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chatting about ddr
 
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Cintifizzo
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0. PostPosted: Thu May 08, 2003 8:02 pm    Post subject: chatting about ddr Reply with quote

are there any chat rooms on AIM for DDR? i know there is a video game one, but ddr? im sure this is either on the wrong forum or just a stupid question and it will be banned.. but can i get an answer before it does?
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Updated: Passed So Deep October 2, 2003
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The EMUpirate
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1. PostPosted: Fri May 09, 2003 8:12 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

"Do not follow where the path may lead... Go instead where there is no
path and leave a trail." -Robert Frost

Everyone is a traveler, choosing the roads to follow on the map
of their continuous journey, life. There is never a straight path that
leaves one with but a sole direction in which to head. Regardless of
the original message that Robert Frost had intended to convey, his
poem, "The Road Not Taken", has left its readers with many different
interpretations. It is one's past, present and the attitude with which
he looks upon his future that determines the shade of the light that
he will see the poem in. In any case however, this poem clearly
demonstrates Frost's belief that it is the road that one chooses that
makes him the man who he is.

"And sorry I could not travel both..." It is always difficult to
make a decision because it is impossible not to wonder about the
opportunity cost, what will be missed out on. There is a strong sense
of regret before the choice is even made and it lies in the knowledge
that in one lifetime, it is impossible to travel down every path. In
an attempt to make a decision, the traveler "looks down one as far as
I could". The road that will be chosen leads to the unknown, as does
any choice in life. As much he may strain his eyes to see as far the
road stretches, eventually it surpasses his vision and he can never
see where it is going to lead. It is the way that he chooses here that
sets him off on his journey and decides where he is going.

"Then took the other, just as fair, and having perhaps the better
claim." What made it have the better claim is that "it was grassy
and wanted wear." It was something that was obviously not for everyone
because it seemed that the majority of people took the other path
therefore he calls it "the road less travelled by". The fact that the
traveler took this path over the more popular, secure one indicates
the type of personality he has, one that does not want to necessarily
follow the crowd but do more of what has never been done, what is new
and different.

"And both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden
black." The leaves had covered the ground and since the time they had
fallen no one had yet to pass by on this road. Perhaps Frost does this
because each time a person comes to the point where they have to make
a choice, it is new to them, somewhere they have never been and they
tend to feel as though no one else had ever been there either. "I kept
the first for another day!" The desire to travel down both paths is
expressed and is not unusual, but "knowing how way leads on to way",
the speaker of this poem realizes that the decision is not just a
temporary one and he "doubted if I should ever come back." This is his
common sense speaking and acknowledging that what he chooses now will
affect every other choice he makes afterward. Once you have performed
an act or spoken a word that crystalizes who you are, there is no
turning back, it cannot be undone.

Once again at the end of the poem the regret hangs over the
traveler like a heavy cloud about to burst. He realizes that at the
end of his life, "somewhere ages and ages hence", he will have regrets
about having never gone back and traveling down the roads he did not
take. Yet he remains proud of his decision and he recognizes that it
was this path that he chose that made him turn out the way and he did
and live his life the way in which he lived. "I took the road less
trvaeled by and that had made all the difference." To this man, what
was most important, what really made the difference, is that he did
what he wanted, even if it meant taking the road less traveled. If he
hadn't, he wouldn't be the same man he is now.

There are many equally valid meanings to this poem and Robert
Frost may have intended this. He may have been trying to achieve a
universal understanding. In other words, there is no judgement, no
specificity, no moral. There is simply a narrator who makes a decision
in his life that had changed the direction of his life from what it
may ahve otherwise been. It allows all readers from all different
experiences to relate to the poem.
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Chukar Partridge
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2. PostPosted: Fri May 09, 2003 8:20 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wing Shooter, you bring up some interesting points. But there's something about it... Anyway:

