Tuesday, November 18, 2008
ignorance is bliss
"Lyra wandered away on her own, and went to the reedy bank to sit and throw mud into the water. She knew one thing: she was not pleased or proud to be able to read the alethiometer-she was afraid" (109). Lyra, being a small child has no idea what power she possesses or what is in store for her. It is no accident that she was given the alethiometer by the processor at Oxford. As she continues with the childish act of throwing mud she begins thinking about ideas and technology way beyond her once-childish mind. Like all humans, Lyra is beginning to realize that growing up is inevitable. William Blake's innocence experience is something that comes to mind when I read these lines. With the alethiometer Lyra begins to question authority with more confidence. Soon she realizes that size doesn't neccesarily constitute power. Although she is a growing girl, Lyra still has quite an influence on many people around her. She is successful in leading the Gyptians North, and greatly responsible for Iorek's reign as polar bear king. Although her friend is lost, Lyra realizes that in life mistakes will be made, LARGE and small. She must take the death of her friend in her memories and live her life with that painful mistake made forever. Although she lost one friend, she saved tons of other children, and is one step closer to finding out what her father, Lord Asriel is up to. Nobdody can figure it out-not even the witches! Something tells me Lyra will overcome her ignorance of her father's intentions, and might just be there in case his intentions are anything but good.
Friday, November 14, 2008
The Auroras of Autumn
The Auroras of Autumn
Wallace Stevens
I
This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.
His head is air. Beaneath his tip at night
Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.
Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,
Another image at the end of the cave,
Another bodiless for the body's slough?
This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,
These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,
Ans the pines above and along and beside the sea.
This is form gulping after formlessness,
Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances
And the serpent body flashing without the skin.
This is the height emerging and its base
These lights may finally attain a pole
In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there,
In another nest, the master of the maze
Of body and air and forms and images,
Relentlessly in possession of happiness.
This is his position: that we should disbelieve
Even that. His meditations in the ferns,
When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun,
Made us no less as sure. We saw in his head,
Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal,
The moving grass, the Indian in his glade.
II
Farewell to an idea...A cabin stands,
Deserted, on a beach. It is white,
As by a custom or according to
An ancestral theme or as a consequence
Of an infinite course. The flowers against the wall
Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark
Reminding, trying to remind, of a white
That was different, something else, last year
Of before, not the white of an aging afternoon,
Whether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud
Or of winter sky, from horizon to horizon.
The wind is blowing the sand across the floor.
Here, being visible is being white,
Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment
Of an extremist is an excercise...
The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.
The long lines of it grow longer, emptier,
A darkness gathers though it does not fall
And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.
The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.
He observes how the north is always enlarging the change,
With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps
And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,
The color of ice and fire and solitude.
III
Farewell to an idea...The mother's face,
The purpose of the poem, fills the room.
They are together, here, and it is warm,
With none of the prescience of oncoming dreams.
It is evening. The house is evening, half dissolved.
Only the half they can never possess remains,
Still-starred. It is the mother they possess,
Who gives transparence to their present peace.
She makes that gentler that can gentle be.
And yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed.
She gives transparence. But she has grown old.
The necklace is a carving not a kiss.
The soft hands are a motion not a touch.
The house will crumble and the books will burn.
They are at ease in a shelter of the mind
And the house is of the mind and they and time,
Together, all together. Boreal night
Will look like frost as it approaches them
And to the mother as she falls asleep
And as they say good-night. Upstairs
The windows will be lighted, not the rooms.
A wind will spread its windy grandeurs round
And knock like a rifle-butt against the door.
The wind will command them with invincible sound.
IV
Farewell to an idea...The cancellings,
The negations are never final. The father sits
In space, wherever he sits, of bleak regard,
As one that is strong in the bushes of his eyes.
He says no to no and yes to yes. He says yes
To no; and in saying yes he says farewell.
He measures the velocities of change.
He leaps from heaven to heaven more rapidly
Than the bad angels leap from heave to hell in flames.
But now he sits in quiet and green-a-day.
He assumes the great speeds of space and flutters them
From cloud to cloudless, cloudless to keen clear
In flights of eye and ear, the highest eye
And the lowest ear, the deep ear that discerns,
At evening, things that attend it until it hears
The supernatural preludes of its own,
At the moment when the angelic eye defines
Its actors approaching, in company, in their masks.
Master O master seated by the fire
And yet in space and motionless and yet
Of motion the ever-brightening origin,
Profound, and yet the king and yet the crown.
Look at this present throne. What company,
In masks, can choir it with the naked wind?
V
The mother invites humanity to her house
And table. The father fetches tellers of tales
And musicians who mute much, muse much, on the tales.
The father fetches negresses to dance,
Among the children, like curious ripenessess
Of pattern in the dance's ripening.
For these the musicians make insidious tones,
Clawing the sing-song of their instruments.
The children laugh and jangle a tinny time.
The father fetches pageants out of air,
Scenes of the theatre, vistas and blocks of woods
And curtains like a naive pretense of sleep.
Among these the musicians strike the instinctive poem.
The father fetches his unherded herds,
Of barbarous tongue, slavered and panting halves
Of breath, obedient to his trumpet's touch.
This then is Chatillon or as you please.
We stand in the tumult of a festival.
What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?
These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?
These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,
A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:
That there are no lines to speak? These is no play.
Or, the persons act one merely by being here.
VI
It is a theatre floating through the clouds,
Itself a cloud, although of misted rock
And mountains running like water, wave on wave,
Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed
To cloud transformed again, idly, the way
A season changes color to no end,
Except the lavishing of itself in change,
As light changes yellow into gold and gold
To its opal elements and fire's delight,
Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence
And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space.
The cloud drifts idly through half-thought-of forms.
The theatre is filled with flying birds,
Wilde wedges, as of a volcano's smoke, palm-eyed
And vanishing, a web in a corridor
Or massive portico. 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.
VII
Is there an imagination that sits enthroned
As grim as it is benevolent, the just
And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops
To imagine winter? When the leaves are dead.
Does it take its place in the north and enfold itself,
Goat-leaper, crystalled and luminous, sitting
In the highest night? And do these heavens adorn
And proclaim it, the white creator of black, jetted
By extinguishings, even of planets as may be,
Even of earth, even of sight, in snow,
Except as needed by way of majesty,
In the sky, as crown and diamond cabala?
It leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps,
Extinguishing our planets, one by one,
Leaving, of where we were and looked, of where
We knew each other and of each other thought,
A shivering residue, chilled and foregone,
Except for the crown and mystical cabala.
But it dare not leap by chance in its own dark.
It must change from destiny to slight caprice.
And thus its jetted tragedy, its stele
VIII
There may be always a time of innocence.
There is never a place. Or if there is no time,
If it is not a thing of time, not of place,
Existing in the idea of it, alone,
In the sense against calamity, it is not
Less real. For the oldest and coldest philosopher,
There is or may be a time of innocence
As pure principle. Its nature is its end,
That it should be, and yet not be, a thing
That pinches the pity of the pitiful man,
Like a book at evening beautiful but untrue,
Like a book on rising beautiful and true.
It is like a thing of ether that exists
Almost as predicate. But it exists,
It exists, it is visible, it is, it is.
So, then, these lights are not a spell of light,
A saying out of a cloud, but innocence.
An innocence of the earth and no false sign
Or symbol of malice. That we partake thereof,
Lie down like children in this holiness,
As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep,
As if the innocent mother sang in the dark
Of the room and on an accordion, half-heard,
Created the time and place in which we breathed...
IX
And of each other thought-in the idiom
Of the work, in the idiom of an innocent earth,
Not of the enigma of the guilty dream.
We were as Danes in Denmark all day long
And knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen,
For whom the outlandish was another day
Of the week, queerer than Sunday. We thought alike
And that made brothers of us in a home
In which we fed on being brothers, fed
And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb.
This drama that we live-We lay sticky with sleep.
This sense of the activity of fate-
The rendezvous, when she came alone,
By her coming became a freedom of the two,
As isolation which only the two could share.
Shall we be found hanging in the trees next spring?
Of what disaster in this the imminence:
Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt?
The stars are putting on their glittering belts.
They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash
Like a great shadow's last embellishment.
It may come tommorow in the simplest word,
Almost as part of innocence, almost,
Almost as the tenderest and the truest part.
X
An unhappy people in a happy world-
Read, rabbi, the phases of this difference.
An unhappy people in an unhappy world-
Here are too many mirrors for misery.
A happy people in an unhappy world-
It cannot be. There's nothing there to roll
On the expressive tongue, the finding fang.
A happy people in a happy world-
Buffo! A ball, an opera, a bar.
Turn back to where we were when we began:
An unhappy people in a happy world.
Now, solemnize the secretive syllables.
Read to the congregation, for today
And for tommorow, this extremity,
This contrivance of the spectre of the spheres,
Contriving balance to contrive a whole,
The vital, the never-failing genius,
Fulfilling his meditations, great and small.
In these unhappy he meditates a whole,
The full of fortune and the full of fate,
As if he lived all lives, that he might know,
In hall harridan, not hushful paradise,
To a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights
Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter's nick.
Wallace Stevens
I
This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.
His head is air. Beaneath his tip at night
Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.
Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,
Another image at the end of the cave,
Another bodiless for the body's slough?
This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,
These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,
Ans the pines above and along and beside the sea.
This is form gulping after formlessness,
Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances
And the serpent body flashing without the skin.
This is the height emerging and its base
These lights may finally attain a pole
In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there,
In another nest, the master of the maze
Of body and air and forms and images,
Relentlessly in possession of happiness.
This is his position: that we should disbelieve
Even that. His meditations in the ferns,
When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun,
Made us no less as sure. We saw in his head,
Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal,
The moving grass, the Indian in his glade.
II
Farewell to an idea...A cabin stands,
Deserted, on a beach. It is white,
As by a custom or according to
An ancestral theme or as a consequence
Of an infinite course. The flowers against the wall
Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark
Reminding, trying to remind, of a white
That was different, something else, last year
Of before, not the white of an aging afternoon,
Whether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud
Or of winter sky, from horizon to horizon.
The wind is blowing the sand across the floor.
Here, being visible is being white,
Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment
Of an extremist is an excercise...
The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.
The long lines of it grow longer, emptier,
A darkness gathers though it does not fall
And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.
The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.
He observes how the north is always enlarging the change,
With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps
And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,
The color of ice and fire and solitude.
III
Farewell to an idea...The mother's face,
The purpose of the poem, fills the room.
They are together, here, and it is warm,
With none of the prescience of oncoming dreams.
It is evening. The house is evening, half dissolved.
Only the half they can never possess remains,
Still-starred. It is the mother they possess,
Who gives transparence to their present peace.
She makes that gentler that can gentle be.
And yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed.
She gives transparence. But she has grown old.
The necklace is a carving not a kiss.
The soft hands are a motion not a touch.
The house will crumble and the books will burn.
They are at ease in a shelter of the mind
And the house is of the mind and they and time,
Together, all together. Boreal night
Will look like frost as it approaches them
And to the mother as she falls asleep
And as they say good-night. Upstairs
The windows will be lighted, not the rooms.
A wind will spread its windy grandeurs round
And knock like a rifle-butt against the door.
The wind will command them with invincible sound.
IV
Farewell to an idea...The cancellings,
The negations are never final. The father sits
In space, wherever he sits, of bleak regard,
As one that is strong in the bushes of his eyes.
He says no to no and yes to yes. He says yes
To no; and in saying yes he says farewell.
He measures the velocities of change.
He leaps from heaven to heaven more rapidly
Than the bad angels leap from heave to hell in flames.
But now he sits in quiet and green-a-day.
He assumes the great speeds of space and flutters them
From cloud to cloudless, cloudless to keen clear
In flights of eye and ear, the highest eye
And the lowest ear, the deep ear that discerns,
At evening, things that attend it until it hears
The supernatural preludes of its own,
At the moment when the angelic eye defines
Its actors approaching, in company, in their masks.
Master O master seated by the fire
And yet in space and motionless and yet
Of motion the ever-brightening origin,
Profound, and yet the king and yet the crown.
Look at this present throne. What company,
In masks, can choir it with the naked wind?
V
The mother invites humanity to her house
And table. The father fetches tellers of tales
And musicians who mute much, muse much, on the tales.
The father fetches negresses to dance,
Among the children, like curious ripenessess
Of pattern in the dance's ripening.
For these the musicians make insidious tones,
Clawing the sing-song of their instruments.
The children laugh and jangle a tinny time.
The father fetches pageants out of air,
Scenes of the theatre, vistas and blocks of woods
And curtains like a naive pretense of sleep.
Among these the musicians strike the instinctive poem.
The father fetches his unherded herds,
Of barbarous tongue, slavered and panting halves
Of breath, obedient to his trumpet's touch.
