Tuesday Oct, 31, 2006

Today in class I read my quality peice of writing (The Book of Bright Ideas, by Sandra Kring.) Then we went on to discuss in small detail how this book is just like high school in many ways. After that we got into our discussion cirle and discussed CBC. On Friday Ms. Hillestad had given us questions to go over and think about for the class discussion. I think this method worked really well, the class discussion seemed to be a lot more smooth with almost everyone having something to say. We talked about the book as a whole, from things as far as the family structure of Jarvis and Kumalo's famalies and how they compare, love/hate, urban/rural, ect. I felt like we covered the important points in this book and this discussion will really help when it is time to take the test. Dr. Johnson also came into class today and we found out that Ms. Hillestad will get her SMART BOARD!!! Wooo hooo!!!!

Wednesday Oct. 25th Review

Well, I read my passage from A Million Little Pieces and everyone when ohhhhhh... they were all touched and Brittany did her review. Then our intense class really started. Mrs. Hillestad told us the super hilarious story about the grading of the multiple choice Stranger tests. And then she told us that we did a whole lot of "weird" stuff on our Stranger essay test. Here are some things you need to make sure you look out for. For novels you underline the title you do not put the title in " ", that is used for short stories, and don't forget your apostrophes when something is possessive. Also when you are writing an essay don't forget to look back at the question while you are in the process of writing so that you cover all questions of the essay and don't digress. Then we discussed Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural Address. The question of how the speech became famous was answered, which was that it was published in the newspapers, and we talked about how it was poetic and how there was balance. We also talked about how Jarvis looked to Lincoln for resolution, inspiration to save South Africa. At this point we then jumped to Cry, the Beloved Country and we discussed a lot. We talked about how Kumalo missed the city once he returned to the village and the many changes Jarvis went through, how he learned from his son and how at the end he is no longer selfish. We also talked about the brightness of the son and grandson. And we talked about how different characters were trying to save Africa in different ways, for example John wanted to save Africa but all he had were words and those words lacked ideas. And now I think that is enough, you are now probably all bored. Don't forget that the end of the quarter is next week and just a reminder the today (Oct. 27th) is Kim's B*day.

The Book of Bright Ideas by Sandra Kring

Freeda’s head dipped down to face Ma’s middle. She clamped her hands on the waist of Ma’s dress and bunched the material tight. “Just look at this, will ya? Starlets once had ribs removed to get waists as tine as this! Course, you keep this asset hidden under there damn sacks your wear.” Freeda patted Ma’s chest where her boobies were supposed to be. “You don’t have much up here, so you gotta bring the eye to that pretty waistline. You see what I’m getting at, Jewel? Distraction! The trick is to learn distraction, just like I have.”

Freeda backed up and leaned on one leg. “Granted I’m a pretty good-lookin’ woman in spite of my shortcomings, but I’ll tell you one thing, Jewel. Even if I was as ugly as a mud fence, I’d still be struttin’ my stuff. And that’s no goddamn lie. I don’t care who we are, or what we look like, we’ve still got something worth struttin’, and we should be proud of whatever the hell that something is. No matter what anybody says to us to the contrary.”

I wasn’t sure why, but those words were the words that made Ma cry the hardest. I pulled away from the door and leaned against the wall.

A Million Little Pieces by James Frey

"She's crying. Crying. I know I shouldn't go, but the sounds of her tears hurt me wreck me destroy me she's crying. I know she needs me. It shouldn't matter what or when or where we are, nothing should matter but her. She needs me. I told myself I would do anything for her. She's crying and she needs me.
Meet me in the clearing."

Review for Friday, October 20th 2006

Since almost everyone was gone for some trip or another the class consisted of three students. Aline, Meghan and I. Our substitute was Mrs. Yadoa. First we took the prose test number two, which I defiently failed. We then had some time to read Cry, The Beloved Country however we sat on the couches instead and dicussed college and life. We also got to see fat pictures of Cheri, courtesy of Aline.

