Humanities: February 2008 Archive Page

H.H. Munro (SAKI)  Esme

"The hyena hailed our approach with unmistakable relief and demonstrations of friendliness. It had probably been accustomed to uniform kindness from humans, while its first experience of a pack of hounds had left a bad impression. The hounds looked more than ever embarrassed as their quarry paraded its sudden intimacy with us, and the faint toot of a horn in the distance was seized on as a welcome signal for unobtrusive departure. Constance and I and the hyena were left alone in the gathering twilight."

From the Short Story of the Day.

Grand Text Auto introduced me to the excellent indie mini-game Passage.  Play it. It takes a few minutes to download and about 5 minutes to play. I'm misty-eyed.

Play it!

ABC News:

In the comic, Dilbert asks, "Why does it seem as if most of the decisions in my workplace are made by drunken lemurs?"

"I wanted to try to boost the morale for the employees," Steward said.

His bosses, however, didn't find the joke so funny. They didn't like the implication that they were the drunken lemurs in this scenario.

Using surveillance video, his bosses identified Steward as the comic culprit and fired him.

I'm posting this as another example in a long line of posts that I hope will encourage my students to be careful about what they write about on their blogs and personal profile pages.

I don't think that publishing a cartoon is a terminal offense.  I don't want to fail a student for showing passion or voicing an opinion, since I'm trained to see even a negative outburst as a "teachable moment" that can benefit the whole class (and my own superiors feel I am doing my job when I try to salvage a difficult situation with a frustrated student, rather than isolating and ejecting every student who causes friction).  I don't know anything else about Steward's situation.  Perhaps this comic was just one volley in an ongoing toxic battle that was affecting productivity.  But, more likely, his action angered powerful people who aren't used to being challenged.

But regardless of what I personally think, the truth is that employers have the legal right to hold you to whatever contract you signed when they hired you.

Politico:

Wolfson made the explosive charge in an interview with Politico after suggesting as much in a conference call with reporters.

On the call, Wolfson said: "Sen. Obama is running on the strength of his rhetoric and the strength of his promises and, as we have seen in the last couple of days, he's breaking his promises and his rhetoric isn't his own."

"When an author plagiarizes from another author there is damage done to two different parties. One is to the person he plagiarized from. The other is to the reader," said Wolfson.

Obama closely echoed a passage from a speech that Deval Patrick, now the Massachusetts governor, used at a campaign rally when he was running for that office in 2006.

American Literature.com

The Short Story of the Day features works by Anton Chekhov, Jack London, Louisa May Alcott, H.H. Munro (SAKI), Guy de Maupassant, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, O. Henry, Ambrose Bierce, and many others. An archive of all the stories featured to date can be found here.

From The Boston Globe:=

College administrators say that intense pressure to gain acceptance to selective schools has compelled parents to turn to high-priced essay editors and coaches. "The euphemism we use is polished," said Parke Muth, an admissions dean at the University of Virginia. "If you're paying someone that much money, there shouldn't be fingerprints. But some essays have that sheen, that lemony-fresh smell that makes you wonder." Outright plagiarism usually sticks out like a sore thumb, and suspicions can often be confirmed with a Google search. But detecting the helpful hand of a parent, guidance counselor, or writing coach, even for admissions officers who have read thousands of personal essays, takes a keen eye.

NPR's In Character treatment of Willy Loman (from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman).

"I can tell you anecdote after anecdote after anecdote of men -- men, 50-year-old pinstripe-suited men dissolved in tears and shaking," Dennehy says. "And telling me story after story about themselves, about their relationship with their sons, and so forth."

I rotated this play off of my syllabus this year. I'm sure I'll bring it back.

Christian Science Monitor:

During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.

Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family. But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved close to $5,000.

The effort, he says, was inspired after reading "Nickel and Dimed," in which author Barbara Ehrenreich takes on a series of low-paying jobs. Unlike Ms. Ehrenreich, who chronicled the difficulty of advancing beyond the ranks of the working poor, Shepard found he was able to successfully climb out of his self-imposed poverty.

Ehrenreich's book was Seton Hill's summer reading selection, so I'm teaching the book later this term. And I'm particularly interested in this item. Shepard's youth and strength (and probably gender) gave him access to a moving job that the middle-aged Ehrenreich wouldn't likely have landed.

Up Right Down already features over a dozen versions of the same story. What's yours? (Via)

THE PLOT: In a bistro in Paris a young woman (A) tells her three girlfriends (B, C, and D) about the affair she had with an American tourist, who returned home promising to write, and hasn't. It's been over two weeks; something must have happened to him. (She has just learned she is carrying his child, but she doesn't tell her friends.) B tells her to call him; C to e-mail him; D to forget all about him. Enter a fat American couple; each of them has a different speech impediment. They order food. The man chokes. A performs the Heimlich maneuver on him, and saves his life.

