Buzzards

Continuing with the "Animal Encounters" section of the course, we're reading a longish article, "Buzzards" by Lee Zacharias. Zacharias actually used to teach at UNCG but she's retired now. Anyway, this is a wonderful piece: the most moving thing you'll read about ugly birds.

Thoughts on "Buzzards"

Quiz 5 mins

I was attracted to this piece because it employs "non-fiction" writing about buzzards in a very unique way, by placing these factual / experiential paragraphs that go into the entire scientific description of vultures as well as how these birds have been regarded by culture / human history, next to the author's meditations / remembrances of her deceased father.

Structurally – there are three "time" frames going on. 1. Zacharias is in an empty parking lot in the Everglades 2. There are the scientific / cultural / literary : encyclopedic references to the vultures 3. Memories of her father.

Overall interpretation: (5 mins)

Why does Zacharias do this? Why "pair" her exploration of vultures with father?

Stylistic analysis (15 mins)

Group discussion [Assign passage pairs]
Each passage contains a paragraph dealing with the vulture (from some perspective) and then with her father.
How are the passages on the vultures stylistically different from the parts describing the father? In terms of content, do they connect or not connect? Are they simply placed randomly next to each other or can you discern a pattern in the structure? Do they reinforce or challenge each other in terms of meaning?
As they share findings (15 min), introduce some of the vocabulary for discussion from the rhetorical reading: such as DICTION / SYNTAX / METAPHOR / SYMBOL. Read closely at the sentence level for examples.

Final paragraph (5 mins) – becoming-vulture: studying the vulture becomes a way of expressing herself / of engaging her feelings toward her father. [Transitional object]

Tell them that this piece should be a model for assignment one.

For next lesson: we will practice more 30 sec words.

Thoughts on the Feast of Tongues

Structure of the Fable – repetitive in two parts.
Seems to be a fool – but really ends up using the occasion to engineer a clever rhetorical discourse: Theme – appearance / reality / foolishness – deeper wisdom
So – using the strangeness of the tongues- Aesop – a slave – gains a "voice" in a community where he wouldn't otherwise have the power or right to speak. In this sense, the animal tongues, dead and prepared – afford him a voice.

The communion of the meal – a gathering that isn't as "formal" as a philosophical discourse or a scholarly gathering (like class). The meal symbolizes hospitality / communion / fellowship / the opportunity for Exantus to show his wealth – and thus, Exantus is able to dictate the terms of the feast – first order the "best meat" and then the "worst meat". Yet this gathering turns into a philosophical discourse- where questions of value "what is good" and who gets to evaluate – a slave in this case – comes to the fore. So food, is used, as the site for discussion about abstract values: and indeed, we often evaluate food and build systems of value around food.

Yet what of the animals? In all this speaking, the most prominent symbol – the disembodied tonges that are themselves mute symbols that are interpreted BY Aesop (to his own gain), that cannot speak because they are dead, that cannot be EXPECTED to speak because they are "animal" force their way into the tale. They are the strange centerpiece of a fable that features animal (parts) without giving the animal voice. And in this tale about speech, and how speech is itself slippery and creative, the silent animal tongues appear to be mute witnesses to the cleverness of human speech. In speaking about the tongues, does Aesop speak on behalf of animals? For it is HUMAN nobility and mischief that he speaks about. How can an animal tongue, sold as meat in the market represent the human tongue, which is, in Aesop's own speech so demonstrably different from the mute tongue that IS meat. Indeed, Aesop never "bites his tongue" while presenting these animal tongues for food (the scholars commend or condemn the tongues but do they eat it?) – the occasion to consume meat allows him to transform these animal tongues into metaphors for human tongues.

LOGOS – Aesop's "cleverness" – his "logic" on display.
ETHOS – the "fable" – does it show us a deeper moral truth? Does it refer to something culturally identifiable and significant?
PATHOS – do we find it in how Aesop the slave, becomes the protagonist? Or can we find it in the disembodied tongues of silent animals – does that move us?

Some post lesson thoughts: While most students seemed to understand the main thrust of the fable, very few were willing to venture thoughts about how animal tongues feature in complicated ways in the passage. I had to do some heavy-handed explication given this unwillingness, although my leading questions did, on a few occasions open up the text a little for the kids. It occurred to me that while we often speak about food from a "human" perspective - ie does this taste good etc, or if you're Guy Fieri, "This is money!" - the "Feast of Tongues" suggests how food can become the basis for philosophical speculation, without departing too far from the embodied presence of the dead animal parts in front of you.  Anyway, while I'm not sure what the intellectual impact of all this was, they kids certainly were enthusiastic about the speaking activity.

Speaking of Tongues

In the fluctuating world of adjunct teaching, I may get a class cut in the Spring semester. Classes start on Tuesday and I'll only know on Monday whether or not the class is on.  Of course, this really is no big deal as I'm teaching several sections of the class, so it's not as if I've spent the past months prepping in vain. But in lieu of that class, here begins the blog version of "Arguing with Animals."

I decided to begin the first lesson (after laying out the syllabus in the first first lesson) of my Animals course with this little excerpt. It's a (free) translation of a late fifteenth C. English "Life of Aesop" that was printed by Thomas Caxton. It's about Aesop being smart alecky, serving tongues when his master asks for him to buy the "best" meat and cleverly explaining why, and then serving tongues (again) when his master tells him to go out for the worst meat, and justifying himself. I came across this piece during a medieval retreat where this passage was explicated in brilliant terms by Peter Travis. It inspired me to see whether freshmen would have interesting things to say about this odd little fable that demonstrates how philosophical argument and the embodiedness of meat come together in a most unexpected way.

Fantasizing the A-levels

Having taught ill-prepared college freshmen this semester, I've been thinking a bit about how the A-levels were possibly the hardest and most stressful exams that I've ever had to do. Even though I took them with almost no pressure to do well (I was headed for NUS to do an Arts degree: four Cs would have sufficed; though, in accordance to the grim and deterministic laws of mugging, I ended up with much better grades), the sheer scope and intensity of the thing was quite staggering.

So it was with much interest that I watched An Education this week, where the A-level year of our protagonist, Jenny, played by a be-witching Carey Mulligan, takes an interesting turn as she becomes involved in a romantic tryst with a much older man. Like many a smart, independent minded female protagonist before her, she offers English as an A-level subject (with aspirations to read English at Oxford) and there are nice references to Jane Eyre in the film. A week before, as I struggled with final grading, A.S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden was a constant companion. That book also features a precocious 17-year-old on the cusp of an Oxbridge career. Frederica Potter, whose devastating intellect (and grating attempts to demonstrate it) is only matched by her adventurous cavorting with older men ends the book losing her virginity (as does Jenny) under the most unromantic of circumstances.


I'm wondering how the A-level year, when it isn't filled with anxious mugging, does represent a way into adulthood that "senior year" in an American High School doesn't. Are there American films and books that don't infantilize 12th graders and deal with girls on the cusp of becoming women at the same level of sophistication as An Education and The Virgin in the Garden? I've rehearsed a version of this argument on these pages (in a desperate attempt to rationalize my fascination with the High School Musical franchise) but the characters of Twilight series, Fast-times at Ridgemont High, Dazed and Confused, and the Gilmore Girls, and even Dead Poets' Society don't come close to capturing the aspiring sophistication of Jenny and Frederica.

Given that both works are set in the 50s and 60s, and that both Jenny and Frederica contemplate NOT going on to University--one to be married and the other with hopes of pursuing a career on the stage--I suppose the A-levels is much more the symbol of a final academic hurdle than senior year in High school will ever be. I'm sure there are interesting literary and filmic representations of precocious 12th graders but I think that given the cultural imaginary, "senior year" in High School can't ever take on the symbolic weight of the momentousness that is enshrined in taking the A-levels.

The Sidneys

David Brooks's pick of the best in long form journalism for 2009. Definitely much more "serious" in subject matter than what has appeared in previous years, but I guess I'll give them a crack.

Midnight's Sighs

I like Salman Rushdie! Along with Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon (and perhaps Don Delillo and let's not forget Jhumpa Lahiri, S.R. Delany and Ursula Le Guin, and Ian McEwan ... ok this list might go on a bit ... ), he's probably one of the few living writers that I'm quite keen about. I'm actually reading The Moor's Last Sigh right now and it's fabulous. My Salman Rushdie moments include 1. explaining why I liked Midnight's Children to a tutor during NUS who liked to grill students about what they were reading "outside" the curriculum. 2. Finding a copy of the Satanic Verses in the French section of Kino. I guess it's ok to read banned books in French. and 3. actually liking The Ground Beneath Her Feet (as well as the U2 song of the same name that Rushdie penned) very much. 4. Of course, I've never had the chance to meet the man, though a friend who has managed to get in a question about his favorite book (if I remember the anecdote correctly) - which happens to be Haroun. I guess if one wanted to see what the whole fuss was about either Midnight's Children or The Moor's Last Sigh would be great representatives of Rushdie's strange blend of poetry, wit, wordplay, irreverence and abiding respect for history. For a fun read, there's Haroun. For a sense of how clever Rushdie can be with myths and intertextual referencing, there's The Ground Beneath Her Feet as well as Fury. There's lots of Rushdie that I haven't read - including his two most recent books - so there's lots for me to enjoy!

Anyway, despite the silliness of lists like these, I will say that I like some of the other people on the "Best of the Booker" shortlist. There was a time that I was really into Peter Carey, and I liked Pat Baker's WWI trilogy immensely. News like this always causes me to go hunt for stuff by these authors I haven't read! Another wonderful distraction!

LONDON (Reuters) - British author Salman Rushdie won the "Best of the Booker" prize on Thursday to mark the 40th anniversary of one of the world's most prestigious literary awards.

"Midnight's Children" won the Booker Prize in 1981, and the Indian-born writer was hot favorite to take the award decided by the public from a shortlist of six in an online poll.

The 61-year-old, whose 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses" outraged many Muslims and prompted death threats against him, also won the 25th anniversary Booker prize in 1993.

"I think it was an extraordinary shortlist and it was an honor to be on it," Rushdie said in a recorded message from the United States, where he is on a book tour.

His sons, Zafar and Milan, accepted a trophy in London on his behalf, and the author said it was apt that "my real children (are) accepting a prize for my imaginary children."

Milan, the youngest, added: "I'm really looking forward to reading it when I'm older. Well done Dad."

Victoria Glendinning, chair of the panel who drew up a shortlist, said the entries were dominated by themes of the end of empire and two world wars.

"These are the nettles we have been compelled to try and grasp," she told reporters.

But there was some criticism of the award, partly because the choice was narrowed to just six nominees.

"It's an artificial exercise, simply because the general public only got to pick from six of the previous winners," said Jonathan Ruppin, promotions manager at Foyles bookshop.

"Readers have not been able to vote for some of their most enduring favorites," he added, mentioning, among others, Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" and Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day."

ONLINE POLL

Around 8,000 people from around the world took part in the online poll, and Midnight's Children won 36 percent of votes.

At least half the voters were under 35, and the largest age group was 25-34, "a reflection of the ongoing interest in quality fiction amongst readers of all ages," organizers said.

Midnight's Children, an example of Rushdie's magical realist style, follows Saleem Sinai who is born on the stroke of midnight on the day of India's independence in 1947 and whose life loosely parallels the fortunes of his nascent country.

Some critics believe it is Rushdie's finest work, eclipsing subsequent novels including The Satanic Verses, for which he remains best known.

What was perceived to be the questioning of the tenets of Islam in The Satanic Verses led to book burnings and riots across the Muslim world culminating in a death edict against Rushdie by Iran's supreme religious leader.

The author was forced into hiding for nine years.

The other nominees included Nobel Prize winners J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, both born in South Africa.

