Happy New Year 2007

Roundtable

Second Year Roundtable: This roundtable was succinct, well delivered and to the point. 8/10

Happy Holidays!

Wishing you all a happy holiday and all the very best in 2007

Tennessee Williams, 1911 - 1983

Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

I didn't go to the moon, I went much further-for time is the longest distance between two places.

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.

Security is a kind of death.

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

Turn that off! I won't be looked at in this merciless glare! A Streetcar Named Desire

Blanch: I don't want realism.
Mitch: Naw, I guess not.
Blanch: I'll tell you what I want. Magic! A Streetcar Named Desire

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?-I wish I knew...Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can.Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Make voyages! - Attempt them! - there's nothing else... Camino Real

Brick: Well, they say nature hates a vacuum, Big Daddy.
Big Daddy: That's what they say, but sometimes I think that a vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)

Everyone says he's sincere, but everyone isn't sincere. If everyone was sincere who says he's sincere there wouldn't be half so many insincere ones in the world and there would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere ones!

We have to distrust each other. It's our only defence against betrayal.Camino Real

The alafaco of the matter is

Last week was fine. Had a few interesting discussions during the class with my usually wakeful students. This is what keeps the teacher going, a few bright eyes gleaming with intelligence here and there in a sea of faces looking up to you for knowledge and wisdom, or perhaps at the clock above your head. Hard to know which.
Discussed a very challenging poem by William Carlos Williams called "To Waken An Old Lady". The poem is about old age; the pain and inglorious state of growing old and also the richness of experience and memory that is part of its package.

Attended the annual end of the year supper with my students and other colleagues from FACO (see the photos below). It is a rewarding experience to get together with the students in an informal relaxed setting and listen to them telling you about their hopes and dreams for the future. It makes an old teacher feel part of a continuity, and contributing to a chain of renewable energies. It is a good way to welcome the new year.

How to Land on your Feet in the American Literature Exam

1) Read the handout on Practical Criticism.

2) Choose one poem we have discussed during the course and prepare at least three questions about its content.

3) Choose a piece of prose ( short story, play or essay) we have discussed during the course and prepare at least three questions about its content.

4) Make sure your diary is up to date and bring it with you to the exam.

Roundtables

First Year: A very good roundtable, with a fine analysis of the text and germane background information. 8/10






Second Year : I enjoyed this roundtable. It was well organized and was delivered with confidence based on a good grasp of the material. 8/10

Images From a Memorable Night

Tennessee Williams 1911-1983

Garrison Keillor, born August 7 1942

May 30, 2006

There is no monument like a book

Memorial Day is a fading holiday, destined to go the way of the Glorious Fourth and Labor Day, which once had ceremonial functions and now are simply bonus Saturdays. It was a small-town institution and a matter of community pride to honor our dead. The citizenry hiked up to the cemetery on Monday morning behind the VFW honor guard and listened to a speech and sang "America the Beautiful" and stood for a rifle salute and "Taps," and then walked quietly home. It's easier to organize this sort of thing in a town of 2,000 than in a city of a million, so it has faded, a victim of urbanization. And also because the speeches were not so good. And because we are young restless people, not old weepy people.

Americans aren't good at memorials. In the wake of President Kennedy's death, his name was attached to many things, including Idlewild Airport in New York and Cape Canaveral in Florida, but naming things isn't the same as remembering. The memorial airport - Kennedy, LaGuardia, Reagan, George Bush, John Wayne, General Edward Logan, General Billy Mitchell - is an odd notion. Airports are beehives. You get your ticket, go through security, get coffee, go to the gate, wait, board, and at what point do you stop to consider the World War II heroism of Navy flyer Butch O'Hare?

Likewise, the memorial freeway. A freeway is a strip of pockmarked concrete on which the uglier aspects of human nature are played out every day. You would not want the name of anyone you care for put on such a place.

A memorial is where the memory of a person is made manifest, such as Emily Dickinson's quiet house and garden in Amherst, or the restored Lincoln neighborhood in Springfield, or Hyde Park. Or the Civil War battlefields, which are faithfully maintained and staffed with knowledgeable guides. A three-hour visit can transport you back to 1863. The National Bohemian Historic Sites of Greenwich Village and San Francisco are there to be seen, the ghosts of E.E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay and Allen Ginsberg and Jerry Garcia. William Faulkner's house in Oxford, Mississippi. The list goes on.

