Owner: paisleyandplaid URL:www.paisleyandplaid.wordpress.com Join Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2008 22:15:22 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Discussions of important literature -- classics and recent -- poetry, novels, film, more. Site statistics:Click here
21 — and counting! 2008-03-30 00:12:55 spoiler warning
Counting cards. I’d never heard of “counting cards,” hayseed that I am. Not exactly illegal, it’s a mathematical way to beat the house at cards based on probability and a heck of a good memory. The film 21 opened Friday night to a full house if it was like our Monaco tonight (Saturday.) We had assigned [...]
Works every time 2008-03-26 22:56:21 Margaret Atwood’s “Siren Song” is a short poem that takes Homer’s original Sirens from the myth and gives one of them a modern voice. Recall that Odysseus’s men tie him to the ship preventing his hearing the irresistable song of the Sirens, which lead to a listener’s death.
In a sarcastic but world-weary tone (”Alas”) the Siren/speaker [...] Read more:Works
, every
Misogyny and gullible women 2008-03-26 22:14:47 Jincy Willett’s catchy title for her 2003 novel, The Winner of the National Book Award, is about a novel that did win the coveted award in the book. Willett’s didn’t, but is nonetheless worth the read. The fictional winning novel is about the narrator’s portly, promiscuous twin sister, who, along with her spinster twin, befriends [...] Read more:gullible
“The horror, the horror” 2008-03-16 21:10:37 Conrad’s singular phrase from the turn-of-the-century novella, Heart of Darkness, says it all. So many have borrowed from it, the best known work being Apocalypse Now, which is set in Vietnam instead of the Congo. Most people find the book a challenging read, but with a few pointers up front, it’s worth the effort.
First, the [...] Read more:horror
Good-bye, Governor 2008-03-12 15:25:02 Eliot Spitzer has resigned. He needed to. He has shown poor judgment, immaturity, dishonesty, and selfishness. His wife and three daughters are publicly humiliated and have some hard decisions to make. New York’s state government is at least temporarily paralyzed. The governor doesn’t understand, or does but is above it all, what makes a society cohesive, [...] Read more:Governor
California Appeals Court and Homeschooling 2008-03-07 23:50:24 Homeschooling families in California
and thus all across the nation may be affected by the disheartening decision by the Second District Court
of Appeal (”Feb. 28) that in order to teach a child at home, a parent must hold teaching credentials or risk criminal complaint. Around 166,000 children are homeschooled in California. The reasons vary, [...] Read more:Appeals
, Homeschooling
William F. Buckley, Sesquipedalians, and Scrabulous 2008-03-02 23:21:33 I never win at Scrabble, often being defeated by students or my own children. Why is this? I have the accoutrements that should make the game my forte, a breeze. My most exceptional word boasts no more than six letters. It’s because I draw bad letters. I get more than my share of vowels. But [...] Read more:William
, Buckley
Call me a quitter. 2008-02-28 11:30:16 I phoned my dad to tell him I had stopped smoking. He called me a quitter. (Steven Pearl)
In my family the worst thing next to folk dancing and incest was quitting. It didn’t matter that you hated it. “Don’t be a quitter.” The idea was that if you made a committment to someone or something, you were obligated [...]
Frost’s ambiguity and the importance of titles 2008-02-26 19:38:03 Do they still make students memorize Robert Frost
’s “The Road Not Taken?” If not, at least the poem is still included in most antholgies. Courses in American literature usually deem Frost a very rural, pro-American, voice of democracy, voice of the people kind of poet. He is that. But there is much more. More brillance.
His [...]
The Bodies Exhibit: Why we read Frankenstein 2008-02-21 17:25:15 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, usually credited as the first true work of science fiction, stresses the fairly common themes of man’s overweening pride, his error in overstepping boundaries, and the often horrific events that follow such actions.
In Shelley’s day, early 19th century, many in the field of “natural philosophy,” or science, were trying to discover the [...] Read more:Exhibit
Who would have guessed? 2008-04-03 23:58:26 I would have, actually. I know a few things about good writing. Now that doesn’t mean stuffy academic prose or elitist modern poetry necessarily. Good writing takes many forms, styles, topics, and genres. Writing is the expression of the mind — funny, smart, name the quality– and with training and/or education and with a good [...]
Rejection 2008-04-06 22:18:46 Who faces rejection more than would-be writers and others who attempt to market their creative produce? You go to work on the text, hands trembling over the cold keyboard. You criticize yourself after every keystroke: immature, trivial, repetitive, boring, banal. Then the seed germinates. It grows. Oh yeah, you’re humming now — for about 250 [...]
Clooney as Clooney in “Leatherheads” 2008-04-05 20:34:48 George Clooney
plays the same character in most of his movies — clever, witty, charming, down on his luck, but able to improvise, adapt, and overcome. Best are the familiar sideways glances, double takes, and double entendres. He makes us like him. He’s the only part of the film that made it worth seeing late [...]
Absolut[sic]ly offensive 2008-04-07 14:12:32 I’m talking about the ad everyone’s buzzing about from Absolut
Vodka. The pictorial ad is worth a thousand words and thousands of dollars lost in sales, I suspect. I’ve included a link to the ad on Strange Maps. Read the article below the ad to read apologies and background. A link to the ad from the LA Times [...]
(In an age of manufactured competitions) The best American novel 2008-04-09 18:00:53 Not the best Americannovel
ever. That would mean going all the way back to the mid-nineteenth century, the American Renaissance, Hawthorne and Melville. The recent survey by vote (125 of them) for the “best” novel of the last 25 years was conducted by Sam Tanenhaus, NYT Books editor, earlier this year and produced some interesting results.
Philip Roth, [...]
Millay’s Figs 2008-04-10 15:48:51 Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote two short poems, “First Fig” and “Second Fig,” which are both often quoted as was the case of “First Fig” by Heath Ledger’s father on the death of his son.
First Fig
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-
It gives a [...]
How do I love thee? — not like that! 2008-04-13 22:05:00 Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a talented poet (Sonnets from the Portuguese), but her best known poem, the sonnet “How do I love thee
? Let me count the ways,” is not her best. I suspect it’s her most popular because of — let me count the ways 1. familiarity and 2. conventionality. Here it is. It [...]
Digitized Reads — a plug and a question 2008-04-15 13:21:07 I discovered Manybooks,net four years ago when I was venturing outside the publisher’s literature anthology in search of readings that would better suit my students’ needs. The site is clean, only a few ads, and easy to navigate. Matthew McClintock maintains the site as a service to the Internet’s reading community. He reports that most of the works [...]
Sonnet 130 and Shakespeare’s Wit 2008-04-14 22:16:38 My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more [...] Read more:Sonnet
, Shakespeare
Digitized reads - a plug 2008-04-17 16:47:07 I discovered Manybooks,net four years ago when I was venturing outside the publisher’s literature anthology in search of readings that would better suit my students’ needs. The site is clean, only a few ads, and easy to navigate. Matthew McClintock maintains the site as a service to the Internet’s reading community. He reports that most of the works [...]
First attempts by Ayn Rand 2008-04-18 15:52:49 I picked up an old, yellowed copy of The Early Rand (Signet, ed. Leonard Peikoff, 1984) and have thoroughly enjoyed reading from her early unpublished fiction. Peikoff and Rand were friends. In fact, she was influential in his move from studying medicine to philosophy. He was one of those invited into the salon circle of [...] Read more:First
Dead is worse than “Expelled” 2008-04-23 15:05:24 Ben Stein’s documentary now showing in theaters had a timely opening with election upon us. The first segment of the film is Stein’s interviews of several professors who lost their positions with distinguished universities. Incompetent? Immoral? No, they all made the fatal error of examining ID, Intelligent design, as a possible explanation for the origin of the [...]
How to read a poem 2008-04-25 14:51:38 Here’s a method for reading a poem that I use. It works pretty well though poetry is “slippery” sometimes by nature. My LINKS page has helpful sites for terms and examples. Here’s a terms site. Check out the NYT RSS in the sidebar for more about a current poet and poetry in general.
1. Read the [...]
Why the sonnet? 2008-04-25 14:21:24 What do Keats, Shakespeare, Frost, Millay, Plath, Browning, Shelley, Wordsworth, Whitman, Poe, Emerson, and Milton (I could go on) have in common?
They wrote sonnets.
Why the sonnet?
Originating in Italy in the 13th century, the subject of the fourteen-line poem was idealized love expressed in iambic pentameter. The Italian version rhymed in an abbaabba — cdcdcd scheme [...]
Parody reigns 2008-04-29 18:37:34 Postmoderns love parody — in short, the humorous imitation of a work well known enough to be, well, made fun of. Why do we love it so? It exposes our flaws with lightheartedness, our foibles with a grin. We like to see the vulnerable side of everyone from the top (Reagan, Bush, Queen Elizabeth II) through [...]
Why Prufrock? 2008-04-29 17:34:16 “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” Sad, isn’t it? T.S. Eliot has J. Alfred Prufrock say this as he contemplates his ineffectual attempts at living. Prufrock symbolizes modern man. From the first image of the poem man is anesthetized, spread on a table ready for life to be done to him, around [...]
Life after teaching 2008-04-30 16:13:34 Dear Paisley and Plaid (are you one or two?),
I majored in English, and by your erudite commentary and precise, exquisite style (and lots of time to blog) I suspect that you, too, may be an English major. I recently resigned my position teaching eighth-grade speech and rhetoric because of, well, it was the principal of [...]
Iron Man exceeds expectations 2008-05-02 22:06:27 My date tonight, my husband, read comic books as a kid, so we’ve seen all the super hero movies. Most have been so-so — except for Batman and I think that was because of the actors: Keaton, Clooney, Bale — about what I expected from a comic book-based production.
But Iron Man
tops them all with [...]
A new word: “dinosaur” 2008-05-03 12:51:25 People actually chuckled that December when I said I got the Oxford English Dictionary for Christmas. It’s the perfect gift for somebody who loves etymologies or word origins.
For example, when for hundreds of years men were finding these huge bones everywhere from North America to China, they had nothing to call them, no speciic [...] Read more:dinosaur
Thirty “household words” and who said them 2008-05-05 17:35:01 Even the phrase “household words” was originated by Shakespeare! It’s in Henry V near the end of the great motivational speech with which the young, untested king must motivate his men to fight at Agincourt — outnumbered 10 to 1. (Watch a YouTube re-enaction of this exciting battle.) Several enumerated men’s names he says will become [...] Read more:Thirty
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