Joli: The screenplay's premise was startling, I hate this habitual treatment of classics, that they shouldn't be touched. That they needed to be treated with eminence, or else you are not doing service to the author. People tend towards streamlined representations of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet and Sherlock Holmes. Even for people who 'update' these stories, the characerisation is couched in the established principle themes of the story. For instance, Romeo and Juliet is an exploration of the young love, the anarchism and self-destructiveness that underlines that level of intimacy. For instance, Sherlock Holmes is some ascetic, violin-playing detective, pale as a whisker, and gets off on solving crimes. Fuck that. I like it when people respond to what they read and share it with people. The last version of Shakespeare I saw (I'm not a huge fan) was Romeo and Juliet in Constantinople. The only attempts at historicising the play were the period costumes and backgrounds, and a certain line about monetary exchange, changing Lira to Drachma or something.
It seems, when people go for adaptations of major literary works, they use the cliff notes more than the actual book itself. Sherlock Holmes is an opium-eating bastard. I never knew this. I'm reading an autobiography of Primo Levi's return to Turin from Aushwitz. He populates the story with people. He works in an infirmary in Katowice, the war has just finished and soldiers who celebrate "do not always fire up in the air". A infantryman and a parachuttist are hospitalised, though they aren't severly wounded. When there is a parade in the streets, the parachuttist, already in full regala, gets out of bed and jumps out of the window, "like all good parachuttists".
I like this, Levi wears his bias on his sleeve. If you guys read that Arundhati Roy essay I posted several weeks ago, like many things addressing a political issue, it is calculated to make you think in a certain way. I guess that's the drawback of rhetoric, I'm sure if Roy went for a neutral tone, it would've impoverished her arguments. But that's the whole idea of political writing. Literature, on the other hand, tells you the skeleton of which needs to be understood: The plot, the rest is like a contract betweent he reader and the author. People disrespect themselves when they say they've "gotten this wrong", or whatever. I'm going to spend the following years unlearning the process of injecting literary criticism into the way I read. Because the only way a novel should ever be is through itself. An opinion that I stand by.

I'm not going to get a 2:1. I think it's a 3rd for me. I never expected my grades to speak of my academic performance, I think I'll have to rely heavily on references if I go for some office job. The present outlook is to find myself in a maintainable lifestyle in order to develop my writing skills. Somehow earning enough money for food, nicotine, beer, cds, comics, clothes. I've completed my job with the library. It was mainly cleaning out old stock. But since I was so goddamn deft, they might have other jobs for me.
btw, Kevin's poem is in reference to when he yakked all over his bed when he was staying at my place in KL two years ago. Then he proceeded to sleep in the piles of vomit, at one point arranging them in neat piles, so they would not cause to much mess.