realized what planet she was on. She was on red fear , the war scarred planet. This planet was ripped in half by war , literally She had too many bad memories of this place. She wanted to get off now. She had known way too many people who had died here. She tried to run and saw something in the distance. She tried to scan it knew it would fail and say object out of scanning range but it scanned it , it said ,
"Pirate crusher , highly advanced s pieces of pirate , crushes everything it sees but is actually very intelligent , only way to defeat is by combining true masters or apprentices powers of death and life , so avoid at all costs , go to logbook for more"
She looked at Shan , he was done scanning too.
"What do you think the true apprentices and masters are?" She asked.
" We , I think, are the apprentices." Shan said.
"Well let's go kick some (censored) pirate ass!" Samus said.
They did another scan , this time it said , "Subject : pirate crusher , weak spot , head , weak plating over weak spot , susceptible to concussive blasts.
They knew what to do , offense protocol 172 , the throw and bomb protocol Shan threw samus and she lay a time bomb at 1:00. Samus threw Shan and Shan lay a bomb. He set it to 0:40. They were each now at 40 seconds. They ran until they saw a 300 foot-long explosion. (they were 2/3 of a mile away)
"Take that ( censored ) nut!" Samus shrieked.
"Hey let's celebrate with a couple drinks on me!" Said Shan.
... 3 hours and 24 (12 for each) drinks later... "
Hit me again waiter." Samus said crazily.
"Samus you should stop." Shan said , he was used to brandy. "Don't get her another , I'm paying" (Shan's POV) He payed the waiter and dragged a thrashing Samus to the command base. He put her in her room and went to his. After a couple minutes they fell asleep. When he woke up he immediately leaned over the side of his bed and puked for about 20 minutes. When he was done he felt really bad.
" ( censored ) hangovers." He said. He went to Samus and saw that she was in her death suit and ready for hell , because as the old saying goes , war is hell. Then the alarms lit up and beeped and over the speakers general Bob started speaking
"Invading army en route , coming from east , all able-bodied personal come to the ship docking bay , get in your ships and blast them to hell."He said. "If you don't have a ship , then follow me to hell , I'll be in the command room"
Shan ran to his ship. Samus followed. They had a war to go to. He got in his ship. He went into the sky. His jaw instantly dropped when he saw the army. 100,000 troops easily. He tapped a button on the control pad. The ship counted the enemies. It came up with 189,430 troops.
"Better get to work." He thought.
He cleared his mind of any leftover drunkenness and blasted 5 missiles. The number dropped by 129. From then on he just kept on blasting. He put the ship on auto-fire and looked around. There were 100 federation ships in the sky. He looked at the number. 99,567 , and rapidly decreasing. He ran out of ammo. At the instant he ran out of ammo space pirate ships appeared. He called Bob and spoke to the COM.
"Bob I'm out of ammo and-" He said but couldn't finish because of his hangover. He puked everywhere. He knocked a thruster and went into a spiral.
"Shan did you drink again,"General Bob said , "Ah well doesn't matter, at the ship docking bay there is extra ammo , and for god's sake go get an anti-hangover pill"
" Sir , yes , sir!" He exclaimed and then drove towards the docking bay.
(Samus' POV) Samus wasn't doing so well. Every second she was swerving out of control. She remembered something. Never drive drunk. She decided to go to get a anti-hangover pill. But that's when it happened. ... Cliffhanger , perfect time to say , dun dun dun dddduuunnn!
Chapter 2 "Now this is the life" , Link thought."No problems at all."Link hadn't heard anything from princess zelda in 4 weeks , and he had found a deserted 1 week he had struck oil , made electricity , and found lots of fruit. A couple days after he thought that he got a letter from zelda. It was for a party. It wasn't just a party , it was a monster blowout. Or at least that's what the letter said. He decided to go. The party was very big. When Link got there he found princess said , "Your letter was right , this is a monster blowout." "Mm hmm" , answered Zelda. "Ok let's party!" Zelda said. ...6 hours later , Link was getting drunk on punch (sugar rush) but he was on high alert , party crashers could come at any moment. "OOWAH OOWAH! He he was on half full of a sudden he saw a couple of teenagers came in with a giant barrel of imedietly ran to wasn't going to be cops at this party. He slashed the barrel in half. He coughed , he hated the smell of grabbed one guys arm and snapped it like a guy fell over and was unconcious before he hit the elbowed another guy in the stomach and kneed him on the nose , he heard a satisfing then hit a pressure point and he fell onto his blew on him and he fell ran towards the other guys. Zelda looked at knew he was doing the right thing , everyone cheered him unsheathed his sword , he heard cheering , he didn't want to kill anyone , so he knocked the last of the beer-teenagers out with the handle."Yeah!" He the sunlight smashed through and Ganondorf grabbed his sword and ran to grabbed his sword and ran to Ganon. Zelda pulled out her bow and arrow , charged it , and struck Ganon in the center of his momentarily was distracted and fell hit the arrow in and it sunk deep into his spurted kept on slashing him untill Ganondorf turned to stone. "Get him out of here."Zelda told her picked up the statue and brought it to the dungeon where they threw it down and Ganondorf smashed into 100's of pieces."Sorry but you all have to leave."Zelda kept on took out his sword and yelled , "She said leave!"They all ran. A couple of days later Link threw a party at his was real fun untill Ridley crashed the said , "Dude , wrong game."Ridley roared , "I know but you killed my friend Ganondorf so I decided to pay you a visit."He ran at Link. Link took out his sword and strafed , as he went by Link slashed his 's blood splattered the then beheaded a prophet sighed and said , "Let me guess , you're friends with Ganondorf."The prophet shot a beam at dodged and jumped on him then stood on his chair. He started slashing missed and hit a fuel chair started spinning prophet screamed and link got prophet collided into a blew came up to him and said , "What's with all the party crashers?"Link said , "I don't know but let's just keep partying."Then Wilfre crashed through the wall."UGH!" Link yelled."You killed Ganon , so my little scorpian will take care of you!"A giant scorpian appeared , it threw both claws forward , but he blocked both blows , and started slashing it's invincible fell back and started spraying shadow. Then clouds appeared and he jumped on them and jumped down on the scorpian's head , slashing through it's heads jumpedat him and he held out his sword , killing enjoyed the rest of the party , without anymore party poopers. ...Down in the dungeon... Ganondorf reformed at the bottom of the dungeon. He flew up.(the dungeon is kind of a pit)He destroyed all of the bars at the top of the dungeon."Muah ha ha hha!"He laughed. End
Ugh , sorry that the update took so log, i got grounded.
I have been really busy.
AND NO I DID NOT STEAL THE IDEA!BELEIVE ME!
... I remember I was at a cliff hanger.
Disclaimer I OWN metroid. Lawyers come saying , " Sue , sue sue!" I guess i only own this fan fiction! :( DAMN LAWYERS:P
(SAMUS'S POV)
Her ship went spiraling as she looked around for the cause. A mother ship that was at least 3 kilo-meters long was the cause.
"FK" She said.
She made her ship do a tight spiral and regained control. She kept going down and got to the station. When she got there Bob said,
" Why the hell are you down here, Shan's down here but he has a reason."
" Sir, I need more ammo, sir!"She then whispered, " and an anti- hangover pill." " Immediately because of the mother ship."
"I know about the mother ship which is why I don't want you down here, walk over to our maintenance engineers."
She walked over to them and restocked. She then went up to the sky with Shan and took on the mother ship.
BOSS FIGHT
Shan blasted the mother ship. Samus sighed, she knew it wouldn't have any effect. Sure enough a tiny mushroom appeared on the ship doing no damage at all. Samus connected her beam to the ship and unleashed power into it, a giant beam blasted from her ship. The ship blew into a billion pieces. Samus frowned, the mother ship shouldn't blow so easily. Then she saw a miracle.
END OF THE BOS FIGHT
Rundas's ship was floating in the wreckage. Rundas continued on to shoot all the troops below, Leaving Samus and Shan to watch In awe.
(SHAN'S POV) (OF BOSS FIGHT)
Shan fired a missile, he knew it wouldn't work, but it was meant to get the mother ship's eye off the main prey. He began typing a complex command but Samus shot a beam. That's when the mother ship blew up. Shan thought ,
"WTF, how did that happen?"
Then a weird ship came into view. He was wondering who that ship was when it attacked all the other space pirate ships, now he was REALLY confused. But then Samus's voice crackled over the COM saying
"This is my buddy Rundas, I thought he was dead."
SORRY THAT CHAPTER IS SO SHORT, I DON'T HAVE MUCH TIME BUT I WILL HAVE PLENTY OF TIME IN MARCH!
chapter 1 1 year after the events of phantom hourglass...link and tetra once again ruled the seas as (their new watchman)said , "hyrule island ahead!"(the new location of hyrule castle.)tetra (or zelda)said , "my new home.""link you are officially a night."link said , "I know zelda , so please stop telling me."tetra said , "don't call me zelda untill we're on the the island!"linebeck(their captain) said , "break it up!""fine." said link and tetra (navigator) said , " linebeck , get back to the wheel before you kill us all!""whoops!"linebeck exclaimed. linebeck started back to the captains wheel when everything darkend suddenly and the sea got a giant shadow attacked the and zonock (ship guard) attacked used his shield and blocked a instantly slashed at him and the phantom sword pinged off of the shadows armor in a shower of shadow killed zonock with one slash of his gilloutine sword.a splash of blood hit links shadow ripped all of link's weapons away."st" said a desperate atempt link grabbed tetra and dived into shark infested waters.a beam of energy hit the water and link got knocked out. ... link woke up and saw a bleeding gash on his leg and wrapped it up with a piece of his blood stained (by zonock) looked around and saw an unconsous checked the map and saw he was on an uncharted island."good we're on hyrule island."said went up to tetra and picked her brought her to hyrule told the guards that she needed medical care. then he went back to the found akoolin and linebeck still brought them to the hopital he went looking around for a asked everyone in town and they said that the only ships were hidden deep in the he decided to trust them , and he went was in there for 5 minutes and he was attacked by a fox(remember he doesn't have any weapons) dun dun dun . zelda woke up!she said , "wwhhaaaa?" the medic said , "princess zelda you're awake"! zelda said , "no fking duh stwad."...well anyway zelda ley me bring you to your throne room." "thorne!oh , sorry i didn't know i was at hyrule , sorry."zelda said."whatever let's just get you to your throne" in the jungle with fox slashed him , he got angry and grabbed it's paw and scooped it's heart held the heart in his hand for about 50 seconds with an the world's stupidest expression on his face(invoulantarily).then his wounds saw a shadow in the corner of his was suspicious and went on full saw a sword in front of ran to it and grabbed it. then he saw the shadow followed it through the jungle untill it brought him to a ship. "strange." he the shadow turned out to be the shadow from the ship. it ran forward and swung it's sword. he surged with energy and knocked the sword out of his hand and stabbed him through the burst into flames and died. link got the ship and left hyrule with linbeck knowing he'd probably be back 3 minutes later to save zelda from ganon."bye!" he yelled to zelda. End
In my defense I was 11 and thought FanFiction was a good website when I wrote those. Here's my FanFiction profile: http://www.fanfiction.net/~metroidblaster
"Kino, a poor Indian/Mexican pearl diver, enjoys a simple life with his wife Juana and their baby, Coyotito. The baby, bitten by a scorpion, falls ill, and the doctors refuse to treat him. Things look up when Kino discovers a huge, beautiful pearl one day. Incredulous, Kino howls with joy, and suddenly everyone in La Paz is interested in his family and his pearl. Greed contaminates their once simple way of life, as Kino fitfully tries to get 50,000 pesos for a pearl that the dealers only wish to pay one thousand for. The pearl leads Kino to corruption, slitting a man's throat who attempted to take the pearl from him, and eventually the price of the pearl is more higher than they imagined--it is paid in the blood of Coyotito. In redemption and sorrow, Kino returns to La Paz and throws the pearl back to the ocean."
