"The Prophet's Hair," contains mystery, magic, and more significantly, morality, as an overt theme carried throughout the story.
The Prophet's Hair," is more like a moralistic fairy tale using religious elements: a silver vial containing a famous relic brings catastrophe upon the greedy.
'The Prophet's Hair', extends Rushdie's range into the magical realism he exploited so effectively in Midnight's Children. The form is that of a folk tale, the tone crisp, swift and pointed. But for those who read the story years ago in the London Review of Books, extra-textual considerations may loom largest. Which of us, as we revelled in what seemed like story-telling at its purest and most sovereign, could have guessed that the fundamentalist madness which destroys the lives of all the protagonists would one day be visited on the author himself?
The Prophet's Hair," a charming, folkloric story, is Rushdie at his best. In the opening paragraph, a "rich idiot" from Srinigar goes looking for a dependable professional burglar in the seediest part of town, and is promptly robbed. It turns out that a moneylender has found the eponymous relic and, despite the hue and cry raised by its loss, declines to hand it to the authorities, justifying himself with the thought: "the Prophet would have disapproved mightily of this relic-worship." The unforeseen consequences of the relic's presence lead to the search for a burglar to take it away.
Salman Rushdie guides the reader through a tale of greed, betrayal, and the testing of human relationships. In many ways, the story reads like a fable, with the exception of Rushdie's typical English vernacular and ancedotes. Most of us can remember Aesop's Fables tales of moral dilemmas. A fable or parable, to some, have moral guidlines and lessons to learn from. In Rushdie's short story, his character's are in constant moral dilemma's when faced with the relic of the Prophet's Hair. The hair, supposedly belonged to the prophet Mohammed, and its significance to the community was undoubtedly important.
The theft of a holy relic from the Hazratbal mosque at Srinagar, seems more fantastic but even this is apparently based on an actual occurence. In this story, a wealthy Indian moneylender finds the missing relic one of the Prophet Muhammad's hairs and forsakes liberal self-indulgence for pious self-denial. His fanaticism is such that it eventually brings about not only his own death, but that of his family, through madness, suicide and murder. For a writer in [Salman Rushdie]'s situation to attempt even this kind of veiled satire when the object of the satire is the state of Islam seems brave to the point of foolhardiness. Perhaps he feels he has nothing more to lose by remaining silent on such themes.
Rushdie depicts the brutality of certain Indian traditions with wonderful irony: With a parent's absolutist love, Sheikh Sin, had made sure they were all provided with a lifelong source of high income by crippling them at birth, so that, as they dragged themselves around the city, they earned excellent money in the begging business.
Answer: Rushdie also recasts the relic from holy relic to secular icon by removing it from its religious framework (it had been removed from the mosque, where it was worshiped as a religious relic, placed into the hands of a moneylender (a profession that Mohammed forbade), where it was viewed as a prized possession for its rarity and monetary value but not its religious significance, then it was stolen by the thief, Sin, who viewed it as a means to retire – again monetary value - and avoid an ignominious death). How does this recasting of the Prophet's hair from holy to profane affect Rushdie's view of Islam and
the Prophet?
Despite being reframed from holy relic to secular icon, the Prophet's hair continues to work miracles. Discuss
11 December 2010
09 December 2010
Dramatic monologue in poetry, also known as a persona poem, shares many characteristics with a theatrical monologue: an audience is implied; there is no dialogue; and the poet speaks through an assumed voice—a character, a fictional identity, or a persona. Because a dramatic monologue is by definition one person’s speech, it is offered without overt analysis or commentary, placing emphasis on subjective qualities that are left to the audience to interpret.
Prufrock
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, commonly known as Prufrock, is a poem by T. S. Eliot, begun in February 1910 and published in Chicago in June 1915. Described as a "drama of literary anguish," it presents a stream of consciousness in the form of a dramatic monologue, and marked the beginning of Eliot's career as an influential poet. With its weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, sense of decay, and awareness of mortality, Prufrock has become one of the most recognized voices in 20th-century literature,[1] and is the quintessential urban zeitgeist of the 20th century.
02 December 2010
Ray Douglas Bradbury, August 22 1920 -
Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois (1920). When he was 12 years old, a traveling carnival came to town, and Bradbury met a magician named Mr. Electrico, who talked to him about reincarnation and immortality, and those ideas excited Bradbury so much that he withdrew from his friends and devoted himself to his imagination. He said, "I don't know if I believe in previous lives, I'm not sure I can live forever. But that young boy believed in both, and I have let him have his [way]. He has written all my stories and books for me."
One night, Bradbury was out for a walk when a policeman pulled up on the side of the road to ask what he was doing. He said, "I was so irritated the police would bother to ask me what I was doing — when I wasn't doing anything — that I went home and wrote [a] story." That story became a novella called "The Fireman" and eventually grew into his first and best-known novel, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), about a man named Guy Montag who lives in a future world in which books are outlawed and burned wherever they're found. Montag is one of the firemen whose job it is to burn the books. One night he takes a book home that he was supposed to destroy and reads it. The act of reading persuades him to join an underground revolutionary group that is keeping literature alive.
Ray Bradbury said, "I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it."
01 December 2010
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). Prufrock and Other Observations. 1917.
T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri (1888). His poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is one of the most anthologized poems in the English language. It begins:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Eliot wrote most of the poem when he was only 22 years old. While it was a work in progress, he subtitled the poem "Prufrock among the women." The part "The Love Song of" came from a Rudyard Kipling poem, "The Love Song of Har Dyal." At the time, T.S. Eliot went by "T. Sterns Eliot." a formulation that he emulated in the title "J. Alfred Prufrock." When he was growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, there was a furniture store there named "Prufrock-Littau Company" — but decades after the poem was published, Eliot wrote to a friend: "I did not have, at the time of writing the poem, and have not yet recovered, any recollection of having acquired this name in any way, but I think that it must be assumed that I did, and that the memory has been obliterated."
The poem was published a few years after it was written, with the encouragement of Ezra Pound, who was serving as Poetry magazine's overseas editor. He wrote in 1915 to Harriet Monroe about T.S. Eliot: "He has actually trained himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN. The rest of the promising young have done one or the other, but never both." Aside from stuff that had appeared in school newspapers and magazines, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was T.S. Eliot's first published poem. In 1917, it appeared in book form, the first of 12 Eliot poems in Prufrock and Other Observations.
Other famous poems by T.S. Eliot include "The Wasteland," which begins "April is the cruellest month" — and "The Hollow Men," which concludes:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats 5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question … 10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, 15
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, 20
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; 25
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate; 30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go 35
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— 40
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare 45
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, 50
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all— 55
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? 60
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress 65
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets 70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! 75
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? 80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, 85
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while, 90
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— 95
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while, 100
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: 105
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . . 110
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use, 115
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old … 120
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me. 125
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown 130
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963
A Time to Talk
When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.
When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.
Jerome David Salinger, 1919 - 2010
Jerome David Salinger, the novelist J.D. Salinger, was born in New York City in 1919. He wanted to be a writer, and his dream was to publish his fiction in The New Yorker, which rejected his work over and over. In November of 1941, he finally got an acceptance letter from The New Yorker for a short story called "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," about a teenager named Holden Caulfield. It was set to come out in the Christmas issue, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the story was put on hold. Salinger was drafted into the Army, deployed in the ground force invasion of Normandy, and he was part of the Battle of the Bulge and some of the worst fighting of WWII. When the war ended, Salinger checked into an Army general hospital in Nuremberg, suffering from shell shock. In 1946, The New Yorker finally published "Slight Rebellion Off Madison." Salinger took the character of Holden Caulfield, and he wrote an entire novel about him. And even though it got mixed reviews and Salinger refused to help with publicity at all, it was a best seller: The Catcher in the Rye (1951). And Salinger became a celebrity, which he hated, so he became a recluse.
“You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart.”
"I hate phonies."
"She is the queen of the phonies."
"I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody."
"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as some day, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
"It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to."
"What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while...What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
"I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.... If they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy."
"I don’t know about bores. Maybe you shouldn’t feel too sorry if you see some swell girl getting married to them. They don’t hurt anybody most of them, and maybe they’re all terrific whistlers or something. Who the hell knows? Not me."
"I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect."
"Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody."
William Maxwell Hetherington, 1803 - 1865
Oh! ! beautiful is God’s green earth I
When in the gentle Spring
Its flowery beauties leap to birth,
And wild-wood echoes ring.
