Happy Holidays!
Continue reading American War--
See you in 2019...
Thursday, December 20, 2018
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
American War/2nd person short story/contests
AGENDA:
READING: Continue reading American War
WRITING: Finish 2nd person short stories
CONTESTS:
Gannon
http://www.gannon.edu/Academic-Offerings/Humanities-Education-and-Social-Sciences/Undergraduate/English/Poetry-Contest/
SOKOL
https://ffrpl.libraryweb.org/programs/sokol-awards/
Guardian Review of Amercian War:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/04/american-war-omar-el-akkad-review
READING: Continue reading American War
WRITING: Finish 2nd person short stories
CONTESTS:
Gannon
http://www.gannon.edu/Academic-Offerings/Humanities-Education-and-Social-Sciences/Undergraduate/English/Poetry-Contest/
SOKOL
https://ffrpl.libraryweb.org/programs/sokol-awards/
Guardian Review of Amercian War:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/04/american-war-omar-el-akkad-review
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
American War/2nd person short story
AGENDA:
Continue working on your second person short story--DUE TUESDAY 12/18
THINK, PAIR, SHARE:
Discuss the following questions with a partner and post reply on blog. Make sure you list both names.
Continue working on your second person short story--DUE TUESDAY 12/18
THINK, PAIR, SHARE:
Discuss the following questions with a partner and post reply on blog. Make sure you list both names.
1. The novel’s epigraphs are taken from two classic texts, an ancient Arabic book of poems and the Bible. What do the quotes and their sources suggest about the conflict that will follow in the novel?
2. Were you surprised by the way the map of the United States has been altered—the states’ borders and the landmasses themselves—in the projections for 2075? What do you think caused those changes; was it solely politics or other forces as well?
3. What does the first-person narrator we meet in the prologue explain—and not explain—about how the country has changed, the timeline of the Second American Civil War itself, and the unnamed “she” who has stayed in his memory since his youth?
Monday, December 10, 2018
Gamzon Short Story in 2nd person
Red Rocks, Green Grapefruits
You are somewhere inside your head in a space without walls, a space nevertheless confining because you are confused about how you got there and feel trapped. It is a place where you seem to be searching for a memory or perhaps a dream. Whatever it is, it wants your attention, demands it, requires it. At first it appears as a vague outline consisting of misty filaments refusing to take definitive shape. Perhaps it is only an idea then, not really a memory or dream returning. And just as quickly as it has emerged, luring you with the tantalizing possibility of its actually being realized, it dissolves or rather dissipates. Dissolves… dissipates… which word best captures how it seems to vanish within this place inside your head? No matter, it is gone.
What was it I was thinking, you ask yourself. What did it want from me?
Try to remember. Make it return. Go back to the place.
The outline begins to take form again; the filaments become a whole landscape. You begin to see a red rock desert with imposing mesas stretching across the horizon and the blue bowl of sky above it. It is a memory that begins somewhere in the American Southwest--Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona perhaps? Good, here is a start.
Now the filaments swirl into the shape of citrus trees--lemons, oranges and grapefruits—planted in a recently watered garden in a gated community with small stucco houses, one after another, all with adobe red tile roofs, and lawns made of landscape rocks instead of grass. A retirement “city” for seniors. And the people who live there are old, some very old, some not. In the backyards are citrus trees with shiny green leaves--lemon, orange and grapefruit trees emerging from cream and pink pebbled lawns, and this here is the house with its garden of citrus trees where you live now.
And then I told them not to pick the grapefruits outside. I said, They’re still green.
Green grapefruits. They had wanted to pick the grapefruits during their visit that winter. They had never picked citrus fruit from a backyard tree before. But the fruit was not yet ripe.
And then they said, So this is Arizona. Red rocks and green grapefruits.
And they left laughing to catch a flight back East laughed and it was a long time before they came to visit again. The girl and her friend. No, not the girl. You know the girl is not a girl anymore. You know she is a grown woman now, but for you she will always be the girl with dark brown hair and wavy curls that you would brush away from her face. She was your first, not like the second or the third. Your first child—the independent “me-do” girl. It is comforting to remember her as a child, even though you know she is a grown woman whose hair is starting to turn grey.