For most of the last two decades discussion of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" has been dominated by controversies centred on historicist readings of the poem. In particular, this has served to focus attention on how far Wordsworth acknowledged the scenes of poverty and industrial activity in theWye Valley as he made his tour with Dorothy in July 1798, and whether such scenes lie behind the poem that he wrote on July 13th, the last day of his tour. Several historicist critics, notably Jerome McGann, Marjorie Levinson, and Kenneth Johnston, (1) have suggested that Wordsworth strategically suppresses awareness of salient parts of the scene on the Wye—the beggars lurking in the Abbey ruins, the furnaces of the iron forges nearby that burned night and day, the busy river traffic that passed the Abbey plying between Chepstow and Brockweir. The vision of unmediated benefit from Nature that the poem famously provides is, in this view, only a screen on which Wordsworth projects his anxieties. Nature can never be known directly: as Antony Easthope puts it, "Nature exists as we appropriate it." (2) Thus Wordsworth is deceiving himself (and his readers) in claiming that here he felt a spirit that rolls through everything. Such a spirit fails to account for the vagrants and the beggars, or the polluted stream of the Wye.
Following the recent emergence of green readings of Romantic poetry, however, it seems appropriate to return to this poem and reconsider some of the arguments about the place of nature in it, and what the Wye valley specifically might have offered Wordsworth. What evidence does the poem provide that a relationship with nature, of the kind Wordsworth asserts, might be possible? Attention to this dimension of the poem has perhaps been preempted by the historicist accounts of the poem. These have depended in part on assumptions about where the opening scene of the poem is located, raising questions whether the scene is merely an imagined compound of scenes, or whether the scene is actually immaterial to the point of the poem. I will argue that the location of the poem is central to Wordsworth's intentions. I suggest a precise location for it in the Wye valley, based mainly on contemporary evidence, and then show how the various aspects of the location in the poem make a specific contribution to Wordsworth's view of our community with nature. While at this point in history our view of nature may not permit us to "see into the life of things," this essay will review the psychic geography of the poem that led Wordsworth to think he may have done so.
The poem, it must be recalled, is referred to as "Tintern Abbey" only by a courtesy. The poem is not about the Abbey—a circumstance that, as Levinson among others has pointed out, is liable to confuse its readers. (3) But given the pedantically long and precise title that Wordsworth actually gave the poem, "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798" (Wordsworth later changed "Written" to "Composed"), it would seem appropriate to assume precision in the poem itself, unless there is strong evidence to the contrary. On these grounds recent criticism of the poem has at times been misleading, drawing inferences that have little or no support in the poem or in what is known about Wordsworth's circumstances at the time of its composition. In pointing to a few of these problems in the critical literature, I will suggest why it is worth attempting to resolve the location of "Tintern Abbey." The forms of landscape that constitute the scene of the poem make it powerfully iconic, a vehicle for self-understanding that Wordsworth appears to find unique.

Among the many interpretive issues raised by the poem, I will mention three that are representative: Wordsworth's style of landscape description in this poem, his relation to the picturesque tradition, and the iconic role of landscape and human figures in the poem. In each case an element of the poem that was once considered uncomplicated has been made the focus of critical suspicion, serving to undo the poem and dislocate the internal connections on which it depends. Reassessing the significance of these aspects of the poem, however, will not restore the idealist readings that the historicist critics found problematic; rather, it will suggest that a more direct and intimate understanding of nature is encoded by Wordsworth's poem.
First, Wordsworth's lines on the hedgerows have been considered symptomatic of a general vagueness in the poem:

Once again I see
These hedge-rows—hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild. (4)
James Chandler sees the passage as part of a move to abstraction in the opening of "Tintern Abbey": "Sensory apprehension is followed by sensory release, as perception gives way to personification. Indeed, by the end of the passage not just the individual objects but the entire landscape seems to dissolve before our eyes." (5) Similarly, for Levinson these lines are characteristic of a tendency in the poem: "Most readers observe that an object does not materialize in the poem before it is effaced or smudged." (6) Thus she suggests later that "Wordsworth corrects his initial statement ('these hedgerows') as if to acknowledge its inaccuracy." Levinson believes the hedgerows to be "another emblem of enclosure," hence a sign of the rural impoverishment that Wordsworth evades throughout the poem. (7) While objecting to Levinson's reading, Thomas McFarland also finds that the passage apparently "runs off into fanciful imprecision" implying that Wordsworth has not kept his eye on the object. In fact, McFarland argues, the sportive lines are purely imaginative, an instance of the "flow" or reverie that he finds everywhere in the opening of this poem and that dissolves the boundary between fact and fiction. (8)
It is much more likely, however, that what Wordsworth is observing in these lines are hedges that were at one time laid: that is, stems that were at first laid horizontally and interwoven for strength and thickness have now been allowed to grow wild. His description is remarkably compact and precise: "Wordsworth was describing exactly what he saw," argues Mary Wedd. (9) Moreover, since this process takes time, the planting of the hedgerows that Wordsworth saw undoubtedly preceded the great period of enclosure towards the end of the eighteenth century which Levinson has in mind (some hedges in England date back to late medieval times). Since the sportive hedgerows are neither imaginative, nor a mark of enclosure, (10) it remains to ask what Wordsworth has in mind by referring to them.
The hedgerows are an essential, if minor, component of the scene that Wordsworth lays before us. It may be noted that in the order of his phrases he recreates the process of observation: conventional, or schematic expection would first look for hedgerows and find them; yet, a second glance—" hardly hedgerows"—would show the hedges in fact to be running wild. These lines thus invite the reader to replicate Wordsworth's own process of observation, a feature of several other elements in the opening paragraph. An object ("plots of cottage ground"; "pastoral farms") is first named, as an objective component of the scene, or what is to be expected in such a location (perhaps what was remembered from 1793); but it is then qualified in ways that suggest a second more careful focus on the actual details before him. In this respect Wordsworth shows to what extent he has superseded the picturesque mode of viewing that largely predominated in 1793. More important, the process intimated through natural objects here anticipates the modifying process occurring in memory that Wordsworth goes on to describe in the second paragraph.
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Phrekwenci
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3. PostPosted: Fri May 09, 2003 8:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Uh, wow.

This is the most incredible thread I have ever seen.
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Remy
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4. PostPosted: Fri May 09, 2003 9:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Regarding chat - go to the front page, find the link that says "Chat", and read.

Locked.

I will remind our banned users that they were banned for a reason.
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