Sunday 15 January 2012

Reflections on Designing the Cover for Florence

















Reflections on Designing the Cover for Florence

Florence by Alice Childress


                                                                









                      Book Cover





After creating the cover for the play Florence by Alice Childress, you are now required to reflect on the following and put them in your respective blogs:





What was my role in the designing of the book cover?

My role was editing the picture for the book cover with the help of my friend. 


Was my opinion taken seriously by the others? Why?

Yes, I think they understand what the picture illustrated on the book cover described about. Although the illustration of book cover is not pretty enough because it was in black and white only, but I think it is just fine for me. Our lecturer commented that our group should have suitable background image for the book cover so that the title of the book cover is clearly illustrated. 


What have I learnt from this task?

I have learnt how to make a book cover and it was my first time. Chosen the pictures for the book cover is quite difficult as we need to considered what the play about. I also give chances for my group to share their opinions and ideas. Besides, I realised that I need to improve my skill in editing pictures and background to improve my presentation. 




By, 
Charles

My thoughts on Drama


For this week, you are required to blog on the following:


Would I be willing to spend my money watching an excellent play/drama? Why?

Yes, I would be willing to spend watching an excellent play/ drama because I can enjoy the beauty of the drama which is acted by many excellent actors and actresses. I like drama because many of them are well played on stage and the drama is played with many nice scenes where the plot is arranged in orderly sequences. Besides, drama is the art which comes closer to everyday life. Well played drama also can give us enough satisfaction.

What do I expect from a good play?



From a good play, I expect that I can get the satisfaction as the play is well played. The play should be fills with emotion, humour and spectacular action for the audience so they enjoy the play. The characters, especially the main character should understand and feel the anxiety when acting on stage so that the character becomes alive so that the strength and the flaw of the character can be showed. The audience supposed to feel sympathy to the hero and I hope that the hero can always save the days.

Do I feel comfortable to act in a play? Why?You can entitle your post "My thoughts on Drama".



Honestly, I’m not comfortable to act in front of audience because I do have the experience before. But I think that I should give it a try.




By, 
Charles

Tuesday 9 August 2011

The Jade Bracelet by Mary Frances Chong





The Jade Bracelet by Mary Frances Chong


1. What is the relationship between Mrs Wong and Mrs Lee?
They are sibling or maybe they are in-laws.

2. Is Mrs Wong a filial daughter? Give three reasons.

Yes because he is willing to take care of her mother without any complaint. This can be shown when Mrs Wong faithfully take cares of her mother for years.Besides that,she never permit any word of complaint.She also paid whatever price just for her mother's coffin even though she knows it will be cremated after that.

3. What is Ah Kow's real name? How is he related to the dying woman in the short story?

Ah Kow's real name is Fook Kee. Ah Kow is the son of the dying woman in the story.
4. Why is Sam Poh Tong mentioned in the short story?
Sam Poh Tong mentioned in the short story because it is the place where the grandmother will be send. Sam Poh Tong is a cave Buddish Temple.

5. What do you think the jade bracelet symbolises? Give your reasons.

I think the jade bracelet symbolises a person status. Jade is made from a precious stone and it is very har to obtain. That is why it costs a lot. A person who wears jade shows that he or she is a rich people. Apart from that, it symbolises a good health of the person who wear it. The energy in the jade bracelet helps to take extra care and protects the person who wear it. Moreover, people who wear jade have a good luck for years and longer life.


6. Do you think Siew May is naive? Cite your reasons with quotations.

Yes.This is show after grandmother passed away.
The quotation, "I want to go home...... Grandmother will be waiting alone!"
7. Did Siew May get the jade bracelet in the end? Why?

No, because her mother claimed that she is not supposed to own the jade bracelet. According to her mother, her uncle is the one who should own the jade bracelet because he is the only son in the family.

8. Do you like the story? Why?

No, because it requires a lot of thinking. I could not figure out who is the main character actually in this short story. I also could not determine what is the role of some characters in the short story such as Ah Kow and Mrs Lee. Apart from that, the dialogues are not understandable. In addition to that, I could not agree that in the end, Siew May did not own the jade bracelet.

Wednesday 3 August 2011

Birthday by Lee Kok Liang

Themes

The abuse of young woman
- Grandmother treat the protagonist character very bad.
- Grandmother do not allowed her to eat after she had spilled the curry over Uncle Teng trouser.

Forgiving
- Uncle Tang is a forgiveness person because he is able to forgive the child accidentally action for spilled the curry.

Characters


The protagonist
her parent had dead and the protagonist is take care by her grandmother
- obey to her grandmother
- being abuse by his grandmother and trapped in the house
- the protagonist's marriage has been planned by protagonist's grandmother
  example: the protagonist's grandmother planned an arrange marriage for her with Uncle Teng.