The full list comprised Rushdie, Pat Barker (The Ghost Road), Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda), Coetzee (Disgrace), J.G. Farrell (The Siege of Krishnapur) and Gordimer (The Conservationist).

Both Coetzee and Carey have won the Booker Prize twice.

The Booker rewards the best novel each year by a writer from Britain, Ireland or a Commonwealth country.

Books Most Unread Meme

Here's an interesting meme. The list of books below are books that have been most tagged "unread" on LibraryThing. So, go through the list and tag see if you've read them!

In bold = You've read it
In red = Started but didn't finish
In blue= It's still sitting on your shelf untouched
No formatting = don't own, haven't read

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (239)
2. The complete fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm by Jacob Grimm (20)
3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (200)
4. One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (179)
5. Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra (140)
6. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (155)
7. Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (167)
8. Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (110)
9. War and peace by Leo Tolstoy (129)
10. Ulysses by James Joyce (129)
11. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (128)
12. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (159) *
13. The complete short stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway (13)
14. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (160)
15. The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (126)
16. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (106)
17. A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens (123)
18. The name of the rose by Umberto Eco (124) *
19. The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova (113)
20. Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi (97)
21. Middlemarch by George Eliot (92)
22. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (117)*
23. Emma by Jane Austen (123)*
24. The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie (81)
25. Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco (100)
26. The Odyssey by Homer (130)
27. The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding (66)
28. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (96)
29. The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (69)
30. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (64)
31. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (92)
32. Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand (97)
33. The Iliad by Homer (113)
34. The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon (96)
35. Dracula by Bram Stoker (101)
36. The book thief by Markus Zusak (72)
37. The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini (127)
38. The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (96)*
39. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond (103)
40. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens (58)
41. The house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne (61)
42. The once and future king by T. H. White (82)
43. Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence (72)
44. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (98)
45. Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood (79)
46. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (127)
47. The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake (50)
48. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (80)
49. The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (78)
50. Gulliver's travels by Jonathan Swift (83)
51. The corrections by Jonathan Franzen (85)
52. Labyrinth by Kate Mosse (54)
53. Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel (121)
54. The god of small things by Arundhati Roy (87)
55. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond (75)
56. The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck (99)*
57. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers (93)
58. A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce (93)
59. The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (94)
60. The sound and the fury by William Faulkner (82)
61. The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger (113)
62. The known world by Edward P. Jones (57)
63. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (83)
64. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (77)
65. Swann's way by Marcel Proust (61)
66. Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence (62)
67. The bonesetter's daughter by Amy Tan (60)
68. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (101)
69. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (61)
70. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (99)
71. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson (70)
72. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (59)
73. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (56)
74. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (77)
75. To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (76)
76. The mill on the Floss by George Eliot (56)
77. Persuasion by Jane Austen (85)
78. Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (64)
79. Baudolino by Umberto Eco (58)
80. The divine comedy by Dante Alighieri (60)
81. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (53)*
82. Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison (79)
83. Underworld by Don DeLillo (59)
84. Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (64)*
85. The island of the day before by Umberto Eco (54)
86. Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan (83)
87. The man in the iron mask by Alexandre Dumas (42)
88. The English patient by Michael Ondaatje (64)
89. In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its… by Truman Capote (78)
90. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (62)
91. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (79)
92. Les misérables by Victor Hugo (72)
93. The poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver (86)