ReplyDeleteAngela Allan, Resident Scholar
"The Pearl, which takes place in La Paz, Mexico, begins with a description of the seemingly idyllic family life of Kino, his wife Juana and their infant son, Coyotito. Kino watches as Coyotito sleeps, but sees a scorpion crawl down the rope that holds the hanging box where Coyotito lies. Kino attempts to catch the scorpion, but Coyotito bumps the rope and the scorpion falls on him. Although Kino kills the scorpion, it still stings Coyotito. Juana and Kino, accompanied by their neighbors, go to see the local doctor, who refuses to treat Coyotito because Kino cannot pay.
Kino and Juana leave the doctors and take Coyotito down near the sea, where Juana uses a seaweed poultice on Coyotito's shoulder, which is now swollen. Kino dives for oysters from his canoe, attempting to find pearls. He finds a very large oyster which, when Kino opens it, yields an immense pearl. Kino puts back his head and howls, causing the other pearl divers to look up and race toward Kino's canoe.
The news that Kino has found an immense pearl travels fast through La Paz. The doctor who refused to treat Coyotito decides to visit Kino. Kino's neighbors begin to feel bitter toward him for his good fortune, but neither Kino nor Juana realize this feeling they have engendered. Juan Tomas, the brother of Kino, asks him what he will do with his money, and he envisions getting married to Juana in a church and dressing Coyotito in a yachting cap and sailor suit. He claims that he will send Coyotito to school and buy a rifle for himself. The local priest visits and tells Kino to remember to give thanks and to pray for guidance. The doctor also visits, and although Coyotito seems to be healing, the doctor insists that Coyotito still faces danger and treats him. Kino tells the doctor that he will pay him once he sells his pearl, and the doctor attempts to discern where the pearl is located (Kino has buried it in the corner of his hut). That night, a thief attempts to break into Kino's hut, but Kino drives him away. Juana tells Kino that the pearl will destroy them, but Kino insists that the pearl is their one chance and that tomorrow they will sell it.
Kino's neighbors wonder what they would do if they had found the pearl, and suggest giving it as a present to the Pope, buying Masses for the souls of his family, and distributing it among the poor of La Paz. Kino goes to sell his pearl, accompanied by his neighbors, but the pearl dealer only offers a thousand pesos when Kino believes that he deserves fifty thousand. Although other dealers inspect the pearl and give similar prices, Kino refuses their offer and decides to go to the capital to sell it there. That night, Kino is attacked by more thieves, and Juana once again reminds Kino that the pearl is evil. However, Kino vows that he will not be cheated, for he is a man.
DeleteLater that night, Juana attempts to take the pearl and throw it into the ocean, but Kino finds her and beats her for doing so. While outside, a group of men accost Kino and knock the pearl from his hand. Juana watches from a distance, and sees Kino approach her, limping with another man whose throat Kino has slit. Juana finds the pearl, and they decide that they must go away even if the murder was in self-defense. Kino finds that his canoe has been damaged and their house was torn up and the outside set afire. Kino and Juana stay with Juan Tomas and his wife, Apolonia, where they hide for the next day before setting out for the capital that night.
Kino and Juana travel that night, and rest during the day. When Kino believes that he is being followed, the two hide and Kino sees several bighorn sheep trackers who pass by him. Kino and Juana escape into the mountains, where Juana and Coyotito hide in the cave while Kino, taking his clothes off so that no one will see his white clothing. The trackers think that they hear something when they hear Coyotito crying, but decide that it is merely a coyote pup. After a tracker shoots in the direction of the cries, Kino attacks the three trackers, killing all three of them. Kino can hear nothing but the cry of death, for he soon realizes that Coyotito is dead from that first shot. Juana and Kino return to La Paz. Kino carries a rifle stolen from the one of the trackers he killed, while Juana carries the dead Coyotito. The two approach the gulf, and Kino, who now sees the image of Coyotito with his head blown off in the pearl, throws it into the ocean.
"
Sara, Resident Scholar
"The Pearl is about Kino, Juana and Coyotito. They live in La Paz Mexico in a small shack. They live in the lower class of society, and are not wealthy by any means. And though they are content with their lives, Coyotito, Kino's son gets stung by a Scorpion. Kino goes to find the doctor but finds since he is poor the doctor won't see his son. He decides he needs to go pearl diving to find a pearl to sell to the doctor in exchange for medicine. When Kino finds "the pearl of the world" everybody seems to notice, and people take advantage of the situation.
People try to steal the pearl and put his family in danger. After Kino kills a man, he, his wife and his son are forced to leave La Paz. These turn of events that should've brought Kino and his family up in society, actually brings them down and what was supposed to help his son, ends up killing him. "
melanie, Resident Scholar
"The pearl is a book written by John Steinbeck .It tells the story of Kino, a poor Indian fisherman. Kino, his wife Juana, and his son Coyotito live in a small hut made of brush in a poor village town in La Paz, Mexico . One day Coyotito is stung on the shoulder by a poisonous scorpion. Kino, Juana, and their neighbors take Coyotito to the local doctor. The doctor refuses to treat Coyotito because Kino is too poor to pay. Kino became very angry because of the doctor's refusal. The next afternoon Kino decides to go fishing for oysters in search of a pearl. He then finds a large oyster and opens it. Inside the oyster Kino uncovers a giant pearl. Kino then becomes very excited thinking that the pearl will make him become very rich. The villagers quickly learn of Kino's finding of the pearl and become very jealous of him. The same night a thief attempts to steal the pearl and attacks Kino.
ReplyDeleteJuana convinces Kino that the pearl is evil and will destroy them. The next day Kino goes to town to try and sell the pearl. Kino believes that the pearl is worth 50,000 pesos, but a pearl dealer insists that the pearl is only worth 1,000 pesos. Kino feels he is being cheated and decides to go to the capital city to sell the pearl. That night Kino is attacked by more thieves. Juana once again tries to convince Kino that the pearl will destroy them. Juana tries to throw the pearl into the ocean later that night. Kino finds Juana before the pearl is thrown into the ocean and beats her. Outside a group of men try to knock the pearl out of Kino's hand. Kino then slits one of the men's throat.
ReplyDeleteKino and Juana decide to go away because Kino has committed murder even though in their view it was in self-defense. Kino and Juana set out on their journey to the capital city. On their journey Kino believes they are being followed so Kino and Juana hide in the mountains. Juana and Coyotito hide in the cave. Kino goes to find who's following them. When Kino leaves Coyotito starts to cry. The followers assume that Coyotito's cry is a coyote pup. One of the followers shoot in the direction of Coyotito's cry. Kino attacks the followers and kills all three of them. As Kino returns to his wife and son in the cave he discovers that Coyotito is dead. Tragically, the first shot fired by one of the followers killed Coyotito. The next afternoon Kino and Juana return to the village carrying the rifle, the pearl, and their dead son Coyotito. They go to the ocean and throw the pearl into the ocean.
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Nikia , Resident Scholar
" Kino is a poor Indian pearl diver. When his baby, Coyotito, is stung by a scorpion, he fears that he may not make it. One day, when diving, he finds a huge pearl he knows to be worth a lot of money. At first, to him and his wife Juana, the pearl seems like a blessing. But as the book progresses, it's greatness is questioned.
After he finds the pearl, life for Kino and his family becomes more complicated. Juana wants to destroy the pearl, but Kino doesn't let her. When a dangerous group of attackers try to kill Kino and his family for the pearl, they find themselves fighting for their lives. "
"Haper Lee's semi autobiographical Pulitzer prize winner is a superb account of bigotry and injustice set in 1930's Alabama."
ReplyDeleteBecky Palmer, Resident Scholar
"This 1961 Pulitzer Prize winning book makes you wish that Harper Lee had published other books, but if you're only going to publish one, To Kill A Mockingbird sure is the way to go. Told through the eyes of Jean Louise Finch, better known as Scout, the story is basically a study of racial prejudice in the South before the Civil Rights era. It is a well-plotted story with lots of action, but what makes it so special is the brilliant characterization. Once you meet Scout Finch, her brother Jem, and her father Atticus Finch who is the unsung hero of the novel, you will never forget them. A book worthy of the "Classic" label it has been given."
Bill Brumlow, Resident Scholar
"To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the best accounts of the hysteria that racial hatred and false accusations could create in the deep South prior to the 1980s. The tireless efforts of Atticus to save the falsely accused black man are set in a tone to draw the reader into sympathy, surprisingly, with both the victim and his accusers. A classic that deserves the title."
Kelly Whiting, Resident Scholar
"Scout and her brother Jem are just playful kids when their father is assigned to the case of a black man raping a white woman. They had never been affected by one of Atticus' cases before, and are surprised to have this one impact their lives. And, though Scout is growing up enough to realize the labels society places on people of different race and social status--and enough to have her aunt scolding her about her tomboyish behvior, she learns a lot more about life when this case comes about."
Sarrah, Resident Scholar
" A girl and her brother go through their youth being kids but discover a new friend and try to understand and right injustices. They learn something new about other people in town as well as the justice system and their new friend."
Yasmin Miranda, Resident Scholar
"To Kill A Mockingbird is a story of awakening - awakening to a not so perfect world. The narrator, six year old Jean Louise Finch (Scout) lives in a world that is shattered by her realization that racism and class discrimination are rampant in her town and will effect her family. Her lawyer father, Atticus seems to be one of the few righteous inhabitants of Maycomb and sets about defending a black man charged with a crime he did not commit. "
Shel, Resident Scholar
"Scout and her brother Jem wittness first hand that the world isn't always fair when their father defends a black man for a crime he didn't commit. Throughout the book, Scout and Jem both grow as individuals. "
Kristian Herron, Resident Scholar
"The novel is about three years in the life of the Finch family: Atticus and his son Jem and daughter Scout. They live in the town of Maycomb in Alabama, where whites are in control and blacks are second-class citizens.
ReplyDeleteAtticus is a lawyer and the central incident of the novel is when he defends a black man, Tom Robinson, against the charge of raping a white girl.
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Andrew Haine, Resident Scholar
"Two children, Scout and Jem Finch are dragged into a racial battle with their father. Their father, Atticus Finch defends a black man in court. The black man is accused of raping a white girl. This event in fact never happened. The black man, Tom Robinson was shot to death in prison before his final trial. This does not stop the attacks on the Finch Family. The two children are attacked on there way home from an evening school function, and Jem sustained serious arm injury."
Natalie , Resident Scholar
"To Kill A Mockingbird is told through the eyes of a six-year-old tomboy named Scout Finch. Her father, Atticus, is an attorney- at- law and defends a black man named Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping a white young woman. Atticus is an extraordinary lawyer, and the verdict is very surprising.
