Carbolated mopboard

carbolated (adj.): Containing or treated with carbolic acid.

mopboard (n.): A molding that conceals the joint between an interior wall and the floor. Also called baseboard.


If I actually named my titles like I should name titles, this post would probably be called "Hurray for Literary Analysis!"

Now, why do I bring this up right now? And especially, why do I bring this up at all, when literary analysis bores me to death, in most occasions. But very recently, I have discovered the untapped potential of literary analysis!

Perhaps some context would help. I was in English class today. It was more or less your standard english class; we talked for an hour about Macbeth. Of course, that's perfectly normal and fine - Macbeth is regarded to be a very interesting, albeit quite unstable character of Shakespearean literature. More interestingly though, was the ten minutes we spent of that hour talking about Harry Potter.

Just like you can get from "Cheese" to "Archie Comics" in two clicks in Wikipedia, we similarly managed to get from Macbeth to Harry Potter. The rationale, of course, was that "Double, double, toil and trouble/ Fire burn and cauldron bubble" was in the third Harry Potter movie, along with another line from Macbeth later on. Of course, the line "Double, double, toil and trouble" is pretty common with anything to do with witchery, just like "To be or not to be" (and horrible witty variants) is used everywhere too. We did spend ten minutes talking about the 'impact' that phrase has on the viewer (guess what? It's ominous!), and how it has an enhanced impact if the viewer has a knowledge of the story of Macbeth.

All that is fine and well, but it was during this discussion that I had my wondrous epiphany about literary analysis. With literary analysis, we can show that Sirius Black is really Macbeth! I mean, look at all the similarities between them:

- they both know witches!
- Macbeth kills (betrays) King Duncan. They think Sirius Black killed (betrayed) Harry's dad.
- Macbeth dies at the end. Sirius dies too.

Okay, that's all the real similarities. And there are probably lots of differences. But luckily, literary analysis is so powerful, it allows us to convert the differences into similarities!

- Sirius was stuck in prison for a bunch of years after they thought he killed Harry's dad, where there were evil Dementors that feasted upon his mind and emotions. Similarly, after Macbeth kills King Duncan, he's trapped in a prison of his own mind and starts going insane and seing ghosts!

- Both Sirius and Macbeth didn't want their victim to die but it happened because of them. Like, Sirius randomly gave some random person all the passwords, and then the random person was able to kill Harry's dad. And Macbeth didn't really want to kill the king, of course, but Lady Macbeth forced him to. And there were those pesky witches too. Promising lots of good things.

- Both of them want revenge after the person gets killed. Sirius tries to kill the random person that he gave the passwords to that can turn into a mouse. Macbeth gets revenge on Banquo, because Banquo is so evil that Banquo's presence inspired the witches to come tell Macbeth the prophecy which compelled him to kill the King. (He also benefits much more than Macbeth from Macbeth killing Duncan too. Sort of).

- Macbeth owns a castle! Actually, he probably owns like three. Sirius also sneaks into the Hogwarts castle at some point.

-Sirius gets killed by a woman. Macbeth gets killed by a man "not born of woman".

- the line "double, double, toil and trouble/ Fire burn and cauldron bubble" is in both Macbeth and the third Harry Potter. What more could you want?

And now, by the method of literary analysis, we can combine all these very logical observations and conclude that, yes, Sirius Black really is Macbeth, of course.

Don't get me wrong, by the way. Macbeth is a very good play, along with most of Shakespeare's stuff. I just don't really see the point of doing analysis, period. Perhaps it's an exercise in random logical deduction (which of course has to be so logical), but it seems like this is is a much better explanation. Talking about literary works is fine, but going so deep into them (and inventing a bunch of jargon in the process) is a bit silly.

I'll post something more interesting in a while. For the meantime, go read Graham's new essays (sidebar). They're good as usual. I also picked up jPod the book a while ago, and it's fairly good so far (it's the only book that includes free spam with it! =) ). I also need to finish Atlas Shrugged sometime, but oh well.

Oh, and I might randomly decide to write a book called "The Adventures of Klee Shay". Just because the title is so good and no one's taken it yet =).

-squid out