You told them to go up to Sedona, the girl and her friend, to see the red rocks because that was something to do and they wanted to do some sight-seeing. They thought a day trip might be nice. So you told them about Sedona, and they hiked up Cathedral Rock and when they returned, they said they had discovered a power vortex. They believed in all those “New Age” Age” stories people told about Sedona.
Whatever makes you happy, you said, trying to please.
The first year you moved here you drove with him to Wickenburg, then to Prescott, and finally Sedona because the neighbors kept saying that you must see the red rocks of Sedona. This was after he had the bypass surgery and was still trying to recover. The surgery had aged him ten years, and he was not the same, would never be the same. From the car you could see the red rocks in the distance. Pretty, you said, as you pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant. Let’s have lunch and go home, he said. I’m tired.
Go back to the other place now. There is something pulling at you, something you must remember if only you can stay there longer and let the outline of what it is return. Perhaps you should open your eyes and look at the notepad on the night table next to the bed you lie in. Perhaps you wrote it down last night before you went to bed. Perhaps there is a clue. But you know you did not write it down. It is something you cannot forget--and now you’ve forgotten what it is. Go back to the place and don’t be afraid. Eventually something will form, the outline will take shape and you will be able to make sense of it all.
In the place a fountain forms. Or is it a memorial? No, not a fountain. A large stone, a plaque with six blue lamps growing up from the white stone below. Yes, you tell yourself, it’s a memorial. That’s what it is. And there is something about a butterfly. A yellow butterfly. Did you see it when you were there? The yellow butterfly?
No, not in this place. Somewhere else. Long ago when you were young and there were butterflies-- hundreds of them—everywhere. In the fields. Yellow like the sun. There was sun, dandelions, and the butterflies. Yellow. So bright. It was all so bright—and pretty.
But you’re wrong. There was only one butterfly, the last butterfly. And then no more butterflies, no more light, only darkness, so much darkness.
The place is empty again. Whatever it was that wanted you needed to remember is no longer there. And there is this emptiness and it hurts. The hurt is like a pebble in a shoe, a hurt that must be removed before one can go any further. Just a pebble.
Now you remember--there were pebbles in the place with the fountain that wasn’t a really a fountain but was a memorial to the dead. And you remind yourself that it is tradition to place pebbles on a grave when you visit. Always, Papa said. To let the dead know that you were there, although some from the old country still believe it will keep them from returning to haunt us and there may be some truth in that.
And there is this emptiness and it hurts.
And there were pebbles at the base of the fountain that was really a memorial and took some and placed them elsewhere on the plaque in the ground ten feet away. Such a small pile of pebbles. No flowers, flowers wilt and die, but little stones survive. So there were pebbles to mark this visit. Pebbles to remember. Pebbles to survive.
The girl, the daughter said, When I got home I went out into my garden and he was there. I know it sounds crazy, but I could feel him there. And suddenly a butterfly appeared and kept swirling around me. It was not a monarch butterfly or like anything I had ever seen in the garden or even a conservatory. It was all black except for some white spots and these brilliant blue spots on the back of its wings. And it kept circling around me, and I knew it was him saying goodbye, departing the earth, as they say, his soul in the form of a butterfly. But he was making one last visit to me to say goodbye. And I’ve never seen a black swallowtail in my garden again.
Black swallowtail. That is the name she gave for the black butterfly with the brilliant blue spots on its wings. But it was not like the yellow ones swirling in the fields that you are remembered this morning. Hundreds and hundreds of yellow butterflies swirling in the fields. Hundreds of souls leaving the earth. And then there was only one and then it was gone and then the darkness came. You remember that butterflies are symbols for the soul. The Greek word for butterfly is psyche or soul. In the old country so very long ago, the world that was filled with the yellow butterflies, Papa showed you a picture book. In your mind’s eye, you can still see beautiful Psyche, a woman with butterfly wings in love with the winged god Eros. But now you are remembering another word for “butterfly”. The language of youth returns. In Russian a “butterfly” is “baboshka”—a grandmother, old woman. So now you, too, have become a butterfly, a babushka—an old woman.
You can leave the place if you want to. Only lately you want stay longer each time. You are actually beginning to enjoy being here, searching for what it is that has lured you into the place—whatever dream or memory appears dimly at first, the mere outline of something that once was, not anything that really is. And you welcome the voices, too, voices that you have lived with most of your life and are beginning to fade. How can you hold on to them?
You can hear him now--that gruff, deep, reassuring voice. So what are our plans for the day? He asks this of you now, just the way he always did, every morning you have been here.
You turn over in bed to answer him, but there is no one there and you are frightened once again because there is so much emptiness here, next to you, not just inside your head where there is a place for dreams and memories and voices that aren’t really there. So you turn back, try to sit up, and reach for the metal walker next to the bed. If you concentrate enough, you can swing one leg over the side of the bed and try to get up. It’s time to get up, time to leave the place.
Yes, it hurts to get out of the bed. Your right knee is now just bone on bone. Yesterday you drove to the store and went through the stop sign at the corner of the street because you could not bring your foot off the accelerator pedal to brake in time. Soon you will have to stop driving altogether, sell the car and ask for rides. Or just stay inside, lie down and retreat to the place more than you really need or want to.
You manage to pull yourself up and stand. You place each swollen foot into the light blue slippers that do not hurt your feet. Gripping the metal walker you move slowly, deliberately from the bedroom to the living room. The air conditioner hums quietly.
Butterfly…babushka…old woman.
Outside it will be hot—maybe more than 100 degrees. Arizona gets like that in the summer. Better to stay inside. Arizona is hot, very hot, and yes, the girl and her friend were right. Arizona is red rocks and green grapefruits. You smile at the silliness of the thought and move to the patio window, draw back the curtains and look outside at the backyard with its citrus trees. A family of quail dart past busily searching for something to peck at amidst the pebbled backyards of the houses. Where is the grass? No grass, only pebbles and citrus trees. Arizona is red rocks and green grapefruits. Saying it again makes you laugh to yourself.
When he came home in the evening from work in the city, you would give him half a grapefruit before the main meal, a half grapefruit carefully cut around the edges, each half slice separated from the center so he could easily spoon it out. You used a special knife for that, the double-bladed one made especially for cutting grapefruit. You brought it here, for his grapefruits, to cut them the way you always did.
That first year, he discovered that they grew on trees right in the backyard. Green grapefruits that ripened into yellow, thick-skinned fruit so much sweeter than those you bought in the stores. He was so happy to have fruit he could pick in the morning, and he would place them in a bowl on the table. Sometimes he would have one for breakfast or lunch in the long days that followed the move out West after the retirement and the bankruptcy.
Today it will be one year and you will go and place pebbles on the plaque that marks where he rests. Next to it is another plaque, still only a marker with your name and birth date engraved on it. When you both moved here, you sold your jewelry and purchased these spaces side by. After all, what did you need all that jewelry for now? Such a deal! Two for the price of one! In life and in planning for death, he was always looking for a deal or gambling away what little you had
So what are our plans for the day? His last words. This is what you had to remember.
Enough. Tonight you will light a yahrzeit candle to remember him by. Soon you will join him not only in the place inside your head, but there in the quiet place across from the fountain as well.
No, not a fountain. A memorial to those who vanished, six million of them, but there are so many more. You will join them as well—the butterflies.
You remember butterflies, so many butterflies, so many souls.
Butterfly, babushka, old woman-- soul.
You are somewhere inside your head in a space without walls, a space nevertheless confining because you are confused about how you got there and feel trapped. It is a place where you seem to be searching for a memory or perhaps a dream. Whatever it is, it wants your attention, demands it, requires it. At first it appears as a vague outline consisting of misty filaments refusing to take definitive shape. Perhaps it is only an idea then, not really a memory or dream returning. And just as quickly as it has emerged, luring you with the tantalizing possibility of its actually being realized, it dissolves or rather dissipates. Dissolves… dissipates… which word best captures how it seems to vanish within this place inside your head? No matter, it is gone.
