Tag Archives: music

Guys and Dolls

“A collection of stories (1931) by the US writer Damon Runyon (1884-1946), comprising amusing tales of gangster life, told in Runyon’s colorful version of New York underworld patois. The first collection was followed by several others, and the stories feature characters such as Joe the Joker, Nicely-Nicely, Apple Annie, and Regret the Horseplayer. The musical comedy entitled Guys and Dolls (1950), based on Runyon’s stories and with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser (1910-69) and book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, focuses on the romance that develops between a Salvation Army worker (representing the ‘dolls’) and gambler Sky Masterson (representing the ‘guys’). It was filmed in 1955 starring Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, and Jean Simmons.”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Trial (German title: Der Prozess): A posthumously published novel (1925; English translation 1937) by Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Set in a nightmarish, proto-totalitarian world, it concerns the tribulations of Josef K., who is arrested and brought before a court, but the charges against him are never stated. He is driven to find out what he is supposed to have done wrong, and to seek acquittal–which he never succeeds in doing, but is taken to the edge of the city and killed ‘like a dog.’

Orson Welles directed a haunting film version (1963). In the opera The Visitation (1966), the US composer Gunther Schuller (1925-2015) transfers Kafka’s The Trial to the Southern states of the USA and Josef K. becomes a black student called Carter Jones.”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

The Weekly Text, October 11, 2019, Hispanic Heritage Month 2019 Week IV: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Eva Peron

Ok, in the ongoing observation of Hispanic History Month 2019 at Mark’s Text Terminal, here is a reading on Eva Peron and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. If you have students interested in the musical theater, this might be high interest material for them, given that Eva Peron’s life constitutes the source material for Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical Evita.

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.

Noel Coward on Hit Songs

“Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”

Noel Coward

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

New Kids on the Block

They were huge in 1990 when I first began working with adolescents. Now I wonder if anyone remembers them. I know the Wahlbergs  (Donnie was a member of New Kids on the Block and his brother Mark enjoyed a solo career as a rapper with the group “Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch; both are now actors) have parlied their success in the entertainment business into a reality show and, of all things, a burger joint franchise called Wahlburgers.

I usually don’t mention such things on this blog, but I find the fact that Mark Wahlberg became a rapper ironic indeed, given his history of racist violence. He also appears to have confused the action-star roles he plays with reality when he made these idiotic comments about the flights that were used as terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, in the United States.

In any case, here is a reading on the New Kids on the Block and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet if you have students who can’t live without this knowledge of this product of the publicity-industrial complex–a brilliant locution for which I thank the peerless journalist Ron Rosenbaum.

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.

14 and Bach

“By giving each letter a number from its order in the alphabet you can deconstruct the name ‘Bach’ as follows: 2 for the B, 1 for the A, 3 for the C, 8 for the H—which makes 14. A pleasing mirror, or reversal, of this number can also be formed from ‘J.S. Bach’—which gives 41. This pseudo-science of substituting numbers for letters is known as gematria, (or abjad in Arabic) and has innumerable variations depending on whether or not you include vowels or which language you translate back to or transcribe into. It has often appealed to creative minds and may have been behind Bach’s playful manipulation of the number 14, achieved by itself (in the fourteen canons of the Goldberg Variations for instance) or in pairs of sevens that occur throughout his work.

Gematria is a very ancient tradition, particularly in the Near East, where it has often had official sanction, with poetic inscriptions commissioned by rulers to reveal the date of the publication of a book or the construction of a building. There are examples dating back to Sargon II of Assyria (in the eighth century BC). In the first century AD gematria became a recognized tool of Jewish hermeneutical scholarship and it was tradition respected by many of the Ottoman Sultans. It seems only to have taken root in the imagination of Western Europe, however, in the seventeenth century.”

Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.

West Side Story

“A much-performed American musical by Leonard Bernstein (1918-90), with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930). It was first staged in 1957. The story is an updated version of Romeo and Juliet set in New York’s West Side dockland area, with the Montagues and the Capulets being replaced by rival teenage gangs, the Sharks and the Jets. The rivalry erupts into violence as a result of the love between Tony, one of the Jets, and Maria, the sister of the leader of the Sharks. The 1961 film version won an Oscar for best picture.”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

The Weekly Text, July 26, 2019: A Lesson Plan on Citing Sources in Synthetic Research Papers

While I have used the materials in this week’s Text in a variety of configurations, including, most often in a unit on the procedural knowledge necessary to produce research papers, I also keep it around as a standalone, which I call the “Research Paper in Miniature Lesson Plan” I wrote this several years ago after observing, in the school in which I worked, that teachers assigned synthetic research papers without any explicit instruction on the how and, perhaps more importantly, the why of citing sources when preparing such a document.

Today’s Text is, then, basically, a lesson plan on citing sources. I have opened this lesson, for reasons I think I can safely assume are obvious, with this context clues worksheet on the noun evidence; if, for some reason, this lesson runs into a second instructional period, I keep nearby this second context clues worksheet on the noun bibliography in case I need it. Finally, the mainstay of this lesson is this worksheet on the why and how of citing sources.

As I’ve worked with this lesson over the years, I have come to regard it (and you might find this a useful way of thinking about it as well) as an outline or template for a series of such lessons. Depending on what you’re working on in your classroom, an hour or so of editing and reconfiguring would transmute this lesson for use with a variety of short readings. In other words, whatever your domain is, and whatever content you are teaching, it could be adapted to work with this lesson and vice versa.

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.

The Rolling Stones

I don’t know how much currency they may or may not have with the students in your classroom, but in my experience this reading on The Rolling Stones is of relatively high interest to high school students. Here is the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it.

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.

Cultural Literacy: Woody Guthrie

Billy Bragg, an British singer I’ve been listening to for over thirty years, announced yesterday on his Twitter feed that New York City will rename part of Mermaid Avenue on Coney Island (where Woody lived, and which is also the name of an excellent trio of albums of Woody’s songs by Mr. Bragg and the American rock band Wilco) as Woody Guthrie Way. Furthermore, this years Mermaid Parade features Arlo Guthrie as King Neptune and Nora Guthrie as Queen Mermaid. They are, you will perceive, Woody’s children. If you’re in Brooklyn, or anywhere near Coney Island, I urge you to attend this cool event.

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Woody Guthrie in celebration of the events limned above, and of Mr. Guthrie as an American treasure.

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.