This plot, however, is not the only action happening in the novel. Down the street from Scout and her older brother jem, lives the Radleys. Arthur(Boo) Radley got in trouble with the law at a young age and has not been seen outside of his house since. The children are very curious about his man, and try various techniques to get him to come out. "
Kristina Murray, Resident Scholar
"The story Begins as Jean-Louise Finch or "Scout" for short, begins
recounting the events in her childhood which eventually led up to her older brother Jem's broken arm. Scout lives with her brother Jem, her widowed father Atticus (a lawyer) and their African-American nanny Calpurnia in the quite county of Maycomb, Alabama. It is the middle of the great depression, yet in comparaison to others, they're doing considerabley well. One summer Jem and Scout meet a boy named Dill, a visitor from out of town, and with his company they go on great adventures and pick up a new fascination with an old, spooky house down the street called the Radley place, but more specifically....a fascination with an odd character that dwells inside.
Finally, controversy hits the sleepy town of Maycomb. Even through the pro-white protest, Atticus, Scout's father, accepts to defend local black man Tom Robinson, accused of raping Mayella Ewell. Mayella Ewell is the daughter of Bob Ewell, a very simple man with a less than respectable reputation. The trial isn't the only event rocking maycomb though. A potential murder and a strange encounter follow closely behind.
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Sarah, Resident Scholar
The story of Atlas Shrugged takes place in the United States at an unspecified future time. Dagny Taggart, vice president in charge of operations for Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, seeks to rebuild the crumbling track of the Rio Norte Line that serves Ellis Wyatt's oil fields and the booming industrial areas of Colorado. The country is in a downward economic spiral with businesses closing and men out of work. Other countries in the world have become socialist Peoples' States and are destitute. Colorado, based on Wyatt's innovative method of extracting oil from shale, is the last great industrial center on earth. Dagny intends to provide Colorado the train service it requires, but her brother James Taggart, president of Taggart Transcontinental, tries to block her from getting new rails from Rearden Steel, the last reliable steel manufacturer. James wants to do business with the inefficient Associated Steel, which is run by his friend Orren Boyle. Dagny wants the new rail to be made of Rearden Metal, a new alloy that Hank Rearden developed after ten years of experiment. Because the metal has never been tried and has been denounced by metallurgists, James won't accept responsibility for using it. Dagny, who studied engineering in college, has seen the results of Rearden's tests. She accepts the responsibility and orders the rails made of Rearden Metal.
ReplyDeleteWorsening the economic depression in the U.S. is the unexplained phenomenon of talented men retiring and disappearing. For example, Owen Kellogg, a bright young Taggart employee for whom Dagny had great hopes, tells her that he is leaving the railroad. McNamara, a contractor who was supposed to rebuild the Rio Norte Line, retires unexpectedly. As more great men disappear, the American people become increasingly pessimistic. Dagny dislikes the new phrase that has crept into the language and signifies people's sense of futility and despair. Nobody knows the origin or exact meaning of the question "Who is John Galt?," but people use the unanswerable question to express their sense of hopelessness. Dagny rejects the widespread pessimism and finds a new contractor for the Rio Norte Line.
The crisis for Taggart Transcontinental worsens when the railroad's San Sebastian Line proves to be worthless and is nationalized by the Mexican government. The line, which cost millions of dollars, was supposed to provide freight service for the San Sebastian Mines, a new venture by Francisco d'Anconia, the wealthiest copper industrialist in the world. Francisco was Dagny's childhood friend and her former lover, but she now regards him as a worthless playboy. In this latest venture, d'Anconia has steered investors completely wrong, causing huge financial losses and a general sense of unrest.
James Taggart, in an attempt to recover the railroad's losses on the San Sebastian Line, uses his political friendships to influence the vote of the National Alliance of Railroads. The Alliance passes what's known as the "Anti-dog-eat-dog rule," prohibiting "cutthroat" competition. The rule puts the superb Phoenix-Durango Railroad, Taggart Transcontinental's competitor for the Colorado freight traffic, out of business. With the Phoenix-Durango line gone, Dagny must rebuild the Rio Norte Line quickly.
ReplyDeleteDagny asks Francisco, who is in New York, what his purpose was in building the worthless Mexican mines. He tells her that it was to damage d'Anconia Copper and Taggart Transcontinental, as well as to cause secondary destructive consequences. Dagny is dumbfounded, unable to reconcile such a destructive purpose from the brilliant, productive industrialist Francisco was just ten years earlier. Not long after this conversation, Francisco appears at a celebration for Hank Rearden's wedding anniversary. Rearden's wife Lillian, his mother, and his brother are nonproductive freeloaders who believe that the strong are morally obliged to support the weak. Rearden no longer loves and cannot respect them, but he pities their weakness and carries them on his back. Francisco meets Rearden for the first time and warns him that the freeloaders have a weapon that they are using against him. Rearden questions why Francisco has come to the party, but Francisco says that he merely wished to become acquainted with Rearden. He won't explain his presence any further.
Although public opinion and an incompetent contractor are working against them, Dagny and Rearden build the Rio Norte Line. Rearden designs an innovative bridge for the line that takes advantage of the properties that his new metal possesses. The State Science Institute, a government research organization, tries to bribe and threaten Rearden to keep his metal off the market, but he won't give in. The Institute then issues a statement devoid of factual evidence that alleges possible weaknesses in the structure of Rearden Metal. Taggart stock crashes, the contractor quits, and the railroad union forbids its employees to work on the Rio Norte Line. When Dr. Robert Stadler, a brilliant theoretical scientist in whose name the State Science Institute was founded, refuses to publicly defend Rearden Metal even though he knows its value, Dagny makes a decision. She tells her brother that she will take a leave of absence, form her own company, and build the Rio Norte Line on her own. She signs a contract saying that when the line is successfully completed, she'll turn it back over to Taggart Transcontinental. Dagny chooses to name it the John Galt Line in defiance of the general pessimism that surrounds her.
Rearden and the leading businessmen of Colorado invest in the John Galt Line. Rearden feels a strong sexual attraction to Dagny but, because he regards sex as a demeaning impulse, doesn't act on his attraction. The government passes the Equalization of Opportunity Bill that prevents an individual from owning companies in different fields. The bill prohibits Rearden from owning the mines that supply him with the raw materials he needs to make Rearden Metal. However, Rearden creates a new design for the John Galt Line's Rearden Metal Bridge, realizing that if he combines a truss with an arch, it will enable him to maximize the best qualities of the new metal.
ReplyDeleteDagny completes construction of the Line ahead of schedule. She and Rearden ride in the engine cab on the Line's first train run, which is a resounding success. Rearden and Dagny have dinner at Ellis Wyatt's home to celebrate. After dinner, Dagny and Rearden make love for the first time. The next day, Rearden is contemptuous of them both for what he considers their low urges, but Dagny is radiantly happy. She rejects Rearden's estimate, knowing that their sexual attraction is based on mutual admiration for each other's noblest qualities.
Dagny and Rearden go on vacation together, driving around the country looking at abandoned factories. At the ruins of the Twentieth Century Motor Company's factory in Wisconsin, they find the remnant of a motor with the potential to change the world. The motor was able to draw static electricity from the atmosphere and convert it to usable energy, but now it is destroyed.
Realizing how much the motor would benefit the transportation industry, Dagny vows to find the inventor. At the same time, she must fight against new proposed legislation. Various economic pressure groups, seeking to cash in on the industrial success of Colorado, want the government to force the successful companies to share their profits. Dagny knows that the legislation would put Wyatt Oil and the other Colorado companies out of business, destroy the Rio Norte Line, and remove the profit she needs to rebuild the rest of the transcontinental rail system, but she's powerless to prevent the legislation.
Dagny continues her nationwide quest to find the inventor of the motor, and she finally finds the widow of the engineer who ran the automobile company's research department. The widow tells Dagny that a young scientist working for her husband invented the motor. She doesn't know his name, but she provides a clue that leads Dagny to a cook in an isolated Wyoming diner. The cook tells Dagny to forget the inventor of the motor because he won't be found until he chooses. Dagny is shocked to discover that the cook is Hugh Akston, the world's greatest living philosopher. She goes to Cheyenne and discovers that Wesley Mouch, the new economic coordinator of the country, has issued a series of directives that will result in the strangling of Colorado's industrial success. Dagny rushes to Colorado but arrives too late. Ellis Wyatt, in defiance of the government's edict, set fire to his oil wells and retired.
ReplyDeleteMonths later, the situation in Colorado continues to deteriorate. With the Wyatt oil wells out of business, the economy struggles. Several of the other major industrialists have retired and disappeared; nobody knows where they've gone. Dagny is forced to cut trains on the Colorado schedule. The one bright spot of her work is her continued search for the inventor of the motor. She speaks to Robert Stadler who recommends a young scientist, Quentin Daniels of the Utah Institute of Technology, as a man capable of undertaking the motor's reconstruction.
The State Science Institute orders 10,000 tons of Rearden Metal for a top-secret project, but Rearden refuses to sell it to them. Rearden sells to Ken Danagger, the country's best producer of coal, an amount of Rearden Metal that the law deems illegal. Meanwhile, at the reception for James Taggart's wedding, Francisco d'Anconia publicly defends the morality of producing wealth. Rearden overhears what Francisco says and finds himself increasingly drawn to this supposedly worthless playboy. The day following the reception, Rearden's wife discovers that he's having an affair, but she doesn't know with whom. A manipulator who seeks control over her husband, Lillian uses guilt as a weapon against him.
Dr. Ferris of the State Science Institute tells Rearden that he knows of the illegal sale to Ken Danagger and will take Rearden to trial if he refuses to sell the Institute the metal it needs. Rearden refuses, and the government brings charges against himself and Danagger. Dagny, in the meantime, has become convinced that a destroyer is loose in the world — some evil creature that is deliberately luring away the brains of the world for a purpose she cannot understand. Her diligent assistant, Eddie Willers, knows that Dagny's fears are justified. He eats his meals in the workers' cafeteria, where he has befriended a nameless worker. Eddie tells the worker about Dagny's fear that Danagger is next in line for the destroyer — that he'll be the next to retire and disappear. Dagny races to Pittsburgh to meet with Danagger to convince him to stay, but she's too late. Someone has already met with Danagger and convinced him to retire. In a mood of joyous serenity, Danagger tells Dagny that nothing could convince him to remain. The next day, he disappears.
Francisco visits Rearden and empathizes with the pain he has endured because of the invention of Rearden Metal. Francisco begins to ask Rearden what could make such suffering worthwhile when an accident strikes one of Rearden's furnaces. Francisco and Rearden race to the scene and work arduously to make the necessary repairs. Afterward, when Rearden asks him to finish his question, Francisco says that he knows the answer and departs.
At his trial, Rearden states that he doesn't recognize his deal with Danagger as a criminal action and, consequently, doesn't recognize the court's right to try him. He says that a man has the right to own the product of his effort and to trade it voluntarily with others. The government has no moral basis for outlawing the voluntary exchange of goods and services. The government, he says, has the power to seize his metal by force, and they have the power to compel him at the point of a gun. But he won't cooperate with their demands, and he won't pretend that the process is civil. If the government wishes to deal with men by compulsion, it must do so openly. Rearden states that he won't help the government pretend that his trial is anything but the initiation of a forced seizure of his metal. He says that he's proud of his metal, he's proud of his mills, he's proud of every penny that he's earned by his own hard work, and he'll not cooperate by voluntarily yielding one cent that is his. Rearden says that the government will have to seize his money and products by force, just like the robber it is. At this point, the crowd bursts into applause. The judges recognize the truth of what Rearden says and refuse to stand before the American people as open thieves. In the end, they fine Rearden and suspend the sentence.