Instructive with melodious joy,
Glad Nature’s anthem pure and high,
To Him whose goodness gave them birth
Oh ! beautiful ia God’s green earth!
When in the gentle Spring
Its flowery beauties leap to birth,
And wild-wood echoes ring.
Instructive with melodious joy,
Glad Nature’s anthem pure and high,
To Him whose goodness gave them birth
Oh ! beautiful ia God’s green earth!
24 November 2010
Armistead Maupin, 1944 -
American writer Armistead Maupin was born Armistead Jones, in Washington, D.C. (1944). After he graduated from college in 1966, he worked for a while at a North Carolina television station managed by the future Senator Jesse Helms. From there, he joined the Navy, served in Vietnam, then returned to the United States to launch a career in journalism. In 1975, he moved from South Carolina to San Francisco, where he landed a job as a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. It was in the pages of the Chronicle that he ran his popular serial "Tales of the City." The stories were later published as a series of six books, beginning with Tales of the City in 1978. The tales follow the adventures and relationships of a group of gay and straight characters living in a boarding house at 28 Barbary Lane. He said: "When you're a gay person, it's much easier to observe the gulf between truth and illusion, because you're often a part of creating it. You learn at a very early age to wear disguises. My work is about taking off those disguises."
Wallace Stevens, 1879 - 1955
The poet Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1879). His father was a lawyer with a strong interest in literature. Wallace went to Harvard and then got a law degree from New York University. His first book of poems, Harmonium, was published in 1923. Although he wrote highly imaginative poems, he led a simple, uneventful life as an executive at a Hartford, Connecticut insurance company. Stevens kept his life as a poet separate from his life as an executive. He would wake up at six o'clock to read for two hours before going to work, and he wrote many of his poems while walking home from the office in the evening. He wrote some of his best poetry after he reached the age of sixty, including the collections Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), The Auroras of Autumn (1947), and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (1950).
One time he was at a party in Florida, and he made a disparaging comment about Ernest Hemingway to a friend. Hemingway's sister overheard the comment, left the party in tears, and immediately told her brother. Hemingway got to the party just as Stevens was saying that if Hemingway were there, he would flatten him in a single blow. Stevens then saw Hemingway and tried to do exactly that, but his punch missed. Hemingway knocked Stevens down several times, and when Stevens finally landed a punch, he broke his hand on Hemingway's jaw. The two literary greats later reconciled because Stevens did not want the story to get back to his coworkers at the insurance company.
Wallace Stevens said, "To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it's all worry and headaches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds." The following poem is called The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
One time he was at a party in Florida, and he made a disparaging comment about Ernest Hemingway to a friend. Hemingway's sister overheard the comment, left the party in tears, and immediately told her brother. Hemingway got to the party just as Stevens was saying that if Hemingway were there, he would flatten him in a single blow. Stevens then saw Hemingway and tried to do exactly that, but his punch missed. Hemingway knocked Stevens down several times, and when Stevens finally landed a punch, he broke his hand on Hemingway's jaw. The two literary greats later reconciled because Stevens did not want the story to get back to his coworkers at the insurance company.
Wallace Stevens said, "To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it's all worry and headaches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds." The following poem is called The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892
Song of the Open Road
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)
David Henry Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau, was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts (1817). He's the author of Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) and the essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849).
He became the first member of his family to go to college when he enrolled at Harvard in 1833 at age sixteen. He wasn't especially happy with the teaching methods used at Harvard. Ralph Waldo Emerson is said to have remarked that most of the branches of learning were taught at Harvard and Thoreau to have replied, "Yes, indeed, all the branches and none of the roots." He graduated in 1837, ninth in his class, and refused a diploma, thinking there were better ways to spend five dollars.
He changed his name to Henry David and became a teacher. When criticized by the supervisor of the local public school for not using corporal punishment on his students, Thoreau thrashed a random group of his pupils to illustrate the senselessness of it all and resigned from the school.
When Emerson moved to Concord, Thoreau lived with him and did odd jobs around the house. Emerson encouraged Thoreau to write poetry, and suggested that Thoreau keep a journal, both of which Thoreau continued to do his entire life.
In 1845, when Thoreau was twenty-seven, he built a small cabin on the edge of Walden Pond, a small lake near Concord, and moved there. His motto was "Simplify, simplify, simplify." He said that his goal was "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach." And he said, "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up." Walden was published in 1854.
Thoreau said, "Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something."
Prayer
Great God, I ask for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe'er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou'st distinguished me.
That my weak hand may equal my firm faith
And my life practice what my tongue saith
That my low conduct may not show
Nor my relenting lines
That I thy purpose did not know
Or overrated thy designs.
Walden (1854). Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."
22 November 2010
Salman Rushdie, 1947 -
The novelist Salman Rushdie, was born in Bombay, India (1947). His parents sent him to school in England, where he didn't get along with his classmates, and he missed India terribly. And then, while he was in school, his parents were forced to leave Bombay and move to Pakistan because they were Muslims. Rushdie was crushed. He didn't want to stay in England, but now he no longer had a home in India. So he enrolled at Cambridge and then got a job writing copy for an advertising company.
Working at the advertising company just two days a week, he took five years to produce Midnight's Children (1981), about the India that he missed so much. It's the story of a group of 1,001 children all born in the hour after midnight on the day that India gained independence. In the novel, each of those children gains magical powers. The novel is told from the point of view of a boy who receives the power to read minds, and who attempts to draw together all the other midnight's children, even as India and Pakistan are sliding toward war.
The book won the Booker Prize and became a huge success, among both Westerners and Indians. Only Rushdie's family hated the book, because he had incorporated a lot of family secrets into the storyline.
Rushdie published his third novel, Shame, in 1983, and then in 1987, he came out with a book called The Satanic Verses, which got mixed reviews. Most Western critics didn't notice that it would be offensive to Muslims. But turned out that Rushdie had made a lot of obscure jokes about the Islamic religion in the book, and one section of The Satanic Verses seemed to suggest that the Quran is not the direct word of God. A month after the book came out, it was banned in India and book burnings throughout the Muslim world followed. The Ayatollah Khomeini eventually announced that Rushdie should be sentenced to death for blasphemy, and he placed a $1.5 million bounty on Rushdie's head.
Rushdie had to go into hiding. His Italian translator was threatened and stabbed. His Japanese translator was murdered. His Norwegian publisher was attacked and left for dead. Rushdie spent the next nine years moving from place to place. He lived in more than 30 houses. He found it difficult to write, so he helped set up an international organization for the protection of persecuted writers. The death sentence was finally lifted in 1998.
Rushdie later said, "The experience taught me ... a lot about the human capacity for hatred. But it also taught me the opposite: the capacity for solidarity and friendship. ... My Norwegian publisher was shot three times in the back and ... his first reaction, upon recovering from the bullet wounds, was to reprint the book. That's courage."
Back when he was still in hiding, a group of writers and literary critics distributed a series of buttons that said, "I am Salman Rushdie," to express their solidarity with him. Rushdie has since acquired a few of those buttons, and he said, "I still wear them sometimes, because, after all, I am Salman Rushdie."
Salman Rushdie said, "A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep."
Working at the advertising company just two days a week, he took five years to produce Midnight's Children (1981), about the India that he missed so much. It's the story of a group of 1,001 children all born in the hour after midnight on the day that India gained independence. In the novel, each of those children gains magical powers. The novel is told from the point of view of a boy who receives the power to read minds, and who attempts to draw together all the other midnight's children, even as India and Pakistan are sliding toward war.
The book won the Booker Prize and became a huge success, among both Westerners and Indians. Only Rushdie's family hated the book, because he had incorporated a lot of family secrets into the storyline.
Rushdie published his third novel, Shame, in 1983, and then in 1987, he came out with a book called The Satanic Verses, which got mixed reviews. Most Western critics didn't notice that it would be offensive to Muslims. But turned out that Rushdie had made a lot of obscure jokes about the Islamic religion in the book, and one section of The Satanic Verses seemed to suggest that the Quran is not the direct word of God. A month after the book came out, it was banned in India and book burnings throughout the Muslim world followed. The Ayatollah Khomeini eventually announced that Rushdie should be sentenced to death for blasphemy, and he placed a $1.5 million bounty on Rushdie's head.
Rushdie had to go into hiding. His Italian translator was threatened and stabbed. His Japanese translator was murdered. His Norwegian publisher was attacked and left for dead. Rushdie spent the next nine years moving from place to place. He lived in more than 30 houses. He found it difficult to write, so he helped set up an international organization for the protection of persecuted writers. The death sentence was finally lifted in 1998.
