Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Language and Literature’ Category

The Odyssey on Living Well

Posted in Language and Literature, Living well, tagged , , , , on May 9, 2013 |

From the Robert Fagles translation

 

On family:

“And may the good gods give you all your heart desires:

husband, and house, and lasting harmony too.

No finer, greater gift in the world than that…

when man and woman posses their home, two minds,

two hearts that work as one.  Despair to their enemies,

a joy to all their friends.  Their own best claim to glory.”

Book 6, lines 198-203

On sports:

“It’s fit and proper for you to know your sports.

What greater glory attends a man, while he’s alive,

than what he wins with his racing feet and striving hands?”

Book 8, lines 169-171

About these ads

Read Full Post »

Reading the Whole Book

Posted in Education, Language and Literature, tagged , on May 2, 2013 |

Much debate among educators these days revolves around the preference in the Common Core State Standards for reading book-length works in excerpts more than in their entirety.

The argument in favor seems to go that there’s too much to cover, and that the skills we need to inculcate can be adequately covered with bits and pieces of text, rather than by slogging through entire works.  Besides, kids today won’t read a whole book, anyway.

Those with such a view are missing out on a huge, obvious fact about reading.

Reading an excerpt isn’t the same thing as reading the whole thing.

I’ve read summaries of and excerpts from long classics plenty of times, and not long afterwards, I’ve forgotten the themes, allusions, stylistic features, and even much of the plot.  Shallow experiences only bring shallow memories.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

Stardust and Ink

Posted in Language and Literature, Living well, tagged , , , on April 18, 2013 |

A while ago, I found this passage among some notes I jotted in a journal.  I was scribbling some thoughts down about the nature of being a compulsive reader and writer.  Pretty melodramatic stuff, but I like the general sentiment:

You read and write. You have ink in your veins and stardust in your soul. You don’t need to stop and smell the flowers because you’re growing a garden in your heart. Yes, you’re giving up some of the typical twists and turns of life. Don’t care. You have speed. A speed so electric, so immediate and eternal, it’ll pull tears out of your eyes and make an hour feel like being awake for weeks at a time.

This life of outer stillness and inner intoxication will thrill you whenever you think about it and nurture you through the rest. Think about it often. And don’t leave the covers closed for too long.

Read Full Post »

Six Similes About Writing

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , , , , , on March 28, 2013 |

Writing is like:

  • architecture.  Form follows function; the design of the piece, especially the basic structure, should require every element to contribute to the overall mission of the creation’s existence.  A solid foundation must be established first–in writing, the introduction is critical.  An outline of major topics and examples is like the layout of various beams and girders in construction.
  • sculpture.  Michelangelo said that he saw his sculptures inside the marble blocks, and simply chiseled off anything that wasn’t part of it.  We should do the same with our drafts.
  • bees.   (more…)

Read Full Post »

“For all intensive purposes”

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , , , , on March 14, 2013 |

I’ve seen this abomination of a bastardized phrase in student writing for years, but last week I actually caught it in an email from a fellow educator.  Oh, the shame!

The correct phrase, of course, is “for all intents and purposes.”  For all intents, and for all purposes.  It’s a legalistic cliché that claims that a given idea is true in every practical situation, even if not technically accurate (de facto, as opposed to de jure, or connotation rather than denotation).

Example: “For all intents and purposes, the boy she’s taken care of all his life is her son.”  The hypothetical boy in question isn’t the woman’s biological offspring, but her motherly care while actually raising him means that he might as well be.

The incorrect version would have to mean something like, “For all purposes which are really serious,” perhaps.  I’m not sure what people have in mind when they try it.

Why the confusion in the phrasing?  Just say it out loud.  It sounds like that; the word intensive is far more common than intents and.

Which means that people know the phrase because they’ve heard it, not because they’ve read it.  So this is yet another example of our increasingly illiterate society, driven by mere oral and visual communication, mangling something that can only be understood fully in print.

 

Read Full Post »

Transcendentalists = Jedi Hippie Boy Scouts

Posted in Humor, Language and Literature, tagged , , , , , , on March 13, 2013 |

Hey there, would-be American Lit mongers!  Is “transcendentalists” too much of a mouthful?  Here’s what I tell people to help them picture who these mid 19th century whackadoos were.

Think of a Jedi: empowered by spiritual communion with a nebulous universal essence.  Then, think of a hippie: an iconoclastic rebel who wants only to be at peace with all.  Finally, add a Boy Scout: an innocent survivalist with unbounded reverence for nature.

That pretty much adds up to Emerson and Thoreau!

 

JHBS

 

Read Full Post »

Back to Blood

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , , , on March 6, 2013 |

9781619698154_p0_v2_s260x420I spent most of January listening to the audio book version of Tom Wolfe’s newest novel, Back to Blood, during my commute to and from work.  It was 22 hours of pure joy.

Wolfe is our modern Mark Twain, our finest satirist and journalistic chronicler of our society as it really is.  As such, it’s only fitting that my comments here take the form of an interview with myself:

Q: What did you think of the narration by Lou Diamond Phillips?

A: Amazing.  I’ll never be able to read this book without hearing his voice now.  It was perfect.  Not only did he have to do characters of both genders and all ages, but several ethnicities, and even speaking fragments of four other languages!  If there’s some kind of industry award for audio book performance, he should get the highest honor.  Listening to him work was bliss from beginning to end.

Q: Didn’t all the sex scenes bother you?  Didn’t you think they were poorly written?

A: Wolfe catches a lot of flak for these two almost contradictory criticisms, but I think they work together.   (more…)

Read Full Post »

Please Read Kent Haruf’s New Book

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , , , , on February 13, 2013 |

benedictionWhen Dan Brown’s sequel to The Da Vinci Code was about to come out, I put it on hold at my library.  I was something like 800th on a waiting list that kept growing.

I’ve been on the waiting list for Kent Haruf’s upcoming book for a while now, and the release is less than two weeks away.

I’m number 4 out of 5.

Haruf deserves to be more popular.  I’ve read two of his earlier novels, Plainsong and Eventide, and deeply loved both, especially Plainsong, which is one of my favorite books.

Think of Haruf as Cormac McCarthy, but without the stark violence.  His tone is just as detached, just as washed-out as McCarthy’s, but where McCarthy wants us to ruminate on the condition of a fallen world, Haruf actively wants us to rebuild our broken communities.  His work always left me with a soft hope for the decency of most people, and the summary I’ve read for his new book, Benediction, brings it all back.

I really look forward to this.  I hope you do, too.

Read Full Post »

“Every age must look to its poets…”

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , , on February 6, 2013 |

joyce“In fine the truth is not that the artist requires a document of
licence from householders entitling him to proceed in this or that
fashion but that every age must look for its sanction to its poets and
philosophers. The poet is the intense centre of the life of his age to
which he stands in a relation than which none can be more vital. He
alone is capable of absorbing in himself the life that surrounds him
and of flinging it abroad again amid planetary music. When the poetic
phenomenon is signalled in the heavens, exclaimed this
heaven-ascending essayist, it is time for the critics to verify their
calculations in accordance with it. It is time for them to acknowledge
that here the imagination has contemplated intensely the truth of the
being of the visible world and that beauty, the splendour of truth,
has been born. The age, though it bury itself fathoms deep in formulas
and machinery, has need of these realities which alone give and
sustain life and it must await from those chosen centres of
vivification the force to live, the security for life which can come
to it only from them. Thus the spirit of man makes a continual
affirmation.”

–James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ch. XIX

Read Full Post »

A Bit of Western Noir

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , , , on January 31, 2013 |

Had this idea a while ago as I was thinking about America’s great tradition of dark, violent Westerns.  Worked on it in pieces for about a week.  It’s just a little snippet of flash fiction, really, but I like it.

*****

The gunman had just sat down at the table he favored when he stopped at this small town’s only saloon, when a girl scuttled over to him and started pouring out her story.

“Please help me, mister,” she said quickly, quietly, taking the seat opposite him.  “My boss is sore at me, I think he’s fixin to kill me.  Thinks I cheated him outta what I got paid last night.”  She seemed to swallow briefly and composed herself.  “I can tell you’re the kind of man can get me out of here.” She looked down into her lap. “I can’t pay,” she looked up into his face and earnestly continued, “but I’ll do anything if you save me.”

He had already noticed everything.  She was dressed in a little red gown that might have been pretty decades ago, before it had covered a hundred different professional girls.  Her hair and makeup were done in the frontier’s best imitation of mature beauty.  Her eyes were huge with fear, and she had her hands on the table in a pleading posture.  She was too young.

The saloon was tiny, really—long, but narrow and cramped.  (more…)

Read Full Post »

Stanley Kubrick Presents the Complete Works of James Joyce

Posted in Arts, Language and Literature, tagged , , , , , , on January 3, 2013 |

As I recently finished reading a survey of Joyce’s writings, it occurred to me that each of his four majors works could be compared to the four major acts of Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in order.

= Dubliners

A critical care for presenting a realistic story gives us the first stage of the work.  The inhabitants of this place are frustrated and stunted.  The Kubrickian monolith is equivalent to the Joycean epiphany.  Ironically, where the epiphanies of Joyce only instigate paralysis, the monoliths of 2001 catalyze a quantum leap in evolution.

= A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Here we see a truly new style (or, at least, a recent style perfected)–Joyce’s stream of consciousness and Kubrick’s special effects ballet.  Each work is a seamless, totally integrated work of ambitious art, where every facet contributes to the whole united  message.  Each work, thematically and in its plot, is about man moving onward and upward.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

2012: My Year in Books

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , on January 3, 2013 |

2012 was by far the worst year of my adult life for total number of books read: I only finished 17 books the whole year; my next worst year was 2001, when I finished 19.  Clearly, I need to tackle my problem with distraction.

