Trojan women assignment

To begin, we are going to establish the context of the story. First, When Paris was given the duty of chose the most beautiful godess and give her the golden apple, he selected Afrodite, and she blessed him with the most beautiful woman of the world, Helen of Troy. The other two godesses, Athenea and Hera, promised revenge and provoked the Trojan Wars.

In the movie «The Trojan Women» we can see the consequences of war in the female population of Troy, whose all problems were caused by Helen of Troy. The story is situated in the ancient times were there were no rights and women were not considered even people by the civilizations of the time. This can be seen when the soldiers attack the thirsty women when they saw Helen was wasting precious water, getting away with what she wants (stay alive), and the sorrow and anger can be noticed by the dialogues of the queen who speaks for all women when they are handled the dead body of the last royal member ( astyanax), lamenting the injustice they are subject.

Quenya

Quenya is a fictional language created by J. R. R. Tolkienand spoken by the immortals imhabitants of middle eart the Elves. It is based in the Finnish language, but also is inspired by  Latin, Greek and ancient Germanic, with the objective of creating an ideal language with sounds familiar to every tongue.

The reason Quenya is one of many languages is because the author wanted it to develope and change with interaction and migration of populations like a real language does.

 

This desire to create and evolve the languages he created made him create a backstory for them; that is the reason of his fantastic stories: his languages needed speakers, so, in a few words, his stories were invented to explain every language and not the other way.

When the author died, there was not enough vocabulary to create the entire language as the examples were only some few lines and there were many unfinished tales and stories with no sense, so, since 1970, fans have added and created a kind of Neo-Quenya; today there are not more than a few hundreds of words, but there are texts, poems and even tattoos written in Quenya, but the language itself is not complete enough to maintain a conversation.

Every elvish population has its own language, but all of them share the same writting system

 

Examples of Quenya with traslation

• Albert Einstein

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

Á parë noa réo, nai cuina síra, á harya estel enwassë

 

• Lord of the rings character

I’d rather share one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world alone

Cilin harya minë cuilë ólë lá cenië ilyë randar Ambarwa eressëa

 

Titus Livius Patavinus (Livy)

Livy was a roman historian, born and dead in Patavium, today Padua, in Italy. He was interested in retoric and the creation of dialogues about morality, but left them aside to dedicate himself to the redaction of the whole history of Rome, his master piece, «Ab urbe condita libri», whose got him the grace of the emperor August.

His only surviving work «Ab urbe condita libri» is composed of 142 short books or actual «chapters»; only 35 of those have survived to our days. «Ab urbe condita libri» narrates the whole history of Rome, from its fundation to the dead of Neron Claudio Druso. The narration is characterized because of its epic and dramatic characteristics, and also, some reflections between stories. The small part of the «chapter» i read was about the destruction of troy and the legend of Romulo and Remo, abandoned at birth, fed by a wolf, adopted by a farmer and then the fundation of the city state of Rome, the abduction of women from outside cities and the sudden expansion of the empire.

The genre of the «Ab urbe condita libri», is not only a chronological narration with an objective point of view. It was almost a tribute of epic poetry and moral dedicated to the madnificence of Rome itself

Some chapters:

https://sites.google.com/site/adduartes/tito-livio

Spot The Classics Assignment

For this assignment, different aspects will be analized in order to see the roman influence in modern days, along some examples there are of this in our city Culiacán.
Rome was one of the biggest empires there ever was as it covered all Europe and part of Africa, and as a single empire, they shared the same language: Latin. That’s why, when the empire collapsed and all the provinces were independent from each other, the language changed and created what we call today the romance languages, like Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.

Other thing that spread with the empire was the roman catholic religion, whose official language is latin

We can find many examples of roman influence in our city of Culiacán. Some examples of them are this Arch’s in the front side of this coffeeshop

The hollow space surrounded by arches and columns at the Museo de Arte de Sinaloa

The structure of the FORUM shopping mall

The decorative aqueduct at side of the street

And the city itself. The city is built in the square shape romans loved so much

Poetic meter assignment

Taylor Swift-I knew you were trouble fragment

u      –     | u          –     | –          u  |    –           u   |     –       –                                   Iamb|Iamb|Trochee|Trochee|Spondee

I knew | you were | trouble | when you |walked in

u            –    |   –    u       –                                                                                          Iamb|Cretic

So shame | on me now

u      –     | u    –   | –      u   | – u  |  u   –   |  u      –                                                Iamb|Iamb|Trochee|Trochee|Iamb|Iamb

I Flew | me to | places |I’d | never | been

u         –    |    u      –  |    u          –                                                                             Iamb|Iamb|Iamb

Till you | put me | down oh

u      –     | u          –     | –          u  |    –           u   |     –       –                                     Iamb|Iamb|Trochee|Trochee|Spondee

I knew | you were | trouble | when you |walked in

u            –    |   –    u       –                                                                                             Iamb|Cretic

So shame | on me now

u      –     | u    –   | –      u   | – u  |  u   –   |  u      –                                                   Iamb|Iamb|Trochee|Trochee|Iamb|Iamb

I Flew | me to | places I’d | never | been

u         –      |  –    u  | u     –     |   –           –            u                                                  Iamb|Trochee|Iamb|Antibacchius

Now I’m | lying | on the | cold hard ground

–          –   |   –         u  |   –      u      |   –        u                                                          Spondaic|Trochee|Trochee|Trochee

Oh, oh, | trouble, | trouble, | trouble

–          –   |   –         u  |   –      u      |   –        u                                                          Spondaic|Trochee|Trochee|Trochee

Oh, oh, | trouble, | trouble, | trouble

The dawn of men

Many millennia ago, a few years after the creation of the world, men came to be, and with them appeared the gods.

The gods inhabited the only existing city by the time with men as guides, judges, masters and sovereigns, with the only task of watch, judge, punish and reward humans.

Cahotic was the nature of men, and yet, with the prescence of the gods among them, they became , with time, generous creatures with strong discipline and respectful of the law of the gods.

The gods noticing the lack of evil in existence, decided to select four individuals to observe their actions and to look into their hearts to decide the fate of the human kind.

The four selected men were two farmers and two businessmen. With these individuals, all sectors of society were going to be judged fairly for gods are not human and lack of any mortal need and yet, they share emotions and knowledge suffering, pleasure and mercy.

The task started and so did the day of the first farmer. At dawn, he plowed the land and fed the livestock, sold some of his products in the market. In this last stage, a malnourished infant stole some stuff of the farmer’s stand; the farmer grabbed his hand and gave the child a basket of bread. Finalized was the day of the first man.

Then was the turn of the second farmer. At dawn, he plowed the land and fed the livestock, sold some of his products in the market.In this last stage, an old woman asked if he could give her some spoiled fruit if he had to feed her family, for they were poor. The farmer refused to give her any food to the women as it was against the law. When the day was over, the farmer retourned to his home without knowledge of what was going to happen. Finalized was the day of the second man.

The next day, the first rich men was going to be observed. He woke up at noon and went out for a walk. While walking in the city most expensive market, he noticed a poor farmer with a weak and skinny cow. The rich men regarded at the men for a while, came close to him, and gave him ten gold coins. Then, he returned home and slept again to not wake up until the next noon. Finalized was the day of the third men.

The last day, the second rich men had the destiny of his race in his hands. He woke up at noon and visited his friend, a powerful landlord, to talk about business. On his way, he watched how a thief stole a woman’s purse, so he had the men arrested and imprisoned. Then he spent the rest of the say with his friend and returned home. Finalized was the day of the last men.

The next morning, the four men appeared in the king’s palace. It was impressive for the four men, but not for the gods for nothing was impossible to them. It was the day of judgment.

The king asked the first man, the first farmer, the reason why he gave the poor kid the food he did, and the farmer answered: “I did it for it was your wish, and you never doubt to reward someone for their actions”.

The gods, impressed, asked the second man the same question, to which he replied: “It is necessary to make sacrifices, even if it causes pain, to maintain order in life”.

The king was disappointed at this point. He turned his head to the third man, the first rich men, and asked why he gave the men the coins. The rich businessmen answered humbly: “I know what pain is as I was poor some time ago, it was the best I could do without harming someone by giving them too much”.

The king was a little relieved, and proceeded to ask the final question to the last man, the second rich man,  which the man replied: “I did what I did to prevent the pain of the less protected in the future. It is painful but necessary”.

The gods, after realizing that the hearts of men were far more complicated than their own, there was no way to determine if someone is totally good or evil, and that if they stayed with men more time, they could become incapable of sustaining themselves, and they decided, with pain in their hearts to abandon mankind to their own fate, giving them responsibility of their own actions.

That is the reason why life is unfair. Good people is punished, evil people is rewarded, or neither, and it is of no one’s fault nor responsibility. Things just happen and there is nothing men can do but trying to do what they feel, in their hearts, is the best for everyone.

Flood Stories Assignment

The legendary flood is an event present in the most antique civilizations, and still lives in many cultures in the world, from small tribes to the most powerful and numerous religions (Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism).

In this post, we are going to analyze 4 examples of these stories: the flood narrative from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of Noah and the Ark from the biblical book of genesis, the greek myth of Deucalion and the hindu myth of Vishnu from the Matsya Purana.

Similarities between stories:

In every story a man and his family are selected because of their perfectness to board a giant boat (or wooden chest) survive the flood a god is going to produce to wipe all live and evil from earth and repopulate it.

Important differences:

-The number of gods and their attitude toward humans.

-All of them were noble or descendants of gods in their civilization (except for Noah)

Gods:

-There are many gods in the Gilgamesh Epic that manifest human emotions.

-God from the Noah Ark story lacks of any human emotion (neither positive or negative).

-The greek gods are somekind more human and numerous.

-Hindu gods seem to be kind, and more merciful than the others.

Animals:

In all stories, animals appear in pairs, and symbolize the continuity of life in the future after the flood.

Difficulties understanding these stories:

In my opinion, they were easy to understand first because we all know the story, so we are most likely to guess what is going to happen.

Conclusion:

Why the protagonists of these stories deserve to survive when other people will die in the floods?

-Because humanity is for some reason important to gods and only the ones with the purest hearts and souls should repopulate the earth, like when you rise many turkeys and you only let the most healthy, beautiful and productive reproduce, and the other ones must (deserve to) die so you only have good turkeys.

Stonehenge

Stonhenge is one of the most mysterious structures in our world, and not because the complexity of its structure, but because of its orientation, and most important, how was it possible for people 4000 years ago transported many several ton rocks  from a place thousands of miles away. It is a mistery comparable to the contemporany pyramids of egypt, the mexican pyramids, and other structures all around the world no one knows how they were made.

People all around the world have wondered how was this possible, and many have arrived to an easy but kind of silly conclusion: Aliens.It almost hurts that everything we cannot explain or understand yet is tried to be explained by the influence of extraterrestial or supernatural beings. The point of investigating these structures must not be trying to arrive to a predetermined conclusion but to discover what really happend even if it does not supports your previous ideas.

If you see today’s structures, they are quiet impresive, and i personally think if we are all wiped out of earth, future civilizations may think «Well, we dont know how they did it but there must be a way». We must not forget people of that time were tribal humans, they had all the time they wanted to do anything they wanted, and as humans that needed to survive, they were really clever and handy; stonehenge was not built in a night, a week or a year, it lasted thousands of years, so they could develope the structures and techniques they needed.

Concerning to the structure’s allignation with the sun in the solstice and equinox, it is not a surprice. Many cultures were aware about this phenomena and its relation with the cultivation of earth, so it is not anything special stonehenge is oriented that way as many other constructions show this event, but it is interesting what happened to them to find it.

Musical Styles Assignment

Today we are going to analize the characteristics of the next songs. Are they fast or slow? Loud or soft? What instruments are playing? Are there voices? Does the music sounds easy or difficult to play? What is the music for (quite listening, dancing, a big concert)?

Harry Partch: Barstow

This song of Harry Partch is really interesting. There are not long songs, but instead there are eight hitchhicker inscriptions from a highway railing of Barstow. Then he added the music with new instruments he created and with scales different than the ones used in standard music.

It is not a slow song, but it takes its time to develope and advance. I identify this song as soft but not too soft, it has variations in its rythm and the use of its Mazda Marimba along with various instruments i cant iddentify (probably because they are unique) create an excentric and exotic athmosphere. The most notorious thing within the sound is his voice, which has the main role and is accompained by the other instruments.

As said before, this man uses his own instruments and scales that no one shares, and taking on account he was some kind of genius, the song is extremely difficult to play even if its simplicity says the opposite. The song is not long and has different rhythms, for this reason, it is not adecuated to dance but for appreciating it and its stories.

Morton Feldman: Piano and String Quartet

This song is really, really long and disturbingly soft. I could only identify a piano in the instruments. There is no voice, only some piano notes followed by long empty spaces of silence. The musica seems easy to play, but i don’t know who would play that, it is so simple it doesnt show the talento of the blayer but the one of the componer, who i found was insñired by the pattern of one of his rugs.

Cats – Musical: La Ballata di Billy M’Caw

This song is part of the Broadway musical play CATS from 1982 when an elder cat has to sing a song about happiness. It is a moderate speeded and soft song, but very emotional and intense. The music is composed by a singing man and an orchestra for a theater and both of them has to coordinate as there is dancing and acting.

Gal Costa: Wave

The music of Gal Costais slow and soft but really sweet and enjoyable. The genre of the song is Brazil Popular Music. I identify it as bossa nova, a Complicated and hard type of music to play, basically there are a lot of instruments: piano, guitar, clarinets, violin, voice, etc… And everyone is playing at different times, and then the singer starts doing its part whenever he/she wants and it is still incredible awesome wherever it is, alone, in a theater or dancing.

The Beatles:I Should Have Known Better

This song is really animated, fast and moderately soft. It is a really simple songand it is easy to play. it has like 2 sets of chords and 3 instruments: an harmonica, a keyboard and an electric guitar. I found some time ago that The Beatles’s members could not read or write music, but it doesn’t takes away they were an incredible and iconic band, they were details away from being the first boy band in history.

