The Cask of Amontillado: Still Relevant

Here's a link to a wine-tasting tomorrow, among the bones, muhahaha!

V for Vendetta blog post: due March 9th

Here's your last blog writing assignment this quarter.
I'd like you to put down responses in two different registers to V for Vendetta.
First, I'd like you to react to thematic elements. In particular, what do you think about the way the novel presents resistance and revolution to change society? Does it make a convincing case? Convincing for some but not all of V's ideas and methods? Why or why not??
Second, I'd like you to select one or two passages where the graphic novel format seems really effective. Yes, we all like books with lots of pictures in them, but historically this is part of what has held back comics from being taken seriously. However, now people are thinking that there is some really significant opportunities through the form of text and pictures. Where did the pictures really make the story more engaging or make you slow down and pay attention to the images instead of just whipping through the text?
350-400 words.

to lighten your finals-approaching mood

Here's a link to a humorous "Spark Notes" version of Goodnight, Moon.

Echoes of RUR

Here are a couple of videos that resonate with themes from RUR. Please post others on your own blogs or as comments--they seem to be everywhere. And, in class the novels/films I mentioned were Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Children of Men. You might also check out a movie called Moon directed by Duncan Jones.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Here's a link to the Gates talk at Mondavi Center next week.

Bill Nye, Science Guy, and a Virtual Reality reality check.

Follow this link about a lecture at USC where Bill Nye, Science Guy, passed out and the student audience sat there tweeting and facebooking about it while no one checked to see if he was okay...

Cairo and Online Social Networking

Last week we talked a little about Gary Shteyngart's SSTLS and the way online social networking has played a significant role in the recent revolutions in the Middle East. Here are a couple of pics.

The Chinese are Coming

Alongside our reading of Super Sad True Love Story, here is a recent documentary about the rising influence of China across the globalizing globe.

Carbon dating and a literary outlier.

Follow this link to a story about a 14th-Century book and the recent turn in its history due to carbon dating discoveries about its materials.

And here is the link to a cool photo gallery of the book's pages with illustrations.

M Butterfly blog, due Feb 13

Hi LitBloggers!

For this blog entry, please write a 300-400 word response to the film M Butterfly, which you just screened in class. In many ways, this film brings together the same themes as Shteyngart's SSTLS: gender, ethnicity, politics, art, and love. Please write your response about some configuration of these multiple themes. For example, you might write a response that compares/contrasts the film's intersections of these with SSTLS. Or, you might simply stick to the movie. Please post your writing before class on Monday.

The future of noir fiction

Here's a pretty cool manifesto, written in 2003 but just published online recently, that argues about what must happen if noir fiction is to survive and thrive.

Blog writing assignment, due Monday Feb 7th

Hi LitBloggers,

For Monday, we're reading pp 72-196 of SSTLS. I want you to do a kind of Brainstorm Extension response writing.
First, choose one of the themes from the essay #2 assignment sheet or one of your own. Next, choose 3 passages in the reading for Monday that relate to that theme. Then, brainstorm. I'd like to see you talk about what each passages says about the theme; why the passage stands out; how the passage relates to the theme in the novel on the whole; and other reactions to each passage that you have.

300-400 words and please have it posted before class. This is a good chance to get ideas cooking up for the essay, so think a bit about which theme you'd like. That said, this does not commit you to the theme.

SSTLS Trailer

Here's the video that screened on Youtube to promote the book before it launched.

On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Here's a link to a recently compiled list of the 25 most influential Black American leaders of all time.

Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, and other literary figures make the list, suggesting once again just how significant we consider literature to be in relation to our social world.

Blog writing due January 12

Once you've read Richard Brautigan's poem "All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace" multiple times and really attentively, please write a 350-400 word blog on it.

First, write 1-2 paragraphs assembling evidence to argue that this poem has an anti-technology tone and message.

Second, write 1-2 paragraphs assembling evidence to argue that this poem has a pro-technology tone and message.

Finally, write 1-2 paragraphs explaining which reading you think is more convincing and explain WHY.

Please post the blog before class.

Ted Hughes "Crow's Theology"

"Crow's Theology"


Crow realized God loved him-

Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.

So that was proved.

Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.


And he realized that God spoke Crow-

Just existing was His revelation.


But what Loved the stones and spoke stone?

They seemed to exist too.

And what spoke that strange silence

After his clamour of caws faded?



And what loved the shot-pellets

That dribbled from those strung-up mummifying crows?

What spoke the silence of lead?


Crow realized there were two Gods-


One of them much bigger than the other

Loving his enemies

And having all the weapons.

A less creepy love poem by Pablo Neruda

Love Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda
(Original in Spanish)
No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal, topacio
o flecha de chaveles que propagan el fuego:
te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,
secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.

Te amo como la planta que no florece y lleva
dentro de si, escondida, la luz de aquellas flores,
y gracias a tu amor vive oscuro en mi cuerpo
el apretado aroma que acendio de la tierra.

Te amo sin saber como, ni cuando, ni de donde,
te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:
asi te amo porque no se amar de otra manera,

sino asi de este modo en que no soy ni eres,
tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mia,
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueno.
(English Translation)
I do not love you as if you were a salt rose, or topaz
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
So I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

In honor of Alan Watts' birthday today, here is a little video the South Park guys made to accompany an audio recording.

"Sanitized" Huckleberry Finn: Thoughts??

Follow this link to a story about an English professor who has proposed a "sanitized" version of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn as a way of overcoming the traditional banning of this book, thereby making it more accessible to more readers.

On the one hand, this would get the book in more people's hands. On the other hand, some might say that this "whitewashes" the history of racial tension in U.S. history.

What do you think??

Blog Writing Assignment Due Monday, January 10th

Hi LitBloggers!

Read all of the poems, multiple times. Now, select one poem and take notice of all the imagery in it. Pay attention to the dominant images as well as those more subtly worked into it. Are there any patterns relating to an image or set of images? If so, are there any breaks or divergences in these patterns? Now get ready to write:

Step 1: Make a comprehensive list of the images in this poem. This can just be a list without complete sentences. The purpose is to create an inventory so you can then decide what to focus on in your writing. This does not count toward the 350-400 words, sorry.
Step 2: Now, select one type of image or a few images you think are somehow connected and/or work together in that poem and write a 350-400 word speculation about how this image offers an interpretation of the poem.

For example, if this assignment was today you might have written a comparative argument about the three images in Shakespeare's quatrains. You might have compared the people and their settings in Wordsworth, whether incorporating the bees or not.

The poems for Monday are rich in imagery, so this should be an inviting assignment. Please have it posted on your blog before we meet Monday morning.

Literature: a new kind of 3-D

Follow this link to view transformations of old pulp books into 3-D art.

Gwendolyn Brooks's "First Fight. Then Fiddle."
(1949)


First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string
With feathery sorcery; muzzle the note
With hurting love; the music that they wrote
Bewitch, bewilder. Qualify to sing
Threadwise. Devise no salt, no hempen thing
For the dear instrument to bear. Devote
The bow to silks and honey. Be remote
A while from malice and from murdering,
But first to arms, to armor. Carry hate
In front of you and harmony behind.
Be deaf to music and to beauty blind.
Win war. Rise bloody, maybe not too late
For having first to civilize a space
Wherein to play your violin with grace.