Or, in terms of quality over quantity, it wasn’t bad at all: I gave five books a perfect ten for enjoyment; my worst year for that was 2008, which only had 2 perfect tens.

Below is the list, with dates finished, my 1-10 score for much I liked reading it, and either a brief comment or link to my review.

 

1. Comstock Lode, Louis L’amour (1/18, Western)–7.  Good, but no different from others of his I’ve read.

2. Cloak, James Goff (2/7, fantasy, young adult)–8.

3.  Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (4/6, literature)–10.  I can’t believe I never finished my review of this!  I made some notes: I jotted down my two favorite quotes:

“I always imagine divine mercy giving us back to ourselves and letting us laugh at what we became, laugh at the preposterous disguises of crouch and squint and limp and lour we all do put on.”

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”

I also wrote down that I loved her usage of Numbers 6:24-26.

4.  Mozart: His Life and Music, Jeremy Siepmann (4/14, biography)–9.  Innovative biography mixed life story with music appreciation to the benefit of both.

5.  Maphead, Ken Jennings (5/11, memoir, humor)–9.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

Elric the Existential Emperor

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , , , on December 13, 2012 |

Elric_of_MelniboneThe Elric saga is a masterpiece of dark fantasy, a sword and sorcery epic that aches in existential angst, more indebted to Lovecraft than to Tolkien.

The first volume in the cycle, Elric of Melniboné, introduces us to the melancholy emperor Elric, a skeletal albino whose keen mind makes him a poor fit for the ancient kingdom of superhuman savages he rules.

We follow him on a quest to thwart a usurpation of his throne and rescue a blood-relative damsel in distress (an influence on George R.R. Martin, perhaps), while growing in power so much that an expanding epic is practically demanded by the denouement.

Even more audacious than the stark story itself is the pervasively dour prose, an exercise in contorted anguish, a French philosopher scribbling in the gloom after watching Reservoir Dogs:

And Elric stepped into a shadow and found himself in a world of shadows.  He turned, but the shadow through which he had entered now faded and was gone.  Old Aubec’s sword was in Elric’s hand, the black helm and the black armour were upon his body and only these were familiar, for the land was dark and gloomy as if contained in a vast cave whose walls, though invisible, were oppressive and tangible.  And Elric regretted the hysteria, the weariness of brain, which had given him the impulse to obey his patron demon Arioch and plunge through the Shade Gate.  But regret was useless now, so he forgot it.

Read Full Post »

Michael Chabon on Finnegans Wake

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , , , , , on November 15, 2012 |

Last month I found this issue of The New York Review of Books (courtesy of my awesome department chair), featuring an article by hipster wunderkind Michael Chabon about the year he spent reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

While not exactly a gloss, it is a piece where Chabon creates a clever framework for viewing the text.  To wit:

Other than its simple unreadability (indeed its apparent hostility to being read), the principal knock against the Wake—what Seamus Deane in his introduction to the Penguin edition calls “the gravamen of the charge against Joyce”—is that, in Deane’s paraphrase, Joyce “surrendered the ‘ordinary’ world, the world as represented in the great tradition of the realistic novel, for a world of capricious fantasy and inexhaustible word-play.” Eliot, Pound, Stanislaus Joyce, Frank Budgen, and other early champions of Ulysses found disappointment in this apparent surrender, and the truth is that, for all the real, nutritious, and hard-won pleasure that can be wrested from the Wake—as from a bucket of lobsters, by a determined reader with a pick and a cracker—anyone who has first loved or admired Ulysses must, as Joyce himself anticipated, find disappointment in Finnegans Wake.

Seventeen years of tireless labor by a mind blessed with a profound understanding of human vanity, with unparalleled gifts of sensory perception and the figuration thereof, and with one of the greatest prose styles in the English language produced a work that all too often, and for long stretches, can remind the reader (when not recalling Yertle the Turtle) of the Spike-Milligan- meets-Edward-Lear prose tossed off by the Writing Beatle in five minutes between tokes and takes of “Norwegian Wood.” But to find disappointment in the Wake’s, and Joyce’s, supposed turn away from approved modernist procedure, derived from Flaubert, which subjects shifting states of consciousness to the same rigorous accounting as the bibelots furnishing a provincial lady’s sitting room, is to miss the point.

I also appreciate that he compares the Wake to Lovecraft’s Necronomicon.  I did the same thing in my article on the Wake several years ago.  =)

Read Full Post »

TED Ed

Posted in Education, Language and Literature, tagged , , on November 13, 2012 |

The TED conference has recently launched a new site dedicated to short, academic videos that might be used in a classroom.  The site, TED Ed, even includes lesson plans.  Here’s their YouTube channel.  Good stuff.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 136 other followers

%d bloggers like this: