Cyber-Assignment from Indivisible

Post the short essay response here from Indivisible (250-500 words). Chose a poem and using explication, talk about the poem: form, content, themes. State at the start of the essay, what you plan to explore in the poem, that is, the question or thesis.

This is a graded assignment.

Howl by Allen Ginsberg

FreewriteRespond in 3 paragraphs minimally.  Look at Writing about Literature (82-87).

Grab a line or a theme, a character or a concept. Look at the form and how it serves the theme or topic. Discuss Ginsberg's Howl. Why was it banned? What was so controversial about it?

Look at the language and imagery. Talk about poetic devices.

Howl
http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/allen_ginsberg_reads_his_beat_classic_poem_howl.html

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308 (text of poem)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howl


Here are other Ginsberg poems:

Sunflower Sutra
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/ginsberg/onlinepoems.htm

► 6:27► 6:27

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A_tDB7t5eg

America
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/america.html



America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.
I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

1. Grade Narratives for Short Story Essay

2. Poetry Reading, Sharing

3. Poetry Group Projects

4. Thursday, Nov. 1, 2012 Guest -- Charles Blackwell

5. Independent Essay

6. Questions?

Art as Life

Today we read Alonzo King's essay introducing his current season "Shadow Dispersing Clarity," (17, 19, 21). See http://www.linesballet.org/company/alonzo-king/ The essay was originally published in the Spring, 2011, Mission at Tenth, Vol. 2: The Hieroglyph Issue, a publication of the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

Homework is to identify an argument or several arguments and engage his views in a short essay. Tie this into, if you can, the film, Women Art Revolution. I think both King, choreographer, and Lynn Hershman Leeson, director, agree--how does art make us more authentically human? How does art make one visible, especially the women profiled in WAR?

How does art act as a vehicle for one's truth to both move and engage others, whom King says are just aspects of self?

If you do not want to combine the conversations, leave them separate, and respond separately to each in 250 words. See http://womenartrevolution.com/about_filmmakers.php

Before you start, visit the websites and read about the artists in question. Also read the essay, which I have given you.

Email these responses to me and paste here. I'd everyone to respond to at least one post.

Short Story Essay Assignment & Updated Essay Assignment Due Dates English 1B

Tuesday, October 23, 2012, students will write their short story analysis essay. Bring in a short story of your choice—I made recommendations last week, and prepare to write a three page essay during class.  Bring in an outline and any notes plus the story. You will submit this as well.

Email the essay to me: coasabirenglish1B@gmail.com

Note the new assignment dates:

Homework:

1. Read the section in Writing about Literature on poetry as well as the introduction to Indivisible by Tuesday, Nov. 6. We reviewed the chapter in class last week, Thursday, October 18. Bring the anthology to class next week as well.

2. Start reading your book for the independent essay assignment.

3. Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8faRwFvqLHU

Optional:
To listen to an interview I conducted with two editors visit: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/wandas-picks/2011/04/01/wandas-picks

Thursday, Nov. 1, come on time. I am going to see if I can get Charles Blackwell or Mary Rudge to come to class this Thursday or next Tuesday to talk about poetry and lead a writing workshop for us.

We will spend next Tuesday and Thursday on the Poetry Unit, and come back to Persepolis. There will be a group poetry presentation on Tuesday, Nov. 13. The poetry essay will be written in class on Thursday, Nov. 15. You will have an hour and a half or 90 minutes to write a 2-3 page or 500-750 word analytical essay. After the essay is written, students will read other student essays and respond in a narrative grade. Both will be emailed to me.

Nov. 20 we will talk about Persepolis and watch the film. Start reading it Nov. 15. We will explore themes and topics Nov. 20. Complete the book by Nov. 27. The essay is due Nov. 29 for a peer review. The essay is due the same day.

Final essay:
Initial Planning Sheet and outline due, Dec. 4. We will review the portfolio today.

Essay presentations, Dec. 6. The final portfolio is due electronically Dec. 14, 2012 by 12 noon.  Send to coasabirenglish1B@gmail.com Make sure you send it correctly. Look for my response as well.

Grace Paley: Collected Shorts (a film)

Today we watched a film about Grace Paley www.gracepaleythefilm.com

At the library orientation students were told about various literary databases. Use at least one of them to get more information about Paley.

Homework is also to visit the film website. Read about the film and the director. Respond to the following questions in 500 words (2 typed pages). Bring a copy of the essay to class. Also bring in a Paley short story or a poem or two, maybe three to share Tuesday.