This then is Chatillon or as you please.
We stand in the tumult of a festival.
What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?
These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?
These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,
A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:
That there are no lines to speak? These is no play.
Or, the persons act one merely by being here.
VI
It is a theatre floating through the clouds,
Itself a cloud, although of misted rock
And mountains running like water, wave on wave,
Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed
To cloud transformed again, idly, the way
A season changes color to no end,
Except the lavishing of itself in change,
As light changes yellow into gold and gold
To its opal elements and fire's delight,
Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence
And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space.
The cloud drifts idly through half-thought-of forms.
The theatre is filled with flying birds,
Wilde wedges, as of a volcano's smoke, palm-eyed
And vanishing, a web in a corridor
Or massive portico. 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.
VII
Is there an imagination that sits enthroned
As grim as it is benevolent, the just
And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops
To imagine winter? When the leaves are dead.
Does it take its place in the north and enfold itself,
Goat-leaper, crystalled and luminous, sitting
In the highest night? And do these heavens adorn
And proclaim it, the white creator of black, jetted
By extinguishings, even of planets as may be,
Even of earth, even of sight, in snow,
Except as needed by way of majesty,
In the sky, as crown and diamond cabala?
It leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps,
Extinguishing our planets, one by one,
Leaving, of where we were and looked, of where
We knew each other and of each other thought,
A shivering residue, chilled and foregone,
Except for the crown and mystical cabala.
But it dare not leap by chance in its own dark.
It must change from destiny to slight caprice.
And thus its jetted tragedy, its stele
VIII
There may be always a time of innocence.
There is never a place. Or if there is no time,
If it is not a thing of time, not of place,
Existing in the idea of it, alone,
In the sense against calamity, it is not
Less real. For the oldest and coldest philosopher,
There is or may be a time of innocence
As pure principle. Its nature is its end,
That it should be, and yet not be, a thing
That pinches the pity of the pitiful man,
Like a book at evening beautiful but untrue,
Like a book on rising beautiful and true.
It is like a thing of ether that exists
Almost as predicate. But it exists,
It exists, it is visible, it is, it is.
So, then, these lights are not a spell of light,
A saying out of a cloud, but innocence.
An innocence of the earth and no false sign
Or symbol of malice. That we partake thereof,
Lie down like children in this holiness,
As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep,
As if the innocent mother sang in the dark
Of the room and on an accordion, half-heard,
Created the time and place in which we breathed...
IX
And of each other thought-in the idiom
Of the work, in the idiom of an innocent earth,
Not of the enigma of the guilty dream.
We were as Danes in Denmark all day long
And knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen,
For whom the outlandish was another day
Of the week, queerer than Sunday. We thought alike
And that made brothers of us in a home
In which we fed on being brothers, fed
And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb.
This drama that we live-We lay sticky with sleep.
This sense of the activity of fate-
The rendezvous, when she came alone,
By her coming became a freedom of the two,
As isolation which only the two could share.
Shall we be found hanging in the trees next spring?
Of what disaster in this the imminence:
Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt?
The stars are putting on their glittering belts.
They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash
Like a great shadow's last embellishment.
It may come tommorow in the simplest word,
Almost as part of innocence, almost,
Almost as the tenderest and the truest part.
X
An unhappy people in a happy world-
Read, rabbi, the phases of this difference.
An unhappy people in an unhappy world-
Here are too many mirrors for misery.
A happy people in an unhappy world-
It cannot be. There's nothing there to roll
On the expressive tongue, the finding fang.
A happy people in a happy world-
Buffo! A ball, an opera, a bar.
Turn back to where we were when we began:
An unhappy people in a happy world.
Now, solemnize the secretive syllables.
Read to the congregation, for today
And for tommorow, this extremity,
This contrivance of the spectre of the spheres,
Contriving balance to contrive a whole,
The vital, the never-failing genius,
Fulfilling his meditations, great and small.
In these unhappy he meditates a whole,
The full of fortune and the full of fate,
As if he lived all lives, that he might know,
In hall harridan, not hushful paradise,
To a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights
Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter's nick.
Theism
Theism
Theism is the belief in a god or gods. Classical theism affirms the existence of one god, and ascribes to this god certain attributes, e.g. omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, and impassibility. The aim of this site is to define these attributes, and explore the difficulties that arise when one tries to explain them.
There are many different positions concerning the existence and nature of God; theism is just one of many alternatives. Rival positions include atheism, agnosticism, pantheism, and deism.
Atheism and Agnosticism
Those without belief in God may be either atheists or agnostics. Atheism may be defined either weakly as the absence of belief in God, or in a stronger form as active disbelief in God.
Agnosticism too comes in weaker and stronger forms; agnosticism may be understood as simple uncertainty, indecision concerning God’s existence, or it may be understood as the view that the question as to whether God exists is one that in principle can never be
Theism is the belief in a god or gods. Classical theism affirms the existence of one god, and ascribes to this god certain attributes, e.g. omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, and impassibility. The aim of this site is to define these attributes, and explore the difficulties that arise when one tries to explain them.
There are many different positions concerning the existence and nature of God; theism is just one of many alternatives. Rival positions include atheism, agnosticism, pantheism, and deism.
Atheism and Agnosticism
Those without belief in God may be either atheists or agnostics. Atheism may be defined either weakly as the absence of belief in God, or in a stronger form as active disbelief in God.
Agnosticism too comes in weaker and stronger forms; agnosticism may be understood as simple uncertainty, indecision concerning God’s existence, or it may be understood as the view that the question as to whether God exists is one that in principle can never be
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
class questions for the second exam (11/12/08)
1. Illustrator of "Alice" books..Tenniel
2. Last word in Beauty and the Beast..Virtue
3. Who wins after death? Worms
4. We triumpth over worms through..Art
5. Oscar Wilde: Art intiminates..Art
6. White Knight is..Carroll
7. 5 themes in class: mystery, history, dream, art, coincidence
8. Parody counterpart to Alice: Crocodile
Moral counterpart to Alice: Bee
9. Food moci turtle sings of: soup
10. Mad Hatter's answer to Raven and writing desk riddle..no idea
11. After Shakespeare..Carroll..is the most quoted writer in english lit
12. myth..is a depersonalized..dream..and..dream..is a personalized..myth
13. portmanteau: Jabberwocky, Humpty Dumpty
14. whose the rudest of all the flowers?
15. The word animated contains which word which means soul?..Anima
16. who is the volcano? Alice
17. Where does Alice live in all of us? our unconcious(dust)
18. When Alice first shrank how tall was she? 10 in.
19. Deleted ch. of "Looking Glass" The Wasp and the Whig
20. Why was mouse offended by Alice? Mentioned cats
21. Protestant Reformation lit. to teach..moral values
22. 1st USA Bible published in.. Algonquin
23. 2 animals to spark curiousity in evolution: monkey and mammoth
24. invention to impact Protestant Reformation: printing press
25. Mercury making Hatters mad in what? misplaced fairytale
26. create anagram from.. ex.Plain-Palin
27. What does White Rabbit drop? White gloves and fan
28. What do Beauty's tears turn into (in movie)? Diamonds
29. When reading a story truth the..tale..and not the..teller.
30. Carroll's nickname inspired by what character? Dodo (stutterer)
31. What rhetorical form is "interesting because its interesting"? Talology
32. Goody-two-shoes is an emblem of..perfection
33. Tweedles: if Alice is part of King's dream than they are..ditto ditto ditto
34. What Alice image appeared in Rebbecca's dream: Flying Pigs
35. We often look at the..dark side..of things
36. Most prolific serial killer in 19th c. Mary-Anne Cotton
37. 2 ghosts appeared throughout Sunderland book? Sid James and White Lady
38. Jabberwocky based upon Sunderland legend: Lampton Worm
39. Life, what is it but a dream?
40. Acrostic: Alice's name in "which do you think it was?"
41. Walter Peter said: All art aspires to the condition of..music
42. The text informs..reality
43. Tweedle Dee says: contrariewise
Also, things to focus on for the test:
Endings to focus on in Tartar's book: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Rumpelstiltskin.
Talbot pages (look at Sam and Lynn's blogs)
My Book and Heart Should Never Part
2. Last word in Beauty and the Beast..Virtue
3. Who wins after death? Worms
4. We triumpth over worms through..Art
5. Oscar Wilde: Art intiminates..Art
6. White Knight is..Carroll
7. 5 themes in class: mystery, history, dream, art, coincidence
8. Parody counterpart to Alice: Crocodile
Moral counterpart to Alice: Bee
9. Food moci turtle sings of: soup
10. Mad Hatter's answer to Raven and writing desk riddle..no idea
11. After Shakespeare..Carroll..is the most quoted writer in english lit
12. myth..is a depersonalized..dream..and..dream..is a personalized..myth
13. portmanteau: Jabberwocky, Humpty Dumpty
14. whose the rudest of all the flowers?