Grandmother
- protagonist's grandmother
- strict and sometimes fierce
- match maker
- kind to Uncle Teng


Uncle Teng
- kind person
- caring
- tolerate person
- forgiving man

C.B.
- a child
- enjoy joking with Uncle Teng .
   Example: laughing with Uncle Teng after they talk about C.B.'s future wife and modern girls.

Plot


Exposition

The protagonist was staring outside from the window looking at the baby who's mother was giving him a bath, when grandmother called her from the ground floor. 

Rising Action

It was her (the protagonist) 25th birthday. Uncle Teng from the northern village came to have a look on her for the possibility of marriage. 


Climax


At dinner time, she clumsyly spilled some curry on Uncle Teng's trousers. It was the cockroach that made her to spill the curry. She would be the spinster her whole life.


Falling action

The protagonist cleaned up the mess and at the same time, being scolded by Grandmother. Then, Grandmother did not allowed her to eat dinner.



Resolution
After the incident, the protagonist went to her room and rest. Grandmother then entered her room and called her as a "clumsy bitch".

























Friday 29 July 2011

Lamb to the Slaughter

Lamb to the Slaughter








Plot/Description

This is probably the most well–known of all Dahl's short stories, simply because (in my opinion) it's so simple. There isn't a single wasted word in it. It's gripping, shocking, and yet the story proceeds in such a rational manner that the reader's suspension of disbelief is never broken. We are with Mary Maloney from the first sentence of the story, and only at the end do we realize that we never really knew her at all.


Spoiler Warning! Mary Maloney is a devoted wife and expectant mother. She waits happily each night for the arrival of her husband Patrick, home from work at the police station. On this particular night, though, she can tell something is wrong. In disbelief, she listens as Patrick tells her that he is leaving her for another woman. [Actually Dahl never really says this; the details are left up to the reader's imagination.] Dazed, she goes into the kitchen to prepare their supper and pulls a large frozen leg of lamb from the deep freeze. Still numb, she carries it into the living room and without warning bashes her husband over the head with it. As she looks at Patrick lying dead on the floor, she slowly begins to come back to her senses. Immediately she realizes the ramifications of what she has done. Not wanting her unborn child to suffer as a result of her crime, she begins planning her alibi. She places the leg of lamb in a pan in the oven and goes down to the corner grocery to get some food for "Patrick's dinner" (making sure the grocer sees her normal and cheerful state of mind). She returns home and screams when she finds Patrick lying on the floor. She calls the police and informs them that she found her husband lying dead on the floor. Within hours swarms of officers are searching the house and conducting an investigation. Mary's story of coming home from the grocer and finding him is corroborated as she had planned. While the police are searching fruitlessly into the night for the murder weapon, Mary offers them some lamb that she had prepared for dinner. They are happy to oblige. While they lounge in the kitchen and discuss the case (their mouths "sloppy" with meat), Mary Maloney sits in the living room and giggles softly to herself.