What was it I was thinking, you ask yourself. What did it want from me?
Try to remember. Make it return. Go back to the place.
The outline begins to take form again; the filaments become a whole landscape. You begin to see a red rock desert with imposing mesas stretching across the horizon and the blue bowl of sky above it. It is a memory that begins somewhere in the American Southwest--Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona perhaps? Good, here is a start.
Now the filaments swirl into the shape of citrus trees--lemons, oranges and grapefruits—planted in a recently watered garden in a gated community with small stucco houses, one after another, all with adobe red tile roofs, and lawns made of landscape rocks instead of grass. A retirement “city” for seniors. And the people who live there are old, some very old, some not. In the backyards are citrus trees with shiny green leaves--lemon, orange and grapefruit trees emerging from cream and pink pebbled lawns, and this here is the house with its garden of citrus trees where you live now.
And then I told them not to pick the grapefruits outside. I said, They’re still green.
Green grapefruits. They had wanted to pick the grapefruits during their visit that winter. They had never picked citrus fruit from a backyard tree before. But the fruit was not yet ripe.
And then they said, So this is Arizona. Red rocks and green grapefruits.
And they left laughing to catch a flight back East laughed and it was a long time before they came to visit again. The girl and her friend. No, not the girl. You know the girl is not a girl anymore. You know she is a grown woman now, but for you she will always be the girl with dark brown hair and wavy curls that you would brush away from her face. She was your first, not like the second or the third. Your first child—the independent “me-do” girl. It is comforting to remember her as a child, even though you know she is a grown woman whose hair is starting to turn grey.
You told them to go up to Sedona, the girl and her friend, to see the red rocks because that was something to do and they wanted to do some sight-seeing. They thought a day trip might be nice. So you told them about Sedona, and they hiked up Cathedral Rock and when they returned, they said they had discovered a power vortex. They believed in all those “New Age” Age” stories people told about Sedona.
Whatever makes you happy, you said, trying to please.
The first year you moved here you drove with him to Wickenburg, then to Prescott, and finally Sedona because the neighbors kept saying that you must see the red rocks of Sedona. This was after he had the bypass surgery and was still trying to recover. The surgery had aged him ten years, and he was not the same, would never be the same. From the car you could see the red rocks in the distance. Pretty, you said, as you pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant. Let’s have lunch and go home, he said. I’m tired.
Go back to the other place now. There is something pulling at you, something you must remember if only you can stay there longer and let the outline of what it is return. Perhaps you should open your eyes and look at the notepad on the night table next to the bed you lie in. Perhaps you wrote it down last night before you went to bed. Perhaps there is a clue. But you know you did not write it down. It is something you cannot forget--and now you’ve forgotten what it is. Go back to the place and don’t be afraid. Eventually something will form, the outline will take shape and you will be able to make sense of it all.
In the place a fountain forms. Or is it a memorial? No, not a fountain. A large stone, a plaque with six blue lamps growing up from the white stone below. Yes, you tell yourself, it’s a memorial. That’s what it is. And there is something about a butterfly. A yellow butterfly. Did you see it when you were there? The yellow butterfly?
No, not in this place. Somewhere else. Long ago when you were young and there were butterflies-- hundreds of them—everywhere. In the fields. Yellow like the sun. There was sun, dandelions, and the butterflies. Yellow. So bright. It was all so bright—and pretty.
But you’re wrong. There was only one butterfly, the last butterfly. And then no more butterflies, no more light, only darkness, so much darkness.
The place is empty again. Whatever it was that wanted you needed to remember is no longer there. And there is this emptiness and it hurts. The hurt is like a pebble in a shoe, a hurt that must be removed before one can go any further. Just a pebble.
Now you remember--there were pebbles in the place with the fountain that wasn’t a really a fountain but was a memorial to the dead. And you remind yourself that it is tradition to place pebbles on a grave when you visit. Always, Papa said. To let the dead know that you were there, although some from the old country still believe it will keep them from returning to haunt us and there may be some truth in that.
And there is this emptiness and it hurts.
