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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Mayor of Crapsterbridge

16:59 / 27.03.03

Grrrr for school i have to read the Mayor of castorbridge for English, and as my examios are comin up, im reakonin i should probably start re-reading it. Coz in the exam i have to write an essay, i dont know what about, without having the book with me, and having to include quotes. How cruel.

Its as if it wasnt dull enough the first time. So does anyone actually read Hardy because they want to, or does every1 have to read such rubbish for schoolwork/exams?

17:19 / 27.03.03

Without being allowed to take the book in with you? That's very harsh - I'd have been lost without my copy and my cunning condensed crib notes written in it... (that's probably why they don't let you do it any longer I suppose).

I did The Mayor of Casterbridge and Hardy's poetry for A-Level and that has stopped me wanting to pick up any Hardy for pleasure, I must say, so I have a great deal of sympathy with you on this one...

Tryphena Absent

21:36 / 27.03.03

Are you in our fair nation of England? If so then you're an 'A' level student and your exam board is OCR because it's the only one with such harsh rules concerning books and their presence in the room and it's disgraceful that they work you so hard. Bastards.

I hate Thomas Hardy with a passion little known to the world. I despise him but his colloquial description is pretty damn good (and boring). His female characterisation is... lacking, his men are pathetic and his animals are unrealistic. Atmosphere, though, he's good at that. I had to read the godawful Mayor of Casterbridge for my 'A' Levels and my teacher got us to watch the TV adaptation and it made it so much more unbearable. I hated it more.

Read it, take pleasure that this is the last time you'll ever have to pick it up, make sure you get some good quotes on the three main characters, a street, the ruins and particularly from the first three pages and the last scene. Something in my head is screaming Chapter 10 so you might want to look at that but I'm unsure- my memory isn't that good. You'll be fine- have fun and good luck!

23:37 / 27.03.03

His female characterisation is... lacking, his men are pathetic and his animals are unrealistic.

LOL, I guess that sums it up! Though I actually did read Hardy for pleasure, some years ago. I suppose I wouldn't reread the novels because they're so sad and frustrating. But back then I was more pessimistic and more open to that sort of vibration.

07:38 / 28.03.03

I read it at the end of last year. Absolutely loved it. So I am in the reading Hardy for pleasure camp. Don't you just love Henchard? So beautifully flawed. So dark. For me the whole story pinned around his very human failings. You've got a very universal motivating factor - the dark secret coming back to haunt.
Gorgeous book. What don't you like about it?

08:47 / 28.03.03

I've not read The Mayor of Casterbridge but I read Tess of the d'Urbervilles a couple of years ago, and found it quite bland. It wasn't awful or anything; it was just blah. I sympathize with your predicament, especially as I recall liking most of the books we did at my high school.

And we were never allowed to take books in to our exams. Exercise your memory before you lose it, good youth!

Regrettable Juvenilia

09:43 / 28.03.03

Hmmm. I will admit that I used to be quite a fan of Hardy - studied him, but also read him for pleasure (but then the two often overlapped for me, English Lit swot that I was/am). I've read Jude, Tess, The Mayor and Far From The Madding Crowd, and at the time I enjoyed them all - mind you, I was a miserable bastard then, and so I'm not sure what I'd make of them now - FFTMC, the least depressing of the bunch, is the only one I'd feel like re-reading any time soon, and that may just be because I'm thinking of the movie, Terry and Julie, etc...

Jude The Obscure is probably the ultimate novel for depressed adolescent, self-professed intellectual young men who wear long black duffel coats, have recently lost their faith (ideally in God, but also in general), worry too much, have a weakness for drink and women but hate themselves (and probably women too) for it, and also have a huge chip on their shoulder about their lot in life. Which is a surprisingly broad demographic.

"Dun becos we was too meny" - cheery stuff!

13:27 / 28.03.03

My friends and I used to annoy the hell out of our English teacher in school by frequently proclaiming our opinion (one I still hold, btw) that Pride & Prejudice is complete ass.

"You're not understanding it properly", the teacher would say.

"But I love Shakespeare, and his stuff's far more complex" I'd reply, "I just think this Austen book is big waste of words that says absolutely nothing of importance about anything".