A great series hosted by Heidi Ruby Miller, a recent graduate of Seton Hill's Writing Popular Fiction program. She has asked writers of genre fiction (fantasy, crime, etc.) to tell the story of their first publication. I'm just starting a career track unit in Introduction to Literary Study, and several of the students want to be professional writers.

Every writer follows her own path within the publishing industry, which makes for entertaining and inspiring stories off the page. Paths to Publication offers some of those unique perspectives. I hope it also gives us all comfort knowing that our journey as writers is not just the breaks we get, but also the opportunities we take.

Frighteningly sad story from a San Diego TV station.

For 17 years Corcoran taught high school for the Oceanside School District. Relying on teacher's assistants for help and oral lesson plans, he said he did a great job at teaching his students.

"What I did was I created an oral and visual environment. There wasn't the written word in there. I always had two or three teacher's assistants in each class to do board work or read the bulletin," said Corcoran.

In retrospect, Corcoran said, his deceit took him a long time to accept.

"As a teacher it really made me sick to think that I was a teacher who couldn't read. It is embarrassing for me, and it's embarrassing for this nation and it's embarrassing for schools that we're failing to teach our children how to read, write and spell!"

From the AP:

Danish police said Tuesday they have arrested three people suspected of plotting to kill one of the 12 cartoonists behind the Prophet Muhammad drawings that sparked a deadly uproar in the Muslim world two years ago.

From the AP:

The estate of "Lord of the Rings" creator J.R.R. Tolkien is suing the film studio that released the trilogy based on his books, claiming the company hasn't paid it a penny from the estimated $6 billion the films have grossed worldwide.

Gettysburg College:

Students create text-based "interactive fiction" games that are rigorously derived from archaeological data and filled with references to Viking and other cultures. The games describe a scene or object in detail, then ask players to make a choice, such as "go east" or "take sword." Each decision leads to a new set of possibilities. "From an English professor's point of view, this is really creative writing," said Fee.

Don't forget the red lutkefish puzzle.

Random thoughts are exactly what they are, random!

Anyone can say random words. It does
Have favorable results. His attempts to woo
-- But never all the way -- toward the cliff
Conform to something so unlike yourself

The other points are pretty valid. It's
A place to jot down information as
Questions. For example: how many?
Some mystery, not just telling the story

And one of the issues that I struggled with
Has meaning and the other does not.  Which
Alters it, stepping farther and farther away
From the last meeting to give you an idea.

I should just take a note book and go sit
At the food court at the mall.

My students are working on showing and telling. It's a difficult concept to learn, and I've found over the years it's not that easy to teach.

So as part of an upcoming short story assignment, I've started to introduce the concept of "pointless showing" to define the practice of avoiding clear language in the misguided belief that "being obscure instead of direct" is the same thing as "showing instead of telling."

• Pointless Showing: "A stream of thick red substance sliding from the jar into the pot... the long strands in the pot, undulating and flowing like hair, like Lucy's hair, took on the crimson hue, and moments later the silence of the empty apartment was broken by the slurping sounds of eating. Or was it weeping? Not even the absent Lucy would have been able to tell for sure, even if Jack could have choked out the question. He reached for the cheese grater, held it to his chest, and ground, ground, ground his love into Lucy's favorite dish."
  [What the hell? Showing isn't simply about being obscure. It's about choosing details carefully, in order to lead the reader to figure out, on his or her own, what precisely the details show.]
  
  
• Good Showing: "Bill still cooked himself pasta with the sauce he made Lucy's way. He hoped he might learn to love pasta, but feared Lucy had learned to loathe him."
  [This scene uses plain language to tell what the character is doing and thinking... but it doesn't come right out and tell the significance of each action, or announce how Bill feels at any particular moment.  This version SHOWS something that is not explicitly stated in the pasta example -- that Bill associates Lucy and pasta in his mind, and that the habits he has developed about pasta echo the habits he has developed around Lucy.  There's no big dusty book that says "Pasta is a symbol of romance," but if the scene progresses so that the pasta catching fire, or Bill throws it away and cooks something else, or he chokes on the pasta and throws up on the floor, we can figure that's a hint about Bill's chances for a relationship with Lucy.]

See also Planning Your Short Story

Good literacy news from the Washington Post:

The share of kindergarten students in the county who can read simple books has risen from 39 to 93 percent in six years, according to school system data culled from reading assessments given each spring. Achievement is so high, and across so many demographic groups, that school officials plan to test future kindergartners on more challenging text.

The article credits the change from half-day kindergarten to full-day kindergarten. One of the main reasons we started homeschooling is that we weren't really ready to send our son away for a full day, and there wasn't an option to send him for a half-day -- the teachers assured us that he would miss out on far too much. We thought that we would miss our son far too much.

I took a little break from evaluating a close reading assignment in order to look into the online chatter about George W. Bush's interpretation of a painting called "A Charge to Keep."  Bush hung it on his wall because he identifies with the guy out in front, whom he sees as leading a tough climb over rough terrain.