And there were pebbles at the base of the fountain that was really a memorial and took some and placed them elsewhere on the plaque in the ground ten feet away. Such a small pile of pebbles. No flowers, flowers wilt and die, but little stones survive. So there were pebbles to mark this visit. Pebbles to remember. Pebbles to survive.
The girl, the daughter said, When I got home I went out into my garden and he was there. I know it sounds crazy, but I could feel him there. And suddenly a butterfly appeared and kept swirling around me. It was not a monarch butterfly or like anything I had ever seen in the garden or even a conservatory. It was all black except for some white spots and these brilliant blue spots on the back of its wings. And it kept circling around me, and I knew it was him saying goodbye, departing the earth, as they say, his soul in the form of a butterfly. But he was making one last visit to me to say goodbye. And I’ve never seen a black swallowtail in my garden again.
Black swallowtail. That is the name she gave for the black butterfly with the brilliant blue spots on its wings. But it was not like the yellow ones swirling in the fields that you are remembered this morning. Hundreds and hundreds of yellow butterflies swirling in the fields. Hundreds of souls leaving the earth. And then there was only one and then it was gone and then the darkness came. You remember that butterflies are symbols for the soul. The Greek word for butterfly is psyche or soul. In the old country so very long ago, the world that was filled with the yellow butterflies, Papa showed you a picture book. In your mind’s eye, you can still see beautiful Psyche, a woman with butterfly wings in love with the winged god Eros. But now you are remembering another word for “butterfly”. The language of youth returns. In Russian a “butterfly” is “baboshka”—a grandmother, old woman. So now you, too, have become a butterfly, a babushka—an old woman.
You can leave the place if you want to. Only lately you want stay longer each time. You are actually beginning to enjoy being here, searching for what it is that has lured you into the place—whatever dream or memory appears dimly at first, the mere outline of something that once was, not anything that really is. And you welcome the voices, too, voices that you have lived with most of your life and are beginning to fade. How can you hold on to them?
You can hear him now--that gruff, deep, reassuring voice. So what are our plans for the day? He asks this of you now, just the way he always did, every morning you have been here.
You turn over in bed to answer him, but there is no one there and you are frightened once again because there is so much emptiness here, next to you, not just inside your head where there is a place for dreams and memories and voices that aren’t really there. So you turn back, try to sit up, and reach for the metal walker next to the bed. If you concentrate enough, you can swing one leg over the side of the bed and try to get up. It’s time to get up, time to leave the place.
Yes, it hurts to get out of the bed. Your right knee is now just bone on bone. Yesterday you drove to the store and went through the stop sign at the corner of the street because you could not bring your foot off the accelerator pedal to brake in time. Soon you will have to stop driving altogether, sell the car and ask for rides. Or just stay inside, lie down and retreat to the place more than you really need or want to.
You manage to pull yourself up and stand. You place each swollen foot into the light blue slippers that do not hurt your feet. Gripping the metal walker you move slowly, deliberately from the bedroom to the living room. The air conditioner hums quietly.
Butterfly…babushka…old woman.
Outside it will be hot—maybe more than 100 degrees. Arizona gets like that in the summer. Better to stay inside. Arizona is hot, very hot, and yes, the girl and her friend were right. Arizona is red rocks and green grapefruits. You smile at the silliness of the thought and move to the patio window, draw back the curtains and look outside at the backyard with its citrus trees. A family of quail dart past busily searching for something to peck at amidst the pebbled backyards of the houses. Where is the grass? No grass, only pebbles and citrus trees. Arizona is red rocks and green grapefruits. Saying it again makes you laugh to yourself.
When he came home in the evening from work in the city, you would give him half a grapefruit before the main meal, a half grapefruit carefully cut around the edges, each half slice separated from the center so he could easily spoon it out. You used a special knife for that, the double-bladed one made especially for cutting grapefruit. You brought it here, for his grapefruits, to cut them the way you always did.
That first year, he discovered that they grew on trees right in the backyard. Green grapefruits that ripened into yellow, thick-skinned fruit so much sweeter than those you bought in the stores. He was so happy to have fruit he could pick in the morning, and he would place them in a bowl on the table. Sometimes he would have one for breakfast or lunch in the long days that followed the move out West after the retirement and the bankruptcy.