Lamb to the Slaughter: Characters 
Mary Maloney
Mary Maloney, the story’s protagonist, is six months pregnant and satisfied with her (from an external perspective) rather banal life with her policeman- husband Patrick, whom she adores. She had ‘‘a slow smiling air about her’’ and was ‘‘curiously tranquil.’’ Mary keeps a neat home, and busies herself with preparations for the baby. When Patrick unexpectedly announces that he is ending their marriage, Mary enters a state of shock. She automatically goes to the basement to remove some- thing from the freezer for supper. She takes the first thing she finds—a leg of lamb—carries it back up the stairs, approaches her husband from behind, and strikes him on the head with the frozen leg of lamb. He falls to the floor dead. ‘‘The violence of the crash, the noise, the small table overturning, helped bring her out of the shock.’’ Concern for the wellbeing of her coming child leads her to act quickly and efficiently to establish an alibi. She starts cooking the leg of lamb, rehearses a normal conversation with the grocer, and then goes to the store to buy vegetables. She hurries home, thinking that if ‘‘she happened to find anything unusual, or tragic, or terrible, then naturally it would be a shock and she’d become frantic with grief and horror.’’ In fact, when she sees her husband’s lifeless body again, she remembers her ‘‘love and longing for him’’ and cries over him quite sincerely. She then telephones her husband’s police colleagues and collapses in a chair while they search the house for the ‘‘heavy blunt instrument, almost certainly a large piece of metal,’’ that is believed to be the Lamb to the missing murder weapon. When a sergeant points out that the oven is still on and the leg of lamb is done, Mary
urges the policemen—’’good friends of dear Patrick’s . . . helping to catch the man who killed him’’—to eat it because she knows they have missed their own suppers.The policemen consume the murder weaponry on while speculating about the case. ‘‘And in the other room, Mary Maloney began to giggle.’’
Patrick Maloney
Patrick Maloney is a policeman still walking a beat. The reader learns that it is unusual for him to drain most of his evening cocktail in one swallow, as he does when he first comes home. He replies in short sentences or monosyllables as Mary watches him intently, trying to anticipate and fulfil his desires by offering to fix him another drink, bring his slippers, fix him a snack. He does not answer at all when Mary expresses her displeasure that ‘‘a policeman as senior as you’’ is still walking a beat—a suggestion that Patrick may not be especially successful at his job. On the evening of the story, Patrick abruptly announces that he is leaving Mary, although he will continue to provide for her financially. His only acknowlegement of her pregnancy is that he says he knows ‘‘it’s kind of a bad time to be telling you.’’ He hopes that there will be no fuss about it. Although the reader is told little outright about Patrick’s character, the narrative implicitly indicates that he dislikes her worshipful adoration of him, her constant catering, and her tactless reminder about his lack of advancement in his profession. 
Sergeant Jack Noonan
Noonan is one of the policemen at Patrick Maloney’s precinct who responds to her frantic telephone call that she found her husband lying on the floor, apparently dead. He and Mary know one another, and he helps the weeping woman gently into a chair before joining another policeman in examining the body and scene and calling for other investigators. He is solicitous of Mary’s well-being, asking if she would like to go and stay with a relative or with his own wife, or be helped up to bed. At one point she asks him to bring her a drink. He, and the remaining officers and detectives, also help themselves to whiskys at her urging. It is the sergeant who notices that the oven is still on and the leg of lamb done cooking. Mary begs him and the others to eat the meal that she cannot bring herself to touch, and after some demurral, all the policemen sit down in the kitchen and completely devour the murder weapon.
O’Malley
O’Malley is Sergeant Noonan’s partner. Dahl is having fun with stereotypes, for O’Malley, like Maloney and Noonan, is an Irish name, and ‘‘the Irish cop’’ was a sociological phenomenon in American big cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. O’Malley’s words and actions are not specified in the story: he is just one of the policemen on the scene, discussing the case and, eventually, unwittingly consuming a portion of the tasty murder weapon.
Sam
Sam, the grocer, appears in the middle of the story. After Mary has killed Patrick, she constructs an alibi by making a hasty visit to the grocery store to buy vegetables to go with the meal she tells Sam she is cooking because Patrick does not want to eat out, as they usually do on Thursday nights. Mary later overhears a policeman reporting that Sam found her behavior at the store ‘‘quite normal.’’

Lamb to the Slaughter: Themes


Betrayal

‘‘Lamb to the Slaughter’’ tells of at least one betrayal: Patrick Maloney’s unexplained decision to leave his pregnant wife. This violation of the marriage-vow is obviously not the only betrayal in the story, however. Mary’s killing of her husband is perhaps the ultimate betrayal. Her elaborately planned alibi and convincing lies to the detectives also constitute betrayal.

Identity Dahl plays with the notion of identity both at the level of popular psychology and at a somewhat more philosophical, or perhaps anthropological, level. At the level of popular psychology, Dahl makes it clear through his description of the Maloney household that Mary has internalized the bourgeois, or middle class, ideal of a young mid-twentiethcentury housewife, maintaining a tidy home and catering to her husband; pouring drinks when the man finishes his day is a gesture that comes from movies and magazines of the day. Mary’s sudden murderous action shatters the image that we have of her and that she seems to have of herself. Dahl demonstrates, in the deadly fall of the frozen joint, that ‘‘identity’’ can be fragile. Once she shatters her own identity, Mary must carefully reconstruct it for protective purposes, as when she sets up an alibi by feigning a normal conversation with the grocer.) In the anthropological sense, Dahl appears to suggest that, in essence, human beings are fundamentally nasty and brutish creatures capable of precipitate and bloody acts. Then there are the police detectives, who pride themselves on their ability to solve a crime, but whom Mary sweetly tricks into consuming the main exhibit. Their identity, or at least their competency, is thrown into doubt.
Love and Passion
At the beginning of ‘‘Lamb to the Slaughter,’’ Mary Maloney feels love and physical passion for her husband Patrick. She luxuriates in his presence, in the ‘‘warm male glow that came out of him to her,’’ and adores the way he sits, walks, and behaves. Even far along into her pregnancy, she hurries to greet him, and waits on him hand and foot—much more attentively, it appears from his reactions, than he would like. Patrick is presumably motivated to leave his wife by an overriding passion for something or someone else. Mary’s mention of his failure to advance at work, and his own wish that she not make a ‘‘fuss’’ about their separation because ‘‘It wouldn’t be very good for my job’’ indicate that it may be professional success that he desires. His treatment of his wife does not suggest that he loves her.


