Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Time Line Collection

Browse the Past and some Futures... a collection of Timelines on the Web
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Last revised 9/16/04
Comments: George Emery
Sourceback Link: AlternaTime

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George Emery is a librarian at Canisius College and has been collecting timelines on the Internet since 1993.
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Cross Posted: Helpful History & Geography Notebook
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Tuesday, January 11, 2011

JABBERWOCKY (and other Glorious Nonsense)

JABBERWOCKY


Lewis Carroll

(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872) `Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.


"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
  The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
  Long time the manxome foe he sought --

So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
  And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
  The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
  And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
  The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
  He went galumphing back.
"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
  Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
  He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

 

Jabberwocky, of course, is a poem from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Despite the Alice books being often thought of as children's books, I didn't get around to reading them until I was an adult. When I did, I was spellbound. I was reading away, with quiet enjoyment, when I came across Jabberwocky. I read it, paused, and read it again. Pondered for a while, then read it again. Jabberwocky beautifully skates the thin edge of being understood and being nonsense. But such glorious nonsense! As Alice put it,
"It seems very pretty," she said when she had finished it, "but it's rather hard to understand!" (You see she didn't like to confess even to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.) "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate---"

Jabberwockies seem to pop up all over the place . . . .

...in print...


...on the big screen...

  • According to the Internet Movie Database there have been two movies based on the poem.
  • In Disney's Alice in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat sang Jabberwocky. I guess they couldn't really have swords and killing and such in a movie indended for kids, but really now - kids have been reading Through the Looking Glass for generations.
  • A quote attributed to the famous British actor Nicol Williamson :
    "The mome rath isn't born that could outgrabe me!"

...on the little screen...

  • The 5th and last season (1980) of the late, lamented, and very sorely missed Muppet Show had an episode starring Brooke Shields which covered bits and pieces of both Alice books. The high point (to me, anyway) was their take on Jabberwocky, with Rowlf (the dog) fighting a giant puppet Jabberwock which looked exactly like the Tenniel illustration!  ~~~>
    Narrator: ...and with its head, he went galumphing back.
    Rowlf: galumph! galumph! galumph! galumph!
  • Remember the Doctor Who rebroadcasts on PBS?  In "The Silurians" (a classic about ancient reptile-men trying to take over the Earth) you will find the good Doctor, repairing Bessie while singing "Twas brillig..." !
  • In the Star Trek episode "Plato's Stepchildren," Kirk and Spock sing:
    I'm Tweedledee, he's Tweedledum.
          We're spacemen marching to and from.
    We slythe among the mimsy troves,
          And tire among the borogroves.

...on stage...


...in schools...

  • David Godfrey wrote in to Glorious Nonsense (SOURCE) share this about his high school:
    Scarsdale High School, in New York, has many a Jabberwocky reference within its walls. Our school mascot is a large maroon dragon named Bandy. Our yearbook is called Bandersnatch. We have 2 nights of student bands performing, one in the spring and one in the fall, named Jabberfest. Our Literary magazine is named Jabberwocky.

...in translation...

  • One of the heights of geek humor ever since Digital put their Altavista Babelfish translation service online, is to feed text to the computer translator, translate it into a foreign language, and then translate it back. Here is a stanza of Jabberwocky, translated into German, and then translated back to English:
    `Beware Jabberwock, my son! The Kiefer, which beien, the grip arms, which intercept! Watch out the bird Jubjub, and avoid you frumious the Bandersnatch! ', he took its vorpal to blade into the hand: Long time manxomefeind, which it looked up -- in such a way stood still it by the tree Tumtum, and confessed one while in the thought.
  • Keith Lim's "the jabberwocky variations" is a really neat collection of Jabberwocky translations. Have you ever wondered what Jabberwocky would look like in Latin (Hora aderat briligi. Nunc et Slythia Tova....)?
  • Here is Jabberwocky in Hebrew. (H/T  David Shaw)
  • Here's a version in Yiddish from Raphael Finkel at the University of Kentucky.

...in art...

  • Graeme Base drew "Jabberwocky", a book of fun illustrations for the poem. Even better is his " Jabberwocky: A Book of Brillig Dioramas".  This is a delightful book that unfolds into a series of three-dimensional dioramas - one for each stanza of the poem.


...on vacation...


...in song...

  • In 1970, for the movie-documentary "You Are What You Eat", Peter Yarrow (more commonly seen along with Paul and Mary) wrote and performed a song called "The Wabe". I don't want to violate anyone's copyright too badly, so here are just the opening lyrics as a 159k AU or a 318k WAV.
  • Johns Hopkins is big on a cappella music, so this one struck me as particularly nice: Brown University's oldest a cappella group is known as (not much suspense here, folks, after all this is a Jabberwocky page) The Jabberwocks.

...even on the net...

SOURCE: http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/jabber/

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    Wednesday, September 29, 2010

    How to Raise Boys Who Read

    Hint: Not with gross-out books and video-game bribes.

    When I was a young boy, America's elite schools and universities were almost entirely reserved for males. That seems incredible now, in an era when headlines suggest that boys are largely unfit for the classroom. In particular, they can't read.
    According to a recent report from the Center on Education Policy, for example, substantially more boys than girls score below the proficiency level on the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test. This disparity goes back to 1992, and in some states the percentage of boys proficient in reading is now more than ten points below that of girls. The male-female reading gap is found in every socio-economic and ethnic category, including the children of white, college-educated parents.
    The good news is that influential people have noticed this problem. The bad news is that many of them have perfectly awful ideas for solving it.

    Everyone agrees that if boys don't read well, it's because they don't read enough. But why don't they read? A considerable number of teachers and librarians believe that boys are simply bored by the "stuffy" literature they encounter in school. According to a revealing Associated Press story in July these experts insist that we must "meet them where they are"—that is, pander to boys' untutored tastes.
    For elementary- and middle-school boys, that means "books that exploit [their] love of bodily functions and gross-out humor." AP reported that one school librarian treats her pupils to "grossology" parties. "Just get 'em reading," she counsels cheerily. "Worry about what they're reading later."

    There certainly is no shortage of publishers ready to meet boys where they are. Scholastic has profitably catered to the gross-out market for years with its "Goosebumps" and "Captain Underpants" series. Its latest bestsellers are the "Butt Books," a series that began with "The Day My Butt Went Psycho."
    The more venerable houses are just as willing to aim low. Penguin, which once used the slogan, "the library of every educated person," has its own "Gross Out" line for boys, including such new classics as "Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger."

    Workman Publishing made its name telling women "What to Expect When You're Expecting." How many of them expected they'd be buying "Oh, Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty" a few years later from the same publisher? Even a self-published author like Raymond Bean—nom de plume of the fourth-grade teacher who wrote "SweetFarts"—can make it big in this genre. His flatulence-themed opus hit no. 3 in children's humor on Amazon. The sequel debuts this fall.

    Education was once understood as training for freedom. Not merely the transmission of information, education entailed the formation of manners and taste. Aristotle thought we should be raised "so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; this is the right education."
    "Plato before him," writes C. S. Lewis, "had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful."

    This kind of training goes against the grain, and who has time for that? How much easier to meet children where they are.

    One obvious problem with the SweetFarts philosophy of education is that it is more suited to producing a generation of barbarians and morons than to raising the sort of men who make good husbands, fathers and professionals. If you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn't go very far.
    The other problem is that pandering doesn't address the real reason boys won't read. My own experience with six sons is that even the squirmiest boy does not require lurid or vulgar material to sustain his interest in a book.

    So why won't boys read? The AP story drops a clue when it describes the efforts of one frustrated couple with their 13-year-old unlettered son: "They've tried bribing him with new video games." Good grief.

    The appearance of the boy-girl literacy gap happens to coincide with the proliferation of video games and other electronic forms of entertainment over the last decade or two. Boys spend far more time "plugged in" than girls do. Could the reading gap have more to do with competition for boys' attention than with their supposed inability to focus on anything other than outhouse humor?

    Dr. Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, confirmed this suspicion in a randomized controlled trial of the effect of video games on academic ability. Boys with video games at home, he found, spend more time playing them than reading, and their academic performance suffers substantially. Hard to believe, isn't it, but Science has spoken.

    The secret to raising boys who read, I submit, is pretty simple—keep electronic media, especially video games and recreational Internet, under control (that is to say, almost completely absent). Then fill your shelves with good books.

    People who think that a book—even R.L. Stine's grossest masterpiece—can compete with the powerful stimulation of an electronic screen are kidding themselves. But on the level playing field of a quiet den or bedroom, a good book like "Treasure Island" will hold a boy's attention quite as well as "Zombie Butts from Uranus." Who knows—a boy deprived of electronic stimulation might even become desperate enough to read Jane Austen.
    Most importantly, a boy raised on great literature is more likely to grow up to think, to speak, and to write like a civilized man. Whom would you prefer to have shaped the boyhood imagination of your daughter's husband—Raymond Bean or Robert Louis Stevenson?

    I offer a final piece of evidence that is perhaps unanswerable: There is no literacy gap between home-schooled boys and girls. How many of these families, do you suppose, have thrown grossology parties?
     

    SOURCE: Wall Street Journal - Opinion Journal
    I believe this link may be time sensitive.
    Formatting and graphics by Soutenus

    This article is by Mr. Thomas Spence.
    Mr. Spence is president of Spence Publishing Company in Dallas.



    Thomas Spence

    Thomas Spence is president and publisher of Spence Publishing and a director of Spence Media. After graduating from Dartmouth College, he earned a law degree from the University of Chicago and a master’s in history from Harvard. He was editor in chief at WRS Publishing before founding Spence Publishing in 1996.

    He has been featured in Publishers Weekly, the Boston Globe, the Dartmouth Review, Insight, and the Washington Times and has written for the Dallas Morning News and the American Enterprise.
    Spence Publishing Co. • 5646 Milton Street, Suite 314 • Dallas, TX 75206 • 888.773.6782 • Fax 214.939.1800 
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    Thursday, May 1, 2008

    The Clown of God

    I read a post over at Domestic Vocation
    that reminded me of one of my favorite children's books (in a crazy train of thought).
    I found a review and a picture to share.

    Book Review from Clown Ministry:

    "The Clown of God is a touching story, a children's story, a Christmas story, and a clown ministry story – all at the same time. In a nutshell, an orphaned street urchin goes begging from door to door, juggling for his food. He joins a traveling troupe of entertainers, and gains fame and fortune as a juggler, until he grows old, and again becomes a homeless beggar.

    On one cold night, he seeks shelter in a nearby church, and falls asleep. He awakens to the site of the townspeople offering gifts to statues of the baby Jesus and his mother. The crowd leaves, and our juggler approaches, to see that the statues are sad.

    He puts on his clown face, and juggles as he never has before, to put a smile on the divine Child's face. He dies of a heart attack in the attempt. The monks in the church, who thought that his performance was sacrilegious, turn to see that the statue of Mary and the baby Jesus are now smiling. The message of the story seems to be that it is not what you can offer the Lord, but the spirit in which you offer it, that really matters."

    This is cross posted at Catholic Notebook
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    Wednesday, April 30, 2008

    Passionate Reader = Higher SAT Scores

    " … Tom Parker, former admissions director at Williams College and now at Amherst College, tells parents who ask about improving their child’s SAT scores, “The best SAT-preparation course in the world is to read to your children in bed when they’re little. Eventually, if that’s a wonderful experience for them, they’ll start to read themselves.” Parker, who has interviewed some of America’s finest applicants, claims he’s never met a student with high verbal SAT scores who wasn’t a passionate reader. And the SAT-prep course can’t package that passion, but parents can."

    - from The Read Aloud Handbook, Fifth Edition by Jim Trelease

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    Saturday, April 5, 2008

    Online Literature Guides

    CliffsNotes
    The complete text of CliffsNotes guides.

    BookRags
    Research site for students, with over 5.8 million pages of literature summaries, biographies, literary criticism, essays, encyclopedias and E-Books.

    NovelGuide
    Educational supplement for better understanding of classic and contemporary Literature Profiles

    BookWolf
    FREE literature book notes and a wealth of helpful information to guide you to a year full of good grades.

    JiffyNotes
    Free source for study guides that focus on literary analysis.

    Awerty Notes
    Literature Summaries and essays to assist in studying.
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