The Homeschooler’s College Prep English class at EIE Oct. 23, 2014 notes and online feed

Dear Homescholars,

This week’s class feed October 23, 2014:
Link to the class event page on Google Plus:
https://plus.google.com/events/cfluh7g9oo7v7qu790c6pjahaj0

The playlist for our 2014-2015 classes is here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLExCxI6q5_Xnpxfr0yI8ATzOnU6SmkO2x

To learn more about the class, please visit: http://abacus-es.com/eie/advancedwriting.html, see the links and watch the video.

The playlist of 2013-2014 classes is also on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLExCxI6q5_XmwbFdBDNpSar91svWKDe9Y

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Updated Assignments

Please continue to read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
and prepare further recitations.

Be sure to keep your vocabulary journals up-to-date. A few words from this week:

• scant: meager, exiguous, paucity
• prophetic: vaticinal, mantic, Sibylline, oracular.

Try using the comedic devices discussed in your writing.

Language Immersion

If you haven’t already done so, please watch the improvisatory TED talk by Glenn Greenwald on the importance of privacy.

Please watch this excerpt Christopher Hitchens on History and Fascism.

Please continue to watch Born Talking by Jonathan Miller.

Please watch/listen to: The Machine That Made Us, a documentary on the Gutenberg press by Stephen Fry.

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Lower Priority Assignments
Terry Eagleton on the war on terror. Prof. Eagleton is one of the great speakers.

Please read: Flying High by Christopher Hitchens. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2009/12/flying_high.html

Robert Fisk on writing and journalism. Fisk is one of the most highly honored journalists in the world.

Please read The Lessons of 1989 by Christopher Hitchens. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2009/11/the_lessons_of_1989.html.

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Class Notes

Discussion of submitted projects

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Discussion of Assignments

Douglas Adams
We started discussing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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Recitations
We did prepared recitations — the beginning of The Hitchiker’s Guide and the Douglas Adams poem on a candle. See below.

“A Dissertation on the task of writing a poem on a candle and an account of some of the difficulties thereto pertaining”

Written by Douglas Adams when he was 17 in fulfillment of an entrance requirement to a literary club, Candlesticks, the poem had to be about a candle and had to be assessed as acceptable. It was.

by Douglas Adams, January 1970

I resisted temptation for this declamation
To reach out to literary height
For high aspiration in such an oration
Would seem quite remarkably trite:
So I thought something pithy and succinct and clever
Was exactly the right thing to write.

For nights I sat musing
And musing … and musing
Whilst burning the midnight oil;
My scratchings seemed futile
My muse seemed quite mute, while
My work proved to be barren toil.

I puzzled and thought and wrestled and fought
‘Till my midnight oil was exhausted,
So I furthered my writing by dim candle lighting,
And found, to my joy, this of course did
The trick, for I flowered,
My work – candle-powered –
Was inspired, both witty and slick.

Pithy and polished, my writing demolished
Much paper, as I beguiled
Myself with some punning,
(My word play was stunning,)
I wrote with the wit of a Wilde.

At length it was finished, the candle diminished,
I pondered and let my pride burn
At the great acclamation, the standing ovation
Its first public reading would earn.

But lost in the rapture of anticipation
And thinking how great was my brilliant creation
I quite failed to note as I gazed into space
That incendiary things were about to take place:
That which had ignited my literary passion,
Was about to ignite what my passion had fashion’d.

And – oh! – all was lost in a great conflagration
And I just sat there and said ‘Hell and damnation’,
For the rest of the night and the following day.
(My muse in the meantime had flitted away
Alarmed, no doubt, at the ornamentation
My language acquired with increased consternation.

So unhaply the fruits of my priceless endeavour
Are lost to the literary world forever.
For now I offer this poem instead,
Which explains in itself why the other’s unsaid.

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We also did a recitation and analysis of Marvin’s Lullaby, the extended version:

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We didn’t get a chance to look at The 42 Best lines from the Hitchhiker’s Guide. Perhaps next time.

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We visited briefly the Taxonomy of Comedic Devices and may do more with these.

Language Immersion
We discussed Stephen Fry on Language
Please watch this short brilliantly worded

We didn’t get a chance to talk about the improvisatory TED talk by Glenn Greenwald on the importance of privacy. Perhaps next time

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Taxonomy of comedic devices
More of these

The absence as presence device:

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t. — Adams

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The more he looked for Piglet, the more Piglet wasn’t there. — A.A. Milne

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Nothing happened, and for quite a while nothing continued to happen. — Adams

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Do you see anybody coming down the road? I see nobody. Oh, that I had such eyes, that I could see nobody — and at such a distance. — Lewis Carroll

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I’m sitting here completely surrounded by no beer. — Roy Clarke

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In his normal state he would not strike a lamb. I’ve known him to do it’ ‘Do what?’ ‘Not strike lambs

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He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. — Adams

Self referential language — direct reference to the words being used

This is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn’t previously aware of.

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Surprise is no longer adequate and he is forced to resort to astonishment

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Don’t believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.

Expansion of a well-known idiom beyond its normal use:

Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

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I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled. — Wodehouse

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Don’t be frivolous Richard. I promise — not a single frivol. Roy Clarke

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Hell, it is well known, has no fury like a woman who wants her tea and can’t get it.

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As a dancer, I out-Fred the nimblest Astaire.

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Personification:

Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing gloves. — Wodehouse

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She decided it was time to be businesslike about the map, which was a fairly rough representation of a fairly rough landscape. She worked out once and for all where the Landrover had to be, and worked it out with such ruthless determination that the Landrover would hardly dare not to be there, and eventually, of course, after miles of trekking, it was exactly there. — Adams

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The word bulldozer wandered through his mind for a moment in search of something to connect with. — Adams

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A man’s subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

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I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Literal use of an idiom not normally taken literally.

“How would you react if I said that I’m not
from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in the
vicinity of Betelgeuse?” Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way. “I don’t know,” he said, taking a pull of beer. “Why – do you think it’s the sort of thing you’re likely to say?”

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The simile taken in unusual and unexpected directions

Good God, Clarence! You look like a bereaved tapeworm.

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I clutched at the brow. The mice in my interior had now got up an informal dance and were buck-and-winging all over the place like a bunch of Nijinskys.

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She uttered a sound rather like an elephant taking its foot out of a mud hole in a Burmese teak forest.

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He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.

The metaphor taken in unusual and unexpected directions
Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.

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Ongoing Assignments

Language immersion
We discussed: Born Talking by Jonathan Miller. Please continue to watch the series.