Mediums

Dear Reader,

If I’m being quite honest, I read the Dworkin piece twice and still really have no idea what I’m looking at. I hope that maybe once I read the other works from this week I might gain a better understanding of the piece and what exactly it’s trying to get at.

I’m reading Chaucer in one of my other classes right now, so I loved hearing the MUPS PennSound piece, especially the Chaucer reading. To hear the old English spoken so uniformly really changes the understanding. Reading it aloud myself simply confused me, but to hear someone say it, I can actually hear the words in their correct format and somewhat understand the text’s meaning. I found it extremely interesting to hear the contrast of modern English text overlaid on the Chaucer reading because it gives an immediate comparison of the two speech styles, as well as detracts from the actual meaning in either text. We start paying more attention to hearing each new word correctly that we forget to pay attention to the words in their contexts within their sentences.

The “We Can’t Stop” rendition of Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” was incredible. It sounded almost like a CAKE song to me, in that the music is good but the words are almost like a traditional story. It’s very interesting how the music of a song can change the way it makes you feel based on the words, almost as if the words are what give the music its emotional quality. I always thought it was some creative combination of chords that evoked an emotional reaction in myself upon listening, though now I understand that it might be more related to the addition of the words to those chords that add the emotional value. The same goes for “The Best I Ever Had” rendition, though I didn’t find this one to be quite as enjoyable, perhaps because I’m not familiar with the poem being spoken.

Sincerely, LCS