November 26, 2008 presentations

GREAT job everyone!
for those who missed it ... you did indeed miss it

YES you can bring your daemon to class!!
revisit Plato's Allegory of the Cave in light of Pullman

Taylor -- All the Skins of a Life
Molly the ball python
add/remove skin
JW Waterhouse
Keats: Le Belle Dame sans Merci
the animal and the human/ the wild and the civilized
wholeness

Hannah -- The Portal between Adulthood and Childhood
Carroll childlike /Dodson adult
puer aeternus
Peter Pan

Sadie -- Too curious?
Psyche, Bluebeard - desire that is dangerous AND essential

Jesse -- Illustrations
something we can’t do with words
Alice in Sunderland, pp 79 and 135
variations in Beast, Puss in Boots, Rumplestilskin
Lyra’s alethiometer
Picasso -- Gertrude Stein's portrait “it will...”
Calvino: The Castle of Crossed Destinies -- mute, Tarot cards

Ronnie -- The Power of Literacy
Greenblatt: Marvelous Possessions
Columbus and indigenous peoples
Frederick Douglass “the pathway from slavery to freedom”
Knowledge is Power
Lyra’s sacrifice -- what is lost, what is gained
the many different forms of literacy

John -- Transformation
surrounding ourselves with art
suspension of disbeliefs
Henry V opening soliloquoy

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

The Second Shepherd’s Pageant
Linfield Theatre Rm 125
Dec 3
7-9

plus

Raquel’s Recital
Howard Hall
Dec 6
7:30 pm

Ben -- Cannibalism
Tracy Willard -- Tales of the Border -- stepmothers
Margaret VanDyke “Horrid Warnings”
cf theme of resurrection
jack and tom thumb offer themselves to be eaten when they are hungry
the apple as evil, as a weapon -- YET “keeps the doctor away”
eat the body and drink the blood
the unconscious learns from the stories

Kathleen -- The Slanted Truth
all these questions and no answers
Emily Dickinson “dazzle gradually”
"...because truth is such a rarity today, it SHOULD be in children’s lit..."

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

Jill -- John Lennon
Lucy in the Sky + I Am the Walrus
dreams, shadows, mirror images
Revolution #9 and Revolution #9 Dream
layers
1964-65 A Spaniard In The Works and In His Own Write
Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll
Lear: The Owl and the Pussycat

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
...They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

John Cage
Jabberwocky "this nonsense reminds me of something..."

November 24, 2008 notes

Presentations
begin Wednesday!

BE
SMART

INFORMED

ENTERTAINING

RELEVANT
____________________________________________

divination: seeking knowledge of the future or the unknown OED
coincidence is not unusual
Charles Dickens’ final chapters full of coincidence -- NOT “too contrived” as some may claim
full of the dickens, euphemistically invoking the Devil OED

the metamorphosis of adolescence
Alice | Dorothy | Lyra and CURIOUSITY -- curator, museum

Sadie : Michael Chabon
Sutter: experience, knowledge, remembrance | ignorance, forgetfulness
to “know” have sexual intercourse with (someone). [ORIGIN: a Hebraism that has passed into modern languages; cf. German erkennen, French connaître.] OED [sorry, just can't resist the old Woody Allen joke: "Don't knock masturbation ... it's sex with someone you love."]
create | procreate
Beauty is truth
Meno’s Paradox

freedom
education/knowledge: submisson/ rebellion

The Grand Inquisitor (text) from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

knowledge is liberation
Ronnie: Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Richard Wright, James Baldwin

MS: DO NOT CONDESCEND TO CHILDREN

Baghdad Cafe ; Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx

Pullman
p. 864 “tell them stories, they need the truth”
Flannery O’Connor
Eliot’s “Four Quartets: Little Gidding”

ys.
Here, in the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

... We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always—

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love 1342 – c. 1416
"...All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well"

p. 926 Dame Hannah <--> Frances Yates “consciously / intuitively”
p. 911 other ways of travelling
p. 926 not pretending but seeing

The Tempest: Prospero

“But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.”

Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell “Eternity is in love with the productions of time”

Stevens: Sunday Morning "Shall she not find in comforts of the sun ...Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?"

Ram Dass: Be Here Now

Stephen Mitchell: Tao Te Ching "Some say that my teaching is nonsense. Others call it lofty but impractical. But to those who have looked inside themselves, this nonsense makes perfect sense." "True words seem paradoxical."

Rabbi Abraham Heschel: No Religion is An Island "No word is God's last word."
"Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy."

Quixotic Lennon

from Sunday's Boston Globe:

No nukes
Once a quixotic slogan, the idea of actually dismantling every nuclear weapon is attracting mainstream policy thinkers

FOR MANY AMERICANS, the idea of a world without nuclear weapons is a bit like the idea of a world without war or disease - it would be nice, but, contra John Lennon, it's hard to imagine.

November 21, 2008 notes

WEDNESDAY NOV 26 presentations:

• Hannah
• Sadie
• Jesse
• Jill
• Ronnie
• John
• Taylor
• Ben
• Kathleen
• Emily
• Racquel
• Cheryl

MONDAY DEC 1 presentations:

• Sutter (rescheduled)
  
• Brandon (rescheduled)
• Kayla
• Kyle
• Brett
• Lisa
• Kalli
• Danielle
• Aaron
• Stephanie
• Julie
• Jessi
• etc. ...
  

please keep presentation to 3 minutes or less!
__________________________________

Trilogy -- why all 3?
the rarity of the length <--> the impact cf. Quixote (~900 pages)
the metaphor of starting afresh
the pain of endings, passing from innocence to experience

Roger Sales' "Fairy Tales and After" : Milne's "House at Pooh Corner"
“leaving childhood behind” “my tears are for the lost boy I am” "wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on top of the Forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing."

knighthood
cf. the ending of Cervantes' Quixote





Peter O'Toole and Sophia Loren in Man of La Mancha 1972




Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II

“...Into this wild Abyss the warie fiend

Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while,

Pondering his Voyage…”

intertextuality : in conversation w/ Blake, Dante, Milton

pro-temptation | pro-curiousity (Alice)
the story is born from doing what you’re told not to do
Milton and the temptation in the garden, “their eyes opened”
original sin <--> knowledge
The Fall as necessary

Blake: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.” Marriage of Heaven & Hell
Blake Archive: Milton a Poem

Salman Rushdie
“the devil gets all the good tunes”

William Blake "A Little Girl Lost" Songs of Innocence and Experience

Children of the future age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.

In the age of gold,
Free from winter's cold,
Youth and maiden bright,
To the holy light,
Naked in the sunny beams delight.

Once a youthful pair,
Filled with softest care,
Met in garden bright
Where the holy light
Had just removed the curtains of the night.

Then, in rising day,
On the grass they play;
Parents were afar,
Strangers came not near,
And the maiden soon forgot her fear.

Tired with kisses sweet,
They agree to meet
When the silent sleep
Waves o'er heaven's deep,
And the weary tired wanderers weep.

To her father white
Came the maiden bright;
But his loving look,
Like the holy book
All her tender limbs with terror shook.

'Ona, pale and weak,
To thy father speak!
Oh the trembling fear!
Oh the dismal care
That shakes the blossoms of my hoary hair!'

Heinrich von Kleist -- the Puppet Theatre -- a fighting bear

Pullman as a gnostic chooses wisdom not ignorance (historically, Gnosticism lost out)
Pullman thinks his own daemon a bower bird
(a female satin bowerbird !)

(a female satin bowerbird !)












(Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia !)









sources:

folk and fairy tale
myth
Bildungsroman
science fiction
and
the Helsinki phonebook -- Serafina


opens in sleep …

“some themes too large for adult fiction, therefore go to children literature to find them”

“stories are VITAL”

TRUE stories or true STORIES

p. 273 parents

cut away from daemon = extinction?
Lyra | Trinity | Eve Matrix
father needs child to sacrifice
rash promises
father reads King James chapter 3 Genesis with a twist
an alternate phrase in an alternate universe

ashes to ashes and dust to dust

Genesis 3:19 (KJV): "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

from the current Anglican Burial Service: " 'You are dust, and to dust you shall return.' All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia."

sin and shame and death -- fixed daemons --
square root of one
unto dust????
from original sin to necessary rebellion

Sutter on daemons and "Philip Pullman had said of the Chronicles of Narnia that, if it is supposed to be a religious book, it is void of the single most important Christian value: love.”

Lord Asriel's daemon is a snow leopard !!!!!!!!!!

materialism matters

p.s. my shipment of the Pullman books was on my doorstep when i got home ...
my heroes? Betterworld.com the "online bookstore with a soul" and Biblio.com

The Moth: Storytelling Phenomenon

“The success of The Moth is one example of
the phenomenon of storytelling that is gaining momentum
nationwide. In The Moth’s case, these narrative
sessions are fast becoming an institution.”
- The New York Times

11/19/2008 notes

Assignment #16: what is your Daemon?????????
Term paper presentations begin next Wednesday Nov 26 ( Z to A : class roster by last name)

Lyra, Alice, Dorothy

myth | dream | coincidence | art | history
Talbot anchors everything in history

Pullman calls himself a “stark realist”
objects to Tolkien and C.S. Lewis fantasy

mulefa

p. 281 the idea of North

metaphysical as opposed to geographical
the imagining of the North
frontier, edge, portal
"things as they are" not as we wish them to be...
“a mind of winter”...
"For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive."


p. 280 the ambiguity of Lyra’s parents

Ode on a Grecian Urn Keats -- can you hear the piper? the music of the spheres? John Donne
forever young Dylan 1973
read the Renaissance philosophers
assigning sentience to the inanimate

p. 364 “Dust knows we’re here”

misinterpretations of Christianity

the Daemon: in children, metamorphasis -- awareness of self, sexuality, experience, sacrifice -- fixed in adulthood? sacrifice -- begins to be more obvious in Subtle Knife
Will and Lyra both have to sacrifice their instruments

Eric Shanower + Skottie Young -- Marvel Comics -- The Wonderful WOZ Sketchbook

Taylor’s response --- no loophole -- saw it coming from far away -- “please don’t do that”
Aristotle’s theory of catharsis
Northrop Frye "depressing?" something wrong w/ the reader or the writer
exultant even tho filled with sorrow

TM: the selflessness is both realistic and Romantic
the romance of Quixote -- that they never meet
The Idealist and Realist, Andre and Wally, Quixote and Sancho Panza
Findhorn

divination, fortune cookies, horoscopes -- what you bring to the experience, the nature of the divining instrument, imaginative devices -- imagination is what makes things happen -- Northrop Frye -- literature is about the possible

"Even a broken clock is right twice"

TM: the Daemon paintings, (erotic) attachment
in Mongolia last summer she bought a beaded bag w/ sheep bones from an old woman

• Dreams will come true
• Weather will win

Ryan’s blog -- symbols on the Aleithiometer
Sam’s blog -- I Ching

Ronnie -- symbolic interactionism
what CONNECTS us, not what SEPARATES us from animals, daemons, anima

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Well. It was snowing as we left class.
And. As I drove into the canyon, the electronic billboard, which usually says "BUCKLE UP -- IT'S THE LAW" or "DIAL 511" or "ROADWORK AHEAD" was now saying

ANIMAL CROSSING
BE ALERT
USE CAUTION

By the time I got to the canyon, the snow was swirling round as tho I were inside that crystal ball with the little pine tree and little deer that my seven-year-old neighbor gave me for Christmas last year and the radio was playing "Man of my heart"

"More Than You Know"
Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson

In my enchantment, I didn't realize that I'd forgotten to stop for gas as planned ... coasted into Livingston on fumes. My dear departed lover Michael used to say that for a woman with such a fine mind, I was shockingly oblivious to the obvious at times...

p.s. "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" was written by the incredible black-listed lyricist Yip Harburg who also ended up writing a significant portion of the film's dialogue ...

11/17/2008 notes

The Pullman Trilogy
Assignment # 15: blog your reading in Pullman, a running commentary w/ page numbers

daemons -- must stay near

Pullman on the teaching of writing:

• public and private payoff
• discovered in the writing
• willing suspension of certainty

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies


Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness.
Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit!
Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,


Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth


The trumpet of a prophecy!
O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

~ from Ode to the West Wind, Shelley, 1819



p. 363-370
Lyra has emerged into a new world
Mary Malone was a nun, studies shadows or particles of consciousness -- you can’t see them unless you expect to (Stanley Fish: "poetry’s eyes") [Plato’s] Cave=computer cf. Matrix Neo sees a cat and suddenly understands “deja vu” almost a remembrance
the Red Queen: "a poor sort of memory that only works backwards"

quoting Keats’ negative capability -- from his letters -- state of uncertainty and doubt -- Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” -- a natural talent
 of children

• non-moralizing
• nonsense clears the palate
• uncertainty required

p. 379 cat on Sunderland Avenue


aleithiometer <->Lethe = river of forgetfulness<->lethal
Heidegger -- aletheia -- un-concealment, un-forgetting, we need to remember -- truth
"Martin Heidegger on Aletheia (Truth) as Unconcealment"
Francis Yates The Art of Memory
the magic eight ball
I Ching
the definition of Dust

Wallace Stevens poets.org uiuc.edu

• 32 short films of Glenn Gould
• Bach's Goldberg Variations (Edgar Allen Poe The Goldbug) Goldbug Variations

haunted by ”the idea of North” -- central metaphor of the Northern Lights
281 colorful curtains and as a serpent

Wallace Stevens' Auroras of Autumn
stanza VI -- theatre -- the little blue book of Wallace Stevens (Major Author Fall '09)
northern lights as a metaphor of consciousness
cf: a scientific explanation "excreted waste of the sun" (thank you Chris :)

…. A capitol,
It may be, is emerging of has just
Collapsed. The denouement has to be postposed...

This is nothing until in a single man contained,
Nothing until this named thing nameless is
And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house

On flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

Novaya Zemlya archipelego Nova Zembla

Salman Rushdie book for children "Haroun and the Sea of Stories"
Zenda, Zembla, Xanadu

Nabokov Pale Fire
eclipse -- feeling of fear
Vonnegut Slaughterhouse Five (film)
Glenn Gould


I Ching

instruments for the imagination

storytelling: In The Tempest, Act I, as Prospero unfolds the truth of Miranda's history to her, he asks repeatedly, "Dost thou attend me ... Dost thou hear?" She answers finally: "Your tale, sir, would cure deafness."

Philip Pullman

Pullman
I thought it would be hard to find an audience for this story, and I've been astonished and delighted by the reception it's had all over the world

The Science of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials"
Religion: The religious impulse – which includes the sense of awe and mystery we feel when we look at the universe, the urge to find a meaning and a purpose in our lives, our sense of moral kinship with other human beings – is part of being human, and I value it. I'd be a damn fool not to.

But organised religion is quite another thing. The trouble is that all too often in human history, churches and priesthoods have set themselves up to rule people's lives in the name of some invisible god (and they're all invisible, because they don't exist) – and done terrible damage. In the name of their god, they have burned, hanged, tortured, maimed, robbed, violated, and enslaved millions of their fellow-creatures, and done so with the happy conviction that they were doing the will of God, and they would go to Heaven for it.

That is the religion I hate, and I'm happy to be known as its enemy.

From time to time I have a new thought on the subject. When I come up with something worth writing down, I'll put it here.

Snow leopardGranada Wild

on writing:

What qualities do you need to be a successful writer? Stubbornness, for a start. Pig-headed obstinacy. The capacity to sit still in front of an empty sheet of paper for hour upon hour and feel that your time is being valuably spent. Then I'd say an interest in the shapes of things. What shape is a story? Is a short story a different shape from a novel? What shape is a joke? Once you become interested in the structure of stories, you're well on the way.

The public doesn't know what it wants until it sees what you can offer. So follow the whole of your nature and write the book that only you can write, and see what happens.

The only duty [children’s literature] has is best expressed in the words of Dr Johnson: "The only aim of writing is to help the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it."

To tell someone else how to read your book is to fall into the temptation of fundamentalism.

on education (the Isis lecture, April 2003):

Stories are written to beguile, to entertain, to amuse, to move, to enchant, to horrify, to delight, to anger, to make us wonder. They are not written so that we can make a fifty word summary of the whole plot, or find five synonyms for the descriptive words. That sort of thing would make you hate reading, and turn away from such a futile activity with disgust. In the words of Ruskin, it's "slaves' work, unredeemed.”



Those who design this sort of thing seem to have completely forgotten the true purpose of literature, the everyday, humble, generous intention that lies behind every book, every story, every poem: to delight or to console, to help us enjoy life or endure it. That's the true reason we should be giving books to children. The false reason is to make them analyse, review, comment and so on.



But they have to do it – day in, day out, hour after hour, this wretched system nags and pesters and buzzes at them, like a great bluebottle laden with pestilence. And then all the children have to do a test; and that's when things get worse.

... as we know, these days editors are lower in the hierarchy of publishing than accountants, and teachers are less important than those who set the tests. We have let the wrong people take charge. [my emphasis - lpd]

on telling stories :

Well, one doesn't want to be patriarchal, authoritarian, imperialist, etc, perish the thought; but this question has always interested me from a storytelling point of view, because the rejection of the central directing consciousness, of the omniscient narrator, is exactly what happened to literary fiction in the twentieth century, to its eventual impoverishment. Novelists became fascinated by other things than telling stories, and in the process, the feeling seemed to grow that there was something wrong about telling a story from a single, central directing consciousness, because that act involved a narrative voice, and narrators were now notoriously unreliable. So more and more literary fiction became tentative, diffident, uncertain, openly self-contradictory, uncommitted, shifting, relative … and story, which is both events and the voice that tells us about them, was banished.

 Where story went was into genre fiction – crime, romance, fantasy, and so on; and into children's books. And, incidentally, and increasingly, into non-fiction. You couldn't kill it; it's too healthy for that, and people have an insatiable appetite for knowing what happened next.

a culture of fear:

Shame on us, to be so timid. Shame on us, to be so mistrustful. Shame on us, to have so little faith in literature, in poetry and drama and story.

five steps we should take, starting right now:

1. Do away with these incessant tests; they only tell you things you don't need to know, and make the children do things they don't need to do.


2. Abolish the league tables, which are an abomination.
3. 

Cut class sizes in every school in the country. No child should ever be in a class bigger than twenty.


4. Make teaching a profession that the most gifted, the most imaginative, the most well-informed people will clamour to join; and make the job so rewarding that none of them will want to stop teaching until they drop.


5. Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.

If we do those five things, we will not bring about a golden age, or an earthly paradise; there are more things wrong with the world than we can cure by changing a system of schooling. But if we get education right, it would show that we were being serious about living and thinking and understanding ourselves; it would show that we were paying our children the compliment of assuming that they were serious too; and it would acknowledge that the path to true learning begins nowhere else but in delight, and the words on the signpost say: "Once upon a time …”

Tristesses de la lune

Tristesses de la lune
Sorrow of the moon
from Les Fleurs du Mal
Baudelaire

The Moon more indolently dreams tonight
Than a fair woman on her couch at rest,
Caressing, with a hand distraught and light,
Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast.
Upon her silken avalanche of down,
Dying she breathes a long and swooning sigh;
And watches the white visions past her flown,
Which rise like blossoms to the azure sky.
And when, at times, wrapped in her languor deep,
Earthward she lets a furtive tear-drop flow,
Some pious poet, enemy of sleep,
Takes in his hollow hand the tear of snow
Whence gleams of iris and of opal start,
And hides it from the Sun, deep in his heart.

at the gas station

The morning after the election of Obama, I drove to Bozeman in a rain/sleet/slush nightmare. I laughed at how little the horrible conditions seemed to affect my mood this day. I stopped to get gas and the woman at the next pump had an Obama sticker on her car too. She pointed at mine as we stood in the rain and said, "It's a beautiful morning, ain't it?"

Today, one week later, I stopped to get gas at the same station. There was a four-year-old cherubim inside the door when I went in to pay. As she left with her dad, she held up a package of candy and said to me, "These are good -- sour and sweet at the same time!" The cashier said, "They're my neighbors. I watched her learn to ride a bike this summer -- no training wheels." I remembered my father standing behind me to steady the bike and then pushing me off. I remembered the smart of skinned knees. I remembered exhilaration.

11/14/2008 notes

(click for details)
Assignment #14: Term paper presentation
Assignment #13: Corona boxes
Assignment #12: blog Pullman

Women in Black:
overview of the trilogy by Ronnie and Sam (thank you!)

• both were introduced to the work around age 13
• both have read and re-read it several times
• both found it profoundly moving
  

innocence and experience
what is a child? what is the end of childhood? what is moral? what are morals? what is dust?
instruments: golden compass, subtle knife, amber spyglass
seeing
portals
Lyra, Will, Mary Malone

Ashley: Find Your Daemon
MS: soulmate Martha Stewart

portmanteaux

damsel-in-distress-fly
delisherist: one who relishes the delicious
impursable: you can’t take it to the bank
mirtherous: killingly funny
tortle: to torture, in a slow and legal manner

ambiguous undulations

I saw a young red fox running up through a young green field

Downward to darkness, on extended wings
Stevens, Sunday Morning

the handsome young man with the big vocabulary

I once dated a handsome young man and I was sorely tempted to marry him. He was beautiful and a zoologist. I thought that meant he loved animals. But it meant he loved zoos! On a "field trip" we chanced upon dragonflies -- iridescent, humming, hovering, darting, disappearing, appearing, miraculous! But he was not captivated. No. He gave me a lecture on species, phyla and related taxonomic classifications -- and I -- and I -- and I -- escaped with my life!

seven ages of man...

salmagundi: a salad of whatever is at hand [purportedly served on pirate ships] derived from the French salmigondis - disparate assembly of things, ideas, people, forming an incoherent [!] whole ...It seems likely that the name is connected with the children’s rhyme, Solomon Grundy. (wiki)

Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Grew worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
That was the end of
Solomon Grundy.

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII


Oedipus and the Sphinx

"What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?"

"Man"



Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw ...

Wallace Stevens, A Postcard from the Volcano





fox and grapes
Pompeii



The River

Toward the end
of its journey
the river
made its final bend.

Clouds of mist
pollen from pines
far above
descended dream like
upon our craft
and upon ourselves

The river flowed
and I flowed,
not only with it
but as it

Not only was I upon it
but it was upon me

And finally we were one

Michael Francis Doyle, 1948-2006

Questions for quiz #2

Tatar book -- various endings

• Snow White
• Sleeping Beauty
• Rapunzel
• Rumplestilskin
• Jack and the beanstalk
• Frog Prince

Talbott pages

• 21
• 27-29
• 92
• 134
• 183 - 186
• 204-206

• 290 - 298

My Book and Heart Shall Never Part

Alice chapters

• Humpty Dumpty
• Wool and Water
• Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee
• Caterpillar
• Question of morals

QUESTIONS:

Classic illustrator of Alice: Tenniel

Last word in Beauty and the Beast (Tatar): Virtue

Who wins after death? the worms (we may yet triumph through Art (Groucho))

Oscar Wilde: "Life imitates art"

themes of the class:
myth | dream | coincidence | art | history

White Knight might represents? Carroll himself

Parodist’s counterpart to "How Doth the Busy Bee"? "How Doth the Little Crocodile"

The beautiful food of which the mock turtle sings? soup

Hatter's riddle: Why is a raven like a writing desk?

Most quoted author after Shakespeare? Carroll

___ is a depersonalized _____ and _____ is a personalized ___
(myth is a depersonalized dream and dream is a personalized myth)

Create your own portmanteau

Who is the rudest of all the flowers?

Animate | anima | soul

Who is the volcano? Alice

Where does Alice live? the collective unconscious | dust

Alice first growth change? shrinks to 10 inches

Title of the deleted chapter from Through the Looking Glass? A Wasp in a Wig

How does Alice offend the mouse? cats!

During the Protestant Reformation, what was the intent of children’s literature? to inculcate moral values to children

According to My Book and Heart, the first Bible published was in? Algonquin

Which two animals sparked curiosity re: evolution? the mammoth and the monkey

What invention influenced the Reformation? the Gutenburg Press

Why are hatters mad? mercury in hat bands (misplaced concreteness)

Create an anagram of _____ (MS torture)

What does White Rabbit drop? white gloves and a fan

In Cocteau's film Beaty and the Beast, Beauty's tears become? diamonds

D.H. Lawrence: “Never trust the teller, trust the tale.”

Lewis Carrol's nickname inspired which character? Dodo

Tautology: circular argument “I’m interested because it’s interesting.”

Goody-Two-Shoes is an emblem of _____ (perfection) which adults lack -- My Book and Heart

If Alice is a part of the Red King's dream, then what are Tweedle Dum and Dee? ditto ditto ditto

What causes Walrus and Carpenter to weep? they feel sorry for the wee Oysters they are gobbling down

Big theme of English classes? the Dark Side (Far Side? :)

Most prolific serial killer 19th century England? Mary Ann Cotton

Two primary ghosts in Talbot book? Sid James and The White Lady

Jabberwocky poem based on which legend? Lambton worm

Last line of Alice: "Life, what is it but a dream?" ACROSTIC

Walter Pater: “All art aspires to the condition of music”

My Book and Heart: “The text informs reality”

dream

Dr. Sexson, looking like the Wizard, is telling me something important, but he is fading and I can't quite hear ... "pay more attention to..." I turn over and go back to sleep to try and hear the rest. I'm in the Beartooths with my father. We're grazing like bears on the huckleberries, stopping to listen for real bears, then clambering down to a small stream for a drink. He shows me the horsetails ! and how to use them to shave oboe reeds. He shows me the mayfly casings on the stone cliffs and tells me the story of their short lives.

I wake and weep. He's been gone ten years. I remember his anger at my grandfather, my husband. I remember my mother's fury when I got lost in a book or at the piano. I remember reading in the green chair near the window and his gentle hand on my head as he passed by.

favorite Alice

more trouble! Every time I try to pick one, I think "But wait, what about..."

'There's no use trying,' she said: 'one CAN'T believe impossible things.'

And it certainly DID seem a little provoking ('almost as if it happened on purpose,' she thought) that, though she managed to pick plenty of beautiful rushes as the boat glided by, there was always a more lovely one that she couldn't reach.

from "Wool and Water", but then there's also chapter one, watching the snow kiss the windows and the drifting into sleep and the pondering of punishment ... and chapter three with everything "worth a thousand pounds" and chapter two "remembering one is a Pawn" and on the way to becoming a Queen!!! ... not to mention "Tweedledum and Tweedledee" and trying to get out of the dark wood and the incredible shocking mesmerising horror of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" !!!!!!!!! .... and Bob Dylan's "a childish dream is a deathless need
 and a noble truth is a sacred creed" from Love and Theft released on 9.11.2001 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Still trying to choose ONE...

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?

impossible

I'm having trouble with this -- when I try to think of something impossible, I always come up with some way it could be possible -- my father used to say I was a classic case of someone who, coming upon a huge pile of shit, would think "there must be a pony here somewhere"

dream

I'm trying to hide money from my mother ... bills ones and fives, I push them into crumpled newspaper and shove it all to the back of shelves stacked to overflowing with other papers. When I go to retrieve it, I can't find it. It’s gone. Madly searching. Gloria shows up and says not to worry, I should go with her to a party at Chico (only it’s not) It’s night, many people, all strangers, music, talk, labyrinthine halls and rooms. I'm sitting at a low table in a small room ... two women and myself smoking opium (only it’s not) ... small dabs like soft hashish but in odd colors like oil paints ... heated, inhaled, a slow smiling gentle floating high. A man behind me, his hands light on my waist, a great soft dark voice, whispering "do you want to dance" ...we do, close, erotic, delicious... “I don’t like cheerleaders” as he disappears ... hoping to find him among the rooms, but I'm in a crowded gallery with lots of small art on the walls that i do not like ... I see Gloria again, she laughs and says his name is Isaac ...


when I woke the Beatles' "Help" was on the TV ... PBS 3 AM

November 5, 2008

DREAMS

dream language
dream logic
intensity
personal myth

"Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it."
Macbeth Act 1, scene 4

"We are such stuff
 as dreams are made on; and our little life
 is rounded with a sleep."
The Tempest Act 4, scene 1

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth | Act 5, scene 5

"We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
Henry James


synecdoche
elegy
history| myth

Talbot
290 recurrent violence

p.291 only immortality is Art
p. 294 immigration
p. 298 all our people

Lambton Worm

The worms crawl in,
the worms crawl out.
The worms play pinochle on your snout.

Mayflies Ephemeroptera

dragonflies and damselflies

My Dinner with Andre

Groucho

Duck Soup

November 3, 2008

Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry 1821 published posthumously in 1840 by Mary

“But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one
...It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Chris Clark’s synchronicity, coincidence, intention is secondary

Talbott
p. 28 “before Carroll, children’s lit was educational tracts”
p. 204 mass murderers
p. 21 Alice pervades Western civilization 

p. 29 John Lennon

p.134 logic of the dream

Chuang Tzu, surrealism, Coleridge opium and Kubla Khan
Kafka, Nabokov, Joyce, Auden, Graves, Heinlein, Lennon, Monte Python

Ernst, Jarry, Dali, Magritte 



Alice public domain ~1900

• Alice's Adventures in Oxford -- Mavis Batey (Pitkin Pictorial Guides and Souvenir Books)
• The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition by Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner, and John Tenniel (Hardcover - Nov 1999)
• Alice's Misadventures Underground: The Complete Annotated Oxford Text by Bradley E. Craddock
• The Story of Alice and Her Oxford Wonderland by Christina Bjork and Inga-Karin Eriksson
• Alice in Wonderland Pop-Up Book
• Tenniel illustrations
• Rackham illustrations
• The Annotated Lolita Alfred Appel Jr.

Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

historical events become myth because they enforce the status quo?
the marginalized mythologized in kitsch?

epilepsy: Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin The Idiot

Northrop Frye: The Educated Imagination

Longinus Sublime: “not to persuasion, but to ecstasy ... bewilderment, surprise, fear”

November 4, 2008

Bill Moyers: Forty years ago, in 1968, she was 19, and the mother of two, and she was shattered by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. ... "He was our everything ...He was our hope for the future." But after his death, she said, "We were afraid... like we would be killed if we stood up."

That was 40 years ago. Johnnie Marie Ross, now 59, says she has lived in fear ever since. No more. On Tuesday she voted and walked home with a flag in her hand and a song on her lips. Hallelujah, she sang, over and over. Hallelujah. All the way home.

Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture December 7, 1993

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. ...It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind.

...[Language] arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here," his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the "final word", the precise "summing up", acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.

...We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.