“Thought…is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom. Unfortunately…no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.”
The Human Condition ch. 45 (1958)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion, women's history
I don’t want to let Women’s History Month 2019 pass without posting something related to Alice Walker. To that end, here is a reading Ms. Walker’s novel The Color Purple and a vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet to accompany it. These, I was pleased to see, were of no small interest to the young women in the classes I currently teach.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review
“(1911-1979) American poet. Bishop’s first book of poems was North and South (1946). In 1955 she reissued that book with A Cold Spring; the double volume was awarded the 1956 Pulitizer Prize for poetry. Bishop had close friendships with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell; her work shares precision with the former and personal warmth with the latter. Her poems are written in a modern idiom with great stylistic subtlety. While she knew many of the confessional poets, she wrote about her own life with irony, humor, and detachment. Her Complete Poems (1969) won the National Book Award in 1970. Geography III (1977), a ten-poem picture of her life, seen through places she remembers, is meditative, but vivid, spare almost to the point of austerity. Bishop was an avid traveler, living in many parts of the world, including Brazil, where she lived with Lota de Macedo Soares for almost two decades. Bishop returned to the U.S. after Soares’ suicide. The end of Bishop’s life was darkened by ill health and alcoholism, which had long plagued her. Bishop was considered by many a “poet’s poet,” but her deceptively simple style carries with it an undercurrent of tenderness that also touches less-sophisticated readers. Bishop also wrote a number of travel books, including Questions of Travel (1965) and Brazil (1967). One Art: Selected Letters (1993) is a large selection of an ever more voluminous and interesting correspondence.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
It’s Thursday, and as another week proceeds to its end, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the goddess Athena. She is, as you will recognize in the nouns Athens and Athenaeum, an important figure in both the Greek pantheon and Western civilization.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“A gloomy tale. The author tries to lighten it with humor, but unfortunately her idea of humor is almost exclusively variations on the pratfall…Neither satire not humor is achieved.”
Saturday Review of Literature
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged literary oddities, women's history
Moving right along with Women’s History Month 2019, here is an Everyday Edit worksheet on Gwendolyn Brooks (and if you like this, the good folks at Education World will give you a yearlong supply of them).
Also, here is a PDF of Ms. Brooks’ linguistically elegant poem “We Real Cool.”
“(1892-1982) American novelist and short-story writer. For many years a resident of Europe, Barnes was the author of three experimental plays produced in 1919-1920 by the Provincetown Players: Three from the Earth, An Irish Triangle, and Kurzy from the Sea. Ryder (1928) and Nightwood (1936) are her best-known books. The latter, with an introduction by T.S. Eliot, is an experimental novel dealing with the Parisian artistic underground. After the publication of Nightwood, however, Barnes became a recluse. She published only one play and two poems after this, the main reason for her lack of fame today; in her time, she was extremely influential. The Antiphon (1958) is a surrealistic play in blank verse. Her Selected Works appeared in 1962. In 1983, soon after her death, Smoke and Other Early Stories was published for the first time. Interviews (1985), a collection of newspaper and magazine conversations with celebrities presents forty portraits of varied people and is illustrated by Barnes’s own drawings.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Continuing with Women’s History Month 2019, here are a reading on Queen Victoria and a vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet to accompany it. Given her outsized influence in British history, as well as the adjectival form of her name–Victorian–serving as a metaphor for a kind of stuffy, repressed age, whenever and wherever it occurs–she seems to me someone with whom students should have at least a passing familiarity.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“After sitting through the preview of a strikingly bad movie made by an independent producer, Tallulah observed, ‘What I don’t see is what that producer has got to be independent about.'”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
It’s Monday again, the first of Women’s History Month 2019, which Mark’s Text Terminal will observe with Women’s History-related posts for the entire month. Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Marian Anderson. I am happy to report that the authors, even in the squib that serves as a reading for this worksheet, mentioned the ugly racist indignity Ms. Anderson suffered in 1941.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
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