The Room Two

Aesthetically superb, intellectually challenging

Aesthetically superb and intellectually challenging, The Room Two follows in the steps of equally gorgeous riddlefest The Room, this time with a hint of a story.

Morphopolis

The wonderful adventures of a grub

A visually gorgeous little game with a surprising and original premise, some decent puzzles and above all else, lovely design and soundtrack. It was offered at a tiny fraction of its already low price via a gift coupon from Steam, so I gave it a go.

Lunar Bed: Battery Farm

Neal and Jack and a bitter reflection

An acoustic mini album with quite unusual melodies (in which I discovered different things each time I listened to them), interesting lyrics and a beautiful, very distinctive voice.

engeo: Half of a Sentence

Nice melodies and guitars

A very pleasant album to listen to, with interesting guitars and good vocals. There are echoes of '90s British bands (and maybe some '70s), but still the sound has an element all of its own.

Of The I: Twelve Sequences of a Storm (Demo-noid E.P.)

Strange and beautiful

Beautiful, strange sounds creating a dreamy ambience, with an alternation of melodic repetition and intense rhythm among the tracks.

Graham Greene - A Tribute

The invisible side of exoticism: Phuong's character in the Quiet American

Phuong's character in The Quiet American is one of the most difficult to define, as she holds no real leading part in the novel and her particular characteristics are shown to the reader through the eyes of Fowler, the narrator, that is through the deforming prism of both a male vision and a European spirit. Attempting thus an approach to Phuong's character, one should beware of a number of traps liable to mislead one's judgement - if it is ever possible to fully analyse a character whose only known aspects are those revealed to us by the author himself through the character mostly acting as his mouthpiece.

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.

An Attempt at Comparative Analysis: A Sketch

Brian Patten VS. D. H. Lawrence

The two poems in question present, first of all, a similarity in subject: they both deal with the cinema. The first one refers to an unexpected incident during the projection of a film, while the second one describes the personal feelings of the poet while watching a love story οn the screen. In the first poem the event is narrated in the third person singular, which actually represents the "projectionist" mentioned in the first line, while in the second poem the "Ι" of the poet-narrator is very obviously present.

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: