Meta Maus

Please read and listen to the interview material here. When you are done, please write a comment of about 250 to 300 words in which you cover your reponse to the two basic questions that emerge when we first approach Maus. First, is a comic book serious enough (in terms of genre) to treat the shoah? And second, what is your reaction to the choice of mice for Jews? Does the irony make it an effective choice or is it, as an older jewsih friend of mine put it, "a choice in poor taste?"

9th Grade Honors

1. Read the story Girl in your anthology.

2. Then read the short critical article here.

3. Next, re-read the story.

4. Finally, write a carefully constructed response based on this assignment:

Low Stakes Writing

Response Paper

Write your paper at your google document site, then share it with me for credit.

Length: about two pages word processed, double spaced

Audience: academic audience, including peers and instructor, the group of educated people who understand and appreciate literature.

Purpose: to demonstrate that you have read and comprehended the text; to express your intellectual response to the text; to help you become more curious about how literature works.

Prompt: read the story/poem Girl by Jamaica Kincaid. Then write a series of paragraph in which you discuss how Kincaid describes the life of women and girls in this culture. In what ways are their lives difficult. How do they react to or even overcome the difficulty? How do women retian their individuality in the face of oppression?

Argument

Read the essay here. What does it add to our discussion of the modes of reason?

Also this is fascinating....

What Truths Science Cannot Speak

Read and respond to this essay from the New York Times. Bring our class discussions about argument into play...you can even reference David Quammen and others.

Raymond Carver Boxes

Carver's story Boxes gives us two of the patterns I have stressed: 1. the difficulty and desperation of the working class and 2. the pre-epiphanic moment, at which a character sort of "wakes up." I have noted that many of the moments are also moments of the awareness of mortality.

When you have read Boxes, please write about 200 words. Tell me the defining characteristics of the narrator and note for me any significant details, that is, any details that function not only as part of the setting or plot, but also of theme or motif.

Where I'm Calling From

This is one of Carver's most praised stories. Published in the early 1980's, it was included in the Best American Short Stories and was subsequently tagged for inclusion in John Updike's BASS of the Century Anthology.

The style is somewhat richer than the spare minimal sentences that Carver produced under the editorial hand of Gordon Lish. I think it points the way Carver would be turning in his last years, as he wrote true masterpieces like Errand.

In the story, Carver uses supporting characters to develop the voice and character of the narrator. Given your reading and completion of the worksheet, please write no more than 4000 characters in which you discuss how several supporting characters helps us to understand the protagonist-narrator.

Carver Video

Please watch parts 1, 2, 3.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Rayond Carver

You have read Cathedral, the poem Photograph of My Father in his 22^nd Year and the memoir piece that includes that poem.

What themes does Carver announce in these pieces? How might we expect that he enlarge (beyond mere stereotype) our understanding of a certain part of American culture?

What parts of each piece of writing (story, essay, poem) communicate most clearly to you? Just begin with a short quote and then tell how that quote means something to you.

Then go the blog and write in your response. Create about 300 words worth of writing. Your audience is your peer group, plus teachers and other smart folks who like to learn about writers and writing. So pay attention to grammar and spelling. But the most important part is the quality of your ideas, the sincerity of your response. This is a Pass/Fail grade. No late work, no excuses.

Dystopia wars

Orwell's 1984 warns us that the future will dominated by totalitarian governments who use force to rule the populace. Brave New World offers another view: that people will become so bebased by entertainment and pleasure that they will willingly give up freedom for a life of guaranteed, mindless pleasure.

Read the short summaries of both books at the links above to remind your self of the books (or learn about them for the first time.

The read this letter from Huxley to Orwell.

Which is more a more accurate future of authoritarian govenment for a country like the USA? Why?

Limit to 4000 characters.

Rockism

Read and respond. Are you a rockist. Where are your music biases?

