Book report : A Clockwork Orange

When he was young, Anthony Burgess wanted to be a composer. Unfortunately, he wasn't accepted in music at university because of his poor grades. He studied in English language and literature instead and he became a teacher in the British colonial service. He travelled to many places, but he grew bored and lied saying that he had a brain tumour and only a year to live. He got discharged and he became a full-time writer. It was a this moment that he wrote his famous novel A clockwork Orange.

A clockwork Orange is the story of a young man called Alex. He lives in what could be London in the near-future . The novel could be separated in three parts. In the first part, Alex has a life of debauchery with his friend. They rampage houses at night to hurt, rape and steal from the inhabitants. They take great pleasure in their ultra-violence and Alex revels in the 9th symphony of Beethoven. But then, Alex's friends grow irritated of the way he treats them. He roughs them up a bit and convinces them to steal into a old woman's house. Alex enters alone in the house through a window and beats the old woman unconscious before going to open the door. When he does, they attack him and leave him incapacitated for the policemen who were on their way. The old lady died from Alex's treatment and he got charged for murder.

The second part is when he's in prison. He was condemned for fourteen years. After two years, he hears of an experimental rehabilitation technique that would release him out of prison immediately after. It is an aversion therapy called the Ludovico technique. It consists of making the patient look at very violent scenes of battle, mugging, stealing and rape while being under the influence of a drug that creates a sharp nauseating response to these scenes. The soundtrack for those scenes was Beethoven's 9th symphony. Alex realizes then that he won't be able to listen to Ludwig anymore. After the treatment, Alex is placed in various violent situations in front of a public to demonstrate that he is cured of his violent side. Here, a priest gets frustrated because Alex is not being non-violent by choice. He must not be violent, because if he does, he feels he will vomit. He remained totally unchanged from the therapy; it was only his body that was trained to react to certain situations.

The final part is when he is release in the society. Unfortunately, his old victims attack him because he isn't able to defend himself anymore. Two police officers, who turned out to be two of his friends, beat him and leave him for dead at the towns outskirt. Alex will then walk aimlessly until he arrives at an house. He doesn't realize that this house is one of the many he had broke into with his friend to rape a woman. The writer living there doesn't recognize him as the one who raped his now dead wife and he wants to use him as a poster child for the victims of the fascist government. Unfortunately, the writer will recognize Alex for what he has done to him and he will torture him by locking him up in a room where Beethoven's 9th symphony was playing. Alex can't take it and he attempt to kill himself by jumping out of the window. However, he will not die. He'll wake up in a hospital from where he'll return to live with his parents. The government reversed the therapy because it was bad publicity for them. Alex will make another gang like the one he had at the beginning of the book, but he will soon tire of it after seeing one of his old friend leading a peaceful life with his wife and children. He saw then that he could be happy while leading another life than the one of debauchery he had.

A Clockwork Orange is a very interesting novel for it's moral about good and bad: It's one thing not to do anything bad, but it's another to do good.

LEL #6

For my sixth Learning express library exercice, I've done the writing diagnostic: organisation and focus. This was a test to evaluate my skills to plan my writing for a text.

It took me two hours to finish the test and I scored 90%.

The test was very repetitive. There was six series of five questions. Each serie was about a different text and asked pretty much the same questions in the same order. After the second one, I was already bored and I knew what the answers would be. This was way too long for what it's worth. I don't know if that shows me if I'm good at organizing my texts, because I didn't have to think at all to answer the questions.

I give it 4/10 because it was too long and repetitive.

LEL #5

I've done the Grammar practice #1 for my fifth LEL. There was forty questions about grammar, punctuation, capitalization, verb, adjective, adverb and pronoun.

I scored 65%. At first, I wasn't happy with myself, but then I looked at the real answers and explanations and I saw that it was filled with errors. For example, look at this sentence.

Tommy's Bar and Grill was | conveniently located on | one of the main streets | in downtown Waynesberg. |

Here, I had to choose what part of the sentence had wrongly used a capital or needed one. In this particular question, I answered that no part was wrong. The test said that the answer was the first part and here's the explanation : ''the conjunction "and" does not take a capital.''

The word ''and'' clearly didn't have a capital. Numerous questions were falsely corrected like this. This test was interesting to do, but I give it 0/10 because it seems to have been corrected by a drunk monkey.

Final Writing

Karoline Leach, born in Liverpool in 1967, author of the play Tryst, has studied in acting and she was an actor and director before being a writer. Her first book, In the shadow of the dreamchild: a new understanding of Lewis Caroll, became a subject of controversy for claiming that the biography of Caroll was far more mythic than true. Her most recent work named tryst was premiered in 2006 and was played in many United States cities and in Montréal. That play reveals much of her understanding of acting. The story is lead by the emotions and the reactions of the two characters to each other and by their own desperate way of life.