Today it will be one year and you will go and place pebbles on the plaque that marks where he rests. Next to it is another plaque, still only a marker with your name and birth date engraved on it. When you both moved here, you sold your jewelry and purchased these spaces side by. After all, what did you need all that jewelry for now? Such a deal! Two for the price of one! In life and in planning for death, he was always looking for a deal or gambling away what little you had
So what are our plans for the day? His last words. This is what you had to remember.
Enough. Tonight you will light a yahrzeit candle to remember him by. Soon you will join him not only in the place inside your head, but there in the quiet place across from the fountain as well.
No, not a fountain. A memorial to those who vanished, six million of them, but there are so many more. You will join them as well—the butterflies.
You remember butterflies, so many butterflies, so many souls.
Butterfly, babushka, old woman-- soul.
2nd person short story/American War
AGENDA:
Begin working on a second person short story (Prayer for the Dying).
Sign out American War.
HMWK: Read to pg. 80
Begin working on a second person short story (Prayer for the Dying).
Sign out American War.
HMWK: Read to pg. 80
Thursday, December 6, 2018
American War Omar El Akkad
AGENDA:
Period 1: Introduction to American War
Master class with Omar El Akkad on March 27
Master class with Omar El Akkad on March 27
Read excerpt, view Ted talk, interview. POST COMMENT ON BLOG ABOUT CH. 1 ON NPR EXCERPT.
audiobook--Ch. 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_7Nt9I8tB4
audiobook--Ch. 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_7Nt9I8tB4
NPR: https://www.npr.org/books/titles/522230830/american-war
https://curio.ca/en/video/canada-reads-2018-omar-el-akkad-on-american-war-16819/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ntq66ojdoh4
https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/4/27/15420306/polarization-politics-american-war-omar-el-akkad
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/books/review-american-war-omar-el-akkad.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/books/review/american-war-omar-el-akkad.html
https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/4/27/15420306/polarization-politics-american-war-omar-el-akkad
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/books/review-american-war-omar-el-akkad.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/books/review/american-war-omar-el-akkad.html
american-war READERS GUIDE:
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of American War, a darkly prescient tale of a country, and a world, torn apart by war in the late twenty-first century, and the young heroine whose commitment to her family takes on the epic proportions of the second installment of America’s battle against itself.Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. The novel’s epigraphs are taken from two classic texts, an ancient Arabic book of poems and the Bible. What do the quotes and their sources suggest about the conflict that will follow in the novel?
2. Were you surprised by the way the map of the United States has been altered—the states’ borders and the landmasses themselves—in the projections for 2075? What do you think caused those changes; was it solely politics or other forces as well?
3. What does the first-person narrator we meet in the prologue explain—and not explain—about how the country has changed, the timeline of the Second American Civil War itself, and the unnamed “she” who has stayed in his memory since his youth?
4. What is the significance of Sarat’s changing of her own name when she’s a girl? How does that sense of agency and identity develop as she gets older? How does her having a twin sister fit into your understanding of her independence and actions?
5. The novel presents many different laws, agencies, and other government entities for the future America. Which did you find to be most plausible, including as sources for political conflict that would escalate into war? Are any similar to real-life policies as you’re reading about them today?
6. Describe the dynamic of the Chestnut family, parents and children. What’s similar and what’s different about domestic life in their world versus today’s and during the time of the first Civil War?
7. How pervasive is the allegiance to the Free Southern State where the Chestnuts live and throughout the cordoned region? What threats do those who disagree with the cause face?
8. How closely do the events and details of the Second American Civil War follow those of the first and/or other historical events in American history? After you finished the novel, were you more or less likely to think another such conflict could happen again in this way, on a national or global scale?
9. How do the interludes of primary source texts—textbook excerpts, government reports, notebooks, letters, etc.—enhance the personal story of Sarat and her family, in terms of the motives for and timeline of the war on a micro and macro level?