Essay assignment due at next meeting:

Who is/was Grace Paley? How did she integrate writing and activism: the writer as social change agent? Use examples from the film and from one scholarly article about the writer. Use the COA library database. Sot there are three sources: Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, directed by Lilly Rivlin, one scholarly article, and your Paley poem or story.

If you missed the film you can still complete the assignment. You'll just have to do a bit more reading about the writer and her work.

Homework is to visit the film website. Read about the film and the director. Respond to the following question in 500 words (2 typed pages). Along with your paper, bring in a Paley short story or a poem or two, maybe three. We will share out loud, so if you get nervous, practice in advance.

Today we spent the class reflecting on the characters. I call them "Femme Fatale or Heroines," not that one character cannot encompass both. This is a continuation of the conversation we had Tuesday.

Many students are behind, so it's hard to have a conversation when most of the class has not read the material. We will continue the Writing Workshop on Tuesday.

If writing is a process, this means that each writing task is an opportunity to improve. None of the students in this class come to my office hour, which I presume means that everything is going well (smile). If there is confusion, we can definitely clarify issues and concerns there. We can also go over essays in greater detail. Students can take any position on a topic they like, I do not have to agree. All I am looking for in the writing is clarity and specificity--be clear and use details. Let the characters speak, especially when it is something negative about another character.

The MLA should be perfect. This is the second transfer level course. If you do not remember how to set up you paper, we reviewed this repeatedly in August and part of September. Buy a Writing Style book and read it. I recommend Diana Hacker's Rules for Writers.

If you are attending Hamlet on Thursday, October 18, 1:30 PM, I need the $20 on Tuesday. I have to pay for all the tickets in advance to reserve our seats. Visit http://www.calshakes.org/v4/ourplays/2012_Hamlet.html

We decided to move the next paper, The Dance Boots to October 23. Bring in a completed essay. Students will grade each other paper with a narrative.

Dance Boots Query or Questions to think about from Tuesday, February 21, 2012

A Few Questions
Today we met in A-232 again. We will meet here for the rest of the semester unless someone reserves the room (smile). I passed out a lot of handouts to help students with "Invention" strategies which is the technical term for developing ideas to write about.

We listed topics or themes on the board after practicing mapping the word: "abuse." We also looked at a sample outline, one a handout, the other one I wrote on the board. Each assigned essay needs to include: a completed Initial Planning Sheet, an outline and a peer review using Microsoft comment and including a response to a set of questions (another handout).

In Writing about Literature we looked at Feminist Criticism as a lens to use when discussing this first book. Step out on a limb and try something new with this first essay. It might not work, but perhaps the experience will prove instructive (smile).

Again, I suggest students find a motif, a theme and follow it across the terrain of a few stories or a symbol and look for deeper meaning as you note the style, tone and imagery the author uses, along with characters to explore a specific theme or an overriding theme or thesis you set out to prove
Is the author telling the same story over and over again through a variety of lens? How adept is she at portraying male characters? Are there any male characters who are more symbol than flesh and blood? What is the point of this creation?

How many main characters are there in The Dance Boots? How many stories are there? What makes one story or character unique? What character(s) make you want to know more? Does the author deliver?

How is The Dance Boots a hero's story? Who are the heroes or heroines? Is the hero or heroine without flaws? What good is their super power, if they can't protect themselves from the enemy or if the hero cannot even save its young?

What do you think about Stan when his back story is revealed? Louis? Other characters who have such promise as children and then life happens and this potential is stifled, interrupted, killed or maimed.

Is there any hope offered in The Dance Boots? What is this hope? Who holds it? Who embodies it? Are there any characters who disappoint the reader with their choices? Are their any who blow their chances at a better life or is this a dream rather than a reality?

Linguistically and perhaps culturally The Dance Boots only allows readers so much access. How does this effect one's reading of the text and its interpretation? Is access difficult? Let's say LeGarde Grover intends to make her audience work, what are the benefits and/or disadvantages of an uneasy or inaccessible work?

Is mystery one of the residual outcomes? Are questions another outcome? What are your questions? Do you raise them when the answers are not evident or do you raise them and then locate the answers? Are unanswered questions okay?

To what end?

As an outsider looking in, what does this distance between the reader and the work allow to happen in the eventual interpretation of the work.

When one writes a book that has a historic context, does the reader feel compelled to do research into the era or time period? What happens when readers resist? Is the reading then shallow?

Homework

Read in Writing about Literature the section on Feminist Critique. Bring in a completed Initial Planning Sheet and an outline. Look at outlines in Hacker under "The Writing Process."

Freewrite: Ain't I a Woman

We listened to Avery Sharpe's Sojourner Truth "ain't I a woman?"  Visit http://averysharpe.com/
http://www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/truth.htm

1797-1883

Aint I a woman?

A found poem from Sojourner Truth's most famous speech, adapted into poetic form by Erlene Stetson click here to see the full text of the speech, in non-poem format.

That man over there say

a woman needs to be helped into carriages

and lifted over ditches

and to have the best place everywhere.

Nobody ever helped me into carriages

or over mud puddles

or gives me a best place. . .


And ain't I a woman?

Look at me

Look at my arm!

I have plowed and planted

and gathered into barns

and no man could head me. . .

And ain't I a woman?

I could work as much

and eat as much as a man--

when I could get to it--

and bear the lash as well

and ain't I a woman?

I have born 13 children

and seen most all sold into slavery

and when I cried out a mother's grief

none but Jesus heard me. . .

and ain't I a woman?

that little man in black there say

a woman can't have as much rights as a man

cause Christ wasn't a woman

Where did your Christ come from?

From God and a woman!

Man had nothing to do with him!

If the first woman God ever made

was strong enough to turn the world

upside down, all alone

together women ought to be able to turn it

rightside up again.


A Biography of Truth, from Stamp on Black History collection.

The Truth Memorial statue page

From a Women's Studies collection


(The following is quoted from an editor's note in the anthology where this poem is found)

"There is no exact copy of this speech given at the Women's rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1852. The speech is adapted to the poetic format by Erelene Stetson from the copy found in Sojurner, God's Faithful Pilgrim by Arthur Huff Fauset, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938)."

The poem and note, along with other great women's poems, can be found in Ain't I a Woman: A Book of Women's Poetry from Around The World, Illona Linthwaite, Editor. New York: Wing Books, 1993, page 129.

Here is another link referencing the speech and its author: http://www.kyphilom.com/www/truth.html

Sherman Alexie on Forum Cyber-Assignment

1. We start the day listening to author Sherman Alexie speaking to Michael Krasney on Forum yesterday: http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201210031000 

http://www.fallsapart.com/ (author's website)

Reflect on the interview, especially what he says about identity. Many of the characters we are meeting in The Dance Boots struggle with identity. What is identity per Alexie? Do you agree? Use characters we have met in The Dance Boots as a part of the discourse with Alexie.

What about his comments on colonialism? Talk about the boarding school phenomena.  Where does this fit into the equation? Reservations . . . poverty . . .  disenfranchisement. . . .

Respond in about three paragraphs and then comment on a classmate's post.

2. Literature Circles.You have a lot to talk about.

3. For homework, reflect on the themes in three separate stories you've read so far. Talk about 1-3 more compelling characters. Reflect on 1-3 scenes that perplex you or that you needed more information about.
Post here.

Today we watched the film, directed by Anne Makepeace, We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân. Visit www.makepeaceproductions.org

Synopsis from the website:

Âs Nutayuneân tells a remarkable story of cultural revival by the Wampanoag of Southeastern Massachusetts. Their ancestors ensured the survival of the Pilgrims in New England, and lived to regret it. Now they are bringing their language home again.

I find the study of language and culture fascinating. Can one participate in one's cultural reality if one lacks linguistic access? How do we speak about what we know, how do we know what we know and what others in our ethnic group knew or found valuable if we have no way to communicate with them via artifacts left or living history in the elders?

Is such a person culturally inept forever? What happens when languages disappear but the people don't, as is the case in so many indigenous communities?

When we read The Dance Boots, Linda LeGarde Grover uses indigenous language in the dialogue characters speak. Note how this language which we are not conversant in adds to the fullness of said characters who like the Wampanaog people were robbed of their culture.

Think about what the narrator says about converted Wampanaog, "I am pitiful. I loath myself." Why is there so much alcohol or substance abuse in such communities--colonized, assimilated, traumatized people?When I was in JHB, South Africa, I saw so many ads for alcohol and encountered so many inebriated adults, healers and medicine men, who were drunk on the job. South Africa, like America, was stolen from its people.

Essay Assignment

In a 250-500 word essay, look at a theme such as language and culture and discuss how its presence or absence affects a community either positively or negatively. Introduce the film in the introduction and then state your thesis after a brief summary. The essay should be minimally three paragraphs. How are Jesse and Artense similar?

How is film a great storytelling medium. How well does the director tell the story. Does her personal involvement in the story affect the product or enhance it?

What questions does the film raise which are perhaps unanswered? Are there references you are unaware of? If so, look them up and list them here in your response to the film.

 Link to my interview with director: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/wandas-picks/2012/01/27/wandas-picks

Homework: Respond to a classmate's essay and extend and expand the discourse.