I've just got no time at all for the whole vicious triangle of Austen, Dickens, Hardy.. that's the main reason why I didn't do English Lit for A-level, despite being good at it.. I suppose Dickens is marginally better in that some of his books are actually about things, but I still find them far too dull to read..

The main components of by brother's current A-level Lit course are *two* Austens, Chaucer and Captain fucking Correlis fucking Mandalin.

The poor bastard.

20:16 / 28.03.03

Im not in the fair land of England, but the unfair land of Scotland, and doing Higher English, not A level (thank god).
Buk, you are in the camp with my English teacher at that time- She LOVED Henchard, and said every year she fell in love with him over and over again. Against Hardy, its just a personal thing, i just plain dont like it. As for the English teacher, well shes hardly in my good books. Bitch. Caught me up the street in a free period and gave me a right rollockin for it. Grrrr.

Shakespeare i find bearable, almost enjoyable, though it is in comparison to Hardy, which may have something to do with it. And also that i now have a teacher who doesnt ramble on about how its as exciting as Corination street (*cough-cough*).

So I've only got 3 school weeks left. Or to put it in less positive terms, ive got 5 weeks to learn it. And Othello. And some poems. O and all the other subjects i do. The joys of school...

The Return Of Rothkoid

22:21 / 28.03.03

Riz: I hate to say it, but I think I agree with your teacher. I hated Austen when I had to read it at school, but have reread Pride and Prejudice since, and it's as snide and snottily enjoyable as any barbfeud.

Well, I came to really enjoy its subtleties, yeah. So you might too.
(I may be making Homeresque "tee hee" noises as I type.)

22:25 / 28.03.03

I've found Tess a bit blah, but did read it far too fast because of University time constraints (ie: a week to study Hardy. In. His. Entirety. That's light, too).

That said, I'm now - with a couple of years hindsight - even enjoying Henry James (bane of my U6th existence), Dickens was always great, Lawrence Sterne is wonderful...

and don't diss Chaucer. Medieval Lit's rather fun when you get into it. I'm sure Knight's Move (if he's still around) can tell you more...

Goodness Gracious Meme

12:43 / 29.03.03

warning: rant.

I'd have been lost without my copy and my cunning condensed crib notes written in it... (that's probably why they don't let you do it any longer I suppose)

*g*

yeah, me too. That sounds bloody harsh. How I love my almost indecipherable copy of The Alchemist

I'm in the sympathy camp, gingerbop, I had a hardy obsessive teacher for four years and so read FFMD, Jude, Tess, Return of the Native and the sodding Wessex Tales.

And Fly, think I'd emphasis the maleness of your otherwise brilliantly accurate sketch. As a teen, I always found the female char.s utterly unsympthatic/poorly drawn and the men feeble. This reached a high point for me with Jude, as I remember, just wanted to slap him about..

And if I never have to write another essay on 'how Hardy uses weather as a meta4' (which is pretty likely), I'll die happy.

Start: People are angsty=it's overcast
Middle: brief respite, hope that love may triumph/conquer the alienating inevitability of the human condition=it's a beautiful summer day, lambs gambolling
End: Everything goes to shit- storms, cracks of thunder, crashing lightning, downpours etc. Downpours are good, the eponymous hero can get caught in them, searching for his lover, and be sticken with pneaumonia. Defeated by nature. Ha!

And I *do* enjoy other things i studied studied during this period. I'm very glad to have encountered Shakespeare, Chaucer(who does indeed rock, once you can get yr head round the language), Ben Jonson etc...

Maybe i should give on another go?

15:42 / 30.03.03

No. It's wooden mince. I did that exact same bloody essay.

I know an English teacher who likes Hardy, though. Just the one. My mum does too.

In my day we did Hardy for SYS, but you don't get that any more do you, ginger?

Regrettable Juvenilia

16:36 / 30.03.03

Start: People are angsty=it's overcast
Middle: brief respite, hope that love may triumph/conquer the alienating inevitability of the human condition=it's a beautiful summer day, lambs gambolling
End: Everything goes to shit- storms, cracks of thunder, crashing lightning, downpours etc. Downpours are good, the eponymous hero can get caught in them, searching for his lover, and be sticken with pneaumonia. Defeated by nature. Ha!

Ha, indeed. I believe the literary term for this is "pathetic fallacy", and I always thought this was a bit odd, because both of those words sound like you're saying it's *bad*. And it fucking can be.

Spot-on about the maleness, too. Hardy's a bit like certain kinds of doomy angst-music: it's probably inevitable that moody teenage boys like it, but I distrust anyone who still likes it *that* much once they get into their mid-twenties...

19:47 / 30.03.03

Duncan: nope, we do advanced higher now, which is the same as SYS. Wish theyd stop changin everythin, pickles my head when they talk about what they did in previous years,and i just get confuddled. But like fuck im doing advanced higher. Hate Enlgish with a passion now, not so much the subject as the completely stupid things they make us do.

I was told i'd fail English. I got the highest mark outta all the higher classes. By the time id got that, id been put down by the teachers enough to not give a shit anymore.

One week till the holidays, 3 weeks after. Then exams, then escaping the institute of hell. xx

17:07 / 09.02.05

I just read Jude the Obscure for pleasure, because I was intrigued by the back-cover blurb about its being anti-marriage and anti-religion. I enjoyed it, admittedly as a sort of curiosity... certainly I wasn't crying in my beer for Jude's unrequited love, or pumping my fist at Sue's wishy-washy anti-marriage rants, but I personally don't have to love the plot or approve of the character development to consider a novel enjoyable reading. It was unique, at least, for what it is.

There were some interesting and complex ideas in the book, I thought, however clumsily they were drawn. For one example, religion as the triumph of sentiment over reason in a reactionary response to adversity... or the way someone of above-average but not exceptional talent/intelligence might get completely stranded, lost somewhere between the academic and working classes.

The characters were weird, true - I think it's due to Hardy's being a little unsure whether he wanted to depict real people or symbolic people, leading him to do neither successfully.

lonely as a cloud...

09:43 / 15.02.05

I used to read Hardy for pleasure. When sitting the Irish Leaving Certificate (which is the equivalent of the A-Levels, I think), the higher level English course gave the choice of studying either Charles Dickens' Hard Times or Thomas Hardy's The Mayor Of Casterbridge. Our teacher chose Hard Times, which I found relentlessly dull, dreary and depressing. Casterbridge was a hell of a lot more fun in comparison - come on, a guy sells his wife and daughter in order to buy rum-laced porridge! What's not to like about it?
But, yeah, I read Tess, Jude and most of Hardy's stuff back then, and rather enjoyed it. Mind you, those English classics were all the reading material I could afford back then - this was just after Penguin and Wordsworth Press published shedloads of books that sold for £1 each.

14:10 / 15.02.05

I loathe Hardy and in fact English Literature A level put me off proper literature: if I try and read any I get horrible flashbacks and then have to go and read some genre fiction until they go away.
I did Mayor of Casterbridge but spent so long (over) analysing it I can't bear to look at it again. In fact I have a real problem with the teaching of English Literature in the UK, but that's a rant for another time.

Brigade du jour

18:43 / 15.02.05

I quite like Far From The Madding Crowd, chiefly because I have a weakness for fat and/or ugly protagonists (cf A Confederacy Of Dunces, Notre Dame De Paris, Frankenstein, um ... The Blues Brothers etc.).

Jude The Obscure I read one Christmas by the fairy lights on my tiny plastic tree. I kind of enjoyed its utter despair and deprivation, but then I also watched a pirate tape of Last Action Hero so it must have been a fucking depressing Christmas actually ...

Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, well I couldn't get past the bit with the horse dying. It was so full of morbidly pornographic detail I swear the old git was touching himself while he wrote it.

14:23 / 16.02.05

I'd like to heartily celebrate this general panning of Hardy, although to be fair I've only read Tess and even that was back in the mists of A-levels... But my god, I hated it with such a passion. The endless rain, the endless catastrophes, and the endless and uncontrollable urge it caused to pound each and every character into the ground with my bare fists. Yes, my bare naked fists. Messy.

I had no idea that there really were people out there who read Hardy for pleasure. I think you scare me.

On the subject of the study of English Lit at school destroying any interest in books/reading, I'd like to say that it is possible to lose that hatred. School exams stopped me from reading for years, and then I ended up taking a degree in English Lit which I loved so much that I'm going back for more.

But I will never return to Hardy.

(ps. this is my first post on barbelith. *nervous wave*)

Brigade du jour

10:59 / 17.02.05

Welcome doozy floop. Great opportunity for spoonerism in your name!