Two of Two reviews for Oct. 19, 06

oops sorry it's late but basically what happened is I read my piece of quality writing from Memoirs of a Geisha cause i was late to class last time (and late writing this blog too) and then Meghan read hers from Gone with the Wind. After that, we got in a circle and graded our poetry and prose tests from some time ago and failed miserably and that's what we did for the whole class and then we had a few minutes left so we discussed Cry the beloved country a bit. and that's what went down on October 19, 2006 xoxoxoxoxox

The Decent by Jeff Long

"Ninteen Days into the trip, and Ike still couldn't link their spirit nicknames with the names in their passports. One woman, was it Ethel or Winifred, now preferred Green Tara, mother diety of Tibet. A pert Doris Day look-alike swore she was special friends with the Dalai Lama. For weeks now Ike had been listening to them celebrate the life of cavewomen. Well, he thought, here's your cave, ladies. Slum away.
They were sure his name--Dwight David Crockett--was an invention like their own. Nothing could convince them he wasn't one of them, a dabbler in past lives. One evening around a campfire in northern Nepal, he'd regaled them with tales of Andrew Jackson, pirates on the Mississippi, and his own legendary death at the Alamo. He'd meant it as a joke, but only Kora got it. "

One of Two Reviews for Thursday, October 19th

This fine blustery day started with Divina reading her piece of quality writing from Memoirs of a Geisha. She read her piece today because she was off completing a top secret mission and missed out on that part of class. I then read one of my favorite parts from Gone with the Wind. Next we discussed the poetry test we did so long ago we forgot about it. Much of the class failed it spectacularly. After poetry came the grading of our first prose test. It wasn't as bad as the poetry one, but it still made one want to cry. After finishing that discussion, we dived right into Cry, the Beloved Country and discussed the part where Jarvis was reading some essays written by his dead son.

Most people are going to be traipsing off about Europe tomorrow and should have picked up Prose test #2. Those very few who will be here tomorrow will be doing that in class.

till next time,
meghan

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

"He remembered the way she had squared her shoulders when she turned away from him that afternoon, rememebered the stubborn lift of her head. His heart went out to her, torn with his own helplessness, wrenched with admiration. He knew she had no such word in her vocabulary as gallantry, knew she would have stared blankly if he had told her she was the most gallant soul he had ever known. He knew she would not understand how many truly fine things he ascribed to her when he thought of her as gallant. He knew that she took life as it came, opposed her tough-fibered mind to whatever obtacles there might be, fought on with a determination that would not recognize defeat, and kept on fighting even when she saw defeat was inevitable.
But, for four years, he had seen others who had refused to recognize defeat, men who rode gaily into sure disaster because they were gallant. And they had been defeated, just the same.
He thought as he stared at Will in the shadowy hall that he had never known such gallantry as the gallantry of Scarlett O'Hara going forth to conquer the world in her mother's velvet curtains and the tail feathers of a rooster."

Review for Friday the 13th *Da da da!* (scary music/lightning flash)

Book of Blanco
Chapter 10 :: Verse 13

The day wast a C-day, and on this most sacred of days, I, Joseph-Jebediah-Ishmael-Johnathon-Williamsing-Isaac-Isaiah-Blanco readst unto mine fellow disciples the sacred poem, I Saw a Man, of the great Stephen Crane. Such words werest these that they kneweth no equal and ye, my fellow disciples wereth so moved that ye fell to thine knees, and tears came to thine eyes, and the prophet, The Great Ms. Hillestad, looked upon them and saw that they were good. Following these words, the lowliest of the disciples, Zach the Zealot, aproachest unto the podium of prophecy and readst unto his fellows his amusing, but wholly less impressive, reviewth of thy preceeding class. Then the disciples lookedst amongst themselves and saw that no more needeth to be saideth of past days or holy poetry, and so spoketh next the Great Prophet Ms. Hillestad and sayeth she these words of wisdom: "O mine loyal disciples, and especially thee, Joseph-Jebediah-Ishmael-Johnathon-Williamsing-Isaac-Isaiah-Blanco, the first among disciples, Harken to mine words of wisdom! Arrangeth ye thine desks into a circle so we mayest be better able to divine the holy truths within thy text, Cry, the Beloved Country. Together we shall seeketh the knowledge contained therin and in doing so we shalt prepareth for the prophesized coming of that most great and terrible event: The inevitable Cry, the Beloved Country exam!" And many truths were then discussed, as the disciples, guided by their wise and powerful prophet, queried about the nature of reform schools, poverty, apartheid, crime, and worst of all, lawyers. Finally, the great, noble, intelligent, insightful, stupendous, wisdomous, scruptulescent, and well-dressed Prophet Hillestad intructeth unto her-eth pupils to readeth the next-eth section-eth of thy Cry, The Beloved Country book by-th thy next-th class-th of the Tuesday-th of October-th Seventeen..........th.

In the name of the Shakespeare, the Hemmingway, and the Holy Spirit (Hawthorne).

Amen.

Memoirs of a Geisha

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

Only a day or two after being separated from my sister, I had been sent to wash some rags one afternoon, when a moth came fluttering down from the sky onto my arm. I flicked it off, expecting that it would fly away, but instead it sailed like a pebble across the courtyard and lay there upon the ground. I didn't know if it had fallen from the sky already dead or if I had killed it, but its little insect death touched me. I admired the lovelypattern on its wings, and hten wrapped it in one of the rags I was washing and hit it away beneath the foundation of the house.
I hadn't thought about this moth since then; but the moment it came to mind I got on my knees and looked under the house until i found it. So many things in my life had changed, even the way I looked; but when I unwrapped the moth from its funeral shroud, it was the same startingly lovely creature as on the day I had entombed it. It seemed to be wearing a robe in subdued grays and browns, like Mother wore when she went to her mah-jongg games at night. Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect, and so utterly unchanged. If only one thing in my life had been the same as during that first week in Kyoto...As I thought of this my mind began to swirl like a hurricane. It struck me that we-the moth and I-were two opposite extremes. My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in every way; but hte moth was likea piece of stone, changing not at all. While thinking this thought, I reached out a finger to feel the moth's velvety surface: but when I brushed it with my fingertip, it turned all at once into a pile of ash without even a sound, without even a moment in which I could see it crumbling. I was so astonished I let out a cry. The swirling in my mind stopped; I felt as if I had stepped into the eye of a storm. I let the tiny shroud and its pile of ashes flutter to the ground; and now I understood the thing that had puzzled me all morning. The stale air had washed away. The past was gone. My mother and father were dead and I could do nothing to change it. But I suppose that for the past year I'd been dead in a way too. And my sister...yes, she was gone; but I wasn't gone. I'm not sure this will make sense to you, but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward toward the past, but foward towards the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would that future be?

Review

Dear my unfortunate successor:

Today, I, Zach Bradt, of the Aviano AP Lit class, was given a chance to show my skills of reading a beautifully written passage from any book that I choose; of course I selected Dave Barry, because, basically, he is the funniest man alive. I read the hilarious passage on insects to the very attentive class via this ridiculous website. Shortly afterward, we began our presentations, one of which was enhanced by an exotic drum beat in the background, and was performed with breathtaking, professional-like acting skills by performers Henson Blanco, Henson Villlenueva, Henson Jackson, and Henson Zach. As the presentations came to an end, Ms. Hillestad, our valiant and fearless leader, vacated the room, and we eagerly followed her outside into the aesthetic landscape, wherein we discussed our book: "Cry, The Beloved Country". During the process, we were politely named a "Hippy Circle" by one of the physical education students, who, it seemed, wished he could join in. All in all, it was a pretty "off-the-chain" period. I am now going to close this letter, and wish you a good day.
Respectfully,
Zach (a.k.a. Henson Zach)

Writing Post #2 - Josh B.

I Saw a Man
By Stephen Crane

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
"It is futile," I said,
"You can never -- "

"You lie!" he cried,
And ran on.