94. A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess (83)
95. The portrait of a lady by Henry James (59)
96. The phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (55)
97. Silas Marner by George Eliot (54)
98. Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (46)*
99. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (61)
100. One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey (78)
101. Infinite jest : a novel by David Foster Wallace (53)
102. The inferno by Dante Alighieri (78)
103. The ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories by Susanna Clarke (39)
104. Cat's eye by Margaret Atwood (58)
105. Anansi boys : a novel by Neil Gaiman (81)
106. Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West… by Gregory Maguire (91)
107. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (59)
108. Twenty thousand leagues under the sea by Jules Verne (57)
109. Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro (68)
110. As I lay dying by William Faulkner (64)
111. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (74)
112. Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy (58)
113. A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson (78)
114. The age of innocence by Edith Wharton (59)
115. Cold mountain by Charles Frazier (66)
116. Snow falling on cedars by David Guterson (63)
117. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (90)
118. Dubliners by James Joyce (74)
119. The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and… by Brian Greene (56)
120. Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen (87)
121. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (48)
122. American gods : a novel by Neil Gaiman (94)
123. Possession : a romance by A.S. Byatt (65)
124. A princess of Roumania by Paul Park (24)
125. The last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper (51)
126. The Dante Club : a novel by Matthew Pearl (52)
127. The confusion by Neal Stephenson (56)
128. Mark Z. Danielewski's House of leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (60)
129. Uncle Tom's cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (56)
130. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (67)
131. The thirteenth tale : a novel by Diane Setterfield (59)
132. Tropic of cancer by Henry Miller (51)
133. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (54)
134. Cloud atlas : a novel by David Mitchell (58)
135. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (64)
136. Vellum by Hal Duncan (27)
137. Freedom & necessity by Steven Brust (27)
138. The good earth by Pearl S. Buck (56)
139. A people's history of the United States : 1492-present by Howard Zinn (61)
140. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (55)
141. White Teeth: A Novel by Zadie Smith (64)
142. Son of a witch : a novel by Gregory Maguire (48)
143. The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood (51)
144. The return of the native by Thomas Hardy (47)
145. Midnight's children by Salman Rushdie (58)
146. Northanger abbey by Jane Austen (63)
147. Angela's ashes : a memoir by Frank McCourt (73)
148. Villette by Charlotte Bronte (46)
149. The shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (66)
150. Dune by Frank Herbert (85)
151. The scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (79)
152. Everything is illuminated : a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer (64)
153. The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman by Laurence Sterne (46)
154. Naked lunch by William S. Burroughs (56)
155. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (47)
156. Sophie's world : a novel about the history of philosophy by Jostein Gaarder (68)
157. Brave new world by Aldous Huxley (95)
158. The system of the world by Neal Stephenson (48)
159. A farewell to arms by Ernest Hemingway (66)
160. Utopia by Thomas More (52)
161. The Aeneid by Virgil (66)
162. Pattern recognition by William Gibson (55)
163. Pride and prejudice by Jane Austen (109)
164. Prodigal summer : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver (52)
165. The mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (47)
166. The mysterious flame of Queen Loana : an illustrated novel by Umberto Eco (42)
167. The plague by Albert Camus (63)
168. The woman in white by Wilkie Collins (49)
169. Watership Down by Richard Adams (71)
170. East of Eden by John Steinbeck (65)
171. Empire falls by Richard Russo (51)
172. The amber spyglass by Philip Pullman (72)
173. The prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (71)
174. The Eyre affair by Jasper Fforde (65)
175. The inheritance of loss by Kiran Desai (43)
176. Far from the madding crowd by Thomas Hardy (48)
177. Of human bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (44)
178. The idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (56)
179. Light in August by William Faulkner (47)
180. The golden compass by Philip Pullman (81)
181. The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (60)
182. Suite française by Irene Nemirovsky (47)
183. A passage to India by E.M. Forster (53)
184. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into… by Robert M. Pirsig (66)
185. Fragile things : short fictions and wonders by Neil Gaiman (48)
186. The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor (28)
187. The Bhagavad Gita by Anonymous (43)
188. The road by Cormac McCarthy (60)
189. Beowulf : a new verse translation by Anonymous (69)
190. The remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro (54)
191. The moonstone by Wilkie Collins (45)
192. On beauty : a novel by Zadie Smith (52)
193. Women in love by D.H. Lawrence (42)
194. Midnight in the garden of good and evil : a Savannah story by John Berendt (55)
195. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (87)
196. The night watch by Sarah Waters (35)
197. A room with a view by E.M. Forster (47)
198. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956; an experiment in literary… by Aleksander Solzenitsyn (41)
199. The plot against America by Philip Roth (49)
200. Eldest by Christopher Paolini (55)