I Did Enact Julius Cesar

Don't forget, we'll be having our Hamlet Festival, Wednesday December 14th at 2:15pm.

You'll be given fifteen minutes to get into costume, etc. We'll do a few warm-ups, then begin.

Hamlet Paper Due

You Hamlet paper is due Friday December 9th by 12pm. Please leave it in the Leave Your Papers Here box.

If you´d like to show me your paper beforehand, feel free too. The best time for me is either during break or the beginning of lunch.

Nanowrimo GOOOOOO!

Congratulations to all of our Nanowrimo novelists!

We’ll be having a launch celebration, get to know one another, and find out the juicy details of the extra credit.

EVL 2:05pm

Brevity: Not Always the Soul of Wit

Ah! My titles crack me up. No seriously -

Bring in your second draft of the Hamlet paper. It must be 4-5 pages in length, Times New Roman, 12 font, and in MLA format.

These words are not mine.

(No, nor mine either.)

Ah, Hamlet jokes!

Thanks Hamlet

By next Monday I'd like you all to have listened to this radio program about a production of Hamlet and respond to it in a blog entry.

Your next draft of the Hamlet paper is due our next Writers Workshop (either Wednesday or Thursday).

In Conclusion

This is the text we'll be working with in Writer's Workshop.

To Do or Not To Do

Next Monday or Tuesday bring in your first draft of the Hamlet paper.

Likewise, read two critical essays from the packet and respond to them in two blog entries.

You might want to assign characters in your scene for December 14th, that way you can memorize some lines over the Thanksgiving break.

Critical Essays

This weekend you must pick up a packet - available on my desk - and choose one essay to respond to in a blog entry.

Don't forget that we'll have our Hamletapalooza December 14th 2:15-4:45.

The first draft of our analytic essay about Hamlet is due November 30th or December 1st (depending on your section). The paper will be discussed at greater length in class.

EXTRA CREDIT - Magic Word!

Want to write a novel? I´ll give you extra credit!

Permanent (Reading) Vacation

Did I just allude to Aerosmith - potentially the worst rock band ever? Yes, I did. This is clearly a sign I need a vacation - of reading, that is.

This break you must read Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville. There are alot of options: mp3s, .pdf, etc. It should be free. You can also take it out from the EVL.

You can give the other book back in the meantime.

When we come back from break we'll discuss the novel and begin the world's greatest play - HAMLET.

Naturally

This week, I'd like you to finish our novel and write two blog entries: one about the last chapter and another that resolves some of your questions in earlier entries.

A Discussion of ¨I Know A Man¨

This weekend I´d like you to listen to this twenty minute discussion of the poem we talked about in class. This might give you some other perspectives on it.

POE MMMMMMMMMMMMM

Throughout this week write a total of three reading blogs. I´d like you to start one reading blog using some one else´s blog entry. Stuck for ideas. Why not link this short (and easy) poem to a text?

Also this Writers Workshop we´ll be working on our poems. Bring what we spoke about last week - namely the raw material with which we will construct wonderful poesies.

Cormac on Being McCarthy

Write three reading blogs in the next week. In one of these blog entries, be sure to incorporate this interview with the author.

On Wednesday or Thursday bring in your FINAL draft of your synthetic essays.

Register Exercise

Register Exercise

For each of the following excerpts identify the register (familiar, informal, formal, ceremonial). Circle four words that helped you reach your conclusion.

1. His sir sorry for not attending your class last week but I was very sick. I arrived today from a trip I was for the puente. I wanted to let you know that all my blogs are completed until last week. Furthermore I will talk to you tomorrow for anything else i am missing. Please take a look at them so you can grade them.

thanks,

2. And tonight, let us think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11. I know that it has, at times, frayed. Yet today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people. The cause of securing our country is not complete, but tonight we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history. Whether it’s the pursuit of prosperity for our people or the struggle for equality for all our citizens, our commitment to stand up for our values abroad, and our sacrifices to make the world a safer place.

3. OMG! I love lit. Holy mole, I want to be a poet, yo. J

4. In Brooklyn days, I wanted to be Carlos Ortiz, lightweight champion
of the world from Ponce, Puerto Rico. I gazed at the radiance
of the black and white television till it spoke to me in tongues,
a boy spellbound by the grainy spirits who stalked each other in the ring.

5. I pointed out that his force had overthrown the government that issued visas. But, in this kind of a stalemate, the guy with the gun wins. And that was Ayman.

Eventually, he came up with a solution. I would give him a ride to his hometown, Zawarah, and the visa requirement would disappear. I gritted my teeth and told him to jump in.

That incident points to a fear that many Americans have of the Libyan rebels. Are they just goons who will create their own tyranny or chaos?

Particularly after we embraced Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, only to see him engulfed by corruption, it’s fair to ask whether the Libyan rebels will do any better. The uncertainties are real. But, after my recent visit to Libya, I’m guardedly optimistic.

A Million Visions and Revisions

Be sure to bring in your revised essays this week, either Wednesday or Thursday.

In addition, over the course of this week write two reading blogs. Respond to any two other reading blogs.

And That Has Made All the Difference

For next Monday, have completed three reading blogs in response to The Road. You must focus in one of those blogs on vocabulary. We´ll be discussing those words in Writers Workshop.

Also, bring in your revised drafts of the synthetic essay on Wednesday or Thursday depending on your section.

What is a reading blog?

Reading to Blog

What's more important the book or our interpretations of the book? Can there be a book without there being interpretation? We'll be able to answer some of those questions after we've recorded the history of our relationships with our books.

In order to preserve paper, as well as to promote our communication with the academic world outside of CNG, we'll be keeping blogs about the books we read.

You will write your own blogs, and respond to your blogs as prescribed by your weekly homework blog entry. You should not approach each blog the same way. With variety comes varied thought; therefore, I hope you focus on different topics and take different approaches in each entry.

Here are some possibilities:

-Respond to the text personally:
I never had my house blown down by a wolf, but I have felt loss. For example, I once abandoned my favorite apartment. I left most of my furniture there, some clothes, even a television!

-Connect text to another book, a film, work of art, a comic or any other creation:
The Three Little Pigs reminds me of The Matrix. When the Wolf "huffed and puffed and blew his house down" he acted just as Morpheus did for Reeve's character. Suddenly, Reeves was without the security he once felt.

-Ask questions to later answer:

What might the grandmother represent? Why would the Wolf want to blow down the houses? How might I write a better ending? I would then maybe answer these questions in later blogs.

-Visual Vocabulary

Select the words you think it was important to define in the text. Match a picture to it on your blog post.

-Hyperlink

You might want to use the 21^st century's answer to footnotes when you're talking about something that is not common knowledge. We'll do a demo of how to insert a hyperlink in class.

You may use any combination of these, or you can write your own type of entries. Let your reading guide your entries. Check StandardScore weekly for your reading blog grades starting next Friday.

Apocalypse How?

By next Monday (September 5th) complete two reading blogs. For each reading blog you should respond to 20-30 pages of text. We'll take out The Road in class together from the EVL.

In the meantime, continue to bring in Coming Through Slaughter for discussion.

Gatsby Miscellanies

Play a Gatsby game.

Watch Gatsby film from the 70s.

Find out about the new Gatsby film, due to come out in 2012.

Searching for Buddy Bolden

This week I'd like you to write two reading blog entries in which you perform a close reading on one passage. For each close reading I want to see the inferences you can make about Buddy Bolden.

On Friday and Monday we'll have our first timed writing together. I'll be speaking about that at greater length in class.

Welcome to AP English Literature

This week you need to begin a blog here and then, once signed in comment on this post.

In your blogger profile be sure to use your full name.

For our second class, we'll be assessing your understanding of The Great Gatsby and begin our first discussion of symbolism.

You'll notice that I change the images on my blog frequently. They are always related to class. Think about making connections - and even commenting on them on your blog.

Finishing Grades, Listening to Poetry Podcasts

While I finish your grades, I thought these two podcasts I'm listening to (not simultaneously) might interest you. This one is one William Carlos Williams; this other is about a flarf poem.

Ezra Pound writes about "In a Metro Station"

from Modern American Poetry at U of Illinois

Ezra Pound (from Gaudier-Brzeska, 1916)

Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to meworthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation . . . not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. It was just that - a "pattern," or hardly a pattern, if by "pattern" you mean something with a "repeat" in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour. I do not mean that I was unfamiliar with the kindergarten stories about colours being like tones in music. I think that sort of thing is nonsense. If you try to make notes permanently correspond with particular colours, it is like tying narrow meanings to symbols.

That evening, in the Rue Raynouard, I realized quite vividly that if I were a painter, or if I had, often, that kind of emotion, of even if I had the energy to get paints and brushes and keep at it, I might found a new school of painting that would speak only by arrangements in colour.

And so, when I came to read Kandinsky’s chapter on the language of form and colour, I found little that was new to me. I only felt that someone else understood what I understood, and had written it out very clearly. It seems quite natural to me that an artist should have just as much pleasure in an arrangement of planes or in a pattern of figures, as in painting portraits of fine ladies, or in portraying the Mother of God as the symbolists bid us.

When I find people ridiculing the new arts, or making fun of the clumsy odd terms that we use in trying to talk of them amongst ourselves; when they laugh at our talking about the "ice-block quality" in Picasso, I think it is only because they do not know what thought is like, and they are familiar only with argument and gibe and opinion. That is to say, they can only enjoy what they have been brought up to consider enjoyable, or what some essayist has talked about in mellifluous phrases. They think only "the shells of thought," as de Gourmont calls them; the thoughts that have been already thought out by others

Any mind that is worth calling a mind must have needs beyond the existing categories of language, just as a painter must have pigments or shades more numerous than the existing names of the colours.

Perhaps this is enough to explain the words in my "Vortex": --

"Every concept, every emotion, presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It belongs to the art of this form."

That is to say, my experience in Paris should have gone into paint. If instead of colour I had perceived sound or planes in relation, I should have expressed it in music or in sculpture. Colour was, in that instance, the "primary pigment"; I mean that it was the first adequate equation that came into consciousness. The Vorticist uses the "primary pigment." Vorticism is art before it has spread itself into flaccidity, into elaboration and secondary application.

What I have said of one vorticist art can be transposed for another vorticist art. But let me go on then with my own branch of vorticism, about which I can probably speak with greater clarity. All poetic language is the language of exploration. Since the beginning of bad writing, writers have used images as ornaments. The point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.

One is tired of ornamentations, they are all a trick, and any sharp person can learn them.

The Japanese have had the sense of exploration. They have understood the beauty of this sort of knowing. A Chinaman said long ago that if a man can’t say what he has to say in twelve lines he had better keep quiet. The Japanese have evolved the still shorter form of the hokku.

"The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:

A butterfly."

That is the substance of a very well-known hokku. Victor Plarr tells me that once, when he was walking over snow with a Japanese naval officer, they came to a place where a cat had crossed the path, and the officer said," Stop, I am making a poem." Which poem was, roughly, as follows: --

"The footsteps of the cat upon the snow:

(are like) plum-blossoms."

The words "are like" would not occur in the original, but I add them for clarity.

The "one image poem" is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence: --

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals, on a wet, black bough."

I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. I a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.

Want to publish your writing?

http://www.hangingloosepress.com/submissions.html

AP Lit Farewell

We'll be presenting all of our AP projects, your final projects, Wednesday June 8th 2:15 - 4:40pm. Please plan accordingly. Failure to come will result in a missing grade for your assignment.

Confusion

It´s okay. There was some confusion about the vacation assignment. If you have completed it, I will count it towards this week´s assignment. If you haven´t I suggest reading three extra passages from the packet and doing the same (tone, two literary elements, one literary device).

10 Days Left!

Between now and Sunday, I'd like you to read seven passages and for each identify one fitting tone word, one literary device, and two literary elements. I'd like you to do one or two a day.

In the meantime, just think how much easier things will be after May 5th. Put in the work now, so we can all relax later.

Please see this inspirational training montage. I'd like you all to interpret as an allegory for the next ten days.

Poetry Recital

I know I've been putting it off, but we need to complete the poetry recitals. Be prepared to read either tomorrow or after break.

Save the date!

Wednesday April 27th at 2:15 in the EVL Mr. Hampton will be speaking with us in relation to the novels we've just read. Be sure to arrange plans accordingly. Of course, if you can't come it's your loss!

You can use this timer

Time yourself.

Timing

Time yourself reading and writing about with this poem (40 minutes).

Time yourself reading and writing about this poem (40 minutes).

For each assignment incorporate, two literary elements, one literary device and explain how it contributes to the meaning of the poem.

Have these completed by Thursday.

Twelfth Night

This week you must see our school's production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. It offers an interesting counterpoint to Hamlet, written that same year. You should read a little about the play. If you like you can watch a recent film version here.

This week you are to finish your novels by Friday. By Wednesday you are to have watched either an interview with Toni Morrison or Edwidge Danticat - and write a blog that somehow links statements made in the interview with your reading of their respective novels.

Likewise, by Friday you must have one blog that deals with the end of the novel.

This Week

In class I'll be bringing you to the library to get a copy of our next novel. We'll finish it in two weeks, and then proceed with the textbook. You'll need to read 30-50 pages every night. I'd like to see a blog by Wednesday on your first impressions of the book, in which you demonstrate your keen literary understanding and unique insights into the work. By Friday I'd like a follow-up blog entry in which you continue themes established in your first.

Two Non-fiction Texts for this week

Ask I mentioned earlier this month, The Age of Discovery is posted on Sharepoint. Read it and write a blog in which you connect it to Heart of Darkness.

Likewise, you should read the prologue and Chapter 19 of King Leopold´s Ghost. Write a blog that also links the book to Heart of Darkness.

White Sepulchre

Finish Heart of Darkness by Friday.

Write one blog entry Tuesday and one blog entry Thursday.

Having trouble reading? Try the mp3s.

Gastby News!

You wouldn't think there's much news about a novel almost a hundred years old, but there is.

Read and comment if you like.

The Age of Discovery

I've posted a chapter of Richard Holmes' fantastic book The Age of Discovery, a work of non-fiction, on Sharepoint. I believe it will contextualize the idea of voyage in Coleridge, and perhaps even Conrad.

AP Exam Date Confirmed

The AP English Lit exam will take place Thursday May 5th. Make sure you cancel any plans you may have the night prior (you want to be well-rested for the exam).

Getting Dark

Okay, okay, I can't help it: things are dark. It's not my fault this classic by Joseph Conrad, probably one of the most famous and renowned novels of the 19th century, comes up everywhere.

This week read until page 100 and write three blog entries united by theme (i.e, an entry about imagery, an entry about Buddhism, and entry about the geography of the Congo in the novel).

Victor Goes Grammar

Victor has taken it upon himself to point out grammatical errors in your blog. Take a breath, take a look and respond.

Great Gatsby...the video game

http://greatgatsbygame.com/

The Cherry Orchard is Mine!

Please don't forget about your presentations this Tuesday at 3:30. I'll provide some pizza.

And Still More On the New Huck Finn

Take a look - respond on your blogs if you like.

Cherry Orchard Performance

Don´t forget that next Tuesday after school we´ll have our The Cherry Orchard presentation.

The Cherry Orchard: A Permanent Vacation

Okay, please finish The Cherry Orchard by next week, when we'll miraculously travel back in time to the early 1800s with the Romantics. Write two blogs. In one, you must somehow discuss comedy (video encouraged). In the other you may catharsis or anagnorisis. Awwww! And just in time for Valentine's Day!

David's Awesome Cherry Orchard Blogs

Check out David's recent blog posts.

Cherry Picking

This weekend please finish Act II of The Cherry Orchard and write one blog entry.

More On the New Huck Finn

Here's another author on the Huck Finn "slave" edition controversy.

The Cherry Orchard Assigment

Read Act One of The Cherry Orchard and write on blog entry.

You may wish to watch this BBC production of the play to help your understanding.

Gardens, Trees, Orchards, and Related Shubbery

This week you're second draft of your Huck Finn papers are due on Wednesday or Thursday (consult calendar on Sharepoint).

Also this week you must read one poem or short story from any of the following literary magazines available exclusively in the library: Tin House, Poetry, The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly by next Monday. Please note you may not take out magazines; they are only for reading in the reading room. You may not read digitally for this exercise.

Secondly, you must read "Cherry Ripe" by Thomas Campion and create some sort of visualization of it. You may do this digitally, with collage, drawing, whatever you like as long as it is visually appealing.

MLA Format Tips Again

Please reading this page carefully.

Paper on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

This Wednesday or Thursday (depending when your section meets) you must bring your first draft of a 3-4 page essay in MLA format about one aspect of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This will be your only assigment outside of class until next week.

Where Twain Shall Meet

This week I’d like you to write a response to each of the following essays or articles about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I expect to see you citing text in your discussions. That is one response per article:

What’s different about this newer gentler edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

Are Huck and Jim a minstrel show?

Was Twain borrowing from others unjustly when he wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

Oh, and a vocab list should you need it.