But why the enormous lump that is Grant's Tomb? And Mount Rushmore? After you've driven the length of South Dakota, four faces carved from rock is not the thrill it ought to be. Add Ronald Reagan's face to it, grinning and winking, and liven up the place. And when will we put a stop to the tradition of the Imperial Presidential Library/Showroom & Temple? Lincoln was one who was worthy of a temple, but his memorial is a cold gloomy cavern. We should take the roof off and let the sun stream in and the rains pour down. It would look better as a ruin.

Anyway, there is no need for a stone memorial to honor the man who wrote "of the people, by the people, for the people" and "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations." He wrote those words himself, sitting at a small desk upstairs in the White House, back at a time when presidents did that. Lincoln lives in the beautiful one-volume Library of America edition of his writings.

No writer needs a memorial. The family of E.B. White decided after he died that the farm in Maine where he wrote his books should not be turned into a museum. If you want to find him, you simply read the essay, "The Death of a Pig," or "Charlotte's Web" or "Here Is New York."

In New York they are trying to figure out how to honor the men and women who went down in the twin towers. Well, the best memorial yet is a lovely book, "102 Minutes." You can visit it anywhere, and it means more than a wall of names, or a reflecting pool. Those people live on in the book, which is about large and small acts of heroism and kindness in the face of death, and you can't say that with stones or reflecting pools. You need words.

© 2006 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, INC.

Woody Allen, 1935-

Everybody says that comedy is harder to do. That's become a truism by now, but it's wrong. Comedy is not harder.The hardest thing is to do good work, whatever it is.

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action.They rented out my room.

His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.

How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?

I am at two with nature.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.

I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.

I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.

Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought-- particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all.

My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers.

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year and spends very little on office supplies.

American Literature Through Journalism

From now on Alafaco is going to bring you one article a week dealing with the subject of American language and literature in current issues of American journals and newspapers.

First Year Alafaco Roundtable

Excellent work. This roundtable displayed first rate delivery and masterful control over the subject. It well deserves 8 out of 10.

Second Year Alafaco Roundtable

A very perceptive roundtable with a good understanding of the text and intelligent questions. I give this roundtable 8 out of 10.

Woody Allen, 1935 -

Toni Morrison, 1931 -

• Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. (Nobel Lecture, 1993)

• The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

• I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

• When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.

• When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.

• If there is a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. (speech)

• What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not? (from Song of Solomon)

• I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that. (from Newsweek interview, 1981)

• If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

• I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races. (Nobel Lecture, 1993)

• In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.
*Becoming an American is based on an attitude: an exclusion of me.

*Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

*Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

*I don't write -ist novels.

*I learned an enormous amount of self-esteem, even though the collapse of the relationship suggested the opposite. I just had to stand up.

*I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

*I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

*It makes me breathless to be told that this is difficult writing-that nobody in the schools is going to want to talk about all of these issues.

*Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963

To Waken an Old Lady

Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing
they are buffeted
by a dark wind --
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
the flock has rested --
the snow
is covered with broken
seedhusks
and the wind tempered
with a shrill
piping of plenty.




To Waken An Old Lady waken=to rouse from inactivity; stir up or excite; arouse; awaken

Old age is
a flight of small flight=A group, especially of birds or aircraft, flying together, flock.
cheeping birds = A faint, shrill sound like that of a young bird; a chirp.
skimming = to pass or glide lightly over or near a surface
bare trees
above a snow glaze. glaze=A thin glassy coating of ice
Gaining and failing gaining=To become fast
they are buffeted buffet=batter
by a dark wind --
But what?
On harsh weedstalks stalk=A stem or similar structure that supports a plant part such as a flower, flower cluster, or leaf
the flock has rested --
the snow
is covered with broken
seedhusks husk=the dry external covering of certain fruits or seeds, esp. of an ear of corn
and the wind tempered temper=to soften or tone down
with a shrill shrill=Sharp or keen to the senses; harshly vivid
piping of plenty piping=characterized by the peaceful music of the pipe plenty=a full or abundant supply or amount

Sherwood Anderson, 1876 - 1941

Hands

Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had been seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds, he could see the public highway along which went a wagon filled with berry pickers returning from the fields. The berry pickers, youths and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy clad in a blue shirt leaped from the wagon and attempted to drag after him one of the maidens, who screamed and protested shrilly. The feet of the boy in the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face of the departing sun. Over the long field came a thin girlish voice. "Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair, it's falling into your eyes," commanded the voice to the man, who was bald and whose nervous little hands fiddled about the bare white forehead as though arranging a mass of tangled locks.

Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years. Among all the people of Winesburg but one had come close to him. With George Willard, son of Tom Willard, the proprietor of the New Willard House, he had formed something like a friendship. George Willard was the reporter on the Winesburg Eagle and sometimes in the evenings he walked out along the highway to Wing Biddlebaum's house. Now as the old man walked up and down on the veranda, his hands moving nervously about, he was hoping that George Willard would come and spend the evening with him. After the wagon containing the berry pickers had passed, he went across the field through the tall mustard weeds and climbing a rail fence peered anxiously along the road to the town. For a moment he stood thus, rubbing his hands together and looking up and down the road, and then, fear overcoming him, ran back to walk again upon the porch on his own house.

In the presence of George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum, who for twenty years had been the town mystery, lost something of his timidity, and his shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts, came forth to look at the world. With the young reporter at his side, he ventured in the light of day into Main Street or strode up and down on the rickety front porch of his own house, talking excitedly. The voice that had been low and trembling became shrill and loud. The bent figure straightened. With a kind of wriggle, like a fish returned to the brook by the fisherman, Biddlebaum the silent began to talk, striving to put into words the ideas that had been accumulated by his mind during long years of silence.

Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender expressive fingers, forever active, forever striving to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery of expression.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and looked with amazement at the quiet inexpressive hands of other men who worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on country roads.

When he talked to George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum closed his fists and beat with them upon a table or on the walls of his house. The action made him more comfortable. If the desire to talk came to him when the two were walking in the fields, he sought out a stump or the top board of a fence and with his hands pounding busily talked with renewed ease.

The story of Wing Biddlebaum's hands is worth a book in itself. Sympathetically set forth it would tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men. It is a job for a poet. In Winesburg the hands had attracted attention merely because of their activity. With them Wing Biddlebaum had picked as high as a hundred and forty quarts of strawberries in a day. They became his distinguishing feature, the source of his fame. Also they made more grotesque an already grotesque and elusive individuality. Winesburg was proud of the hands of Wing Biddlebaum in the same spirit in which it was proud of Banker White's new stone house and Wesley Moyer's bay stallion, Tony Tip, that had won the two-fifteen trot at the fall races in Cleveland.

As for George Willard, he had many times wanted to ask about the hands. At times an almost overwhelming curiosity had taken hold of him. He felt that there must be a reason for their strange activity and their inclination to keep hidden away and only a growing respect for Wing Biddlebaum kept him from blurting out the questions that were often in his mind.

Once he had been on the point of asking. The two were walking in the fields on a summer afternoon and had stopped to sit upon a grassy bank. All afternoon Wing Biddlebaum had talked as one inspired. By a fence he had stopped and beating like a giant woodpecker upon the top board had shouted at George Willard, condemning his tendency to be too much influenced by the people about him, "You are destroying yourself," he cried. "You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in town here. You hear them talk and you try to imitate them."

On the grassy bank Wing Biddlebaum had tried again to drive his point home. His voice became soft and reminiscent, and with a sigh of contentment he launched into a long rambling talk, speaking as one lost in a dream.

Out of the dream Wing Biddlebaum made a picture for George Willard. In the picture men lived again in a kind of pastoral golden age. Across a green open country came clean-limbed young men, some afoot, some mounted upon horses. In crowds the young men came to gather about the feet of an old man who sat beneath a tree in a tiny garden and who talked to them.

Wing Biddlebaum became wholly inspired. For once he forgot the hands. Slowly they stole forth and lay upon George Willard's shoulders. Something new and bold came into the voice that talked. "You must try to forget all you have learned," said the old man. "You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices."

Pausing in his speech, Wing Biddlebaum looked long and earnestly at George Willard. His eyes glowed. Again he raised the hands to caress the boy and then a look of horror swept over his face.

With a convulsive movement of his body, Wing Biddlebaum sprang to his feet and thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets. Tears came to his eyes. "I must be getting along home. I can talk no more with you," he said nervously.