10. What gender stereotypes persist in the future between the young girls and boys, especially once the family reaches Camp Patience? How does Sarat push back against expectations of what she can and cannot do, including in contrast to her sister and brother?
11. How does the novel complicate the meaning of “home,” in a personal and national level? Does where and how a character lives at any given point determine his or her sense of security or belonging, or does this feeling come from somewhere else?
12. Sarat sees on Albert Gaines’s, a northerner’s, map different kinds of borders and observes, “To the north the land looked the same but she knew there existed some invisible fissure in the earth where her people’s country ended and the enemy’s began.” (163) How did such fissures form, and what does the outcome of the war and novel suggest about their ability to be healed?
13. How does Sarat’s plight speak to Gaines’s statement that “the first thing they try to take from you is your history”? (150)
14. What defines one’s sense of “belief” in the novel? Are people more motivated by personal beliefs, or by more institutional ones like religion or politics?
15. How are certain characters in the novel mythologized? What does this do to their day-to-day existence and their legacy? How do the mythic characters in the book parallel historical figures in what they’re remembered for and how?
16. Discuss the sequence of events and outcomes of the plague. How does that kind of warfare reflect advancements in society as well as the sense of humanity’s worth?
17. What is the role of love in the novel? By the story’s conclusion, does the idea of love conquering all still apply, or does revenge supersede it?
18. Many historians consider the first Civil War to have been a battle of the past (the South) versus the future (the North). Do those distinctions apply to the Second American Civil War, and what does this say about the future—and present—of the country and those running it?
Period 2:
Work on second person short story.
Period 2:
Work on second person short story.
Tuesday, December 4, 2018
Prayer for the Dying Essay Test
Prayer for the Dying Essay Test
Post essay on Google Classroom
Today, read over the following discussion questions and write a thoughtful response to one of them in essay form. Develop your response using specific examples from the book. You may use your book, of course. Length: at least 1 page single spaced using text references cited in MLA format
These questions require thoughtful answers focused on what O'Nan has written (AP English students take note of Question #5!). How does this novel relate to other works you have read in or outside class this year--? A little critical lens practice, perhaps, in comparison and contrast?)...
Link to blog:
http://thelibrarium.wordpress.com/2006/11/24/discussion-starters-for-a-prayer-for-the-dying/
1) A Prayer for the Dying uses as its epigraph a quote from Albert Camus: “There is no escape in a time of plague. We must choose to either love or to hate God.” How does A Prayer for the Dying illustrate this quote? Do you believe that Camus is correct in presenting the choice we must make in such stark terms?
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2) Richard Eder, in his review of A Prayer for the Dying, writes:
[Jacob Hanson, the protagonist] is, he tells us, the town sheriff. He is the minister. He is the undertaker.What are your feelings about Jacob’s descent into madness? When did you first recognize that all was not well with him? Can religious belief become absurd, and do you see evidence of Eder’s contention above in the book? And, can religious faith not only descend into absurdity, but even madness?
This wacky accumulation expresses his obsession: Out of the destruction of the war, when God seemed to have vanished, Jacob is determined to reinvent Him. He cares for his town as God is supposed to care for the world: He punishes transgressions, provides faith for the living and passage for the dead. “Credo quia absurdum” — the classic religious formula of, roughly, “I believe even to absurdity” — becomes, as horrors multiply, its own horror: I believe right on into madness.
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3) Eder also goes on to state, “Clinging to his faith, Jacob disputes it as well. Here is one of his tortured arguments with himself:
” ‘It’s not right,’ you say.Eder concludes with, “It is the problem of belief: how to reconcile God with evil. O’Nan carries it further. In Jacob he has the believer, torn. He has God, as well: struggling in despair with the same problem.”
“Who are you angry with?
“Not God
“No? Who else is there? Is this the devil’s work?
“It must be, you think, but uncertainly.”
I know that a book discussion forum is too limiting a place for a full expose on the problem of God and evil, but what does O’Nan say about this problem in A Prayer for the Dying?