Rushdie later said, "The experience taught me ... a lot about the human capacity for hatred. But it also taught me the opposite: the capacity for solidarity and friendship. ... My Norwegian publisher was shot three times in the back and ... his first reaction, upon recovering from the bullet wounds, was to reprint the book. That's courage."
Back when he was still in hiding, a group of writers and literary critics distributed a series of buttons that said, "I am Salman Rushdie," to express their solidarity with him. Rushdie has since acquired a few of those buttons, and he said, "I still wear them sometimes, because, after all, I am Salman Rushdie."
Salman Rushdie said, "A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep."
18 November 2010
Edgar Lee Masters, 1868 - 1950
American poet Edgar Lee Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas, in 1868. Masters grew up in the small town of Lewiston, Illinois, in the Spoon River valley. His father was a lawyer who didn't approve of his son's ambition to write, so Masters became a lawyer in Chicago. While he practiced law, he started to write and publish poetry and plays under the pseudonym Dexter Wallace, including A Book of Verses (1898) and Maximilian (1902), but he didn't write anything particularly successful. He dreamed of writing a novel about the small-town Illinois of his childhood.
Then in 1909, he got a gift from Marion Reedy, the editor of Reedy's Mirror in St. Louis. Masters had been submitting poems to the journal, and Reedy rejected all his poems, but he liked corresponding with Masters, and he sent him a copy of Selected Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, a book of poems from the Classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature. Most of these poems are in the form of epigrams. After Masters read the Greek Anthology, he decided to change the form of his novel and make it into a series of monologues. These monologues would be set in a graveyard, and they would be anecdotes spoken by more than 200 dead citizens of a small town. He based the small town on a combination of Lewiston, where he grew up, and nearby Petersburg, where his grandparents had their farm, but he named it after the river that ran by these towns, and these monologues became Spoon River Anthology (1915). It was an immediate commercial success, one of the most popular books of poetry in American history. But the monologues were often cynical and showed the hypocrisies of small-town life, and so Spoon River Anthology wasn't popular with everyone. It made Masters an outcast from the small towns where he grew up — he had based many of his characters directly on people there, hadn't even changed their last names, and many of them were horrified by his unflattering depictions of them. And even beyond these towns, lots of people were scandalized by Masters's cynical view of small-town America and considered him unpatriotic. He continued writing but he never achieved the same level of success that he had with Spoon River Anthology.
Edgar Lee Masters said, "How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?"
And he wrote in Spoon River Anthology:
"Mickey M'Grew"
It was just like everything else in life:
Something outside myself drew me down,
My own strength never failed me.
Why, there was the time I earned the money
With which to go away to school,
And my father suddenly needed help
And I had to give him all of it.
Just so it went till I ended up
A man-of-all-work in Spoon River.
Thus when I got the water-tower cleaned,
And they hauled me up the seventy feet,
I unhooked the rope from my waist,
And laughingly flung my giant arms
Over the smooth steel lips of the top of the tower —
But they slipped from the treacherous slime,
And down, down, down, I plunged
Through bellowing darkness!
Then in 1909, he got a gift from Marion Reedy, the editor of Reedy's Mirror in St. Louis. Masters had been submitting poems to the journal, and Reedy rejected all his poems, but he liked corresponding with Masters, and he sent him a copy of Selected Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, a book of poems from the Classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature. Most of these poems are in the form of epigrams. After Masters read the Greek Anthology, he decided to change the form of his novel and make it into a series of monologues. These monologues would be set in a graveyard, and they would be anecdotes spoken by more than 200 dead citizens of a small town. He based the small town on a combination of Lewiston, where he grew up, and nearby Petersburg, where his grandparents had their farm, but he named it after the river that ran by these towns, and these monologues became Spoon River Anthology (1915). It was an immediate commercial success, one of the most popular books of poetry in American history. But the monologues were often cynical and showed the hypocrisies of small-town life, and so Spoon River Anthology wasn't popular with everyone. It made Masters an outcast from the small towns where he grew up — he had based many of his characters directly on people there, hadn't even changed their last names, and many of them were horrified by his unflattering depictions of them. And even beyond these towns, lots of people were scandalized by Masters's cynical view of small-town America and considered him unpatriotic. He continued writing but he never achieved the same level of success that he had with Spoon River Anthology.
Edgar Lee Masters said, "How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?"
And he wrote in Spoon River Anthology:
"Mickey M'Grew"
It was just like everything else in life:
Something outside myself drew me down,
My own strength never failed me.
Why, there was the time I earned the money
With which to go away to school,
And my father suddenly needed help
And I had to give him all of it.
Just so it went till I ended up
A man-of-all-work in Spoon River.
Thus when I got the water-tower cleaned,
And they hauled me up the seventy feet,
I unhooked the rope from my waist,
And laughingly flung my giant arms
Over the smooth steel lips of the top of the tower —
But they slipped from the treacherous slime,
And down, down, down, I plunged
Through bellowing darkness!
Touched by an Angel
We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.
We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.
Maya Angelou
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.
We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.
Maya Angelou
17 November 2010
Dorothy Parker, August 22 1893 - June 7 1967
Dorothy Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild in West End, New Jersey (1893). She's remembered as one of the greatest wits of the 20th century, even though she only wrote a few books of poetry and short stories. She started her career just after World War I, in an era when slick magazines were one of the most popular forms of entertainment. The writers for these magazines wrote in a jaded, wisecracking tone of voice, and it was Dorothy Parker who proved that women could wisecrack just as well as any man.
Parker was four feet and eleven inches tall, and she loved to swear. The drama critic Alexander Woollcott described her as, "A blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth." She said, "[I'm] just a little Jewish girl, trying to be cute."
She was the only woman who belonged to the famous group of New York writers who met every day at the Round Table of the Algonquin Hotel to trade wit and gossip. That circle included Harold Ross, who created the New Yorker, and he said he borrowed the tone of voice for his magazine from those Algonquin meetings. He later hired Parker as a columnist.
Much of her writing was collected in the Portable Dorothy Parker, which has been in print since 1944. Of the first ten Portables published by Viking, only the Portable Shakespeare and the Portable Bible sold as well and as steadily as the Portable Parker.
Dorothy Parker said, "I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true."
And, "People are more fun than anybody."
I'm never going to be famous. I don't do anything, not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.
• I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.
• Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
• I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.
• You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.
• Women and elephants never forget.
• I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound -- if I can remember any of the damn things.
• Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.
• Four be the things I'd have been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.
• A girl's best friend is her mutter.
• I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.
• Take care of luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.
• Salary is no object; I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.
• Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.
• The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.'
• If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.
• The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
• The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires.
• Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word.
• It serves me right for keeping all my eggs in one bastard.
• All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.
• Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.
• Scratch a lover, and find a foe.
• Men don't like nobility in woman. Not any men. I suppose it is because the men like to have the copyrights on nobility -- if there is going to be anything like that in a relationship.
• That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them.
• People are more fun than anybody.
• I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host.
• I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.
• You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.
• Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life.
• The Monte Carlo casino refused to admit me until I was properly dressed so I went and found my stockings, and then came back and lost my shirt.
• Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
• This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
• She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.
• The only ism Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.
Mrs. George Reece by Edgar Lee Masters, 1868 - 1950
"Mrs. George Reece" by Edgar Lee Masters from Spoon River Anthology
Mrs. George Reece
To this generation I would say:
Memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty.
It may serve a turn in your life.
My husband had nothing to do
With the fall of the bank—he was only cashier.
The wreck was due to the president, Thomas Rhodes,
And his vain, unscrupulous son.
Yet my husband was sent to prison,
And I was left with the children,
To feed and clothe and school them.
And I did it, and sent them forth
Into the world all clean and strong,
And all through the wisdom of Pope, the poet:
"Act well your part, there all the honor lies."
______________________
Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology. 1916.
John M. Church
I WAS attorney for the “Q”
And the Indemnity Company which insured
The owners of the mine.
I pulled the wires with judge and jury,
And the upper courts, to beat the claims
Of the crippled, the widow and orphan,
And made a fortune thereat.
The bar association sang my praises
In a high-flown resolution.
And the floral tributes were many—
But the rats devoured my heart
And a snake made a nest in my skull!
Mrs. George Reece
To this generation I would say:
Memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty.
It may serve a turn in your life.
My husband had nothing to do
With the fall of the bank—he was only cashier.
The wreck was due to the president, Thomas Rhodes,
And his vain, unscrupulous son.
Yet my husband was sent to prison,
And I was left with the children,
To feed and clothe and school them.