Without looking back, the old man had hurried down the hillside and across a meadow, leaving George Willard perplexed and frightened upon the grassy slope. With a shiver of dread the boy arose and went along the road toward town. "I'll not ask him about his hands," he thought, touched by the memory of the terror he had seen in the man's eyes. "There's something wrong, but I don't want to know what it is. His hands have something to do with his fear of me and of everyone."

And George Willard was right. Let us look briefly into the story of the hands. Perhaps our talking of them will arouse the poet who will tell the hidden wonder story of the influence for which the hands were but fluttering pennants of promise.

In his youth Wing Biddlebaum had been a school teacher in a town in Pennsylvania. He was not then known as Wing Biddlebaum, but went by the less euphonic name of Adolph Myers. As Adolph Myers he was much loved by the boys of his school.

Adolph Myers was meant by nature to be a teacher of youth. He was one of those rare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle that it passes as a lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men.

And yet that is but crudely stated. It needs the poet there. With the boys of his school, Adolph Myers had walked in the evening or had sat talking until dusk upon the schoolhouse steps lost in a kind of dream. Here and there went his hands, caressing the shoulders of the boys, playing about the tousled heads. As he talked his voice became soft and musical. There was a caress in that also. In a way the voice and the hands, the stroking of the shoulders and the touching of the hair were a part of the schoolmaster's effort to carry a dream into the young minds. By the caress that was in his fingers he expressed himself. He was one of those men in whom the force that creates life is diffused, not centralized. Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they began also to dream.

And then the tragedy. A half-witted boy of the school became enamored of the young master. In his bed at night he imagined unspeakable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts. Strange, hideous accusations fell from his loose-hung lips. Through the Pennsylvania town went a shiver. Hidden, shadowy doubts that had been in men's minds concerning Adolph Myers were galvanized into beliefs.

The tragedy did not linger. Trembling lads were jerked out of bed and questioned. "He put his arms about me," said one. "His fingers were always playing in my hair," said another.

One afternoon a man of the town, Henry Bradford, who kept a saloon, came to the schoolhouse door. Calling Adolph Myers into the school yard he began to beat him with his fists. As his hard knuckles beat down into the frightened face of the schoolmaster, his wrath became more and more terrible. Screaming with dismay, the children ran here and there like disturbed insects. "I'll teach you to put your hands on my boy, you beast," roared the saloon keeper, who, tired of beating the master, had begun to kick him about the yard.

Adolph Myers was driven from the Pennsylvania town in the night. With lanterns in their hands a dozen men came to the door of the house where he lived alone and commanded that he dress and come forth. It was raining and one of the men had a rope in his hands. They had intended to hang the schoolmaster, but something in his figure, so small, white, and pitiful, touched their hearts and they let him escape. As he ran away into the darkness they repented of their weakness and ran after him, swearing and throwing sticks and great balls of soft mud at the figure that screamed and ran faster and faster into the darkness.

For twenty years Adolph Myers had lived alone in Winesburg. He was but forty but looked sixty-five. The name of Biddlebaum he got from a box of goods seen at a freight station as he hurried through an eastern Ohio town. He had an aunt in Winesburg, a black-toothed old woman who raised chickens, and with her he lived until she died. He had been ill for a year after the experience in Pennsylvania, and after his recovery worked as a day laborer in the fields, going timidly about and striving to conceal his hands. Although he did not understand what had happened he felt that the hands must be to blame. Again and again the fathers of the boys had talked of the hands. "Keep your hands to yourself," the saloon keeper had roared, dancing, with fury in the schoolhouse yard.

Upon the veranda of his house by the ravine, Wing Biddlebaum continued to walk up and down until the sun had disappeared and the road beyond the field was lost in the grey shadows. Going into his house he cut slices of bread and spread honey upon them. When the rumble of the evening train that took away the express cars loaded with the day's harvest of berries had passed and restored the silence of the summer night, he went again to walk upon the veranda. In the darkness he could not see the hands and they became quiet. Although he still hungered for the presence of the boy, who was the medium through which he expressed his love of man, the hunger became again a part of his loneliness and his waiting. Lighting a lamp, Wing Biddlebaum washed the few dishes soiled by his simple meal and, setting up a folding cot by the screen door that led to the porch, prepared to undress for the night. A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth one by one with unbelievable rapidity. In the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary.

Round Table First Year, November 30

Very well coordinated and coincise. Next time however, try to enlist the participation of the whole class by presenting a few questions about the text. This seminar gets 8 out of 10.