First off, Tryst doesn’t have any major action because the play revolves around the emotions of George Love and Adelaide Pinchin. George is a dandy and his way of life consists of seducing women to then steal their possessions. Adelaide works at a hat shop and if George hadn’t chose her for his schemes, she would have been doing that until her death. In the first act, the two of them talks in monologue to describe themselves and what they are doing. Because of that, the audience can know what their thoughts are and why they are answering as they are. It is easy to see that George is a liar and a hypocrite while Adelaide seems to believe everything he is telling her. That is exactly what George wants and everything goes as he knew it would. They get married and go at a resort for the honeymoon. Then, during the second act, Adelaide is not so gullible. She knew George was too good to be true, but it is only then that she confronts him. There is no monologues now, but the awkwardness and the silences gives as much information on what they think and feel. George can’t bring himself to stop being a thief and Adelaide still wants to believe in him and love him. It is because their ways of thinking are so different that this interesting story can take place.

Secondly, even if we can think the contrary, the two of them are desperate, not only Adelaide. She is a mid-life woman and she thought it was too late for her to find love. George, even if he seems to be self-assured and happy of his life, is also feeling he is getting too old for this. In fact, he doesn’t know if he could do anything else than seducing desperate women to take their money. This is why these two are so alike. Adelaide psychologically changed very much during the play. She begins as a seamstress who knows she has no future and then she shows her backbone when she confronts George. Him, on the contrary, he didn’t really change. During the second act, he seemed to be convinced by Adelaide’s dream of owning a hat shop. But he didn’t change. He kills her at the end to go back to being what he was at the beginning, even if he knows he might not get another chance. If Adelaide had not acted differently, George would have gotten away as he always do.

Finally, Tryst is a play where emotions and the thoughts of the characters have the major role. The desperate ways of each of them brought them together and changed at least her. Through all the play, we could know what they were thinking even if there wasn’t that much foreshadowing. That is why this play is so amazing and should be seen at least once.
599 words.

sentence patterns #3

Figure of speech

Simile: A comparison between two things not alike with comparative words.
Ex: My feet smells like a rose that have committed suicide.

Metaphor: Implied comparison without a comparative word.
Ex: A plane is a caged bird.
Ex: The young goalie skyrocketed to fame but now he's crashed

Analogy: inference from one subject or word to another.
Ex: the grand bibliotheque might have the key for your future; it unlocks many doors to knowledge.
Ex: The humain brain, when compared to a computer, is really simple. A computer can execute a billion calcuation per second and some people have difficulty when adding numbers. It's still a mystery why the computers are letting us be masters over them.

Allusion: reference to something. It can be direct or indirect.
Ex: His achilles heel was his lack of personnality.

Personnification: When human caracteristics are given to inanimate objects or animals.
Ex: The car approved with a honk.

Hyperbole: exaggerated statements to evoke strong feelings.
Ex: There is more dust in my room than on the moon.

Understatement: Statement wich is lesser than the expression expected.
Ex: It's just a flesh wound, said the man who had lost both arms.

LEL #4

For my final learning express library course, I chose to do another one that was about vocabulary. It's the word analogy practice 1. I figured this would allow me to further evaluate myself in my knowledge of the meaning of words.

I didn't like this test. There was no explanation for what was the answer I should be looking for. It took me quite some time to figure out the questions. For example, every question was like this : word1 : word2 :: word? : word4. I understood that it could mean : word1 to word2 is like word ? to word4. But in many other question, it seemed like word1=word? and word2=word4. I was really confused and I think that they could have better explained the situation. Also, for being the first test in a serie of 4, it was very difficult and there was a lot of words I have never seen before. That's considering I read a lot in english.

I got 75%, but I guess I was lucky because there was a lot of answers I guessed because all the words were unknown to me.

I give it a 3/10 because someone took the pain to do this test.

LEL #3

For my third LEL I did the reading skills diagnostic: Literary text. I figured I could see how well I read in english. I had to read three text and a poem and correctly answer questions about them.

I scored 34/40, wich makes 85%.

I found this test rather interesting, because even if it was rather long, I love reading. But still, I think that two text would have been enough. When I saw the third text to read, I was a little discouraged to read all that only for a diagnostic test.

I didn't find this test so hard, but it wasn't easy either. I had to think and read the texts again and again to be sure I had understood. The question were about comprehension of the plot and the author's meaning and many other things like main ideas, point of view and vocabulary.

I didn't really learn anything new, but I guess doing tests like this are good practice to read and analyse faster. That would come in handy for tests wich I don't have much time.

I would give this test a 10/10. It's a well conceived practice tool.