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4) Patrick McGrath in his review in the NY Times reminds us of O’Nan’s use of the second person singular and present tense in his writing:
O’Nan has employed a surprising but ultimately successful narrative technique for Jacob’s story: it is told throughout in the second-person singular and the present tense. Thus Jacob’s references to himself as ”you” have a self-distancing effect; it is as if he doesn’t fully occupy his own being and observes himself from some other place. He is both in his own experience and outside of it. This is a fine perspective for a narrator who will be forced to move from the orderly, predictable contentment of his life in a placid 19th-century farm town to confront the appalling prospect of chaos and destruction as the people around him sicken and die and the brush fires advance ever closer.Stewart O’Nan once said
“I mean, I could’ve written, I think, Prayer for the Dying, in first person but it probably wouldn’t work nearly as well. This particular character has this overdeveloped sort of superego and it’s always sort of accusing him. No matter how well he’s doing it’s always sort of saying, “You’re screwing up, you’re screwing up, even though he wants to be this perfect, blameless person, so it fits him perfectly.”In another interview, O’Nan says:
For A Prayer I needed an intimate narrator capable of fairly hiding things from the reader. So I knew it had to be a first- or second-person, because a third- who’s unreliable is kind of cheating. I tried the first, and it was too close. I was reading Robert O’Connor’s Buffalo Soldiers, written in the second person, and noticed how the voice scourged its owner, tapping him on the shoulder whenever he’s doing wrong, like a conscience or superego. It’s the same use of the second as in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, or Charles Johnson’s story “Moving Pictures.” And I thought: what effect would that scourging, nagging, blaming voice have if it were inside a man doing everything he could to prevent a terrible, unavoidable catastrophe? Especially a man who loves his town and feels responsible for everything and everyone. And as I wrote further into the story, I noticed that the voice would veer close to Jacob and then stand apart from him, accusing, and that it worked to highlight that gothic split in him of the strange and troubled private side and the solid and responsible public side. The hidden vs. the seen. And it also works as that ceaseless voice in the head of a mad person, the voice that won’t leave him alone.Did you find this narrative technique to be successful or off-putting? Did it take a while for you to settle into the book because of O’Nan’s style here?
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5) Mark Winegardner, writing for Barnes and Noble, says:
When I finished Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying . . . I called him. I told him how jealous I was that he’d been able to write such a large-vision book in such a svelte (190-page) package. Flannery O’Connor was right: A good man is hard to find, when what’s meant by “good” is moral and not civil, when it refers to something larger than likability. What O’Nan does in this book — create a convincingly good man and put him in the middle of his story — is among the toughest acts a novelist can perform.Given some of his actions in the story, Is Jacob Hanson a good man? Is he a moral man? Does Hanson believe, as one reviewer has stated, ”that the calamity is all his fault.” Is it even possible to be a good man in a time of madness.
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6) In the first chapter we find this bit of dialogue:
“In Heaven you forget everything,” she says. “In Hell they make you remember.”Which do you think it is, if either?
No, you think, it’s the other way around. “Maybe so,” you say.
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7) O’Nan says that the one question underlying all of his work is “When do you give up?” Which, he concedes, “is a horrible question to ask, but it’s a question that a lot of people have to face.” Then, echoing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on the subject, he adds, “That’s the question.”
Do you see this question reflected in A Prayer for the Dying? Is this question “the question?”
O’Nan also once stated, ”I am primarily a realist and hope to show great empathy for my people without softening the difficult situations they find themselves in-yet my work inevitably veers into the cruel and the sentimental…It is extreme fiction masquerading behind the guise of mainstream realism. I hope it is generous, or, as Cheever said, ‘humane.’”
Is A Prayer for the Dying a humane book despite its extremes?
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8) On the last page of the novel Jacob thinks:
“The whole idea of penance is selfish, misguided. You can’t bargain with God, buy Him with pieties. This is what you’ve found out – that even with the best intentions, even with all of your thoughtful sermons and deep feelings and good works, you can’t save anyone, least of all yourself. And yet it’s not defeat. After everything, you may still be saved. Your mother was wrong; it’s not up to you. It’s always been His decision.”Ultimately, what does this book say about Divine providence? Do you agree with Hanson’s statements?
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