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Archive for the ‘Language and Literature’ Category

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris

Posted in Arts, Language and Literature, tagged , , , , on May 23, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Loved this movie!  What a sweet, beautiful celebration of a single time and place in the history of culture.  However, I wish Allen had squeezed James Joyce in with the rest of his pantheon.  Ewan McGregor played Joyce in a film once; would it have killed Allen to call him up to see if he [...]

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Great Authors On Symbolism In 1963

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , on April 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

In 1963, a precocious American student wrote to dozens of authors, asking them about symbolism.  This article collects some of the most memorable responses he got, including this one from beatnik auteur Jack Kerouac.  Others include Saul Bellow, Ayn Rand, John Updike, and Norman Mailer.

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Basically the Same Trick in Chinese and English

Posted in Humor, Language and Literature, tagged , , , , , , on March 15, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

I recently saw this posting online.  Even though the Mandarin Chinese word “shi” is used below with four different tones of pronunciation, the same tone can still have multiple meanings.  Obviously, then, very common syllables in Chinese, like “shi,” can have tons of homonyms.  Thus, this.  I regret to say that the only words I [...]

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Reviewed: The Original John Carter Story

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , , , , on March 9, 2012 | 2 Comments »

Disney’s new movie John Carter is based on the first book in a classic series by Edgard Rice Burroughs, who also created Tarzan.  The movie must have at least enough similarity to the book that their official novelization of the film also includes the text of the book, called A Princess of Mars.  I read [...]

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Epic LOLs in Milton’s Paradise Lost

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 1, 2012 | 3 Comments »

I’m reading John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, and what impresses me most (besides how aggressively macho Milton makes every detail—perhaps how Ray Bradbury would write if he were on steroids) is how funny it can often be.  Two scenes in Book 2 will demonstrate: As the deposed demons discuss what to do about their infernal [...]

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Reviewed and Recommended: Cloak, by James Gough

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , , , on February 9, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

I have a secret.  It’s James Gough’s young adult fantasy novel Cloak.  It’s a terrific read and a solid entry in a trending genre but, thanks to Gough being a new author and Cloak being put out by a small press, you’ve never heard of it.  It’s a secret I’d love to have more people [...]

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More Stephen King-Inspired Media About Teens

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , on February 9, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

A few days ago, I noted that the plot for the movie Chronicle is very similar to the plot for Carrie.  That reminded me of another similarity. I read The Hunger Games a couple of years ago and really liked it.  But the basic template was not new. A tyrannical government in a future dystopia [...]

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The Value of Term Papers

Posted in Education, Language and Literature, tagged , , , on January 25, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

The brilliant professor Mark Bauerlein scores yet another direct hit in a recent post about the value of those old-fashioned writing assignments: In my classes I include both types of assignments, short, one-page writings and longer 7-page papers (I rarely go over 10 pages these days, but I try to make the class have 25-30 [...]

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Why I Never Bothered Finishing Eragon

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , , , on January 12, 2012 | 5 Comments »

I’ve started many books which I’ve stopped reading before they were finished–some after only a few chapters, others when I was halfway through–but there has only been one where I read far more than half and then decided that I had wasted enough time on it.  That was Eragon; I only had 50 pages left when I [...]

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2011: My Year In Books

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , on December 29, 2011 | 2 Comments »

I only read 26 books in 2011, but on the plus side, this year had the highest overall quality of any year yet–by far the most perfect tens.  And in my own defense, some of these were pretty long.  Mostly, this makes me realize how little I’ve blogged about my reading this year–I used to write [...]

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Reviewed: Truth Barriers

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , , on December 8, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Reading this old collection of poetry by this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature showed me pretty clearly just how little poetry I read.  It took me a while to get into the rhythms of the technique, and even though the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer is extraordinarily lucid (his accessibility is often praised [...]

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The Oxford English Dictionary Has a Blog!

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged on November 17, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Doing some research this morning for an upcoming vocabulary assignment my classes are doing, I found that the Oxford English Dictionary has a delightfully logophillic blog, OxfordWords.  The most recent offerings appear to be about invented languages, word origins, eponyms, and the persistence of cassette tapes. Has this blog already been added to my link [...]

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Punctuation Riddle

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , on November 10, 2011 | 3 Comments »

This one was in Eats, Shoots & Leaves; punctuate such that it makes sense: Every lady in this land Has twenty nails on each hand Five and twenty on hands and feet And this is true without deceit  

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Scrutiny in Teaching Writing

Posted in Education, Language and Literature, tagged , , , , on November 5, 2011 | 3 Comments »

A post at National Review, and some great follow up comments from readers, offers some great ideas about teaching writing: The only way to address writing is to give line-by-line feedback. We cannot assume that students know what good writing looks like. Every time students pass a written assignment at any level with subpar writing, such [...]

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Animal Farm Shrugged

Posted in Language and Literature, Politics and Society, tagged , , , , , on November 5, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

I just read chapter seven of Animal Farm, George Orwell’s allegory for the disastrous early years of the Soviet Union, and noted this passage: One Sunday Squealer announced that the hens, who had just come in to lay again, must surrender their eggs….When the hens heard this, they raised a terrible outcry….they protested that to take away [...]

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