Crime and Punishment.

So I just finished reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Wow, that was heavy going.

I know pretty much nothing about Russian literature. I read Tolstoy's Anna Karenin and then I read this, and that's the extent of my reading in that particular area. I have to read War and Peace for one of my modules next year, but I probably won't be conscious after finishing that, one so I thought I'd better write a blog entry now.

I'm not going to even attempt to adopt a scholarly tone for this, so here we go: Crime and Punishment is absolutely mental.

Seriously. Not a single character in the book is sane. Where do I begin? There's the main character, Raskolnikov, who murders an old woman with an axe, the reason given to justify this deed being that he thinks he's some kind of revolutionary Napoleon, from what I gather. He's poor and wanders around in filthy rags and lives in a cupboard which he can't pay the rent for, and this woman is wealthy due to being a greedy old witch, and yet he doesn't kill her for the money. He hides everything he steals from her under a rock. Oh, and when people give him money, which they do quite often, he either gives it to someone else or throws it off a bridge. I wanted to yell at him to keep the money and go buy himself a nice meal, since he never seems to eat anything, leaving me to wonder how he survives to the end of the book. He gets very ill, raves deliriously in his bed, broods a lot, wanders around the slums falling asleep in bushes, abuses all his friends and family, and then finally turns himself in to the police. Then he goes to jail, decides he's in love with a prostitute, and that's the happy ending.

Who else is there? He has this friend, Razumikhin, who's also completely off his rocker. He's basically permanantly excited and follows Raskolnikov around like an overexcited spaniel, despite the fact Raskolnikov tells him to get lost on numerous occasions. Then there's Svidrigailov, this weird old lecher who has a creepy obsession with Raskolnikov's sister and flings money at everyone who comes within ten metres of him, before announcing he's going to America and then shooting himself in the head. Porfiry is the clever detective who knows that Raskolnikov murdered the old woman, but he never tells anyone because he has no concrete evidence. Instead he constantly torments Raskolnikov and makes long rambling speeches in which he says "tee-hee-hee!" a lot. There are lots of other characters, but it would take too long to go through them all, and I can't pronounce let alone remember any of their names.

I'll briefly mention the female characters though, because they don't fare much better. Sonya is the prostitute who 'offers Raskolnikov redemption'. I think this is because she is the only person he feels able to confess the murder to. And she loves him and he loves her and she gives him the New Testament and at the end he considers maybe thinking about reading it. Which is good, I guess. Anyway, Sonya spends most of the book trembling and crying and wailing, "Oh merciful Lord!" which was very sweet at first but just got a bit pathetic after a while. The other woman worth mentioning is Katerina Ivanova, Sonya's stepmother, who is consumptive and runs around going "cahuh-cahuh-cahuh!" a lot, and thinks she is a noblewoman despite living in absolute squalor, and goes raving mad when her permanently drunk husband dies, and then forces her children to wear ridiculous hats and dance in the streets. And then dies. Yeah. I do feel a bit sorry for her, but she is mental like the rest of them.

So you've got all these crazy characters wandering around St. Petersburg trying to have conversations with each other, but failing since none of them is on the same page as any of the others. Most of them spout two-page long monologues in which there is no logical line of thought, and which are usually misunderstood by the other characters. Everything is so...disconnected. I suppose it's the real world seen through a framework of poverty and exggerated ten times over. It's a grotesque, gloomy, clownish fantasy world, full of charicatured figures, where nothing feels real and nothing quite makes sense. It completely threw me out of my prim and proper middle-class English Home Counties comfort zone. No one did what I expected them to do, what I would have done, and it frustrated me a lot. By the end of it, I'd stopped expecting anything to make sense.

But then, there was a suggestion at the end that order might be restored - that Raskolnikov will repent of his crime and lead a happy life with Sonya when he is released from jail. Wikipedia tells me that Dostoyevsky was an Orthodox Christian (though I suspect it's more complicated than Wikipedia suggests), which I suppose makes sense of that.

Anyway, I know I have spoken irreverently about Crime and Punishment and its general craziness. But you know what? I thought it was brilliant. Who says literature has to make sense?

I love Hamlet.

If it were possible to marry an inanimate object, I would probably marry a copy of Hamlet. I love Hamlet to the point that it is almost disturbing.

