Nifty Blog Title

All righty, this is the last bit of writing I have to do. Once I finish this the only thing I’ll have left is the title page. Of course since I am yet to think of a nifty title that may turn out to be one of the more difficult parts of the project. The research portion of my project was actually very easy. Adam, Rachel, Katie, and I all went to Oakland University on one of our late start days and I found all three of my critical essays with no problem. All of my other research was done with the help of google and oakland university online from my home.

The writing portion of the project was the most difficult part of the project but I must say that I did not find it to be as hard as I expected it to be. Unlike the majority of the year prior to this project, all of the writing came incredibly easy to me. I started out with the annotations and after one hiccup (I veered off course and wrote about America) I found my grooze. I finished all three of them with almost no other problems whatsoever. Then I started the abstracts…

I found the abstracts to be the most painful part of the project. Reading the critical essays was not fun at all, much worse than even The Prince. If anyone reads these for fun they are very, very sick. The abstracts did not come as easily as the annotations, however I still managed to produce good writing (or so I think). Once I finished the abstracts I quickly moved on to the most imposing parts of the project, the introductions.

The introduction to the annotations was actually very easy to write as I already had much of what I wanted to cover already written in the annotations, I just had to properly introduce them. In a way this was the closest to an overall essay on the book’s themes, this introduction was where I focused on main themes and Machiavelli’s writing styles. Once I finished that I moved on to what I had been dreading, the GENERAL INTRODUCTION. The description on our objective/process sheet was of little help, it essentially said students were responsible to come up with what they wanted it to say. Thanks Kreinbring. After about four tries I finally settled on a way to introduce the intro, focusing on the history of Florence. Once I got that out of the way I found that the intro was not bad at all, in fact I cruised through over four pages in about two hours covering political theory from Machiavelli to Locke. Then tragedy struck. I tried saving and my entire intro disappeared. Needless to say I almost had a complete nuclear meltdown. To waste all of that effort would be spirit breaking. However, I was extremely lucky and we were able to rescue it. YAY!!!!!!

So there you have it. After all of that I went to the works cited and blog posts but by then it was cruise control. I will conclude this post with a picture that I feel describes what I felt when I finished the project.

It should be fairly obvious that I have already finished reading the book at the time of the post. If I hadn’t I wouldn’t be wasting my time writing a blog post. I started reading The Prince about everyday in AC in April, a few months after it was assigned. I realized that in order to start this massive project I would probably have to read the book. The Prince is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because it was just over one hundred pages, a curse because it is written in sixteenth century language, which is god-awful to read. It is said that a picture is worth one thousand words so I felt it would be appropriate to include a picture to best illustrate my thoughts and emotions while reading this book.

Needless to say Machiavelli’s work was not the most interesting of reading material. However, I was pleased that Machiavelli rarely used literary techniques (not suprising for a non-fiction political treatise). Why is this a good thing one might ask. Well, it is very easy to find passages to annotate when there are only about two metaphors and five allusions in the whole book. It becomes very, very easy to decide what to annotate.

While reading I also noticed some similarites to other works that I have heard of, one of which was Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. The full text of his work can be found here. While I do find this book to be one of the more boring books I have read, Machiavelli has some extremely excellent points which I agree with most of the time. The most important ones I have included in my project so you can read them there.

The book I have chosen for my critical research project is The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. I read this book earlier this year for AP European History and was intrigued by some of the principles and ideas contained within the book. I will admit that it is not the easiest book to read and I would much rather read something easier, such as The Picture of Dorian Gray. For that reason I intially thought about reading either The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, or some other work of fiction that I had read before. However, I did not want to ruin my enjoyment of these great books by having to critically read and annotate them. I have no desire to ever return to Paradise Lost and I do not want that to happen to a work as great as those of J.R.R. Tolkien. With almost anything that could also be read for pleasure taken out of the picture I decided to search for something of literary merit that I had read before. Since what we have read in english classes were out of the picture the only viable option was The Prince.

While researching The Prince I noticed an interesting pop culture reference that I know Machiavelli could have never anticipated. The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory is the final album recorded by rap artist 2Pac before his death.

It was not released under 2Pac’s name, rather it was released under the name of Makaveli. The album was inspired by Machiavelli’s The Prince and The Art of War (also by Machiavelli) which 2Pac studied extensively while he was in prison. However, I highly doubt that this album will be of much use for me on the other parts of the research project.

 Sources: http://www.donkilluminati.com/lifeondeathrow.htm

“… It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’”

The scene in the third video is not a direct representation of a scene in Heart of Darkness. Rather, it is an added scene that serves to convey the message that is found in other parts of the book. The above quote is a fine representation of the message that the helicopter attack on the village represents. The American soldiers with their helicopters and missiles are working to civilize the “brutes”. These “brutes” are Vietnamese villagers, both armed and unarmed. Their lives are viewed less importantly than the lives of the Americans. This view is illustrated both by the emotionless slaughter of the Vietnamese villagers and the music that accompanies the scene. Richard Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries” is not the sort of song one would associate with an attack on a village. It is an upbeat, happier song that clashes terribly with the action that it accompanies. However, that is the exact purpose of the musical choice, to echo the carelessness of the slaughter. Along with the scene where Willard’s boat inspects the small fishing vessel, the attack on the village is an excellant visual representation of the idea of civilization through extermination.

Welcome to Brian Nowinski’s long procrastinated Nifty AP English Blog.