The Scotto Grotto (org)

okie doke… so I dug into social crit last night.

the two short essays (well, one was a speech, but you know what I mean.) were nice, and I got about midway into C&P. (I also discovered I have about 5 more holiday cards that I thave to send out today…. oopsie, but that’s beside the point) Well… it is translated from Russian. Character names are still foriegn, lots of “ov’s” like Raskolnikov, Svidrigaïlov, Zamitov, and Marmeladov. So far, the book’s about the planning and the execution of a murder, a poor man wiping out a nasty pawnbroker for the money that she has. Quite a lot of imagery, dreams of him visiting his mother’s grave with his father, seeing a horse beaten to death, his cramped apartment, drunks and people being beaten and having reputations ruined by folks who have money… Ultimately the idea of killing goes from a repugnant idea to something that’s reasonable.(He rationalizes it, thinking that he’ll do good works with her money, and that she’s never done anything good with it in her life…so that polishing her off is actually a lesser evil) He ends up blunting her skull with the flat of an axe, and is discovered by her sister, who got her head cleft for her trouble… that’s where I called it quits for the evening.

Overall, it’s a lot quicker read than I’d thought…. maybe a 1/4 into the tale. I’ll be interested in seeing where the religious overtones start to really come in.