Passivity

The concept of passivity figures in the story. The first pages of the story portray Mary’s existence as almost mindlessly passive: she sits and watches the clock, thinking that each minute brings her husband closer to her. She is content to watch him closely and try to anticipate his moods and needs. Patrick’s predictability up to
this point is part of this passivity. The two are living a clockwork life against which, in some way, each ultimately rebels. Passivity appears as the repression of passion, and passion finds a way to reassert itself.


Justice and Injustice

The question of justice and injustice is directly related to the question of revenge. ‘‘Lamb to the Slaughter’’ narrates a train of injustices, beginning with Patrick’s betrayal of Mary and their marriage, peaking with Mary’s killing of Patrick, and finding its denouement in Mary’s deception of the investigating officers. Patrick acts unjustly (or so it must be assumed on the basis of the evidence) in announcing his abandonment of Mary, for this breaks the wedding oath; Mary acts unustly, in a way far exceeding her husband’s injustice, in killing Patrick, and she compounds the injustice by concealing it from the authorities. 

Lamb to the Slaughter: Style 
Black Humor
Black humor is the use of the grotesque, morbid, or absurd for darkly comic purposes. Black humor became widespread in popular culture, especially in literature and film, beginning in the 1950s; it remains popular toward the end of the twentieth century. Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 (1961) is one of the best-known examples in American fiction. The short stories of James Thurber and the stories and novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. also offer examples. The image of the cheerful housewife suddently smashing her husband’s skull with the frozen joint of meat intended for his dinner is itself blackly humorous for its unexpectedness and the grotesque incongruity of the murder weapon. There is a morbid but funny double meaning, too, in Mary’s response to her grocer’s question about meat: ‘‘I’ve got meat, thanks. I got a nice leg of lamb from the freezer.’’ She did indeed get a leg of lamb from the freezer, and after she used it as a club, she found herself with a rather large portion of dead meat on her living-room floor. Also darkly funny is the grocer’s question about what she plans to give her husband ‘‘afterwards,’’ that is, for dessert. From Mary’s point of view, Patrick has already gotten his ‘‘just desserts,’’ and there will be no more ‘‘afterwards’’ for him! The ultimate example of black humor in ‘‘Lamb to the Slaughter’’ is, of course, the spectacle of the policemen and detectives sitting around the Maloney kitchen table, speculating about the murder weapon while they unwittingly devour it. 
Point of View                                                                                                                     Dahl grants the point of view to Mary, the protagonist. Right away, readers see the scene through Mary’s eyes. The warmth and cleanliness, the punctilious ordiliness, of the living room where Mary awaits Patrick reflect Mary’s conviction, soon to be shattered, that she has built a comfortable and even beautiful life. In Patrick’s case, Dahl communicates indirectly by gesture. Mary greets Patrick with a ‘‘Hullo, Darling,’’ while Patrick responds with a ‘‘hullo’’ only, omitting the endearment. He drinks his evening scotch and soda more quickly than usual and resists Mary’s efforts to wait on him; he fails to respond to Mary’s conversation. Readers see these things more or less as Mary sees them, although they likely interpret them more quickly than she does as signs of his dissatisfaction with his marriage. After the killing, Mary changes. No longer the ornament of a contented setting, she becomes the calculator of her own survival, and that of her unborn child. As Dahl writes, Mary’s mind suddenly clears; she begins to dispose of evidence, and she sits in front of her dresser-mirror rehearsing a normal conversation with her grocer. When she returns home, having founded her alibi, she views the body of her husband as if for the first time, and readers, too, get a newish view of it, described much more grotesquely, with greater and more poignant detail, than previously. In these two contrasting scenes of the death, Dahl completes the transformation of his central character.
Symbols
The setting is symbolic: Its domestic primness implies Mary’s having bought into a rather banal version of middle class happiness. The frozen leg of lamb is also symbolic and indeed constitutes the central symbol of the story. The piece of meat is already a token of violence: an animal traditionally viewed as meek and gentle slaughtered for carnivorous consumption. The notion of a lamb, moreover, resonates with biblical symbols, such as the scapegoat mentioned in Leviticus, the ram that substitutes for Isaac in the tale of Abraham and Isaac, or Jesus himself, ‘‘the Lamb of God.’’ But Dahl’s story reverses the connotation of these biblical images.