Posts and comments on "Your Antonia" and "Your Eyes"

Over the next week, you must write at least one post, and several comments on other people's posts, on the blogs for your books (links are over there on the right).

Your posts should be interesting enough to provoke discussion.  You might raise a question, but often a provocative statement of an idea can make for more interesting discussion.  It helps to have something to argue against!

Your comments should actually say something--more, in other words, than just "Good idea!"  You should comment on all of your group's posts, but you should also post on others' posts...

AP TESTS

Checks are due this Friday, for $87 made out to "AP Guidance"  On the memo line write which test it's for (English Language or English Literature).

Hemingway stories

We will be reading these the week after break; if you are in France, read them!

http://www.nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/4/hemingway/camp.htm

http://www.repeatafterus.com/title.php?i=8752

http://www.scribd.com/doc/94569/Hills-Like-White-Elephants

Modernist poems Day 2

Below is T.S. Eliot's first great poem.  We will consider the picture it gives of its narrator, of the possibility of fulfillment, of modernist anxiety and self-consciousness, and connections to other texts we've read.

 

The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

By T.S. Eliot


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . .                               10
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

  In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

  The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,                               20
And seeing that it was a soft October night
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

  And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;                                30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

  In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

  And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—                               40
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

  For I have known them all already, known them all;
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,                       50
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
  So how should I presume?

  And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?                    60
  And how should I presume?

  And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
  And should I then presume?
  And how should I begin?
        .     .     .     .     .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets              70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
        .     .     .     .     .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?                  80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet–and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

  And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,                                             90
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
  Should say, "That is not what I meant at all.
  That is not it, at all."

  And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,                                           100
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
  "That is not it at all,
  That is not what I meant, at all."                                          110
        .     .     .     .     .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

  I grow old . . . I grow old . . .                                              120
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

  Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

  I do not think they will sing to me.

  I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

  We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown               130
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.


                                                              [1915]

Modernist poems Day 1

These poems are all in their different ways a part of "imagism." We will consider (and if you are in Mexico you should consider) how what these poems imply without saying straight out.  (Williams said, "No ideas but in things.")

In a Station of the Metro
by Ezra Pound (1913)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough. 


The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams (1923)

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Wallace Stevens (1917)

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird. 

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds. 

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime. 

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one. 

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after. 

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause. 

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know. 

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles. 

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply. 

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds. 

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying. 

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

assignment sheet for "Beast" papers

are available at the link on the right...

If you missed class Monday or Tuesday

Check out the powerpoint presentations available at the link on the right, and read the first 10 pages or so of Willa Cather's My Antonia (1918).  Check out in particular the paragraph in which Jim Burden, the narrator, who has just lost both of his parents and has to go live with his grandparents in Nebraska, describes driving from the train station across the Nebraska prairie.  Consider in particular what this passage has to do with "modernism" as described in the powerpoint.

"Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land—slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be."

What will your paper be about?

Write a note to your classmates telling what your paper will be about.  Before you post, first read the comments and make a helpful suggestion about the previous person’s ideas; then offer your own.

If possible, use the "reply" button below the last person's post to make your helpful suggestion; and then in a separate new comment box present your own paper idea.

Marcher and May

Why do you think May doesn't tell Marcher what she thinks?