And I did it, and sent them forth
Into the world all clean and strong,
And all through the wisdom of Pope, the poet:
"Act well your part, there all the honor lies."
______________________
Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology. 1916.
John M. Church
I WAS attorney for the “Q”
And the Indemnity Company which insured
The owners of the mine.
I pulled the wires with judge and jury,
And the upper courts, to beat the claims
Of the crippled, the widow and orphan,
And made a fortune thereat.
The bar association sang my praises
In a high-flown resolution.
And the floral tributes were many—
But the rats devoured my heart
And a snake made a nest in my skull!
14 November 2010
Unreliable narrator
An unreliable narrator, a narrator whose account of events appears to be faulty, misleadingly biased, or otherwise distorted, so that it departs from the ‘true’ understanding of events shared between the reader and the implied author. The discrepancy between the unreliable narrator's view of events and the view that readers suspect to be more accurate creates a sense of irony. The term does not necessarily mean that such a narrator is morally untrustworthy or a habitual liar (although this may be true in some cases), since the category also includes harmlessly naïve, ‘fallible’, or ill‐informed narrators. A classic case is Huck in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): this 14‐year‐oldnarrator does not understand the full significance of the events he is relating and commenting on. Other kinds of unreliable narrator seem to be falsifying their accounts from motives of vanity or malice. In either case, the reader is offered the pleasure of picking up ‘clues’ in the narrative that betray the true state of affairs. This kind of first‐person narrative is particularly favoured in 20th‐century fiction: a virtuoso display of its use is William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1928), which employs three unreliable narrators—an imbecile, a suicidal student, and an irritable racist bigot.
07 November 2010
Delta Autumn by William Faulkner, 1897 - 1962
William (Cuthbert) Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi (1897). He grew up listening to stories about his family, including several stories about his great-grandfather, a colonel in the Civil War, who once killed a man with a bowie knife and later killed another man who tried to avenge the first man's death. And then there were stories about Faulkner's father, who was once sitting in a drug store with a girl when the girl's spurned boyfriend walked in and shot Faulkner's father in the back with a shotgun. Somehow, Faulkner's father survived.
Aside from family lore, Faulkner's literary education came not from school but from an older friend named Phil Stone, who had gone to Yale. At that time, Faulkner had been reading Moby-Dick and Shakespeare, but it was Phil Stone who introduced him to modern literature like the works of James Joyce and Joseph Conrad.
After dropping out of high school, Faulkner spent several years trying to figure out what to do with himself. He went to the University of Mississippi for a year, where he got a D in his English class. He went to New York City, where he was fired from a job at a bookstore because he told the customers they were reading trash. Then he worked for a while at a post office, until he lost that job because he failed to deliver the mail and often closed down early to go golfing.
He published a book of poems and two relatively conventional novels, and then he met the writer Sherwood Anderson, who advised him to write about his hometown. So Faulkner began observing Oxford, Mississippi, more closely, and he began to invent an imaginary version of Oxford he called Jefferson, located in an imaginary county he called Yoknapatawpha.
He later said, "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top."
One of the first novels he wrote about his new imaginary landscape was The Sound and the Fury, about a wild young woman named Caddy Compson and her three brothers: Benjy, who is mentally handicapped; Quentin, who falls in love with her; and Jason, who feels she has ruined the family's name by getting pregnant out of wedlock.
Faulkner went on writing through the 1930s, but he never really broke through to popular success. By 1944, all but one of his books were out of print. But in 1945, Malcolm Cowley helped publish a Portable Faulkner edition, which brought attention back to his work. Then in 1949, he won the Nobel Prize for literature. All his books were brought back into print, and they have stayed in print ever since.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949
William Faulkner's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
.............
* The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
*Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.
...............
Characters:
Isaac McCaslin (Uncle Ike): The main character. He is an old man who is deeply committed to nature and hunting. He has trouble sleeping while on the hunting trip. He meets the mother of Roth's child while everyone is hunting.
Carothers Edmonds (Roth): One of the other main characters. He has a secret child with a negro woman. He is attempting to pay her off and keep the child a secret. At the end of the story he is the one who shot the doe.
Will Legate: Another main character. He hints at that fact that Roth has a secret relationship. When Roth kills the doe, Legate refuses to say whether it was a doe or a buck.
Girl with baby: She is the woman who Roth has a secret child and relationship with. SHe lives near the hunting camp. Additionally, she is the granddaughtor of Tennies's son James Beauchamp (a man who used to go hunting with Isaac).
Isham: One of the slaves. He cooked the meals and helped set up camp.
Aside from family lore, Faulkner's literary education came not from school but from an older friend named Phil Stone, who had gone to Yale. At that time, Faulkner had been reading Moby-Dick and Shakespeare, but it was Phil Stone who introduced him to modern literature like the works of James Joyce and Joseph Conrad.
After dropping out of high school, Faulkner spent several years trying to figure out what to do with himself. He went to the University of Mississippi for a year, where he got a D in his English class. He went to New York City, where he was fired from a job at a bookstore because he told the customers they were reading trash. Then he worked for a while at a post office, until he lost that job because he failed to deliver the mail and often closed down early to go golfing.
He published a book of poems and two relatively conventional novels, and then he met the writer Sherwood Anderson, who advised him to write about his hometown. So Faulkner began observing Oxford, Mississippi, more closely, and he began to invent an imaginary version of Oxford he called Jefferson, located in an imaginary county he called Yoknapatawpha.
He later said, "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top."
One of the first novels he wrote about his new imaginary landscape was The Sound and the Fury, about a wild young woman named Caddy Compson and her three brothers: Benjy, who is mentally handicapped; Quentin, who falls in love with her; and Jason, who feels she has ruined the family's name by getting pregnant out of wedlock.
Faulkner went on writing through the 1930s, but he never really broke through to popular success. By 1944, all but one of his books were out of print. But in 1945, Malcolm Cowley helped publish a Portable Faulkner edition, which brought attention back to his work. Then in 1949, he won the Nobel Prize for literature. All his books were brought back into print, and they have stayed in print ever since.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949
William Faulkner's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
.............
* The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
*Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.
...............
Characters:
Isaac McCaslin (Uncle Ike): The main character. He is an old man who is deeply committed to nature and hunting. He has trouble sleeping while on the hunting trip. He meets the mother of Roth's child while everyone is hunting.
Carothers Edmonds (Roth): One of the other main characters. He has a secret child with a negro woman. He is attempting to pay her off and keep the child a secret. At the end of the story he is the one who shot the doe.
Will Legate: Another main character. He hints at that fact that Roth has a secret relationship. When Roth kills the doe, Legate refuses to say whether it was a doe or a buck.
Girl with baby: She is the woman who Roth has a secret child and relationship with. SHe lives near the hunting camp. Additionally, she is the granddaughtor of Tennies's son James Beauchamp (a man who used to go hunting with Isaac).
Isham: One of the slaves. He cooked the meals and helped set up camp.
03 November 2010
Maya Angelou, 1928 -
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri (1928), the author of six autobiographical volumes, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970). As a teenager, she and her mom and brother moved to San Francisco. There she became a streetcar conductor, the first black person and the first woman to be one there. She was only 16. A few months after graduating from high school, she gave birth to a son. Later, she married a Greek sailor named Tosh Angelos and began using a variation of his surname — Angelou — for her stage name at the Purple Onion cabaret in San Francisco, where she was a calypso dancer. She toured Europe as a dancer in a government-sponsored production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, and when she returned to the U.S., she settled in New York City, where she performed off-Broadway, sang at the Apollo Theater, and started going to meetings of the Harlem Writer's Guild. She met James Baldwin and Jules Feiffer, who thought that she should write about her life in the manner that she spoke, in the "same rhythmical cadences with which she mesmerized" her friends and others with whom she interacted. She did, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The sixth volume of her autobiography, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, came out in 2002.
Stephen Crane, 1871 - 1900
In Heaven
Some little blades of grass
Stood before God.
“What did you do?”
Then all save one of the little blades
Began eagerly to relate
The merits of their lives.
This one stayed a small way behind
Ashamed.
Presently God said:
“And what did you do?”
The little blade answered: “Oh, my lord,
“Memory is bitter to me
“For if I did good deeds
“I know not of them.”
Then God in all His splendor
Arose from His throne.
“Oh, best little blade of grass,” He said.
Some little blades of grass
Stood before God.
“What did you do?”
Then all save one of the little blades
Began eagerly to relate
The merits of their lives.
This one stayed a small way behind
Ashamed.
Presently God said:
“And what did you do?”
The little blade answered: “Oh, my lord,
“Memory is bitter to me
“For if I did good deeds
“I know not of them.”
Then God in all His splendor
Arose from His throne.
“Oh, best little blade of grass,” He said.
The Jewbird
is is a summary of Bernard Malamud's "The Jewbird." The story is an allegory demonstrating that a homeland for Jews was a humanitarian necessity. Israel must continue to exist as a safe haven for those who need one and for those who choose to make Israel their nation. During the Holocost, escaping Jews were turned away from the United States, Palestine (then occupied by the British), and most other countries. They had to return to the places from which they had escaped only to be exterminated. There was no safe haven. This is the reason that the Israelis must weaken or destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. There is no other choice for them.
"The Jewbird". by Bernard Malamud Reporter, 28 (April 11, 1963), pp. 33-36.
Major Characters:
Schwartz: A crow-like talking bird that can speak Yiddish and English and even make Jewish prayers. He calls himself a Jewbird, once removed from a Jewfish. He is running from "Anti-Semeets" and flows in "Harry Cohen's top-floor apartment on First Avenue near the lower East River."
Harry Cohen: A frozen food salesman. "A heavy man with hairy chest," whose mother is dying in her flat in the Bronx.
Edie Cohen: Harry's wife. A kind-hearted skinny woman, not courageous enough to protect Schwartz from her husband.
Morris Cohen: Harry and Edie's ten-year-old son. He is named after her father but they call him Maurie. "A nice kid though not overly bright." According to Schwartz, he is a kind of boy that "won't be a shicker or a wifebeater" and will never be a scholor but "maybe a good mechanic."
Chronology of Events:
"On a hot August evening a year ago": Schwartz, a skinny bird, wearily flows in through the open kitchen window of Harry's apartment ["That's how it goes. It's open, you're in. Closed, you're out and that's your fate."] and lands on the table when the Cohens are having supper. The Jewbird tells them that he is running from "Anti-Semeets" and vultures and that he goes "where there's charity." After "davening" he gets marinated herring. Although Harry does not want him to stay, he lets him stay the night because of Maurie: "Let him stay, papa....He's only a bird."
"In the morning": Cohen orders Schwartz to leave but Maurie cries, so he reluctantly lets the bird to stay for a while:
"So all right," said Cohen, "but I'm dead set against it. I warn you he ain't gonna stay here long."
"What have you got against the poor bird?" [said Edie.]
"Poor bird, my ass. He's a foxy bastard. He thinks he's a Jew."
"What difference does it make what he thinks?"
"A Jewbird, what a chuzpah. One false move and he's out on his drumsticks."
Although Schwartz wants to stay inside, he lives out on the balcony at Harry's insistence, in a new wooden birdhouse Edie gets for him.
"When Cohen brought home a bird feeder full of dried corn": Schwartz says, "Impossible" and Cohen is annoyed. Edie gets herring for him.
"When school began in September": Cohen once again suggests the bird to leave but Edie prevailes on him to wait a little while until Maurie adjusts to school. Though nobody has asked, Schwartz takes on full responsibility for Maurie's performance in school: he oversees the boy's school lessons and violin practice.
Maurie's work improves in school and even his violin teacher admits his playing is better. When "there was nothing lower than C minuses on Maurie's report card," Schwartz celebrates with a little schnapps on Edie's insitence. But he angers Harry not agreeing with his hope to send his boy to an Ivy League college.
"One night when Edie was at the movies and Maurie was taking a shower": Harry begins a quarrel with Schwartz:
"For Christ sake, why don't you wash yourself sometimes? Why must you always stink like a dead fish?"
"Mr. Cohen, if you'll pardon me, if somebody eats garlic he will smell from garlic. I eat herring three times a day. Feed me flowers and I will smell like flowers."
"Who's obligated to feed you anything at all? You're lucky to get herring."
"Excuse me, I'm not complaining." said the bird. "You're complaining."
...."All in all you are a goddamn pest and free loader. Next thing you'll want to sleep in bed next to my wife."
"Mr. Cohen," said Schwartz, "on this, rest assured. A bird is a bird."
The quarrel deeply disturbs Schwartz and he sleeps badly. He tries to stay out of Cohen's way and keeps to the birdhouse as much as possible. Sensing his unhappiness, Edie advises him to take a bath so that he can get along better with her husband. The bird's reply: "Everybody smells. Some people smell because of their thoughts or because who they are. My bad smell comes from the food I eat. What does his come from?"
"In late November": Schwartz freezes on the balcony, already feels twinges of rheumatism. Cohen, after reading articles about the migration of birds, orders him to leave soon. But the bird stubbonly refuses to depart so Cohen embarks on a campaign of harassing him. He brings a cat into the house, supposedly a gift for Maurie. The bird complains but Edie only says: "Be patient, Mr. Schwartz. When the cat gets to know you better he won't try to catch you any more."
Weeks go by, "on the day Cohen's mother had died in her flat in the Bronx, when Maurie came home with a zero on an arithmatic test": Cohen, enraged, waits until Edie takes Maurie to his violin lessons, openly attacks the bird. He grabs Schwartz's leggs and whirls him around and around his head. The bird manages to catch Cohen's nose in his beak. Cohen punches the bird and flings him into the night. "Schwartz sank like a stone into the street."
"In the spring": Maurie looks for Schwartz and finds "a dead black bird in a small lot near the river, his two wings broken, neck twisted, and both bird-eyes plucked clean."
"Who did it to you, Mr. Schwartz?" Maurie wept.
"Anti-Semeets," Edie said later.
"The Jewbird". by Bernard Malamud Reporter, 28 (April 11, 1963), pp. 33-36.
Major Characters:
Schwartz: A crow-like talking bird that can speak Yiddish and English and even make Jewish prayers. He calls himself a Jewbird, once removed from a Jewfish. He is running from "Anti-Semeets" and flows in "Harry Cohen's top-floor apartment on First Avenue near the lower East River."
Harry Cohen: A frozen food salesman. "A heavy man with hairy chest," whose mother is dying in her flat in the Bronx.
Edie Cohen: Harry's wife. A kind-hearted skinny woman, not courageous enough to protect Schwartz from her husband.
Morris Cohen: Harry and Edie's ten-year-old son. He is named after her father but they call him Maurie. "A nice kid though not overly bright." According to Schwartz, he is a kind of boy that "won't be a shicker or a wifebeater" and will never be a scholor but "maybe a good mechanic."
Chronology of Events:
"On a hot August evening a year ago": Schwartz, a skinny bird, wearily flows in through the open kitchen window of Harry's apartment ["That's how it goes. It's open, you're in. Closed, you're out and that's your fate."] and lands on the table when the Cohens are having supper. The Jewbird tells them that he is running from "Anti-Semeets" and vultures and that he goes "where there's charity." After "davening" he gets marinated herring. Although Harry does not want him to stay, he lets him stay the night because of Maurie: "Let him stay, papa....He's only a bird."
"In the morning": Cohen orders Schwartz to leave but Maurie cries, so he reluctantly lets the bird to stay for a while:
"So all right," said Cohen, "but I'm dead set against it. I warn you he ain't gonna stay here long."
"What have you got against the poor bird?" [said Edie.]
"Poor bird, my ass. He's a foxy bastard. He thinks he's a Jew."
"What difference does it make what he thinks?"
"A Jewbird, what a chuzpah. One false move and he's out on his drumsticks."
Although Schwartz wants to stay inside, he lives out on the balcony at Harry's insistence, in a new wooden birdhouse Edie gets for him.
"When Cohen brought home a bird feeder full of dried corn": Schwartz says, "Impossible" and Cohen is annoyed. Edie gets herring for him.
"When school began in September": Cohen once again suggests the bird to leave but Edie prevailes on him to wait a little while until Maurie adjusts to school. Though nobody has asked, Schwartz takes on full responsibility for Maurie's performance in school: he oversees the boy's school lessons and violin practice.
Maurie's work improves in school and even his violin teacher admits his playing is better. When "there was nothing lower than C minuses on Maurie's report card," Schwartz celebrates with a little schnapps on Edie's insitence. But he angers Harry not agreeing with his hope to send his boy to an Ivy League college.
"One night when Edie was at the movies and Maurie was taking a shower": Harry begins a quarrel with Schwartz:
"For Christ sake, why don't you wash yourself sometimes? Why must you always stink like a dead fish?"
"Mr. Cohen, if you'll pardon me, if somebody eats garlic he will smell from garlic. I eat herring three times a day. Feed me flowers and I will smell like flowers."
"Who's obligated to feed you anything at all? You're lucky to get herring."
"Excuse me, I'm not complaining." said the bird. "You're complaining."
...."All in all you are a goddamn pest and free loader. Next thing you'll want to sleep in bed next to my wife."
"Mr. Cohen," said Schwartz, "on this, rest assured. A bird is a bird."
The quarrel deeply disturbs Schwartz and he sleeps badly. He tries to stay out of Cohen's way and keeps to the birdhouse as much as possible. Sensing his unhappiness, Edie advises him to take a bath so that he can get along better with her husband. The bird's reply: "Everybody smells. Some people smell because of their thoughts or because who they are. My bad smell comes from the food I eat. What does his come from?"
"In late November": Schwartz freezes on the balcony, already feels twinges of rheumatism. Cohen, after reading articles about the migration of birds, orders him to leave soon. But the bird stubbonly refuses to depart so Cohen embarks on a campaign of harassing him. He brings a cat into the house, supposedly a gift for Maurie. The bird complains but Edie only says: "Be patient, Mr. Schwartz. When the cat gets to know you better he won't try to catch you any more."
Weeks go by, "on the day Cohen's mother had died in her flat in the Bronx, when Maurie came home with a zero on an arithmatic test": Cohen, enraged, waits until Edie takes Maurie to his violin lessons, openly attacks the bird. He grabs Schwartz's leggs and whirls him around and around his head. The bird manages to catch Cohen's nose in his beak. Cohen punches the bird and flings him into the night. "Schwartz sank like a stone into the street."
"In the spring": Maurie looks for Schwartz and finds "a dead black bird in a small lot near the river, his two wings broken, neck twisted, and both bird-eyes plucked clean."
"Who did it to you, Mr. Schwartz?" Maurie wept.
"Anti-Semeets," Edie said later.
Wordsmith
psephology\see-FAH-luh-jee\
DEFINITION
noun
: the scientific study of elections
EXAMPLES
Erin is a political science major with a particular interest in psephology.
"To help voters make up their minds, this issue contains a 20-page briefing on personality, policy and psephology." -- From an article in The Economist, April 10, 2010
shellacking noun
Definition of SHELLACKING
: a decisive defeat : drubbing
Examples of SHELLACKING
They took a shellacking in yesterday's game.
op·er·a·tive
[op-er-uh-tiv, op-ruh-tiv, op-uh-rey-tiv]
significant; key: The operative word in that sentence is “sometimes.”
mis·ceg·e·na·tion
[mi-sej-uh-ney-shuhn, mis-i-juh-]
–noun
1.
marriage or cohabitation between a man and woman of different races, esp., in the U.S., between a black and a white person.
2.
interbreeding between members of different races.
3.
the mixing or a mixture of races by interbreeding.
in·e·luc·ta·ble
[in-i-luhk-tuh-buhl]
–adjective
incapable of being evaded; inescapable: an ineluctable destiny.
Origin:
1615–25; < L inēluctābilis, equiv. to in- in-3 + ēluctā ( rī ) to force a way out or over, surmount ( ē- e- + luctārī to wrestle) + -bilis -ble
—Related forms
in·e·luc·ta·bil·i·ty, noun
in·e·luc·ta·bly, adverb
—Synonyms
inevitable, unavoidable.
DEFINITION
noun
: the scientific study of elections
EXAMPLES
Erin is a political science major with a particular interest in psephology.
"To help voters make up their minds, this issue contains a 20-page briefing on personality, policy and psephology." -- From an article in The Economist, April 10, 2010
shellacking noun
Definition of SHELLACKING
: a decisive defeat : drubbing
Examples of SHELLACKING
They took a shellacking in yesterday's game.
op·er·a·tive
[op-er-uh-tiv, op-ruh-tiv, op-uh-rey-tiv]
significant; key: The operative word in that sentence is “sometimes.”
mis·ceg·e·na·tion
[mi-sej-uh-ney-shuhn, mis-i-juh-]
–noun
1.
marriage or cohabitation between a man and woman of different races, esp., in the U.S., between a black and a white person.
2.
interbreeding between members of different races.
3.
the mixing or a mixture of races by interbreeding.
in·e·luc·ta·ble
[in-i-luhk-tuh-buhl]
–adjective
incapable of being evaded; inescapable: an ineluctable destiny.
Origin:
1615–25; < L inēluctābilis, equiv. to in- in-3 + ēluctā ( rī ) to force a way out or over, surmount ( ē- e- + luctārī to wrestle) + -bilis -ble
—Related forms
in·e·luc·ta·bil·i·ty, noun
in·e·luc·ta·bly, adverb
—Synonyms
inevitable, unavoidable.
28 October 2010
Emily Dickinson, 1830 – 1886
SUCCESS is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,
As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.
Emily Dickinson1830-1886
The poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts (1830), who dropped out of college at Mount Holyoke to take care of the family household when her mother had a nervous breakdown. She didn't enjoy being a housekeeper, hated dusting, and hated hosting all the men who stopped by to talk politics with her father every day. She watched as her friends got married and moved away, and she grew increasingly isolated from her community, in part because she did not consider herself a Christian and so she did not go to church. Many biographers have tried to find some other reason why she withdrew from the world, suggesting that she may have fallen in love with a man who rejected her. But there's no definite evidence for that theory.
What we do know is that Dickinson spent most of her adult life in her corner bedroom, which contained a writing table, a dresser, a Franklin stove, a clock, a ruby decanter, and pictures on the wall of three writers: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Carlyle. She wrote on scraps of paper and old grocery lists, compiled her poetry and tucked it away neatly in her desk drawer. After a few years of writing, she began collecting her handwritten poems into packets of folded paper, stitching the spines herself. She often included poems in her numerous letters to friends.
Dickinson eventually wrote more than 1,700 poems, most of them composed during the Civil War. She wrote 366 poems in 1862 alone, about one per day. Only seven of all her poems were published in her lifetime. Her sister Lavinia found the huge stash of the rest of her poems after Dickinson's death, but they were heavily edited when they finally came out in 1890. For a while, Dickinson was considered an interesting minor poet. It wasn't until 1955 that a more complete edition of her poetry was published, with the original punctuation intact. She's now considered the first great lyric poet in American history.
Emily Dickinson said, "To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
_______
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,
As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.
Emily Dickinson1830-1886
The poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts (1830), who dropped out of college at Mount Holyoke to take care of the family household when her mother had a nervous breakdown. She didn't enjoy being a housekeeper, hated dusting, and hated hosting all the men who stopped by to talk politics with her father every day. She watched as her friends got married and moved away, and she grew increasingly isolated from her community, in part because she did not consider herself a Christian and so she did not go to church. Many biographers have tried to find some other reason why she withdrew from the world, suggesting that she may have fallen in love with a man who rejected her. But there's no definite evidence for that theory.
What we do know is that Dickinson spent most of her adult life in her corner bedroom, which contained a writing table, a dresser, a Franklin stove, a clock, a ruby decanter, and pictures on the wall of three writers: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Carlyle. She wrote on scraps of paper and old grocery lists, compiled her poetry and tucked it away neatly in her desk drawer. After a few years of writing, she began collecting her handwritten poems into packets of folded paper, stitching the spines herself. She often included poems in her numerous letters to friends.
Dickinson eventually wrote more than 1,700 poems, most of them composed during the Civil War. She wrote 366 poems in 1862 alone, about one per day. Only seven of all her poems were published in her lifetime. Her sister Lavinia found the huge stash of the rest of her poems after Dickinson's death, but they were heavily edited when they finally came out in 1890. For a while, Dickinson was considered an interesting minor poet. It wasn't until 1955 that a more complete edition of her poetry was published, with the original punctuation intact. She's now considered the first great lyric poet in American history.
Emily Dickinson said, "To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
_______
Bernard Malamud, 1914 - 1986
Novelist Bernard Malamud, born in Brooklyn, New York (1914). He grew up in Brooklyn in a household where both Yiddish and English were spoken. He wrote a few stories in college, but after he graduated he was too preoccupied with finding a job to start writing seriously. It was the middle of the Depression and he was struggling just to earn enough money to eat and pay the rent. He said, "I would dream of new suits."
In 1940, he got a job as a clerk in the U.S. Census Bureau. He spent mornings checking drainage ditch statistics, but as soon as that work was done he would crouch over his desk and write short stories on company time. Eventually, he got a few stories published in magazines and he got a job as a professor at Oregon State College.
It was while he was working there that he published his first novel, The Natural (1952), about a talented baseball player who is dragged down by his own desires and obsessions. He was inspired to write the novel after reading biographies of Babe Ruth and Bobby Feller. It was a huge success and he went on to publish many more novels.
Malamud said, "I ... write a book, or a short story, at least three times—once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say."
*The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
*Without heroes, we are all plain people, and don't know how far we can go.
*We have two lives—the one we learn with and the life we live after that.
*Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
*There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go - if there are no doors or windows he walks through wall.
*Life is a tragedy full of joy."
*Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
*What one Christian does is his own responsibility, what one Jew does is thrown back at all Jews"
*I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
*The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
21 October 2010
Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892
Beat! Beat! Drums!
Beat! beat! drums!---blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows---through doors---burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying;
Leave not the bridegroom quiet---no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums---so shrill you bugles blow.
Beat! beat! drums!---blow! bugles! blow!
Over the traffic of cities---over the rumble of wheels in the streets;
Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds,
No bargainers' bargains by day---no brokers or speculators---would they continue?
Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?
Then rattle quicker, heavier drums---you bugles wilder blow.
Beat! beat! drums!---blow! bugles! blow!
Make no parley---stop for no expostulation,
Mind not the timid---mind not the weeper or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Let not the child's voice be heard, nor the mother's entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump O terrible drums---so loud you bugles blow.
Beat! beat! drums!---blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows---through doors---burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying;
Leave not the bridegroom quiet---no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums---so shrill you bugles blow.
Beat! beat! drums!---blow! bugles! blow!
Over the traffic of cities---over the rumble of wheels in the streets;
Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds,
No bargainers' bargains by day---no brokers or speculators---would they continue?
Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?
Then rattle quicker, heavier drums---you bugles wilder blow.
Beat! beat! drums!---blow! bugles! blow!
Make no parley---stop for no expostulation,
Mind not the timid---mind not the weeper or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Let not the child's voice be heard, nor the mother's entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump O terrible drums---so loud you bugles blow.
20 October 2010
John Updike, 1932 - 2009
John Updike 1932 –2009
American author John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania (1932). His family moved to a farm when he was thirteen, so he and his father -- who was a high-school math teacher -- had to commute daily into town for school. The isolation Updike felt on the farm fueled a desire to escape his life. He escaped first through cartoons and fiction in The New Yorker, and then by winning a scholarship to Harvard. He later joined the staff at The New Yorker, but left to concentrate on his writing. A prolific writer of poetry, short stories, and essays, Updike is best known for his novels, in particular the four Rabbit books, which began with the classic Rabbit Run (1961). Updike said, "The character of Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom was for me a way in -- a ticket to the America all around me. [The four novels] became a running report on the state of my hero and his nation." Rabbit Run begins,
Boys playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he's twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him as a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.
Updike said: "Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader."
B. Franklin, 1706 - 1790
Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston (1706). Books were hard to come by when he was a young apprentice in his brother's printing shop, but he got hold of an odd volume of Addison and Steele's The Spectator and used it to teach himself how to write. He took notes on each of the pieces, then hid the book and tried to reconstruct the essays from the notes alone. He toyed with the idea of becoming a poet, but his father assured him that "verse-makers were generally beggars," and he turned his attention to the cultivation of virtue and the aid of humanity. He became better known than any of the leaders of the Revolution except George Washington; he signed every document associated with the founding of the Republic, and took Paris by storm when he appeared at court to secure an alliance with France. He invented bifocals and the glass harmonica, charted the Gulf Stream on his way across the Atlantic, and chased tornadoes on horseback. He was flirtatious on up into his seventies. In 1731, Franklin founded America's first circulating library so that people could borrow books to read even though they might not have been able to afford to buy them. He was the author, printer, and publisher of Poor Richard's Almanack, an annually published book of useful encouragement, advice, and factual information, beginning in 1732. It contains maxims such as "Early to bed and early to rise, Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise" and "In this world nothing can said to be certain except death and taxes.
* A little neglect may breed mischief:
for want of a nail the shoe was lost.
for want of a shoe the horse was lost.
for want of a shoe the horse was lost.
for want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
*Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
*God helps those who help themselves.
*Little strokes fell great oaks.
*Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.
*Where there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.
*There will be sleeping enough in the grave.
*Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.
*The sleeping fox catches no poultry.
*There are no gains without pains.
*He that lives upon hope will die fasting.
*Fish and visitors smell in three days.
14 October 2010
City Upon a Hill
* City upon a hill is a phrase from the parable of Salt and Light in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:14, he tells his listeners, "You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden". It is commonly used in invocations or criticisms of American exceptionalism.
* John Winthrop was born in Groton, Suffolk, England in 1588. Educated at Cambridge University he practised law in London.
* John Winthrop was born in Groton, Suffolk, England in 1588. Educated at Cambridge University he practised law in London.
13 October 2010
Stephen Crane, 1871 - 1900
A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
-- Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane was a war correspondent, fiction writer and poet. He is considered as pioneer of realism and a rebel against Romanticism. Crane was born in Newark (1871). He was the youngest of 14 children, and was very frail. His first published novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), a novel about a soldier in the Civil War, was very well received, although those critics who read it refused to believe that Crane was not a veteran soldier, since the story was so vivid, real and detailed. After The Red Badge of Courage was published, Crane released a book titled Maggie: Girl of the Streets, which he had written when he was 16 years old. Crane was also a war correspondent for The Westminster Gazette and The New York Journal for the Greco-Turkish War, and eventually went to Cuba as the Journal's correspondent, witnessing the operations at Santiago and Havana and Puerto Rico. He made his home in England, and died on June 6, 1900. Stephen Crane, who said: "The nearer a writer gets to life, the greater he becomes as an artist."
William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963
Men Die Miserably Every Day
from "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.
********
"so much depends"
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
07 October 2010
Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892
Are You the New Person Drawn Toward Me?
Are you the new person drawn toward me?
To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?
Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction?
Do you think I am trusty and faithful?
Do you see no further than this facade, this smooth and tolerant
manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
Have you no thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?
Are you the new person drawn toward me?
To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?
Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction?
Do you think I am trusty and faithful?
Do you see no further than this facade, this smooth and tolerant
manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
Have you no thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?
29 September 2010
Tewa (Pueblo) poem
Oh our Mother the Earth, oh our Father the Sky,
Your children are we, and with tired backs
We bring you the gifts that you love.
Then weave for us a garment of brightness;
May the warp be the white light of morning,
May the weft be the red light of evening,
May the fringes be the falling rain,
May the border be the standing rainbow.
Thus weave for us a garment of brightness
That we may walk fittingly where birds sing,
That we may walk fittingly where grass is green,
Oh our Mother the Earth, oh our Father the Sky!
Tewa: a member of a cluster of pueblo-dwelling North American Indian peoples of New mexico and Arizona.
Warp:the set of yarns placed lengthwise in the loom, crossed by and interlaced with the weft, and forming the lengthwise threads in a woven fabric.
Weft: Textiles . yarn carried by the shuttle and interlacing at right angles with the warp in woven cloth
Fringe: a decorative border of thread, cord, or the like, usually hanging loosely from a raveled edge or separate strip.
Native American Prayer
Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining Pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect.
All are holy in the memory and experience of my people. We know the sap which courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and its part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers.
The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man, all belong to the same family. The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors.
Each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give to the rivers the kindness you would give any children.
So you must give to the rivers the kindness you would give any brother … Remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life.
Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth, befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.
All things are connected like the blood which unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
- Chief Seattle Prayer
Welcome to American Literature at FACO
Approach: The emphasis of the course will not be on information, but on finding our critical individual voice for evaluating and understanding the American literary experience that spans over five centuries. Genuine American literature has been to a large extent a pioneer experience. It has been the expression of a hope to arrive at a unique personal account vis à vis the surrounding universe. Emerson in his famous essay Self Reliance exhorts his readers to “judge for yourself” and Emily Dickinson promotes the individual “house” of human consciousness that is able “to support itself”. This attitude is at the core of American experience. To thoroughly come to terms with this viewpoint one needs at the end to stand on one’s own intellectual feet and judge for oneself.