ReplyDeleteBecause of the new economic restrictions, the major Colorado industrialists have all retired and disappeared. Freight traffic has dwindled, and Taggart Transcontinental has been forced to shut down the Rio Norte Line. The railroad is in terrible condition: It is losing money, the government has convinced James Taggart to grant wage raises, and there is ominous talk that the railroad will be forced to cut shipping rates. At the same time, Wesley Mouch is desperate for Rearden to cooperate with the increasingly dictatorial government. Because Rearden came to Taggart's wedding celebration, Mouch believes that Taggart can influence Rearden. Mouch implies that a trade is possible: If Taggart can convince Rearden to cooperate, Mouch will prevent the government from forcing a cut in shipping rates. Taggart appeals to Lillian for help, and Lillian discovers that Dagny Taggart is her husband's lover.
In response to devastating economic conditions, the government passes the radical Directive 10-289, which requires that all workers stay at their current jobs, all businesses remain open, and all patents and inventions be voluntarily turned over to the government. When she hears the news, Dagny resigns from the railroad. Rearden doesn't resign from Rearden Steel, however, because he has two weeks to sign the certificate turning his metal over to the government, and he wants to be there to refuse when the time is up. Dr. Floyd Ferris of the State Science Institute comes to Rearden and says that the government has evidence of his affair with Dagny Taggart and will make it public — dragging Dagny's name through the gutter — if he refuses to sign over his metal. Rearden now knows that his desire for Dagny is the highest virtue he possesses and is free of all guilt regarding it, but he's a man who pays his own way. He knows that he should have divorced Lillian long ago and openly declared his love for Dagny. His guilt and error gave his enemies this weapon. He must pay for his own error and not allow Dagny to suffer, so he signs.
ReplyDeleteDagny has retreated to a hunting lodge in the mountains that she inherited from her father. She's trying to decide what to do with the rest of her life when word reaches her that a train wreck of enormous proportions has destroyed the famed Taggart Tunnel through the heart of the Rockies, making all transcontinental traffic impossible on the main track. She rushes back to New York to resume her duties, and she reroutes all transcontinental traffic. She receives a letter from Quentin Daniels telling her that, because of Directive 10-289, he's quitting. Dagny plans to go west to inspect the track and to talk to Daniels.
On the train ride west, Dagny rescues a hobo who is riding the rails. He used to work for the Twentieth Century Motor Company. He tells her that the company put into practice the communist slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," a scheme that resulted in enslaving the able to the unable. The first man to quit was a young engineer, who walked out of a mass meeting saying that he would put an end to this once and for all by "stopping the motor of the world." The bum tells her that as the years passed and they saw factories close, production drop, and great minds retire and disappear, they began to wonder if the young engineer, whose name was John Galt, succeeded.
ReplyDeleteOn her trip west, Dagny's train is stalled when the crew abandons it. She finds an airplane and continues on to Utah to find Daniels, but she learns at the airport that Daniels left with a visitor in a beautiful plane. Realizing that the visitor is the "destroyer," she gives chase, flying among the most inaccessible peaks of the Rockies. Her plane crashes.
Dagny finds herself in Atlantis, the hidden valley to which the great minds have gone to escape the persecution of a dictatorial government. She finds that John Galt does exist and that he's the man she's been seeking in two ways: He is both the inventor of the motor and the "destroyer," the man draining the brains of the world. All the great men she admires are here — inventors, industrialists, philosophers, scientists, and artists. Dagny learns that the brains are on strike. They refuse to think, create, and work in a world that forces them to sacrifice themselves to society. They're on strike against the creed of self-sacrifice, in favor of a man's right to his own life.
Dagny falls in love with Galt, who has loved and watched her for years. But Dagny is a scab, the most dangerous enemy of the strike, and Galt won't touch her — yet. Dagny has the choice to join the strike and remain in the valley or go back to her railroad and the collapsing outside world. She is torn, but she refuses to give up the railroad and returns. Although Galt's friends don't want him to expose himself to the danger, he returns as well, so he can be near at hand when Dagny decides she's had enough.
When she returns, Dagny finds that the government has nationalized the railroad industry and controls it under a Railroad Unification Plan. Dagny can no longer make business decisions based on matters of production and profit; she is subject to the arbitrary whims of the dictators. The government wants Dagny to make a reassuring speech to the public on the radio and threatens her with the revelation of her affair with Rearden. On the air, Dagny proudly states that she was Rearden's lover and that he signed his metal over to the government only because of a blackmail threat. Before being cut off the air, Dagny succeeds in warning the American people about the ruthless dictatorship that the United States government is becoming.
ReplyDeleteBecause of the government's socialist policies, the collapse of the U. S. economy is imminent. Francisco d'Anconia destroys his holdings and disappears because his properties worldwide are about to be nationalized. He leaves the "looters" — the parasites who feed off the producers — nothing, wiping out millions of dollars belonging to corrupt American investors like James Taggart. Meanwhile, politicians use their economic power to create their own personal empires. In one such scheme, the Taggart freight cars needed to haul the Minnesota wheat harvest to market are diverted to a project run by the relatives of powerful politicians. The wheat rots at the Taggart stations, the farmers riot, farms shut down (as do many of the companies providing them with equipment), people lose their jobs, and severe food shortages result.
During an emergency breakdown at the Taggart Terminal in New York City, Dagny finds that John Galt is one of the railroad's unskilled laborers. She sees him in the crowd of men ready to carry out her commands. After completing her task, Dagny walks into the abandoned tunnels, knowing that Galt will follow. They make love for the first time, and he then returns to his mindless labor.
ReplyDeleteThe government smuggles its men into Rearden's mills, pretending that they're steelworkers. The union of steelworkers asks for a raise, but the government refuses, making it sound as if the refusal comes from Rearden. When Rearden rejects the Steel Unification Plan the government wants to spring on him, they use the thugs they've slipped into his mills to start a riot. The pretense of protecting Rearden is the government's excuse for taking over his mills. But Francisco d'Anconia, under an assumed name, has taken a job at Rearden's mills. He organizes the workers, and they successfully defend the mills against the government's thugs. Afterward, Francisco tells Rearden the rest of the things he wants him to know. Rearden retires, disappears, and joins the strike.
Mr. Thompson, the head of state, is set to address the nation regarding its dire economic conditions. But before he begins to speak, he is preempted, cut off the air by a motor of incalculable power. John Galt addresses the nation instead. Galt informs citizens that the men of the mind are on strike, that they require freedom of thought and action, and that they refuse to work under the dictatorship in power. The thinkers won't return, Galt says, until human society recognizes an individual's right to live his own life. Only when the moral code of self-sacrifice is rejected will the thinkers be free to create, and only then will they return.
The government rulers are desperate. Frantically, they seek John Galt. They want him to become economic dictator of the country so the men of the mind will come back and save the government, but Galt refuses. Realizing that Dagny thinks the same way that Galt does, the government has her followed. Mr. Thompson makes clear to Dagny that certain members of the government fear and hate Galt, and that if they find him first, they may kill him. Terrified, Dagny goes to Galt's apartment to see if he's still alive. The government's men follow her and take Galt into custody, and the rulers attempt to convince Galt to take charge of the country's economy. He refuses. They torture him, yet still he refuses. In the end, the strikers come to his rescue. Francisco and Rearden, joined now by Dagny, assault the grounds of the State Science Institute where Galt is held captive. They kill some guards and incapacitate others, release Galt, and return to the valley. Dagny and Galt are united. Shortly after, the final collapse of the looters' regime occurs, and the men of the mind are free to return to the world.
Odyssesus (Isn't that cool how his name goes w/ the book??!!) is coming home from the Trojan War **Illiad** and is lost at sea. He sees many things, mostly bad. And ends up loosing his entire crew. He is protected by the Goddess Athene."
ReplyDeleteAlli, Resident Scholar
"It is around 1200BC by our reckoning, and on the Greek island of Ithaca the Lady Penelope and her almost grown-up son, Telemachus, have increasing fears. The Trojan War took ten years, and the Greeks won. But ten years later the cunning Odysseus, greatest of the war-heroes, has still not returned home to his lands and his place in society. He is missing presumed dead, and a hundred rich suitors are now encamped in his palace, eating them out of house and home, all the time hoping for the hand of the rich and beautiful Penelope in marriage. Odysseus has had more adventures on the long journey home than he did during the war (told in 'The Iliad'). Telemachus decides to take ship himself to find his father, or confirm him dead.
We pick up his voyage of adventure when he is almost home, just as a sea storm is tragically released by his own men, who open a magical sack he holds onboard which contains the four winds and is enabling them to sail easily and safely west. Most of the rest of the story is artfully told in flashback by Odysseus as he narrates to his hosts how he was shipwrecked, and eventually loses all his men on the second weary voyage home. For three years on the high seas he and his men encounter and mostly survive The Lotus Eaters, the giant Cyclops, Circe the enchantress, the Underworld, the Sirens, and the twin monsters Scylla and Charybdis. Seven he spends trapped on the island of the amorous nymph Calypso until he is released. Eventually Odysseus returns to Ithaca all alone, in disguise as a filthy beggar and unsure if he will find his home intact or his friends and household faithful. He meets his own son, who has inherited his father's strength and spirit, but lacks experience. Now he too has returned and is spoiling for a fight with the arrogant suitors in the family homestead. Together they plot revenge on the greedy nobles and hope to restore the family fortune."
Michael JR Jose, Resident Scholar
Long ago, in the early 1990s, I was given a long piece of coursework for English Lit. at school: we had to compare and contrast two works of the same genre. Naturally, I chose science fiction. Being a bit of a speed-reader, doing the sane thing and just contrasting two books would have taken about a week, so I decided to be a bit more ambitious and went for two series of books: Isaac Asimov's six-volume Foundation series (the seventh and last was out but I hadn't read it), which I'd just read for fun anyway, and another series which I'd just started reading after randomly finding the first book in a library. That book was called The Invaders Plan and was the first volume in a 'dekalogy' (the writer's term) called Mission Earth. Its author was one L. Ron Hubbard.
ReplyDeleteAs a result, I had committed myself to what remains one of the most harrowing literary experiences of my life: approximately four thousand pages of some of the worst writing in any genre I've ever read. And I've read Kevin J. Anderson.
To backtrack, L. Ron Hubbard had originally been a somewhat-successful author of SF and horror novels, novellas and short stories back in the Golden Age of science fiction. Then, famously, he'd hit upon the idea of inventing a new religion, Scientology, complete with a detailed and coherent, if completely bizarre, mythology. He was catapulted to immense wealth and had no need to write any more.
In the late 1970s Hubbard seems to have apparently decided that he wanted some literary acclaim as well (perhaps fearing that Scientology would be the only thing in his obituary). He wrote Battlefield Earth, about aliens invading and occupying the Earth for a thousand years, reducing humanity to the Stone Age, before they were driven off by nuke-armed cavemen flying fighter jets. The book became an immense success, despite its total lack of readability, and seems to have encouraged Hubbard to write a much bigger story: Mission Earth. This was written as a looooong single novel, but divided into ten volumes by the publishers (the publishing house owned by Scientology), possibly out of artistic respect for the author's vision of the story, but probably because it meant they made more money. The first novel, The Invaders Plan, was published in October 1985 and the following nine appeared at regular intervals until the last book was published in September 1987. That Hubbard wrote such a huge story in just three years seems implausible, leading to accusations of ghostwriting, but some former Scientologists and editors have backed up the idea that he did write the whole thing, though his editor did move some material round and write a new introduction and ending to each volume to make them stand alone better.
