Saturday, September 12, 2009

Miss Heath Ledger

Really wish that he didn't work so hard!
-that he worked himself to stressful life and death.
Wish he lived longer.
- Bet he wished the same thing!
Maybe he didn't know he's dead
and he is flying around looking at us.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Reading advice on NY times

"There is general agreement on the indispensable canon: Homer, Plato, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Milton. From the 19th century until now, keeping only to English and American authors, a slightly more arbitrary selection might include Blake, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Yeats and Joyce in England and Ireland. Among the Americans would certainly be Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Hawthorne; and in the 20th century, Faulkner and the major poets: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane.

Many of these authors are difficult and demand rereading, but that doubles their value. A freshman may have read Shakespeare before, but the richest and most available of all writers is also the most profound and elliptical. Rereading “Hamlet” and “King Lear” should teach a student Shakespeare’s mastery of the art of leaving things out."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/opinion/06bloom.html