I am obsessed with it: it is one of the very few things in this world that make me cry every time without fail (the other things being Rachmaninov's 2nd piano concerto and Norrington's death in the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie - I have a devastatingly massive crush on Jack Davenport) and I consider it to be the best thing ever written EVER. I can't explain why I love it so much. There's a huge debate about whether Hamlet is feigning madness or whether he is actually mad, but I think that even in his madness he is the sanest character in any play. The way he responds to his tragic circumstances is so convincing - I think I'd go crazy if my uncle killed my father and then married my mother. All of the other characters (except Horatio) betray or totally misunderstand Hamlet, but as the audience you feel like the only people who see who he really is. Every time I watch it I feel like I go a bit mad with him.

I was obviously delighted when my friend offered me very cheap tickets to see Jude Law play Hamlet in London last night. I'm not such a big fan of Law, but I thought it would be interesting to see him attempt the ultimate role when I'm accustomed to seing him in awful romcoms. I mean, The Holiday is pretty much the Bad Movie I compare all other bad movies to. That one really set the bar. My friends and I watched it last Christmas and we rewinded back to the bit where the little girl looks at Cameron Diaz and goes YOU SMELL LOVELY...I LIKE YOUR LIPS! about five times because at the time it was the funniest thing we'd ever seen. Anyway, I'm off on another tangent. Sorry.

Last year I was also lucky enough to get tickets to see David Tennant in the Royal Shakespeare Company production. We drove up to Stratford-upon-Avon and combined it with a visit to Shakespeare's birthplace. Tennant was so good that I left fancying him a bit, despite his not being particularly attractive and my not being a fan of Doctor Who. I didn't expect Law to better his performance and I was right. So now, like everyone else who has had the good fortune to see both productions, I am going to compare them.

Tennant was far more witty and charismatic. He was excellent at being mad, which isn't surprising considering the quirky, barmy way he played Doctor Who. However, when it came to the soliloquys, the moments when Hamlet is consumed by grief and the desire for revenge, he was surprisingly touching. One minute I was laughing, the next I had to hide the fact my eyes were watering pathetically from the people sitting around me. Law on the other hand went down the angry, brooding, shouty route, which he did pull off well, but at times I felt it lacked any emotional content and he was just speaking lines. He substitued emotion for over-the-top hand gestures, such as pointing to the sky when he said the word 'sky'. Thanks, Jude, I had no idea in which direction the sky was located. At points he was very over the top...but I feel I'm being a bit mean to him. He spoke the lines very well whereas Tennant had a tendency to garble, and he grated on me a lot less in the second half. His portrayal was consistent, he drew laughter from the audience in all the right places, and by the end he had really pulled me into the story.

Hm, what else? My friend and I both agreed that Ophelia in last night's production was unbearable. I just read a review that described her as 'touching'. Ugh. The only thing she touched was my suppressed desire to scream and break things. She was stiff and dull and just reeled off the lines robotically. Her version of madness was wandering around the stage singing in a pretty voice. In the Tennant production Ophelia was running around the stage, shouting, flinging flowers at people, tearing off her clothes. The ghost wasn't, er, ghost-like enough for me last night, and Horatio didn't really do it for me. It's not Hamlet's actual death that always sends me into floods of tears, it's when Horatio says "Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest" that I begin to bawl like a five-year-old, because Horatio loves Hamlet and stays loyal to him to the end. But this Horatio didn't particularly seem to care, and I only experienced a bit of mild eye-watering (and for some reason nose running, which was very attractive).

Both productions went for the whole gloomy set, everyone wears dark colours vibe, which is probably the best way to go with Hamlet. In the Tennant production it was chilling and atmospheric, but last night's set was a bit...blah. When Law spoke the "to be or not to be" line he was standing in the snow framed by a set of massive doors. I suppose it was a little hackneyed but I quite liked it. Oh, and the scene of Polonius' death was excellent. Hamlet and Gertrude were behind a sheer curtain and Polonius was on the side of the audience listening. Hamlet then stabbed him through the curtain and he tore it down as he died. He ruined this a bit by falling onto his front and then suddenly flopping over onto his back with a massive thud. It made me laugh but no one else found it funny. It was like one of those moments when someone sneezes in a silent exam hall and you are the only person trying to hold back hysterical laughter.

Oh, and apparently Kevin R. Mcnally played Claudius, and I had absolutely no idea until I got home and looked it up online! I didn't recognise him because the only thing I've seen him in is Pirates of the Caribbean as Gibbs, and so I always picture him covered in muck and swigging a bottle of rum (Pirates is another one of my obsessions if you hadn't guessed).

Overall it was a very good performance and I now have a lot more respect for Jude Law - he did very well, though not as well as David Tennant, who is awesome. Law proved that he can act more than one type of character. I read somewhere that Tennant and co. are going to create a film version of the RSC performance to release on DVD, which I am so buying and watching over and over again (and you should too). I suppose the point of this massive blog post is to say that if you've never seen or read Hamlet, please do so. It will make your life better. It might even make you sob like a baby. Then again, that might just be me.

BASIC GRAMMAR FOR IDIOTS

Okay, so I don't expect much from Fictionpress. It is a site predominantly for angsty pre-teens, and at nineteen years old I am basically a veteran. But here's what baffles and angers me about it: it's supposed to be a site for people who love writing. How can you love writing and yet have no knowledge, let alone respect, for the very basics of the English language? I know grammar at nineteen years old, and I knew it when I was thirteen years old, too. Age is no excuse. I am appalled by the quite frankly embarrassing butchering of English I see on Fictionpress on a daily basis.

Here is a guide to grammar for idiots. I know that the people who read my blog are generally lovely, intelligent people who can spell, and so this is not directed at you. It is more of a generic angry rant.

Emma's guide to basic grammar for idiots

1. "It's" is a contraction. It means IT IS. If you write, "the cat licked it's paw", you are in fact saying, "the cat licked it is paw". THIS MAKES NO SENSE.
2. On a similar note, you can't just shove apostrophes into random plurals. Egg's. Dvd's. Pillow's. Sorry, the pillow's what? These are the only two functions of an apostrophe: to signify a contraction, or to denote possession. Stop using them for other things. Apostrophes are not like sugar, which you can sprinkle randomly all over something to make it nicer.
3. You're = YOU ARE. Your = POSSESSIVE PRONOUN. Learn the difference. It's really not hard. I'm not asking you to memorise the periodic table here.
   
4. Capitalising Every Word In a Sentence Does Not Constitute Formal Writing. It Is In Fact Incredibly Irritating And Makes You Sound Like You Are Talking Like a Robot. Please Stop it Now.
5. You must always capitalise 'I'. I learnt this in Year One. If you are still writing "and then i went to the shops", I think you have a lot of catching up to do and perhaps need to be demoted to aforementioned year. In fact, please remember to start your sentences with capital letters in general.
   
6. You can't just randomly change tenses halfway through a paragraph or sentence. If you don't understand why this is, I wash my hands of you, but let me get the ball rolling by telling you that we do not live in a completely incoherent time-warped world where the present can become the past in an instant. This is one of the basic facts of existence, let alone grammar.
   
7. Why do some people not realise that if you pose a question you must end it with a question mark or else it will sound like you are an unbearable person who talks in a monotone all the time.
8. I don't understand why people seem to hate question marks, and yet they love exclamation marks - so much that they deem it acceptable to either make every sentence an exclamatory one, or to use six all in one go. You cannot write, "And I couldn't believe how handsome he was!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" without sounding like a squealing fangirl at her very first boyband concert.
   
9. Okay, I apologise for the caps lock, and I am aware that this in itself is bad grammar, but I need to use it to express my sheer outrage at this last point. Here goes: YOU CANNOT SPEAK IN INTERNET SLANG IN YOUR WRITING. THIS IS COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE. YOU ARE CREATING A PIECE OF ART, NOT CHATTING TO YOUR BEST BUDDY ON MSN. IF YOU THINK CREATIVE WRITING IS SUCH A WASTE OF YOUR TIME THAT YOU FEEL THE NEED TO CONTRACT "YOU", A SIMPLE THREE LETTER WORD, TO "U", THEN YOU SHOULD NOT BE WRITING, AND SHOULD ACTUALLY BE BANNED FROM BEING NEAR A KEYBOARD OR ANY KIND OF WRITING IMPLEMENT EVER AGAIN IN YOUR LIFE. THIS IS THE ULTIMATE DISRESPECT TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND I DIE QUITE A LOT INSIDE EVERY TIME I SEE ANYONE DOING IT.
   

Breathe, Emma, breathe...