Mission Earth's plot is somewhat straightforward: the Voltar Empire has decided to add Earth to its expanding sphere of influence. The invasion is not scheduled for another century, but the Empire discovers that the people of Earth are experimenting with more and more powerful nuclear weapons, and the Cold War between the USA and the USSR (the story is set in a contemporary period, so mid-1980s Earth) is in danger of going hot. Since Earth will make a vital supply depot on the Empire's invasion route, they decide they must prevent Earth's self-destruction by sending an engineer, Jettero Heller, to investigate and if possible defuse the situation.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, the Empire's intelligence-gathering organisation, the CIA (the Coordinated Information Apparatus), has been running various illegal and underhanded operations on Earth for generations, most notably importing illegal drugs back to Voltar as an attempt to unseat the ruling government in favour of the CIA's director, Lombar Hisst. Panicking that these plans are about to be unmasked by the unknowing Heller, Hisst assigns one of his best agents, Soltan Gris, to undermine and disrupt Heller's plans no matter the cost.
This is where Mission Earth briefly - very briefly - threatens to get interesting. The bulk of the story - the first seven and a half volumes - are told from Gris's POV, that of the villain. Using a CIA base near Ankara, Turkey and posing as a fellow agent sent to help Heller, Gris attempts to stop Heller's plan from succeeding, either by sabotaging his operations or by trying to kill him directly. Effectively the story is a long farce as Gris's attempts to defeat Heller repeatedly blow up in his face, with Heller's plan sailing on serenely with him continuing to believe that Gris is a good guy. Eventually Heller realises that Earth should be spared invasion and encourages the development of new sources of power and renewable energy, earning the enmity of the powerful Rockecenter family (Hubbard was, perhaps, not the subtlest of satirists), who, it is revealed, control Earth's sources of oil and are unhappy with Heller's attempts to give free energy to the whole planet (by creating a black hole in orbit and tapping the energy of its singularity). To this end the Rockecenters assign a public relations genius to destroy Heller's reputation, a plan which nearly succeeds until Heller, aided somewhat randomly by the Mafia, turns the tables and successfully rescues the Earth from oblivion. He also discovers that Gris is his true enemy and has him incarcerated. The last two volumes are set back on Voltar as Heller attempts to stop Hisst's plan from conquering the Empire coming to pass.
ReplyDeleteOn the surface this is a fairly random but not entirely valueless story. Old-school, yes, but with some potential for exploring themes about nuclear self-destruction, the problem of dwindling energy supplies and the corruption of power, whilst having the main villain as the central POV character for 75% of its length is an unusual and potentially fascinating move.
Hubbard, of course, doesn't actually fulfil any of this potential. Instead, the series mounts a sustained, shock-and-awe assault on the reader's intelligence, taste and suspension of disbelief that is awesome to behold (though thoroughly unpleasant to experience). With Battlefield Earth, by virtue of its far-future setting, Hubbard was unable to really do much in the way of satire or commentary on modern American values. With Mission Earth, mostly set in contemporary New York City (with occasional jaunts to Turkey and other locations), he was able to let rip with both barrels. As a result, we get lengthy digressions on how rock music turns people into effeminate gays, how lesbians are just frigid women in need of 'real men' to show them who's boss (in a stomach-churning sequence, Gris imprisons two lesbians, tortures them with a cheese grater and chili powder, and they end up falling passionately in love with him), how drugs are the root of all evil and how most foreigners are shifty criminals who are not to be trusted. Whilst Hubbard doesn't mention Scientology directly, he goes on at some length about the evils of psychology and psychiatry, one of the pillars of that belief system. Ironically, he does give immense credence to the power of public relations and image-building, and how people can believe the most self-evidently delusional tripe if it's sold the right way.
ReplyDeleteSo, the series is effectively a very basic, pulpy old-school SF adventure decked out with more torture porn, homophobia, sexism and racism that you can shake a stick at. It was greeted with full-blown disbelief from both the general SF and literary communities, though bizarrely a few people (like Orson Scott Card, who really should have known better) did give it good reviews. The series also managed to briefly damage the credibility of the Hugo Awards, when Scientology block-voting got the second volume, Black Genesis, onto the shortlist for Best Novel in 1987. This was the same year as William Gibson's Count Zero and Bob Shaw's The Ragged Astronauts, genuine classics of the genre. At Worldcon that year (fortunately held in the UK, preventing too many hardcore Scientologists from attending and voting) tensions ran high as a number of SF novelists and fans alike were heard muttering darkly about the quality and integrity of the books. For their part the few attending Scientologists, mourning Hubbard's death a year earlier, were taking any slight against the book as an assault on Hubbard's memory, leading to at least one alleged bar-room heated argument over the matter.
Eventually, Orson Scott Card made up for his earlier error of judgement by going ahead and winning for Speaker for the Dead, restoring sanity to the world.
At 14 Mission Earth was a bit of an eye-opener, I can tell you, and in retrospect I perhaps should have given up after the fourth or fifth book (when the rape scenes were kicking in with full force), but a sense of honesty propelled me through reading the whole series. When I handed in my 2,000-word essay it talked about the challenges of writing a long SF series and what ideas could be handled in the medium, but it could generally be summed up as one sentence:
"Foundation was better."
"Helen, the wife of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, has been kidnapped by Paris, the evil prince of Troy. In anger, Helen's son the almost invulnerable hero Achilles wages war on King Priam, Paris' father, and the city of Troy. All of Greece is swept into war with Troy, including some of the world's greatest warriors, kings, and holy men. Achilles and his friends fight to rescue Helen and destroy the Trojans, and after ten years, they succeed, but not without disaster."
ReplyDeleteDaniel, Resident Scholar
"The Iliad is the first book in Western literature, told c.720BC, it is set during the Trojan War c.1200BC. The noble Achilles, most powerful of the Greeks, has been serving in the war against the Trojans for nearly ten years. Originally it may have been about rescuing the beautiful queen Helen who was stolen away, but now it is about the wounded pride and hot rage of Achilles. After being publicly insulted by his leader King Agamemnon, in fury he refuses to fight any further and withdraws his troops. He demands compensation for the insult or, unless the battle goes so badly against the Greeks that all their ships are in danger of being burnt, he will not lead his elite troops into battle.
The war does start to go against the Greeks. Although the cunning Odysseus leads a daring night-time commando raid into the heart of the enemy camp, the tide is turning and King Agamemnon sees that he must make amends with Achilles. But Achilles is now hardened in his anger and will not take the compensation. He calls the whole war a pointless sham and accuses the king of speaking with forked tongue. Unwisely he allows his best friend Patroclus to wear his magical armor and lead his troops into battle. Tragically, the Trojan hero Hector kills him and the armor is captured. Only now Achilles swings into action, not for the glory of the Greeks, but to avenge his friend's death. Inside the Trojan city we see scenes of family life and feel pity for the wives and children as they helplessly watch the men don armor and go out to battle for the last time. Outside is the mighty Achilles, for though it cost him everything, he will have his vengeance and win the undying glory of a hero of battle. And he is still remembered even to this day.
This is a long and complex book but the key chapters for the action are 1, 6, 9, 16, 18, 22, and 24. Good translations abound but Robert Fitzgerald's in the Oxford World Classics series is a good read with handy notes and maps. If you need to get serious Robert M. Willcock's, 'A companion to the Iliad' is the way to go."
Michael JR Jose, Resident Scholar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFWd2QaZMto
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yetTFoIpIZs
In Search of Lost Time is notorious for its length. Its six volumes stretch over 3,700 pages, with individual sentences clocking in at almost three pages (the longest sentence is 847 words long in the original French). Proust himself is known as an eccentric who slept all day in a cork-lined room and wrote obsessively about himself at night. So why even bother starting with Swann's Way, when the narrator spends fifty pages just lying in bed thinking?
ReplyDeleteSome people start to read Proust thinking that it is the literary equivalent of climbing a mountain or running a marathon: something that is horrible at the time but great to boast about afterwards; or rather, something that gives you a real sense of achievement. The last part is certainly true, but the best-kept secret about Proust is that once you get into it, it's actually good: enjoyable, funny, easy to read, and full of memorable characters. Everyone has had a Proustian moment: experiencing a smell, taste or sight which unexpectedly sets off long-forgotten memories.
Proust is, in fact, the perfect antidote to modern life. Everything around us is boiled down to its shortest form for our shorter attention spans, from 140-character tweets to sixty second news bulletins on the T.V., radio and internet. Proust forces you to slow down, to notice things about the world that get missed out of these edited highlights. The experience of reading In Search of Lost Time is different to reading any other book: you become immersed in an unique world which will change the way you view everything else. The patience and concentration required to work your way through some of the longer sentences is rewarded by the ideas with which Proust stuffs every page: thoughts about art, memory, love, and childhood.
Swann's Way is a brilliant introduction to the rest of the Search, introducing the themes of love, jealous, time and memory which will be elaborated in the other five volumes and full of eccentric characters such as Madame Verdurin, who collapses in ecstasy over her favourite music, and Françoise, who weeps over the suffering of people she doesn't know and torments those she does. It is also a fascinating guide to the early years of the Belle Époque, when Paris was full of writers, artists, musicians and ideas.
Proust's thought has been turned into a hugely successful self-help book by Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life. The famous Proust Questionnaire appears at the back of every issue of Vanity Fair. He has been tweeted, mocked by Monty Python, and filmed as Swann In Love, starring Jeremy Irons, and as Le temps retrouvé (Time Regained) with Catherine Deneuve. He is an important part of our modern world, a phenomenon literally too huge to be ignored.
"À la recherche du temps perdu is the constant attempt to charge an entire lifetime with the utmost awareness." Walter Benjamin, The Image of Proust
"Proust's great novel is like a beautiful garden filled with delights but hidden behind a forbidden wall..." Patrick Alexander, author of Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time
"Getting to know Proust is not the acquisition of a bundle of facts, it is familiarity with a world of the imagination in which one gradually comes to feel at home." Richard Bales, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Proust
"Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 after causing a nationwide controversy, this novel relates the saga of a poor extended family of tenant farmers called the Joads, who are driven by the Midwestern dustbowl and the Depression from Oklahoma to the promise of a better life in California. But members of the family die or are otherwise lost on the way, the prospects are no better out West, and nascent unionizers and police clash violently. (When film producer Darryl Zanuck proposed to make a movie of the book -- directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda and John Carradine -- he hired private detectives to verify the details of the disheartening plot; they told him the truth was even worse.) Steinbeck's writing is Biblically majestic, a triumph of the spirit."
ReplyDeleteDavid Loftus, Resident Scholar
"Main character gets out of jail, finds his family farm destroyed, finds his family living with his uncle, they have to leave Oklahoma to go to California and try to make a living out of it. Good part of the book about the road trip to California, all their miseries, misfortunes. They get in California to find it's no better what they had."
Martin Deschenes, Resident Scholar
"Steinbeck's "Grapes" is probably the most well-known of a slew of communist tracts masquerading as novels from the depression era. It is a powerful work because Steinbeck knew what he was writing about and could bring it home to his readers by adroitly manipulating the novel's contextual circumstances to create the emotions he wanted in his readers. This is the basic reason all novels of sociel commentary are useless as rational arguments - Dickens was a master at the same game."
Kelly Whiting, Resident Scholar
"This is a classic, epic story of the treacherous trek for survival against the odds, of the Joad family. As their homes are turned into dustbowls, and capitalist businesses move in to take over small farming interests, the people of Oklahoma are wooed west to the rich pickings of California by cold hearted big businessman offering false hopes of free and happy new lives for the couragous, beleagured 'Okies'. What unfolds is a heartrending, inspiring and totally overwhelming tale of human survival and political questioning with ultimately spiritual overtones."
James Mulligan, Resident Scholar
"This guy gets out of jail and goes home only to discover his family is moving because they are geting pushed off their land during the Great Depression. They exhaust themselves trying to get to California, where they have heard there is work. Once there, they discover that things are not going to look up."
Belle, Resident Scholar
"The Grapes of Wrath is the story of a family who is struck by the great depression, and travels to California with the hope of a new life. They encounter many problems and dissapointments, and struggle with poverty and the threat of starvation. It is hard to find a job, and they live day by day, with only a glimmer of hope. This book is somewhat depressing, and really illustrates what the dust bowl was like."
Katie, Resident Scholar
"Two men, George and Lenny, form a strong friendship, one man assuming the role of father-figure for the other, who has a child-like mentality but a brute strength that needs to be kept in check. Their quest in life is simple - to become settled and self-sufficient and to end their roaming lifestyle. However, George, the father-figure, is forced to face the reality of Lenny's mental instability/physical strength; he takes on the responsiblity of preventing further hurt/death by ending his friend's life, and thus ending his dream for their future."
ReplyDeleteJ.L. McEachen, Resident Scholar
"George and Lenny have a dream. They want to save enough of the money that they earn as migrant field hands to buy their own farm and become their own bosses. George will be able to settle down without having to spend all his time and energy looking out for his huge cousin, Lenny, who is retarded, and Lenny will be able to do as he pleases without causing them trouble. They are hired to help pick the crop on a farm. The pint-size foreman, Curley, a sadistic, former boxer, who is unsure of his manhood and of his ability to satisfy his wife, doesn't like Lenny from the start, and George warns Lenny to stay clear of both Curley and his wife. One of the other workers gives Lenny a newborn puppy, which stays in the barn with its mother. After Curley picks a fight with Lenny and Lenny breaks Curley's hand, Curley goes to the hospital and Lenny seeks to comfort himself by stroking his puppy, which he has unknowingly killed. Curley's wife enters the barn and flirts with Lenny. She lets him pet her hair, as he had petted the puppy, but he won't release her hair when she tries to pull away. Frightened, she screams, and Lenny, trying to silence her, accidentally breaks her neck. Curley returns, and he and his men hunt for Lenny. George suspects that Lenny will go to a nearby creek. George finds him there, and kills him quickly and mercifully so that Lenny won't fall into the hands of the sadistic Curley. This is a short and enjoyable, if somewhat sentimental, novel, that illustrates the difficulty of the uneducated poor and their attempt to better their lives. It also condemns the harsh brutality of farm owners who cared nothing for the men by whose sweat and blood they obtained and retained the profits from their farms."
Gary Pullman, Resident Scholar
" The novel Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is a tale of friendship, dreams, and violence. Set in Steinbeck's childhood home near the Salinas River of California, the main characters are George Milton and Lennie Small. The two are as different as can be: George is small and quick of mind while Lennie is an enormous man with the mind of a child. Yet together, they are a family.
As the novel opens, George and Lennie are once again on their way to work as hired ranch hands. The status quo for tramps is people who travel for work and have no future beyond working for someone else every month. But George and Lennie are working toward something. They have a dream of owning a few acres, having a home to call their own, and being the masters of their own fate. For Lennie, his childish mind delights at the prospect of tending rabbits and stroking their fur. For now, the six hundred dollars needed to attain their dream seems years away. But, at the ranch they meet Candy, an old man, who adds 350 bucks when he joins them in planning to purchase the land and suddenly the dream is within reach.
Although George's life would be less complicated if he didn't have to take care of Lennie, he can never leave him. George tries to teach Lennie how to behave in a way that is acceptable to society. As they approach the job site, George warns Lennie not to say a word and let George do all the talking At the ranch, they meet the boss's son, Curley who is a cruel little man Curley despises men of large girth and focuses on Lennie as his victim. One time in a rage, he comes to the bunkhouse and picks a fight with Lennie. As Curley rains blows on Lennie, George commands Lennie to defend himself. Lennie does not know his own strength and crushes Curley¡¦s hand. Another source of worry to George is Curley¡¦s wife. She is lonely for companionship yet all the men view her as a tart and her conduct as flirtatious. But in the end, George cannot protect Lennie from the explosive events that follow and must act out of love.
ReplyDeleteOne day, Lennie accidentally brings about the death of Curley's wife. Lennie is stroking her hair when she begins screaming. Lennie cannot conceive to let go and unintentionally breaks her neck as he covers her mouth to silence her. An angry mob lead by Curley commences to hunt for Lennie, intent on killing him. George finds Lennie near the Salinas River which is their meeting place should there be any trouble. Lennie anticipates George to be upset but he responds His voice choked with emotion, George bades Lennie to look toward the river and imagine their dream coming to reality. He wants Lennie to envision a place where there is no cruelty and Lennie can be accepted as himself. George discerns that if Lennie were to be caught, Curley would make certain to cause Lennie pain and anguish. This time George cannot protect Lennie. Out of mercy, George kills Lennie, drawing his strength from the love they share for one another.
"
Joanna , Resident Scholar
The Travels of Marco Polo, translated by William Marsden (Norton, £10.99)
ReplyDeleteWhen this edition of the book dropped through the letterbox, I was mildly intrigued. When a reissue of the Penguin Classics edition followed a couple of days later, I took it as a recommendation from providence. This is, after all, one of the great unread ancient European books. Our own national contribution to the genre is the Domesday Book, which is also now published by Penguin; but Polo's Travels offer, unlike Domesday, the conventional pleasures of reading, in spades.
I imagine that more people have read Calvino's Invisible Cities than Polo's Travels. In Calvino's book, Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan of various imaginary cities he has visited - all of them, if you wish, in some way versions of his own home town, Venice. So in a sense we feel we have "read" Marco Polo already, when all we have done is seen his reflection, an upside-down image in a lagoon. (Which I suspect was precisely Calvino's intent, or one of them.) Here, then, is the original image: and it is just as remarkable.
Here are provinces where, for three hours of the day, the inhabitants immerse themselves up to their chins in water so as to escape the effects of a blistering, suffocating wind. Here are lakes of fire, worshipped by descendants of the Magi; here is the first western mention of the Old Man of the Mountains, who trained his assassins to welcome death by drugging them and then allowing them to experience all the pleasures of Paradise. Here are mountains so high that fires fail to cook food properly; here are eagles trained to kill wolves.
ReplyDeleteHere, too, is the province of Peyn, where, if the husband is absent from home for 20 days (by no means a rare occurrence in a region where the nearest town was typically five days away), the wife had a right to take another; even more enticingly, here is the district of Kamul, where the men not only are "addicted to pleasure, and attend to little else than playing upon instruments, singing, dancing, reading, writing... and the pursuit, in short, of every kind of amusement", but also offer their wives and all female relations to any strangers seeking accommodation, while they leave the house. When the local ruler, Mangu Kaan, discovered and banned the practice, crops failed, and, with the abrupt cessation of visits from outside, the area's entire income dried up. When the locals begged Kaan to reconsider, he replied: "Since you appear so anxious to persist in your own shame, let it be granted." By the time Marco Polo arrived, things were back to normal. Likewise, ambassadors to the great Khan's court were offered a different courtesan each night. Polo was away from home for 26 years, and stayed with Khan for 17 of them.
I have gone for the much older translation rather than Ronald Latham's 1958 Penguin version. The latter is more complete and, strictly speaking, more useful - Polo's text exists in numerous versions, and it's not always easy to tell what was put in later - but the Norton edition (which is a 1930 scrubbing and polishing of William Marsden's 1818 translation) not only has nice illustrations, it has an excellent introduction by Manuel Komroff, a more colourful and engaging style, and wonderful notes. Example: the people of Kashcar "are a wretched and sordid race, eating badly and drinking worse". Footnote: "Their manners have not improved. See Ancient Khotan, Sir Aurel Stein." Other notes attest to the veracity of some of Polo's more astonishing claims, including tricks that would appear to be beyond any contemporary scientist or magician. (Why should I become a Christian, asked Khan, when Christians "do not possess the faculty of performing anything miraculous"?)
Polo's travels endured so long in the imagination that, 500 years later, Coleridge was inspired to use some of their details in a work of visionary intensity. They coloured all subsequent imaginings of China until 1948 - and may do once again. This is a world of almost inconceivable possibility - and the remarkable thing about it is that so much of it turns out to have been true. Besides, how can you fail to love a travel book which, from time to time, gives up looking for marvels and declares: "Nothing else occurs here that is worthy of remark"?
This review explores how Shakespeare structured this story and brought it to life.
ReplyDeleteRomeo and Juliet opens with a prologue announcing the story's star-crossed young lovers will die and their deaths reconcile their warring clans. Shakespeare opens his story by boldly announcing the climax of its plot. How can he get away with this? Because the better the storyteller, the stronger their understanding that a story is a journey. That a well-told story makes every step of that journey engaging and dramatic, more than the sum of its parts. Shakespeare can do what most inexperienced writers would be loathe to do -- give away his ending -- because what makes his story satisfying is a separate issue from the mechanical working out of its plot.
Further, by telling the audience the story's outcome, Shakespeare gives the story a poignancy it would lack otherwise. Knowing the lovers will die makes their every step toward that fate more deeply felt. This speaks to that issue of drama being not only the anticipation of action, but the feelings and thoughts that anticipation arouses.
Act One
Scene One
Act one opens with some of the men of Capulet clan meeting on the street men of the Montague clan. A brawl erupts, citizens join in, and the heads of the houses of Capulet and Montague come upon the scene. The Prince of the City arrives. His judgment, if there is more fighting, those guilty face death.
The dramatic purpose of this scene is to introduce that the families are bound together by an ancient blood feud that has grown to a lethal hatred. The scene does this through a measured introduction of characters that always gives the audience time to assimilate who a particular character is, their personality, and their relationships to other characters.
On a story level, because this story is about a conflict between love and hate, introducing the hate that fuels the story's action also sets the story into motion.
In the aftermath of the brawl, a question arises to the whereabouts of Romeo, a young Montague. It comes out that Romeo has been shedding tears and avoiding his kinsmen, but why is unclear. It is left to Benvolio to discover the cause of Romeo's distress.
Story note, the play opens with some hotly contested action that sets up the retribution further conflict will bring. There's clearly something at stake if anyone from either household engages in more brawling. Second, Romeo is mentioned in a way that it's made clear before his arrival he has issues he's dealing with. Because it's made clear he has an issue to resolve, he is a character who is "ripe" even before he appears. The story's audience anticipates some outcome to Romeo's issues.
