YouTube Copyfraud Strikes again

Or, how to abuse the law to one's own advantage

On YouTube's page of our very own Down to Earth video (Public Digital Festival 2010 entry) you may see a message saying that it contains material from an entity called IODA.

Samuel Beckett - A Tribute

Beckett's view of the human condition in Waiting for Godot

Written in the mid-'50s, in other words shortly after the end of World War II, Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot offers a most perceptive, bitter and yet quite sympathetic vision of the human condition in the trying times Europe was then going through. Vladimir and Estragon, the two principal characters, spend their lives "waiting for Godot" in an almost desert scenery. The characters of the play are very few, five only, plus Godot, the invisible sixth, who is all the same omnipresent due to the continual reference to him by Estragon and Vladimir. In a dramatic environment where the animate element, as well as the non-animate, appear reduced to the absolutely functional, an entire existential reasoning is amply presented to the audience.

Jane Austen - Nonsense & Insensibility

The place of rank & money in Jane Austen's world

In Jane Austen's Emma, one of the author's best known novels beside Pride & Predjudice, the homonymous main female character is described as "handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition". It is not by chance that Emma's wealth is mentioned in the very heart of the description, among natural personal qualities such as beauty, intelligence, generosity and pleasant temper: amusingly implanted in the middle of the list of conventional moral and physical attributes, Emma's fortune immediately suggests the social dimension, or perspective, of both the novel character and the novel itself. Austen's world is one of more or less financially self-sufficient middle class provincials, successors probably of the mediaeval feudalists, or otherwise liberal professionals having acquired a certain economic sufficiency through hard work, like the naval officers in Persuasion.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - A Tribute

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The present six verses of The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner by Samuel Coleridge are extracted from the fourth part of the poem and constitute in fact the ending of this part. The Mariner, who has been subject to complete material and moral deprivation for having killed the beneficent Albatross, immobilised in a tormentingly static universe and surrounded by corpses, now attains absolution through the ability to recognise the beauty of living creatures and finally to feel genuine love for them. This turning point in the Mariner's soul and mentality will signal his reconciliation with the natural elements and his gradual re-integration in a friendlier, familiar world.

Much Ado About Nothing

The title of the play as related to the content

Apart from having universally been recognised as one of the most brilliant pieces of comedy ever written, Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing can also be considered as a humorous yet quite accurate definition of the nature of dramatic art, answering with their own weapons to his contemporaries who condemned the theatre considering it as "nothing" because it highlighted spectacle and artificiality against substance and meaning. From beginning to end, the plot of the play is "much ado about nothing", as every character makes too much fuss, or too much ado, about forged facts and testimonies of misled witnesses. An entire theatrical intrigue is therefore introduced within the given, conventional scheme conformable to the very nature of the comic piece, a multiple game of observation and eavesdropping ("noting"), based on false impressions and deformed appearences, in other words on nothing. Moreover, the phonetic relationship between the words "nothing" and "noting" (taking into consideration the fact that "nothing" was pronounced "noting" by the Elisabethans) is here inevitable to remark. The "noting" taking place on stage has, in a further interpretation, nothing as a reasonable counterpoise, it is vacant and meaningless, like a mask which is lifted to reveal no face underneath.

King Lear - A Scene by Scene Walkthrough

Act I, Scene 1

The King of France is surprised and indignated at Lear's unexpected injustice to Cordelia. Lear has just approved of her rejection by the Duke of Burgundy and addressed France, warning him of her supposedly bad nature: