Birthday cards

Yeah, most cards are rather corny, of the "Hope lovely surprises are coming your way / To make your Birthday a wonderful day" sort.  Yet, this year, I've received so many beautiful, smart, and funny cards for my birthday.

A quote written in one of them by Thoreau: Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think there is nothing, not even a crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

This one reads: birthdays...what a perfect time to get down with your bad self.

 
My friend Lizz sent me one that reminds us that "With each passing year, we need to accept and appreciate ourselves for who we are....Smart, special, super, amazing, awesome, wonderful women!"  It reminds me of a song we learned as 5th graders: I like myself, I'm worth a lot, don't say I'm not, 'cause you can't see inside of me, huh!

Another funny one from my sis:

Thank you my dear friends for making me laugh and making me think as well as making me feel so loved...as always.  You're great!  -Sarah

Imagism

Imagism, a school of modern poetry founded by Ezra Pound, seeks to portray an image with words, hence its name. The goal is also to use the exact word and to employ as few words as possible to portray the image. For example the title of Pound's poem "In a Station of the Metro," is almost half the length of the poem itself.  Originally the poem was 30 lines long, but Pound destroyed it because it was the work "of second intensity."  To condense the impact, he rewrote the poem, this time half of its original length.  Then a year later he rewrote the poem to the form we know it today:

In a Station of the Metro


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

Pound tells the story of the inspiration for this Imagist poem in the memoir he wrote about the artist Gaudier-Brzeska (pages 86-89). While in a station of the Paris metro, he saw "a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion."

The goal of an imagist poem is to recreate a visual image with verbal utterances using the most exact words possible.

My friend, Nathalie Le Beller, wrote a poem in the imagist form for a class we had together.  I feel the image as well as the emotion is well captured.

With No Ink


with no ink
left

the empty pen
scratches

invisible words and
drawings

against the used
paper.


This one my friend Lysandre wrote...which I just love for its imagery and feeling.

Carnival


Faces
Round unseeing
Eyes twisted frozen;
Pushed piled grotesque
Lifeless, carnivalesque.

Another friend from my class, Alisa, wrote this one.  The rhyme scheme emphasizes perfection and also the motion of waves.

The Ocean Touching You
Waves glide through one another
Admirable in perfection
When they leave the weave and wander
Perfect meets interruption.

Read aloud you can almost hear the waves crashing.

Cadence

Cadence is often neglected when constructing a poem. For Ezra Pound, one of the initiators of the Imagist school of poetry, cadence was essential to the form.

Think of it like this...a runner has 2 minutes to run 2 laps. If the first lap takes 1 ½ minutes, the second must only take 30 seconds. The distance is the same for both laps, but the cadence is greatly varied.

I kept this point in mind while writing a poem in the Imagist model for a British poetry class.



Being



Groggy...      morning...      waking...      slowly....

Yawn...       long...

Fist to eye and foot to floor

"Being": noun to verb

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

This is also a summary of a presentation given by classmates in a 19th century British novel class.

Wuthering Heights is the only novel written by Charlotte Brontë's (the author of Jane Eyre) sister, Emily.

A summary of the novel's characters can be found here.

Family Trees:
                                                                      Wuthering Heights
                                                                  Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw
Hindley m. Frances      Catherine m. Edgar Linton   Heathcliff (adopted) m. Isabella Linton
Hareton Earnshaw       Catherine Linton

                                                                   Thrushcross Grange
                                                                    Mr. and Mrs. Linton
          Edgar m. Catherine Earnshaw           Isabella m. Heathcliff (adopted by Earnshaw)
          Catherine Linton                               Linton Heathcliff    
                            
 Catherine and Linton marry.  After he dies, at the book's end, she is planning on marrying Hareton Earnshaw.

Time-line:
1771: The owner of the manor Wuthering Heights Mr. Earnshaw, adopts an orphan, Heathcliff.
1773: Mrs. Earnshaw dies.
1774: Their son, Hindley, is sent to college.
1777: Hindley Earnshaw marries Frances; Mr. Earnshaw dies.
1778: Hareton is born to Hindley and Frances; Frances dies.
1780: Heathcliff runs away; the owner of the manor Thrushcross Grange Mr. Linton dies.
1783: Edgar Linton and Catherine Earnshaw marry, uniting the two families
1784: Heathcliff and Isabella Linton marry; Edgar and Catherine Earnshaw Linton have a daughter, Catherine; Catherine Earnshaw dies; Heathcliff and Isabella have a son, Linton Heathcliff; Hindley Earnshaw dies.
1797: Isabella dies.
1801: Catherine Linton and Linton Heathcliff marry; Edgar and Linton die.
1802: Heathcliff dies.
1803: Catherine and Hareton are to be married.

Themes:
Love: destructive love, marriages based on social advancement vs. passionate love, weakness and manipulation, successful/hopeful love, familial love.
Social Class: can be seen in the architecture of the manors, within the characters
Revenge

The trailer for the 1992 film:

Buy the book here:

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Based on a summary by some of my classmates in a 19th century British novel class.

Plot Summary:
When the creature that Victor Frankenstein comes to life, Victor is so frightened he leaves but so does the monster. Victor becomes depressed thinking about the monster's possible return. When he hears of his five-year-old brother's death he goes to the scene of the murder in Geneva where he discovers that the creature he made has killed his brother. Eventually the two speak, the creation sharing with the creator stories of his bouts of loneliness. He asks Frankenstein to create a female creature to accompany him, an "Eve." Although Victor initially agrees, under the condition that his creature will stay far from him and his family afterwards, apprehension over the mayhem that two creatures could cause to humankind, he destroys the second creation before she comes to life. His creature is so angry that he kills Victor's fiancée in revenge. Victor is charged with the murder and imprisoned although he is later acquitted of the crime. He marries his cousin, Elizabeth, but she too is murdered by the creature. Victor thus pursues the creature in an attempt to destroy it, keeping it from causing further harm. He follows him to the Arctic where Victor meets Walton, a ship captain, and shares his unbelievable story with him. The novel is composed of letters that Walton writes to a Mrs. Saville to convey the account. Frankenstein dies and his creature, overwhelmed by sorrow, destroys himself on a funeral pyre.

Themes:
Death: many characters die throughout the novel; an execution; murders; suicide; manhunts; cemeteries; creating the monster from bodies.
Effects of Rejection and Isolation: Victor and society rejects his creation. Victor does so out of guilt and fear. Society out of fear and prejudice. The monster feels lonely, unloved, and unwanted which leads to murder.
Reversal of the Roles and the Burden: Victor is the hunter, then the monster becomes the hunter, ending with Victor again being the hunter.

The trailer to the 1931 movie:

And that of the 2004 version:

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Hard Times by Charles Dickens

As the 2 past posts, this is based on a summary prepared by fellow students in a 19th century British novel class.

Like Gaskell's North and South, Dickens' novel is also an industrial/social novel which takes place during England's industrial revolution. It is also a moral tale, didactically revealing the downfalls of being overly dependent on the rational to the detriment of the enjoyable. Hence, the two main concepts of the novel are the opposing poles of fact and fancy.

Characters:
Fact:
Mr. Gradgrind: a school principal, a utilitarian. He raises his children to follow the philosophy of fact.  He adopts one of the students in his school, Sissy, when her circus performer father deserts her.
Mr. Bounderby: one of Mr. Gradgrind's friends, also a utilitarian, claims to be a safe-made man.
Louisa Gradgrind: Mr. Gradgrind's eldest child. She marries Mr. Bounderby based on rational evidence. She falls prey to a seducer.
Tom Gradgrind: Mr. Gradgrind's second child. He works with Mr. Bounderby to escape his father's influence. He does not have the necessary tools to manage his life.

Fancy:
Sissy Jupe: Represents the balance between fact and fancy.
Stephen Blackpool: the embodiment of the working class.

Themes:
Utilitarian education: be efficient to achieve the greatest amount of happiness for the most people. Children are therefore raised to be machines that will please their future industrialist employers.
Economic laissez-faire: capitalism without limits
Social mobility and humanism.

Buy the novel here:

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

This summary is also based on presentations made by fellow students in a 19th century English novel class.

North and South was first published as a serial in Charles Dickens' weekly, Household Words from September 1854 to January, 1855. In it, Gaskell presents the industrial life of Manchester, England by portraying the fictitious Milton. She had settled with her husband in Manchester so she had a first-hand account of this massive industrial city (based mostly on the cotton industry), using it as a backdrop of her industrial novels.  In 1847 trade slowed causing wage reduction and generated a strike.

Plot Summary:
Margaret Hale is an emotionally-strong young middle-classed woman. Her family moves from the prosperous south of England to the industrial north. There she meets John Thorton, the wealthy owner of the local mill. He exposes the struggles of industrialization from a businessman's perspective. She also makes friends with Bessy Higgins, from the working class, and from her learns of the harsh realities of the mill workers that are on strike. A love/hate relationship develops between John Thorton and Margaret as she attempts to make him aware of the strikers' needs and of their miserable living conditions.

Themes:
North of England vs. the South of England: The differing lifestyles of those living in northern England from those living in the south greatly caused great cultural differences among the two areas. Industrialization brings technology, factories and a burgeoning economy, but also diseases and pollution to Milton. Industrialization commoditized humans as dispensable workers.

Sickness and Death: Create a separation between the strong and the weak. Strong-minded characters (Margaret, John) survive in Milton despite the poor living conditions while weaker characters (Bessy and Mr. and Mrs. Hale) often get sick and die.

As a social/industrial novel, North and South reveals feminist concerns, addresses educational deficiencies, discusses some of the economical issues of colonialism, as well as putting the industrial revolution to the forefront.

This is a trailer of the 2004 BBC television series based on the novel:

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