Romeo enters as the others exit. It comes out quite quickly that Romeo is lovesick. "Out of her favor where I am in love."
Story note, the dramatic purpose here isn't to withhold that Romeo is lovesick.
Scene Two
The Senior Capulet enters, mentioning the ban on any further fighting and that it should be easy to uphold. Note how Capulet's words will come back to haunt him. During this scene, Count Paris reminds Capulet of his desire to wed Juliet, not quite fourteen. Capulet wishes that Juliet be older before she weds, but Paris presses his suit. Capulet invites him to a party that night, and they exit.
Story note, our introduction to Juliet offers a sense of who she is. Further, that Juliet's life is at a moment of potential transition, i.e., she's a "ripe" character.
Enter Benvolio and Romeo, still caught up in his love sickness. They immediately come upon a servingman sent out by Capulet to announce the party to those on a list he cannot read. He asks Romeo to read the list. It comes out that Rosaline, for whom Romeo pines, has been invited to this party. The servingman, grateful to Romeo for reading the list, invites him to the party as long as he's not a Montague.
Benvolio suggests Romeo go, that seeing some of the town's other beauties aid his recovery from his infatuation with Rosaline.
ReplyDeleteRomeo answers, defending Rosaline,
"One fairer than my love? The all-seeing sun
Ne'er saw her march since first the world begun."
Story note, note the speed and ease with which the author has set up Romeo to attend this party. He's even prodded into it by Benvolio. Since to advance the story means bringing together its principals, Shakespeare designs the play to make that happen.
Through these opening scenes the author maintains a measured, brisk, pace that introduces the principles and their issues. He now begins bringing them together in a way that escalates the story's dramatic tension. Romeo going to a party at the Capulet's is inherently dangerous.
Scene 3
This scene opens with Lady Capulet, Juliet's nurse, and Juliet. The nurse is a folksy, humorous character. She ends a long answer to a simple question with the hope she live long enough to see Juliet marry. That becomes the lead in for Lady Capulet to broach her parents desire she consider marrying Paris. Juliet's answer,
"I'll look to like, if looking liking move.
But no more deep will I endart mine eye
Than your consent gives strength to make it fly."
They exit to attend the party.
Story note, again the measured, brisk pace of introducing characters and their issues.
Scene 4
When Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio enter the party, it is a masquerade, which means they do not have to announce who they are, nor are their faces visible. Romeo and Mercutio pause to talk about dreams, then Romeo says,
"I fear too early, for my mind misgives,
Some consequence yet hanging in the stars."
Something about this moment troubles him, but he goes forward.
Story note, to have Romeo and company pause before entering the party allows the drama over what will happen to build for the audience.
Scene 5
Capulet welcomes Romeo and company to the party. Romeo sees Juliet and exclaims,
"O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!"
Story note, Romeo falling in love with Juliet is the purpose of this scene, so it is not delayed. The question now becomes, what will be the outcome of this?
Many writers struggle because they build up to a moment of dramatic tension and then cut away. Shakespeare begins a scene with dramatic tension and quickly works to heighten that tension to a higher release point. It's a subtle point to understand, but a major fault for inexperienced writers is cutting away too early from the tension they create.
Tybalt, who crossed swords with Benvolio in scene one, hears Romeo's voice and sends for his sword. The elder Capulet orders Tybalt to stand aside, and even praises Romeo. Again, an act that will come back to haunt him. Tybalt protests, but Capulet rebukes him and orders him to not upset the party.
Romeo takes Juliet's hand and speaks to her,
"If I profane with my unworthiest hand,
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss."
Story note, it is the purpose of the scene to show how quickly and deeply Romeo falls in love with Juliet. It is not delayed, nor does it happen off stage.
Juliet is quickly swayed by Romeo's passion. Juliet,
ReplyDelete"Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hands too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
Romeo kisses Juliet, then again.
Juliet's nurse calls her away, and Romeo learns from the nurse that Juliet is of the house of Capulet. Romeo,
"O dear account! My life is my foe's debt."
Again, the author maintains his brisk pace of setting up and advancing the story.
Juliet, on learning Romeo's identify, speaks,
"My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth it is to me
That I must love a loathed enemy."
This is the end of act one. All the major elements are in place. The hatred of the Montagues and Capulets. That Romeo is lovesick and in love with the idea of love. The fate of what will befall the next person to disturb the peace. And now Romeo and Juliet in love. The curtain closes on a note of high drama and feeling. The storyteller has brought the audience to this height of feeling by potently and directly putting into play the elements of the story. Very little is withheld for some far off plot effect or revelation. What's important to setting up and advancing this story has been presented in a clear, dramatic way with poetic grace and wit.
In a script written by a struggling storyteller, one could imagine the brawl that opens Romeo and Juliet being the climax of act one. Because Shakespeare had a clear sense of his story and how to escalate its drama, he doesn't delay setting out the conflict that fuels it. In this story, if Shakespeare writes that one character doesn't like another, one can surmise they will meet in either that scene or the next. Because of this arrangement of the story's elements, the play's audience develops a sense of trust the author won't introduce characters for no clear dramatic purpose, introduce information but delay its import.
When Romeo is introduced, he is already lovesick, and very poetic and direct about it. What he's feeling isn't withheld to create a revelation at the end of act one. Because it defines Romeo, it comes out in his opening scene. Further, the dramatic purpose of his introduction isn't to make a statement about the kind of character he is. It's to show a young man in the anguish of first love that will quickly be tested. This speaks again to that issue of trust that develops between a writer like Shakespeare and his audience, because one trust Shakespeare to move the story forward dramatically.
Further, Shakespeare writes every moment of every scene to bring out its drama, texture and poetic richness. If a character is angry, they speak of that; lovesick, they speak of their heavy heart; vengeful, they speak of the joys of vengeance. Each moment he creates heightens the drama of that particular moment. The struggling writer is forever doing what I call "describing the furniture." Describing characters, events, environments as if from rote, while the dramatic richness of what should be the heightened moments of a scene are held back for some revelation or plot effect. Shakespeare is both a master of the moment, the scene, the act, the story. He presents passionate, feeling characters in full flower, not as seeds set to bloom late in the fall.
Wonderful structure for the first act of a play.
I'm done... for now.
ReplyDeleteDISCLAIMER I DON'T OWN METROID
ReplyDeletechapter 1
this story is 3 years after (yes it's a horrible mis-spelling)samus killed a space pirate with a missile to the open asked g.f.t.(galactic federation trooper) Fred , "damn , why did the space pirates wage war with us?""I dunno , i'm still in shock that you can talk".Fred answered."whatever".said samus as she blasted a ing through the head."i just want to know how they did this , with all the ing and st".then she gave the move out and destroy killed 2 s.p.s(space pirate) with shots to the chest and 7 ing with head then dived behind said, "wait here."she then took all the energy in her suit and blasted it into enemy ranks , a huge explosion destroy them power drained out of her power suit and she fainted.
2 hours later , landing we got her back!said admiral Dane."samus get the fk back in the fight , new reinforcements power suit is recharged over there."he pointed to a went to the room , unlocked the door and saw her put a hazard shield and 4 energy tanks on it , she put it on."thanks", she said , and dashed Dane thought out loud , for what?...space pirate major Gen'lox said, working perfectly , he turned to the sergeant next to him and said , blow her.
aether command basesamus was running down the hall , she turned and ran through the door , as soon as she got through the door all hell was released on went flying 30 feet into the air and hit the ground she woke up she saw her power suit was covered in massive laser burns , "it must have been an inside blast from my suit because i would still be able to move if it came from outside."she she saw a giant berserker lord towering over was talking in it's horrible clacks and clicks language. her barely working suit translated it.
"brilliant plan master , putting in energy tanks with bombs in them."said the berserker lord.
"wait she just woke up!"he raised his giant fist and an energy blade came out of his punched down and all of a sudden her suit recharged. she jumped out of the way and b.l.'s arm got stuck in the ground."damn you to fking hell!" screamed samus as she launched a barrage of missiles at his head.a crack appeared on his head armor.
he ripped his blade out of the ground and slashed samus with lost 50 stumbled backward."st"she then switched to nova and fired a barrage of nova beam armor on his head cracked and broke fired a bunch of purple orbs from his shot them with precision landed in his open mouth and some landed in his exposed coughed up blood and fell switched to imperialist and shot his open brain 7 called into command post and said , "target annihilated"
"great come back to command base we'vie got a new mission for you."admiral Dane answered.
End
Chapter 1 (Samus' POV)
ReplyDeleteShe couldn't hear anything over her heavy breathing. She took a turn. She saw a 3-way path.
"Which way shan?" Samus asked.
Shan was another chozo-raised warrior. He was 2 years younger than samus. He was found by the chozo on a destroyed planet when he was 2 months old. He has a weird suit called the life suit. It's white and green. The shoulder parts on the suit look like the power suit's , but the rest of the suit looks like the varia suit. She never met him until 6 months ago. The reason for that is because he was raised on the other side of the planet.
"Take the left." Shan answered.
"Thanks." Samus said. "I'm gonna get you Ridley"
She took the left path. She was on a private mission. This time Ridley was gonna die. She saw a room with Ridley's H.Q. written over the door. She blasted the hinges. The giant door fell over. Inside was a giant cave. In the center was Ridley. She jumped onto his back and held the blaster to his head.
She said , "Die (censored) bastard!
He said , "Wait I was corrupted"
She hesitated. Ridley wasn't much of a liar. But , corrupted or not , he killed her parents. She still just couldn't decide what to do. She slightly let down her guard. That's when it happened. Something hit her neck. She fell over. She felt a strange burning sensation. Instantly her energy drained down to 0.
Right before she fainted she heard Ridley say , "Gotcha"
She fainted. When she awoke she was in a strange room. It looked like a hospital room. She looked at her suit and gasped. It looked slightly like Sylux's suit. It was black and red. Her suit powered back up.
Across the HUD it said , "New suit upgrade acquired , death suit on line"
"Death suit ..." She said.
She got up and pain sliced her side. "Broken ribs." She thought. She felt the sensation again , the HUD said , "Death powers activated"
She glowed with a black and red aura. Secret compartments opened on her arm cannon. One was glowing black and the other red. She floated.
Shan called in. He said , "Heard about the suit , they say a beast made it out of your varia , they call it the death suit"
She cut him off , She said , "Hold on , life and death , cool , what happened." She was surprised , her voice was regular , with a slight demonic touch.
"Well , you were in Ridley's hands , a thousand feet in the air , so we shot him and he released you." He answered."But the retrieval system missed , your energy took most of the impact , but not all of it , which is why you have 3 broken ribs"
"Not anymore , the death suit fixed them , send me your coordinates"
He told her that he was in the waiting room of the hospital. So she was in the hospital. She soared down the hallway. She was surprised Her HUD said she was going at 70 mph. She got to the waiting room. She saw Shan.
She said , "I hate hospitals , let's get out of here"
They decided to go to a command base. As soon as they got out she realized what planet she was on. She was on red fear , the war scarred planet. This planet was ripped in half by war , literally She had too many bad memories of this place. She wanted to get off now. She had known way too many people who had died here. She tried to run and saw something in the distance. She tried to scan it knew it would fail and say object out of scanning range but it scanned it , it said ,
"Pirate crusher , highly advanced s pieces of pirate , crushes everything it sees but is actually very intelligent , only way to defeat is by combining true masters or apprentices powers of death and life , so avoid at all costs , go to logbook for more"
ReplyDeleteShe looked at Shan , he was done scanning too.