15. The word animated contains which word which means soul?..Anima
16. who is the volcano? Alice
17. Where does Alice live in all of us? our unconcious(dust)
18. When Alice first shrank how tall was she? 10 in.
19. Deleted ch. of "Looking Glass" The Wasp and the Whig
20. Why was mouse offended by Alice? Mentioned cats
21. Protestant Reformation lit. to teach..moral values
22. 1st USA Bible published in.. Algonquin
23. 2 animals to spark curiousity in evolution: monkey and mammoth
24. invention to impact Protestant Reformation: printing press
25. Mercury making Hatters mad in what? misplaced fairytale
26. create anagram from.. ex.Plain-Palin
27. What does White Rabbit drop? White gloves and fan
28. What do Beauty's tears turn into (in movie)? Diamonds
29. When reading a story truth the..tale..and not the..teller.
30. Carroll's nickname inspired by what character? Dodo (stutterer)
31. What rhetorical form is "interesting because its interesting"? Talology
32. Goody-two-shoes is an emblem of..perfection
33. Tweedles: if Alice is part of King's dream than they are..ditto ditto ditto
34. What Alice image appeared in Rebbecca's dream: Flying Pigs
35. We often look at the..dark side..of things
36. Most prolific serial killer in 19th c. Mary-Anne Cotton
37. 2 ghosts appeared throughout Sunderland book? Sid James and White Lady
38. Jabberwocky based upon Sunderland legend: Lampton Worm
39. Life, what is it but a dream?
40. Acrostic: Alice's name in "which do you think it was?"
41. Walter Peter said: All art aspires to the condition of..music
42. The text informs..reality
43. Tweedle Dee says: contrariewise
Also, things to focus on for the test:
Endings to focus on in Tartar's book: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Rumpelstiltskin.
Talbot pages (look at Sam and Lynn's blogs)
My Book and Heart Should Never Part
Monday, November 10, 2008
The Carpenter and the Walrus
"The Carpenter and the Walrus" is my favorite story, told in poetic form by Tweedledee in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass." The illustrations by John Tenniel are absolutely brilliant.. Disney movies often give us a much different picture than we imagine the characters to look like. However, Tenniel offers such intimate and accurate illustrations to Carroll's words that I constantly see direct parallels between Tenniel and Disney's illustrated portrayal of Alice and her adventures. The story of two sobbing characters, the walrus and the carpenter, confronted by adorable oysters that they fool into becoming a delectable meal is great! I read the poem spoken by Tweedledee with absolute delight. It definitely made me feel like a giddy-kid again!
Sunday, November 9, 2008
A Facsimile
Facsimile according to the many authors of Wikipedia is:
(From Latin fac simile, "make like") is a copy or reproduction of an old book, manuscript, map, art print or other item of historical value that is as true-to-the-original source as possible using, normally, some form of photographic technique. They differ from other forms of reproduction by attempting to replicate the source as accurately as possible in terms of scale, colour, condition, and other material qualities. For books and manuscripts, this also entails a complete copy of all pages; hence an incomplete copy is known as a "partial facsimile". Facsimiles are used, for example, by scholars to research a source that they do not have access to otherwise and by museums and archives for museum and media preservation. Many are sold commercially.
(From Latin fac simile, "make like") is a copy or reproduction of an old book, manuscript, map, art print or other item of historical value that is as true-to-the-original source as possible using, normally, some form of photographic technique. They differ from other forms of reproduction by attempting to replicate the source as accurately as possible in terms of scale, colour, condition, and other material qualities. For books and manuscripts, this also entails a complete copy of all pages; hence an incomplete copy is known as a "partial facsimile". Facsimiles are used, for example, by scholars to research a source that they do not have access to otherwise and by museums and archives for museum and media preservation. Many are sold commercially.
John Tenniel
SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM ALICE IN WONDERLAND
THE ILLUSTRATOR HIMSELF
"John Tenniel, who best known today for his illustrations to the Alice books, was born in London in 1820, the son of a dancing master and fencing instructor. He studied at the schools of the British Royal Academy and at the Clipstone Street Art society, but was largely self-taught as a book illustrator and periodical cartoonist.
At the age of 16, he exhibited his first oil painting at the Society of British Artists. In 1840, while fencing with his father, he was blinded in one eye, according to his biographer, F. Sartzano in Sir John Tenniel (1948). In 1845, he was awarded a premium for a sixteen-foot cartoon of The Spirit of Justice, although the Fine Arts Commission awarded Daniel Maclise £250 for the oil painting which sits behind the Strangers' Gallery in Westminster's House of Lords. There in "The Hall of Poets" one may still see Tenniel's fresco illustrating John Dryden's Saint Cecilia.
Some three years younger than Punch regular and Dickens Christmas Book illustrator John Leech (1817-64) and considerably younger than Clarkson Stanfield, R. A. (1793-1867), by the time of his work on Dickens's The Haunted Man Tenniel had already exhibited at the Society of British Artists in 1836 and at the Royal Academy (1837-42). He had also contributed illustrations to The Book of British Birds (1842), his friend Charles Keene's Heath's Book of Beauty (1845), and, most recently, Thomas James's Aesop's Fables (1848).
Since Dickens's usual engraver, L. C. Martin (whose firm was responsible for seven of the 17 Haunted Man plates) was married to Tenniel's sister, it is surprising that Dickens and Tenniel had not met sooner. The year after illustrating The Haunted Man, Tenniel replaced gifted illustrator and fairy-artist Richard Doyle on the staff of Punch when the latter left because as a Catholic he objected to the magazine's attacks on the papacy. At the outset of The Haunted Man project in October 1848, Dickens, not yet aware of Tenniel's capabilities, confined him to ornamental subjects (the frontispiece, the title-page, and the fire-side scene that opens the story proper), and gave over to him what Leech had not the time for, resulting in the extremely wooden renditions of Mrs. Tetterby and her brood, a muffled Redlaw, and "The Boy before the Fire" in "The Gift Diffused" (Ch. 2).
He was a member of Dickens's amateur theatrical troupe in 1851, acting in Bulwer-Lytton's Not So Bad As We Seem. He married in 1852, but became a widower only two years later. In 1861, he illustrated Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh, and succeeded Leech as head Punch illustrator upon that artist's death in 1864, and the following year illustrated Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; the forty-two illustrations had involved Tenniel in much acrimonious debate with Carroll, who insisted that the first edition be withdrawn because he was displeased with the reproductive quality of the prints. Reluctantly, Tenniel agreed to work on Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1872), his last book illustration.
His most successful political cartoon was his caricature of German Chancellor Otto Von Bismark's resignation as "Dropping the Pilot" (Punch, 1891). He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1893, and continued his life-long association with Punch until 1901. See Michael Hancher's The Tenniel Illustrations to the "Alice" Books (1985)."
OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS By John Tenniel
THE ILLUSTRATOR HIMSELF
"John Tenniel, who best known today for his illustrations to the Alice books, was born in London in 1820, the son of a dancing master and fencing instructor. He studied at the schools of the British Royal Academy and at the Clipstone Street Art society, but was largely self-taught as a book illustrator and periodical cartoonist.
At the age of 16, he exhibited his first oil painting at the Society of British Artists. In 1840, while fencing with his father, he was blinded in one eye, according to his biographer, F. Sartzano in Sir John Tenniel (1948). In 1845, he was awarded a premium for a sixteen-foot cartoon of The Spirit of Justice, although the Fine Arts Commission awarded Daniel Maclise £250 for the oil painting which sits behind the Strangers' Gallery in Westminster's House of Lords. There in "The Hall of Poets" one may still see Tenniel's fresco illustrating John Dryden's Saint Cecilia.
Some three years younger than Punch regular and Dickens Christmas Book illustrator John Leech (1817-64) and considerably younger than Clarkson Stanfield, R. A. (1793-1867), by the time of his work on Dickens's The Haunted Man Tenniel had already exhibited at the Society of British Artists in 1836 and at the Royal Academy (1837-42). He had also contributed illustrations to The Book of British Birds (1842), his friend Charles Keene's Heath's Book of Beauty (1845), and, most recently, Thomas James's Aesop's Fables (1848).