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/arts/music/31sann.html?_r=1

Language

Like far too many "educated" Americans, I am fluent in exactly NO other world languages. I can read French a bit, but it's been twenty years since I did any real reading in French, way back in grad school. I have a hazy desire to learn Spanish because so many of our nation's newest citizens are Spanish speakers, but I never seem to find the time.



If I could learn any language, I think I would go back to French. That language retains, for me, its cosmopolitan allure, its sound of sophistication. And I would like to read the Mallarme, Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Reverdy again with clarity. There is newish translation of Rimbuad’s Illuminations by my hero John Ashberry. I have the dual language edition and have enjoyed playing with some of the challenging ideas therein. My French is too too rusty to do much more than look at various phrases and try to remember how the verb tenses work.



Read the essay here. Then write about 400 words in which you summarize your own work with world languages and then look to the future. What will you learn and why? After all, you are still young! Your brain is still plastic enough to learn a language quickly.

Show off as a writer. Please proofread carefully.

The Ghost in the Machine

We can distinguish five positions on consciousness: eliminativist, dualist, idealist, pan­psychist and mysterianist. Which are you? Readf and explain why you favor your choice.

Read the article here.

Scientist Politicians

The author of the article here (Why Don't We Elect More Scientists?") says, "To avoid receiving the candidates’ canned responses on these and other issues, I sometimes wish that a debate moderator would forgo a standard question about immigration or jobs and instead ask the candidates to solve a simple puzzle, make an elementary estimate, perform a basic calculation."

Read the article and then respond in the comment section, please. You may be askd to join the NYT subscription list...it's free...just do it.

Write down your intellectual response to Paulos' proposition that we would be better off if more scientists were in government.

In your writing, make good points...show off your writing style...present yourself as bright and interesting!

Given what you know about the book, where do your sympathies lie: with Fingal, who says the essayist may not alter facts or with D'agata, who says "it's art, d***head."

Post in less than 4000 characters.

Faith and Reason

Reason should be illuminated by faith and faith must be undergirded by reason.

Identify two tropes and one sentence level figure. Then should how that use of language makes the idea more convincing.

AP juniors, please post here...

jrb

La Mort de La Dissertation

An article at the Times summarizes arguments for and against the assignment of formal, sustained arguments with sources, namely the term paper.  Since no one writes term papers anymore (most college students report that they never write a paper over fifteen pages) I guess the argument is, in terms of practice, settled. But the emergence of the "synthesis" essay on the AP exam is just one of the signs that some people are at least troubled by, if not in actual mourning for, the old fashioned assignment.

I'm not as bothered by the inability of students to use sources as I am their disinclination to reason carefully in writing. In that sense, I think the term paper asks for two linked but distinct skills.

Please read the Times article (you may need to log in) and then write a short comment in which you take a side. Give at least one good reason for your stance.

Poetics of Consciousness

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/james-schuyler

We made the point that Elizabeth's Bishops poems seek to map the mind as it works (indeed the map is one of her favorite tropes). James Schuyler takes this imulse to a more intense level in his discursive poems that seem to work as the mind works, shifting from one idea to the next.

But Schuyler's pomes are craftier than they look and the best ones are anything but loosely structured. The best way to find the underlying structure is to look for motifs and think about how they mean in the larger context of the poem.

Reading Dining Out Doung and Frank (page 692) and write about 500 words in which you find one motif that interests you. Tie it into your reading of the poem's theme. Cut and paste your response inot the comment column below. Limit to 4000 characters.

Michael Chabon's first book of essays covers a topic most critical to BC and the college prep program there: what does it mean to be a man?

Chabon's insightful, often playful, always beautifully written essays frame a series of autobiographical stories within the idea of contemporary manhood. In Honors 10th grade, we listened to Chabon read and we have written drafts of our own responses to the fascinating question.

Short AP Essays

AP Language students:

Now that we have done one in class paragraph, completed one at-home draft, and peer edited in class, it's time to post drafts here.

Post at this entry!.