"What do you think the true apprentices and masters are?" She asked.
" We , I think, are the apprentices." Shan said.
"Well let's go kick some (censored) pirate ass!" Samus said.
They did another scan , this time it said , "Subject : pirate crusher , weak spot , head , weak plating over weak spot , susceptible to concussive blasts.
They knew what to do , offense protocol 172 , the throw and bomb protocol Shan threw samus and she lay a time bomb at 1:00. Samus threw Shan and Shan lay a bomb. He set it to 0:40. They were each now at 40 seconds. They ran until they saw a 300 foot-long explosion. (they were 2/3 of a mile away)
"Take that ( censored ) nut!" Samus shrieked.
"Hey let's celebrate with a couple drinks on me!" Said Shan.
... 3 hours and 24 (12 for each) drinks later... "
Hit me again waiter." Samus said crazily.
"Samus you should stop." Shan said , he was used to brandy. "Don't get her another , I'm paying"
(Shan's POV)
He payed the waiter and dragged a thrashing Samus to the command base. He put her in her room and went to his. After a couple minutes they fell asleep. When he woke up he immediately leaned over the side of his bed and puked for about 20 minutes. When he was done he felt really bad.
" ( censored ) hangovers." He said. He went to Samus and saw that she was in her death suit and ready for hell , because as the old saying goes , war is hell. Then the alarms lit up and beeped and over the speakers general Bob started speaking
"Invading army en route , coming from east , all able-bodied personal come to the ship docking bay , get in your ships and blast them to hell."He said. "If you don't have a ship , then follow me to hell , I'll be in the command room"
Shan ran to his ship. Samus followed. They had a war to go to. He got in his ship. He went into the sky. His jaw instantly dropped when he saw the army. 100,000 troops easily. He tapped a button on the control pad. The ship counted the enemies. It came up with 189,430 troops.
"Better get to work." He thought.
He cleared his mind of any leftover drunkenness and blasted 5 missiles. The number dropped by 129. From then on he just kept on blasting. He put the ship on auto-fire and looked around. There were 100 federation ships in the sky. He looked at the number. 99,567 , and rapidly decreasing. He ran out of ammo. At the instant he ran out of ammo space pirate ships appeared. He called Bob and spoke to the COM.
"Bob I'm out of ammo and-" He said but couldn't finish because of his hangover. He puked everywhere. He knocked a thruster and went into a spiral.
"Shan did you drink again,"General Bob said , "Ah well doesn't matter, at the ship docking bay there is extra ammo , and for god's sake go get an anti-hangover pill"
" Sir , yes , sir!" He exclaimed and then drove towards the docking bay.
(Samus' POV)
Samus wasn't doing so well. Every second she was swerving out of control. She remembered something. Never drive drunk. She decided to go to get a anti-hangover pill. But that's when it happened. ... Cliffhanger , perfect time to say , dun dun dun dddduuunnn!
Chapter 2 "Now this is the life" , Link thought."No problems at all."Link hadn't heard anything from princess zelda in 4 weeks , and he had found a deserted 1 week he had struck oil , made electricity , and found lots of fruit. A couple days after he thought that he got a letter from zelda. It was for a party. It wasn't just a party , it was a monster blowout. Or at least that's what the letter said. He decided to go.
ReplyDeleteThe party was very big. When Link got there he found princess said , "Your letter was right , this is a monster blowout." "Mm hmm" , answered Zelda. "Ok let's party!" Zelda said. ...6 hours later , Link was getting drunk on punch (sugar rush) but he was on high alert , party crashers could come at any moment. "OOWAH OOWAH! He he was on half full of a sudden he saw a couple of teenagers came in with a giant barrel of imedietly ran to wasn't going to be cops at this party.
He slashed the barrel in half. He coughed , he hated the smell of grabbed one guys arm and snapped it like a guy fell over and was unconcious before he hit the elbowed another guy in the stomach and kneed him on the nose , he heard a satisfing then hit a pressure point and he fell onto his blew on him and he fell ran towards the other guys.
Zelda looked at knew he was doing the right thing , everyone cheered him unsheathed his sword , he heard cheering , he didn't want to kill anyone , so he knocked the last of the beer-teenagers out with the handle."Yeah!" He the sunlight smashed through and Ganondorf grabbed his sword and ran to grabbed his sword and ran to Ganon. Zelda pulled out her bow and arrow , charged it , and struck Ganon in the center of his momentarily was distracted and fell hit the arrow in and it sunk deep into his spurted kept on slashing him untill Ganondorf turned to stone.
"Get him out of here."Zelda told her picked up the statue and brought it to the dungeon where they threw it down and Ganondorf smashed into 100's of pieces."Sorry but you all have to leave."Zelda kept on took out his sword and yelled , "She said leave!"They all ran. A couple of days later Link threw a party at his was real fun untill Ridley crashed the said , "Dude , wrong game."Ridley roared , "I know but you killed my friend Ganondorf so I decided to pay you a visit."He ran at Link. Link took out his sword and strafed , as he went by Link slashed his 's blood splattered the then beheaded a prophet sighed and said , "Let me guess , you're friends with Ganondorf."The prophet shot a beam at dodged and jumped on him then stood on his chair.
He started slashing missed and hit a fuel chair started spinning prophet screamed and link got prophet collided into a blew came up to him and said , "What's with all the party crashers?"Link said , "I don't know but let's just keep partying."Then Wilfre crashed through the wall."UGH!" Link yelled."You killed Ganon , so my little scorpian will take care of you!"A giant scorpian appeared , it threw both claws forward , but he blocked both blows , and started slashing it's invincible fell back and started spraying shadow. Then clouds appeared and he jumped on them and jumped down on the scorpian's head , slashing through it's heads jumpedat him and he held out his sword , killing enjoyed the rest of the party , without anymore party poopers. ...Down in the dungeon... Ganondorf reformed at the bottom of the dungeon. He flew up.(the dungeon is kind of a pit)He destroyed all of the bars at the top of the dungeon."Muah ha ha hha!"He laughed.
End
Ugh , sorry that the update took so log, i got grounded.
ReplyDeleteI have been really busy.
AND NO I DID NOT STEAL THE IDEA!BELEIVE ME!
... I remember I was at a cliff hanger.
Disclaimer I OWN metroid. Lawyers come saying , " Sue , sue sue!" I guess i only own this fan fiction! :( DAMN LAWYERS:P
(SAMUS'S POV)
Her ship went spiraling as she looked around for the cause. A mother ship that was at least 3 kilo-meters long was the cause.
"FK" She said.
She made her ship do a tight spiral and regained control. She kept going down and got to the station. When she got there Bob said,
" Why the hell are you down here, Shan's down here but he has a reason."
" Sir, I need more ammo, sir!"She then whispered, " and an anti- hangover pill." " Immediately because of the mother ship."
"I know about the mother ship which is why I don't want you down here, walk over to our maintenance engineers."
She walked over to them and restocked. She then went up to the sky with Shan and took on the mother ship.
BOSS FIGHT
Shan blasted the mother ship. Samus sighed, she knew it wouldn't have any effect. Sure enough a tiny mushroom appeared on the ship doing no damage at all. Samus connected her beam to the ship and unleashed power into it, a giant beam blasted from her ship. The ship blew into a billion pieces. Samus frowned, the mother ship shouldn't blow so easily. Then she saw a miracle.
END OF THE BOS FIGHT
Rundas's ship was floating in the wreckage. Rundas continued on to shoot all the troops below, Leaving Samus and Shan to watch In awe.
(SHAN'S POV) (OF BOSS FIGHT)
Shan fired a missile, he knew it wouldn't work, but it was meant to get the mother ship's eye off the main prey. He began typing a complex command but Samus shot a beam. That's when the mother ship blew up. Shan thought ,
"WTF, how did that happen?"
Then a weird ship came into view. He was wondering who that ship was when it attacked all the other space pirate ships, now he was REALLY confused. But then Samus's voice crackled over the COM saying
"This is my buddy Rundas, I thought he was dead."
SORRY THAT CHAPTER IS SO SHORT, I DON'T HAVE MUCH TIME BUT I WILL HAVE PLENTY OF TIME IN MARCH!
chapter 1 1 year after the events of phantom hourglass...link and tetra once again ruled the seas as (their new watchman)said , "hyrule island ahead!"(the new location of hyrule castle.)tetra (or zelda)said , "my new home.""link you are officially a night."link said , "I know zelda , so please stop telling me."tetra said , "don't call me zelda untill we're on the the island!"linebeck(their captain) said , "break it up!""fine." said link and tetra (navigator) said , " linebeck , get back to the wheel before you kill us all!""whoops!"linebeck exclaimed.
ReplyDeletelinebeck started back to the captains wheel when everything darkend suddenly and the sea got a giant shadow attacked the and zonock (ship guard) attacked used his shield and blocked a instantly slashed at him and the phantom sword pinged off of the shadows armor in a shower of shadow killed zonock with one slash of his gilloutine sword.a splash of blood hit links shadow ripped all of link's weapons away."st" said a desperate atempt link grabbed tetra and dived into shark infested waters.a beam of energy hit the water and link got knocked out. ... link woke up and saw a bleeding gash on his leg and wrapped it up with a piece of his blood stained (by zonock) looked around and saw an unconsous checked the map and saw he was on an uncharted island."good we're on hyrule island."said went up to tetra and picked her brought her to hyrule told the guards that she needed medical care.
then he went back to the found akoolin and linebeck still brought them to the hopital he went looking around for a asked everyone in town and they said that the only ships were hidden deep in the he decided to trust them , and he went was in there for 5 minutes and he was attacked by a fox(remember he doesn't have any weapons) dun dun dun .
zelda woke up!she said , "wwhhaaaa?" the medic said , "princess zelda you're awake"! zelda said , "no fking duh stwad."...well anyway zelda ley me bring you to your throne room." "thorne!oh , sorry i didn't know i was at hyrule , sorry."zelda said."whatever let's just get you to your throne"
in the jungle with fox slashed him , he got angry and grabbed it's paw and scooped it's heart held the heart in his hand for about 50 seconds with an the world's stupidest expression on his face(invoulantarily).then his wounds saw a shadow in the corner of his was suspicious and went on full saw a sword in front of ran to it and grabbed it. then he saw the shadow followed it through the jungle untill it brought him to a ship.
"strange." he the shadow turned out to be the shadow from the ship. it ran forward and swung it's sword. he surged with energy and knocked the sword out of his hand and stabbed him through the burst into flames and died. link got the ship and left hyrule with linbeck knowing he'd probably be back 3 minutes later to save zelda from ganon."bye!" he yelled to zelda.
End
In my defense I was 11 and thought FanFiction was a good website when I wrote those. Here's my FanFiction profile: http://www.fanfiction.net/~metroidblaster
ReplyDeleteI love how I wrote SORRY THIS CHAPTER'S SO SHORT. As if anyone gave a shit.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete/b/'s pretty cool. http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/7563/1330723377482.png
ReplyDeleteAm I talking to Nick right now?
DeleteI am a literary genius, just look at those fanfictions. (yes)
DeleteYeah, I agree, /b/ is awesome. Unlike those fanfictions. Seriously, those are almost as bad as this blog. In a hilarious way.
Delete