Practical Criticism:
Practical criticism is, like the formal study of English literature itself, a relatively young discipline. It began in the 1920s with a series of experiments by the Cambridge critic I.A. Richards. He gave poems to students without any information about who wrote them or when they were written. In Practical Criticism of 1929 he reported on and analysed the results of his experiments. The objective of his work was to encourage students to concentrate on 'the words on the page', rather than relying on preconceived or received beliefs about a text. For Richards this form of close analysis of anonymous poems was ultimately intended to have psychological benefits for the students: by responding to all the currents of emotion and meaning in the poems and passages of prose which they read the students were to achieve what Richards called an 'organised response'. This meant that they would clarify the various currents of thought in the poem and achieve a corresponding clarification of their own emotions.
Evaluation:
1) Diary: An ongoing record based on a short summary of authors and concepts discussed in the class plus one or two paragraphs of personal comments and criticism at the end of each entry. Neatness and legibility is important.
2) Seminar: Every student will be responsible for presenting at least one seminar per semester. Students should choose a topic ahead of time (a list will be provided) and offer an oral presentation to the class lasting between ten to fifteen minutes. A team of two to three students can work together on a topic and offer a joint presentation.
3) Regular attendance and active participation in the discussions.
4) Use of secondary material without providing the source will be considered plagiarism.
Recommended Texts:
1) An Outline of American Literature by Peter B. High, Longman, 1986
2) An Introduction to American Literature: time present and time past by Françoise Grellet, Hachette
3) La Littérature américaine par Dominique Lescanne, Langues Pour Tous, 2004
Objective: This course aims at a critical survey of texts that are representative of American thought and literature. It will include extracts from novels, short stories, plays, essays and poetry. The works of major American authors will be examined in the following order:
Native American outlook
Puritan Legacy: John Winthrop, William Bradford (1590-1657)
Benjamin Franklin ( 1706-1790)
Thomas Jefferson ( 1743-1826)
Washington Irving ( 1783-1859)
Ralph Waldo Emerson ( 1803-82)
Mark Twain ( 1835-1910)
Words to ponder: "There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong. "
Chesterton, Gilbert K.
America
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.
Practical Criticism:
Practical criticism is, like the formal study of English literature itself, a relatively young discipline. It began in the 1920s with a series of experiments by the Cambridge critic I.A. Richards. He gave poems to students without any information about who wrote them or when they were written. In Practical Criticism of 1929 he reported on and analysed the results of his experiments. The objective of his work was to encourage students to concentrate on 'the words on the page', rather than relying on preconceived or received beliefs about a text. For Richards this form of close analysis of anonymous poems was ultimately intended to have psychological benefits for the students: by responding to all the currents of emotion and meaning in the poems and passages of prose which they read the students were to achieve what Richards called an 'organised response'. This meant that they would clarify the various currents of thought in the poem and achieve a corresponding clarification of their own emotions.
Evaluation:
1) Diary: An ongoing record based on a short summary of authors and concepts discussed in the class plus one or two paragraphs of personal comments and criticism at the end of each entry. Neatness and legibility is important.
2) Seminar: Every student will be responsible for presenting at least one seminar per semester. Students should choose a topic ahead of time (a list will be provided) and offer an oral presentation to the class lasting between ten to fifteen minutes. A team of two to three students can work together on a topic and offer a joint presentation.
3) Regular attendance and active participation in the discussions.
4) Use of secondary material without providing the source will be considered plagiarism.
Recommended Texts:
1) An Outline of American Literature by Peter B. High, Longman, 1986
2) An Introduction to American Literature: time present and time past by Françoise Grellet, Hachette
3) La Littérature américaine par Dominique Lescanne, Langues Pour Tous, 2004
Objective: This course aims at a critical survey of texts that are representative of American thought and literature. It will include extracts from novels, short stories, plays, essays and poetry. The works of major American authors will be examined in the following order:
Native American outlook
Puritan Legacy: John Winthrop, William Bradford (1590-1657)
Benjamin Franklin ( 1706-1790)
Thomas Jefferson ( 1743-1826)
Washington Irving ( 1783-1859)
Ralph Waldo Emerson ( 1803-82)
Mark Twain ( 1835-1910)
Words to ponder: "There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong. "
Chesterton, Gilbert K.
America
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.
06 May 2010
The life of Pi
Yann Martel was born on June 25, 1963, in Salamanca, Spain, to Canadian parents.
There, while sipping coffee in a café in the town of Pondicherry, he met an elderly man named Francis Adirubasamy who offered to tell him a story.
Piscine Molitor Patel
Pi’s companion throughout his ordeal at sea is Richard Parker, a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger.
There, while sipping coffee in a café in the town of Pondicherry, he met an elderly man named Francis Adirubasamy who offered to tell him a story.
Piscine Molitor Patel
Pi’s companion throughout his ordeal at sea is Richard Parker, a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger.
05 May 2010
Tips for the Oral Exam
1) Be prepared to discuss "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J.D. Salinger
2) Choose one poem from the poems we studied in class and be prepared to talk about it at length
3) Make sure your diary is complete and in good order
4) Those who memorize the following poem by Robert Frost and are prepared to discuss it earn themselves extra marks:
Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
________
Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---
________
by Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882
What makes a nation's pillars high
And it's foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?
It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.
Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.
And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.
Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor's sake
Stand fast and suffer long.
Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly...
They build a nation's pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.
__________
Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892
Song of the Open Road
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)
19 April 2010
American Revolutionary War
When it came to the war and the losses of life, about 7,200 Americans were killed in battle during the Revolutionary War. Approximately 8,200 were wounded. Around 10,000 others died in military camps from disease or exposure. Some 8,500 would die in prison after being captured by the British. American military deaths from all causes during the war adds up to 25,700 people.
In addition, approximately 1,400 soldiers were missing.
British military deaths total about 10,000.
In addition, approximately 1,400 soldiers were missing.
British military deaths total about 10,000.
15 April 2010
Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
*************
A Prayer in Spring
Robert Frost (1915)
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.
And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.
For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfil.
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
*************
A Prayer in Spring
Robert Frost (1915)
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.
And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.
For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfil.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 - 1882
Compensation
Why should I keep holiday,
When other men have none?
Why but because when these are gay,
I sit and mourn alone.
And why when mirth unseals all tongues
Should mine alone be dumb?
Ah! late I spoke to silent throngs,
And now their hour is come.
_____________________
What makes a nation's pillars high
And it's foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?
It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.
Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.
And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.
Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor's sake
Stand fast and suffer long.
Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly...
They build a nation's pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.
Why should I keep holiday,
When other men have none?
Why but because when these are gay,
I sit and mourn alone.
And why when mirth unseals all tongues
Should mine alone be dumb?
Ah! late I spoke to silent throngs,
And now their hour is come.
_____________________
What makes a nation's pillars high
And it's foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?
It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.
Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.
And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.
Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor's sake
Stand fast and suffer long.
Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly...
They build a nation's pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.
14 April 2010
Yann Martel born June 25, 1963
Yann Martel wrote a big best seller about a boy and a tiger in a lifeboat: Yann Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain (1963). His father was a Canadian diplomat, and he grew up in Alaska, British Columbia, Costa Rica, France, Ontario, and Mexico. He studied philosophy, and then worked odd jobs — as a tree planter, a dishwasher, and a security guard — and he started to write. He wrote some stories, and then a novel, Self (1996), about a man who turns into a woman on his 18th birthday. It won plenty of awards, but it didn't sell very well.
He was feeling burnt out and had no idea what to do with his life, so he went to India, where he felt even worse. He was lonely, and he tried to write a novel but it failed. He left Bombay for Matheran, a quiet hill station where all motor vehicles were outlawed. And it was there, sitting on a boulder, that he suddenly thought of a book review he had read many years ago. The book was by a Brazilian writer, and its premise was that a German Jewish family who owned a zoo tried to escape to Brazil, but the ship ended up sinking and one family member was left alone in a lifeboat with a black panther. Martel loved the premise, and so he made it his own.
He spent the next six months researching Indian zoos, churches and mosques, and cities. He went back to Canada and wrote a story about an Indian teenager named Pi Patel, who calls himself a Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. Pi is the son of a zookeeper, and his family leaves India for Canada to begin life there. They are shipwrecked, and Pi ends up in a lifeboat with a few animals, and eventually, only a tiger named Richard Parker. Yann Martel said, "The idea of a religious boy in a lifeboat with a wild animal struck me as a perfect metaphor for the human condition. Humans aspire to really high things, right, like religion, justice, democracy. At the same time, we're rooted in our human, animal condition. And so, all of those brought together in a lifeboat struck me as being … as a perfect metaphor." The novel ends with a surprise twist that asks the reader to rethink the entire plot. In 2001, Martel published the book, Life of Pi, which became a best seller and won the Booker Prize.
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