“A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”
Gertrude Stein, in Dictionary of Biographical Quotation 1978
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, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, poetry
“…do you not know that there is not perhaps one page in Milton’s Paradise Lost in which he has not borrowed his imagry [sic] from the scriptures? I allow and rejoice that Christ only appealed to the understanding and affections; but I affirm that after reading Isaiah, of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, Homer and Virgil are disgustingly tame to me and Milton himself barely tolerable.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letters 1796
“I could never read ten lines together without stumbling over some Pedantry that tipped me at once out of Paradise, or even Hell, into the schoolroom, worse than either.”
Edward Fitzgerald, Letters, 1876
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, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, poetry
Here is a learning support on the 9 muses that I contrived to use with a unit on the History of Hip-Hop unit I began assembling in my second or third year of teaching. (OK, yes, I admit I don’t know what I was thinking here; let’s just say I was a neophyte teacher attempting to find a way to synthesize a broad of content into a high-interest unit that would attract highly alienated and challenging students in the South Bronx.)
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.
“After reading some of Poe’s stories one feels a kind of shock to one’s modesty. We require some kind of spiritual ablution to cleanse our minds of his disgusting images.”
Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library 1874
“A verbal poet merely; empty of thought, empty of sympathy, empty of love for any real thing…he was not human and manly.”
John Burroughs, The Dial 1893
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, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, poetry
From my sophomore year of high school on, I was quite taken with The Beat Generation. In the event that you have any students with a similar interest (I still stumble across one every so often), this cultural literacy worksheet on the late, great Allen Ginsberg might be a place for them to start in the pursuit an inquiry into the Beats.
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.
“Double Entendre (noun): A provocative ambiguity in an expression, especially a humorous or risqué connotation in a word or phrase; double meaning. British: double-entente.
‘The editor was also often on the edge of panic about suspected double entendre, and after thirty-one years I recall his concern about an Arno drawing of one of his elderly gentlemen of the old school dancing with a warmly clinging young lady and saying, ‘Good God, woman, think of the social structure!’ Ross was really afraid that “social structure” could be interpreted to mean a certain distressing sexual phenomenon of human anatomy.’ James Thurber, The Years with Ross”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, poetry
“Alliteration: (Latin ‘repeating and playing upon the same letter’) A figure of speech in which consonants, especially at the beginning of words, or stressed syllables, are repeated. It is a very old device indeed in English verse (older than rhyme) and is very common in verse generally. It is used occasionally in prose. In Old English poetry alliteration was a continual and essential part of the metrical scheme and until the late Middle Ages was of was often used thus. However, alliterative verse becomes increasingly rare after the end of the 15th century and alliteration—like assonance, consonance and onomatopoeia—tends to more to be reserved for the achievement of special effect.
There are many classic examples, like Coleridge’s famous description of the sacred river Alph in Kubla Khan:
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Any others less well known, like this from the beginning of Norman MacCaig’s poem Mutual Life:
A wild cat, fur-fire in a bracken brush,
Twitches his club-tail, rounds his amber eyes
At rockabye rabbits humped on the world. The air
Crackles about him. His world is a rabbit’s size.
And this, from the first stanza of R.S. Thomas’s The Welsh Hill Country:
Too far for you to see
The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot
Gnawing the skin from the small bones,
The sheep are grazing at Bwlch-y-Fedwen,
Arranged romantically in the usual manner
On a bleak background of bald stone.
Alliteration is common in nonsense verse:
Be lenient with lobsters, and ever kind to crabs,
And be not disrespectful to cuttle-fish or dabs;
Chase not the Cochin-China, chaff not the ox obese,
And babble not of feather-beds in company with geese
in tongue-twisters:
Betty Botter bought some butter,
But, she said, the butter’s bitter;
If I put it in my batter
It will make my batter bitter,
But a bit of better butter,
That would make my batter better.
in jingles:
Dingle digle doosey,
The cat’s in the well,
The dog’s away to Bellingen
To buy the bairn a bell.
and in patter beloved of drill sergeants and the like:
Now then, you horrible shower of heathens, have I your complete hattention?
Hotherwise I shall have to heave the whole hairy lot of you into the salt box
where you will live on hopeful hallucinations for as long as hit pleases God and
the commanding hofficer”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
“His fame is gone out like a candle in a snuff and his memory will always stink.”
William Winstanley, diary 1687
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, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, poetry
“Thirteen is a famously unlucky number in the Western world. I certainly grew up with the belief that to invite thirteen guests to sit around the table doomed the last to some nameless dread–so, to avoid that fate, out table was always laid to include fourteen. It was a belief shared by Napoleon, F.D. Roosevelt and John Paul Getty, and concern over the number 13 is the most common form of Western superstition. Hotels often have no room 13, tower blocks tend to avoid a 13th floor, and travel agents know that the thirteenth of a month (especially if it falls on a Friday) will be short of bookings.
The most common explanation of unlucky thirteen is the Last Supper, where thirteen sat down to eat, one of whom was a traitor plotting the arrest and judicial murder of his host and master. But similar stories can be found in many other cultures, such as the Viking Norse, who remembered how Loki stumbled into a gathering of twelve gods (from which he had been excluded) and in his envy started plotting the events that would lead to the end of the world.
Robert Graves enthusiastically listed in The White Goddess the various mythological companies of thirteen that tend to lead to the betrayal, if not sacrificial death, of one of their members: be they Arthur and his twelve nights, Odysseus and his twelve companions, Romulus and the twelve shepherds, Roland and the twelve peers of France, Jacob and his twelve sons, of Danish Hrolf and his twelve Berserks. Not to mention the thirteen dismembered portions of Osiris’s body recovered by Isis from the Nile.
The ultimate cause of our attitude to thirteen may be that the thirteenth month of the year was always weak and withered. For, although twelve lunar months almost fill up our solar year (to produce 360 days from twelve sets of 29 and a half days), there was always the issue a left-over period of five days. This was considered in ancient cultures to be the thirteenth month, a five-day oddity, often believed to be a period of immensely bad luck where the world was not policed by the normal powers, and evil spirits held brief reign. Some cultures made this into a Saturnalia-like carnival, where the norman roles of society were reversed; others deemed it a needful time for sacrifice.”
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.
Happy New Year! Here, for the first blog post of the New Year, is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Beowulf.
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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