Polis Is This

here's the flyer for the MFA Boston showing:

here is Henry Ferrini's website--there's also a bio on him....please read up and be prepared. Oh yeah, you Kerouac scholars might want to notice that he has a film on Kerouac called Lowell Blues.

here's a review of Lowell Blues

here's a review of Polis Is This, followed by a bunch of blog posts on Olson by Ron Silliman. Worth reading--you bet.

Plum Plum Pickers passage explications

Please post your papers


in this comment stream if you are period 6.

Plum Plum Pickers passage explications

Please post your papers

in this comment stream if you are period 5.

I have too Munch to do...

that I can't keep up with my promise of posting all those wonderful creative covers and chapters that I received. Plus I had to make JPGs of the Word files in order to post etc. I hope to do that some day.

This is Edvard Munch's "The Scream". Munch was a very good painter and there is a good Simpsons version of this painting--but I digress. The title for this painting has always intrigued me--Is life really scary, i.e--worthy of a scream, or absurdly funny, as in ha ha that's a scream?

Anyway, you may want to scream because of my sophomoric puns--but I just want to dance.

Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement

Please consult the following page. Everyone needs some help with pronouns! I expect you to ask questions on what you need help on in class. But from now on, your writing needs to banish 2nd person and your pronouns must agree with its antecedent.

Literature Circles: December

We will spend December on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

Here are some works of Tragedy and / or Modernism (though not all choices fit perfectly)

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
A Lesson Before Dying (supplemented by selections from Joyce's Dubliners), Ernest J. Gaines
Ghetto Nation, Cora Daniels and Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata (plus one more from the list in back of book of Japanese Literature)
Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Town and the City, Jack Kerouac
A Vonnegut Novel (Slaughterhouse-Five, supplemental material)
Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe) will need a supplement (Possibly Amiri Baraka)
Othello and Tempest, Shakespeare (with essays)
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez

Myth and the Modern World Quartely Test

on Friday October 2nd, 2007
Be prepared to explain the significance of either of these quotations and explain how they relate to Modernism.

Portrait of Kafka done by Andy Warhol.

Kafka described in a letter to Klopstock: “If we were on the right road, having to leave it would mean endless despair. But we are on a road that only leads to a second one, and then to a third one, and so forth, and the real highway will not be sighted for a long time—perhaps never—and we drift in doubt, but also in inconceivably beautiful diversity; so the accomplishment of hopes remains an always unexpected miracle, but in compensation, the miracle remains forever possible.

cover of Duncan's book done by the painter / collage artist Jess (Collins)

Robert Duncan, 20th Century American poet, writes in his essay “Towards an Open Universe”, “Beauty strikes us and may be fearful, as there is great beauty in each step as Oedipus seeks the heart of tragedy, his moment of truth, as he tears out his eyes, and sees at last. . . For in our common human suffering, in loss and longing, an intuition of poetic truth may arise”(Duncan 79).

an interesting article on Duncan in Jacket 29, April 2006