Jazzy D's Soul Notes

Arthur Miller "A View From The Bridge" (Penguin)



Plays are like poetry in their economy of words. By necessity, plays pack a tremendous amount of character development and tension into a mere couple hours of dialogue. This is certainly true with Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge.

Miller first heard the story of Eddie and his family from a water-front worker and decided to write it as a play. He first wrote it as a "mood experiment" (vii). He "wanted the audience to feel toward it as I had on hearing it for the first time—not so much with heart-wringing sympathy as with wonder" (vii). After a dismal debut which led to a major rewrite, Miller achieved his goal.

This story is full of tension. Imagine the low cello note in the backdrop of a suspense movie. That note builds throughout the play and doesn't relent until the climax. Miller gives us characters and relationships of psychological depth.

This play is a study in desire gone wrong. This is human nature left to play out its vices.

This morning i started this course at  The Office via Learn Direct. Most of the morning was spent being signed up and after a lunch break doing a very simple English test which i passed with flying colours. As usual, among the ten who had attended there was one member that was disruptive with the group dynamics, and hence little was achieved. The real course starts tomorrow ,apparently, and at the end of it if we get through all the modules there is a certificate at the end. (Yawn!)

There was much thumb twiddling and boredom, so i opened my Nexus tablet and read some more poems from the Christina Rossetti collection.

We finished at 3 pm and thus, feeling parched like a sere plant, i went  straight to  the pub for a pint of ale, a frothing Titanic Iron Curtain (6.0 % ABV) based on a Russian Imperial Stout recipe. I could taste  the revolutionary zeal of this beer comrades.

It had been a very wet day and uninspiring, and yet strangely enough, I did not want the day to be a sunny one being stuck indoors with other old reprobates.

After the refreshing ale, i popped into the Demelza chazzer and picked up three books for a pound.



I then caught the train to Faversham and arrived at the Fleur Bookshop and bought another Introduction book.



Then had another pint of ale at the Leading Light pub, a tasty Australian beer (not lager) called Young Henry's Real Ale (4.0 % ABV). I never knew you could get real ale from our Aussie cousins, but this one was really a pleasant surprise. The beer festival ends on Sunday.