Book assignment: Five Chimneys

book assignment <-Link to download essay

The book I read for this assignment is named Five Chimneys. It was written by Olga Lengyel in 1946 as an autobiographic novel telling the story of her life during the second world war and describing life inside a concentration camp where she managed to survive for more than a year thanks to her courage, perseverance, and something that made her want to live and survive even when there was nothing to live for; hope.

Her story starts in the Hungarian village of Cluj, where she and her husband Miklós own a deluxe hospital. They lived helping any person that needed it, even if they can afford it. Their family consisted on both of them, their two children, the grandpa and godfather, all catholic and rich, with a very big house and a very big heart, they opposed to the third Reich and the anti-jew ideas; for this, Olga was threatened by Dr. Osvath about denounce Miklos for treason unless she signs a paper that proves that she sold the hospital, their house and all equipment to him. Even though, Dr. Miklos is deported to Germany by the government, and she and her family are tricked to follow him, and this happened to other families; they take the husband and the family delivers itself to the government thinking they would be safe. On the contrary, they were delivered to the Birkenau concentration camp, where she is separated from her offspring and parents, who were going directly to the gas chamber not before their belongings were taken away.

After her arrival to the concentration camp, her clothes and hair were taken away and replaced by the ones of the previous victims of the gas chamber. She was assigned to a barrack were she slept with other hundreds of women under horrible conditions, like using the same casserole they used to evacuate to serve food. These conditions made her ignore almost all her human values to survive. By the other side, her great intelligence made her survive the selections of Irma Grease when she was selected to die in the gas chamber and obtain the liking of powerful people like the blocova and the cooks, and also a S.S official Dr. Klein. She became nurse of the camp, so she was relatively safe of dying, enough food and the privilege of going to the restroom whenever she wanted.

Olga was part of a resistance group inside the camp. They were trying to destroy the crematory buildings of the camp do stop the massive murder for a while, enough time for the Russians to arrive. When the Russians were arriving, the managers of the camp took all the people to walk to the inside of Germany. When this was happening, Olga saw that corpuses started to appear in the way and she noticed they were being killed while walking and left in the road, so she and her group of friends escaped when they arrived to a small village. There they were given a hideout in a barn, clothes and simple food; some bread with fat over it. This made her realize how they were treated to find a simple piece of bread and some water so amazing.

When the Russians were close, the Germans in the village ran away not before taking all the women with them; at night, Olga broke the ropes that she was tied with and killed the watcher with a glass bottle, and ran to another village were the Russians were fighting with the Germans, but she had to cross a near frozen river to find her freedom and real safety with the Russians.

After the war, she migrated to the United States of America, where she wrote her memories and had them published on 1947.

In the memories contained in the book are some really interesting facts that I have not known until I read it.

To begin, Hitler did have a religion. He worshipped the god Wotan/Odin as he was the god of war, and he not only persecuted Jews but Christians, because a merciful god as the Christian’s one had no place in world domain and extermination. Also, the extermination camps were not full of Jews but an 80% of Christians and only a 20% of Jews, Jehovah witnesses and gypsies.

Moreover, it is a lie they forgave Aryan people; Nazis only wanted German Aryan people as they exterminated Aryan people from other countries like Poland or Hungry, and, along with other races, doctors like Joseph Mengele and Fritz Klein subjected them to horrible experiments. For example, Joseph Mengele, a fool as described by Olga, had a fascination with twins, and made experiments like make Siamese people or experiment with one to see the differences. He also tried to make unborn children from other races to turn their races to Aryans by injecting substances to the mothers, and then killing them to analyze. Other of his experiments consisted on dissect people of low height. All of these experiments lacked of scientific basis as there was no progress in nothing. Unfortunately, the doctor fled to South America and lived in a village where today many white twins with blue eyes are. He was known as “The death angel” as he selected the people who lived and died.

Another interesting thing was that people like Irma Grease abused of the prisoners as she made them work for her and then killing them. She did not consider the inmates as human beings, and her only presence made them knew they were in hell. She was nicknamed “the beast of Belen” as she was like a demon with the appearance of an angel. The author says that her angel face was useless in her execution.

Inside the camp, people were close to beasts. Aggression, rape and food possession was a way to obtain authority. People used food, sex, favors and goods obtained from the warehouse “Canada” as a change coin. This environment, along with the danger of death, changed anyone; a housewife into a prostitute, a rich women into a maid and a maid into the boss of their previous boss. The best example of this was one of the richest women in Hungry that turned into a robber. Also, there was distinction inside the camp: Normal prisoners to work, Jews for extermination, gypsies for experimentation, normal German criminals marked with a green triangle, homosexuals marked with pink triangles, religious people marked with a purple triangle, and something that impressed me: really skinny people were called Muslims.

In conclusion, I share an idea the author had at the middle of her experience: The German “supermen” wanted the entire world for they but not before torturing or abusing others to the point the prisoners become as savages as the oppressors.