Since Dickens's usual engraver, L. C. Martin (whose firm was responsible for seven of the 17 Haunted Man plates) was married to Tenniel's sister, it is surprising that Dickens and Tenniel had not met sooner. The year after illustrating The Haunted Man, Tenniel replaced gifted illustrator and fairy-artist Richard Doyle on the staff of Punch when the latter left because as a Catholic he objected to the magazine's attacks on the papacy. At the outset of The Haunted Man project in October 1848, Dickens, not yet aware of Tenniel's capabilities, confined him to ornamental subjects (the frontispiece, the title-page, and the fire-side scene that opens the story proper), and gave over to him what Leech had not the time for, resulting in the extremely wooden renditions of Mrs. Tetterby and her brood, a muffled Redlaw, and "The Boy before the Fire" in "The Gift Diffused" (Ch. 2).
He was a member of Dickens's amateur theatrical troupe in 1851, acting in Bulwer-Lytton's Not So Bad As We Seem. He married in 1852, but became a widower only two years later. In 1861, he illustrated Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh, and succeeded Leech as head Punch illustrator upon that artist's death in 1864, and the following year illustrated Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; the forty-two illustrations had involved Tenniel in much acrimonious debate with Carroll, who insisted that the first edition be withdrawn because he was displeased with the reproductive quality of the prints. Reluctantly, Tenniel agreed to work on Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1872), his last book illustration.
His most successful political cartoon was his caricature of German Chancellor Otto Von Bismark's resignation as "Dropping the Pilot" (Punch, 1891). He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1893, and continued his life-long association with Punch until 1901. See Michael Hancher's The Tenniel Illustrations to the "Alice" Books (1985)."
OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS By John Tenniel
A Mad Tea-Party
My favorite chapter in Alice and Wonderland is Chapter VII, "A Mad Tea-Party." Alice always seems to get angry when a story seems unrealistic, while accepting a bizzare world which she has been meeting talking animals and growing taller and smaller. The chapter begins when alice sees a large table with three characters crowded around one corner of it. They see Alice coming and immediately cry "No room! No room!" When the Hatter speaks, Alice observes that "The Hatter's remark seemed to her to have nor sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English" (107). The Hatter and the March Hare speak of riddles with no answer and speak of time which they find no concern or purpose for. They are afraid of the Queen who threatened to cut of their heads. Of course nothing ever came of it. Alice gets frustrated as she always does in this world of make-believe. The third character at the table, the Dormouse plays a very liminal role considering he spends most of the scene asleep. The imagery is fantastic, and Alice walks out of the scene enraged by such unrealistic animals!
Monday, November 3, 2008
dreams
Last night I had the most odd dream. It was very fairy-tale oriented. The character that stalked my friends and I was a wolf. Right before I went to bed I was reading a hiking book of the greater Los Angeles area. It recommended wonderful hikes, and many involved camping. So in this dream, my friends and I-a large group of about fifteen people went camping up in the San Gabriel mountains. Now in Los Angeles it is rare to camp. Not many people in the metropolitan area treat themselves to such pleasures. We had set up camp around an abandoned building in the woods. My friend Duncan warned us that there was a specific wolf in the area that I nor any of my fellow campers had heard of. While setting up camp it got dark quickly which reflects the shorter days we have been having lately. As soon as the sun settled behind the San Gabriel mountains, Duncan warned us all that we must be quiet. Just as the victims in fairy tales, we ignored this statement and continued to talk excitedly. Soon we heard howling which Duncan identified as the feared and famed wolf. Fear ran through the crowd. We all decided to sleep close together. Duncan told us if we woke up with the wolf next to us the best defense was to run as fast as we could. This would be not easy feat, considering the rough and rocky terrain in the dark. Everybody wanted to be nestled close to another. Nobody wanted to be at the end of the big sleeping mess of people. Why we stayed I do not know. In a dream, looking in and not being able to do anything about the situation happening to you or your close friends, all I could do in my dreaming state was to stick around and find out what happened. Soon as all ran into the house when we saw the huge wolf come along on two feet. There happened to be abandoned kittens strewn around the house and the wolf killed two in front of us. The boys all had shotguns with no ammo. They all took shots anyhow but nothing happened. We all stood, paralyzed in fear. Finally one of the outdoor-oriented males among us took a knife and stabbed the villain to death. I had to go outside in the dream because I couldn't bare the brutality. Everyone in my camping party was unharmed physically, but it caused personal mental discomfort after the terrible event happened.
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