Dave Barry- The funniest man alive

"We cannot simply destroy insects in a cavalier manner, because, as many noted ecology nuts have reminded us time and time again, they (the insects) are an essential link in the Great Food Chain, wherein all life forms are dependent on each other via complex and suble interrelationships, as follows: Man gets his food by eating cows, which in turn eat corn, which turn comes from Iowa, which in turn was part of the Louisiana Purchase, which in turn was obtained from France, which in turn eats garlic, which in turn repels vampires, which in turn suck the blood out of Man. So we can see that without insects there would be no... Hey, wait a minute! I just noticed that there are no insects in the Great Food Chain. Ha ha! Won't that be a kick in the pants for many noted ecology nuts! I bet they all race right out and buy 4,000-volt patio insect-electrocution devices!
Nevertheless, we do need insects, for the perform many useful functions. Without insects, for example, we would have no reliable way to spread certain diseases. Also, in some part of Africa that I saw in a documentary film once, they have this very, very large insect, called the Goliath beetle, which grows to almost a foot in length, and the children actually use these beetles to pull their little toy carts. Wouldn't that be fun, Bobby, to have a foot-long beetle of your own, pulling a cart around and clambering into bed with you? Perhaps I'll get one of my own.

Jane Eyre : Charlotte Bronte

"I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you-especially when you are near me, as now; it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if the boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communication will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you- you'd forget me."

Review Oct. 6, 2006

So after my piece of quality writing and Josh's...review..., Mrs. Hillestad talked to us about Cry, the Beloved Country. She wants us to read up to chapter 21 by Tuesday October 10, 2006. To understand the book a little better, she split us up into three groups and gave us a nice assignment to work on. It is due on Wednesday, October 11, 2006. One group is tackling pre-1940 africa, one doing post-1940, and one group is doing geography. She said we have to be interesting with our report. After we got our topics, we went to the library to do some research till class was over and that's what went down on Friday October 5, 2006 Oh! And make sure you're doing your walkabout just a reminder :D xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox
Divina

Review: Wed, Oct 4

Henson Blanco's log.
Stardate 10.04.06
Today Captain Hillestad was absent and her First-Lieutenant, Ms. Sullivan assumed command of the Starship AP-Lit. I recited a passage from the holy book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and the lives of my fellow crewmates were forever changed by its jaw-dropping eloquence and insurpassable beauty. Following this, the crew was subjected to a torturous and extremely difficult pair of exams, one concerning a wholly incomprehendible piece of poetry, the other, a wholly incomprehendible piece of prose. Once the crew had finished utterly failing these, Ms. Sullivan commenced "quiet reading time," providing an opportunity for crewmembers to catch up on their reading of Cry, the Beloved Country. "Quiet reading time" involved crewmembers dispersing around the room and engaging in just about every human activity imaginable except the quiet reading of Cry, the Beloved Country. Perhaps with the help of divine intervention, we are expected to have read up to chapter 18 by next class. Finally Henson Zach and I discovered the large bouncy rubber ball hidden in the back of the room, ostensibly used either for torturing prisoners or unconventional aerobics. We claimed it for our "reading" place. Much hilarity ensued.

Henson Blanco, signing off
Catch the next episode of Star Trek: Literature, where esoteric novels are the final frontier.

Flowers in the Attic

Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews

It is so appropriate to color hope yellow, like that sun we seldom saw. And as I begin to copy from the old memorandum journals that I kept for so long, a title comes as if inspired. Open the Window and Stand in the Sunshine. Yet, I hesitate to name our story that. For I think of us more as flowers in the attic. Paper flowers. Born so brightly colored, and fading duller through all those long, grim, dreary, nightmarish days when we were held prisoners of hope, and kept captives by greed. But, we were never to color even one of our paper blossoms yellow.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Douglas Adams

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Douglas Adams

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe from the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.
To explain – since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation – every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex – just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end, he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant, the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

Review for September 27

Last Wednesday I presented my piece of quality writing to the class. Then we discussed the very end of The Stranger, mainly Meursault’s confrontation with the priest. We discussed he behaved that way he refused to talk to the priest and, his attitude towards life compared to the beginning of the novel. Then we took a test on The Stranger for the rest of the period. We were handed back our second drafts of our personal profiles the final draft of which is due today. We also got a new book, Cry, the Beloved Country, and the first eight chapters are due today as well.