Monday February 1, 2010

SECOND SEMESTER / term 4
VOCABULARY 7 handed out today. This is due next Monday, February 8
Some folks have a lackadaisical perspective on the vocabulary. It will come back to haunt you, as we will be reviewing units through short reading passages- much like an SAT- where the words will show up and you'll need to respond to questions with the assumption you are familiar with them. Please, take your time with these. This vocabulary will guarantee help you immensely on your SAT test.

Quiz on Ethan Frome today.
In class we are reviewing the literary movement known as Naturalism (see last Monday's blog, if you need a refresher). Again note the environmenatal forces, physical drives and economic circumstances that impacted the characters of the eponymous Ethan, his wife Zeena and Maddie Silver. Individually, you will need to be able to write out an example of each at the end of your quiz. The class discussion will be based your responses.

A reminder: we are in the 3rd floor lab on Wednesday. You will blog your response.

SYMBOLISM NOTES FOR ETHAN FROME based upon the powerpoint presentation.

1. Starkfield is besieged by long winters in which everything lies
buried under a deep, frozen layer of snow. Similarly, Ethan "seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its
frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface."

2.Ethan marries Zeena only because he does not want to spend a winter alone
in the silent farmhouse. But soon, Zeena too falls silent, her emotional chill
becoming an extension of the externalchill whose deadening influence Ethan
had feared. Winter is the barren season, when nothing grows, and Ethan and
Zeena's marriage is barren, in that they are childless. Zeena lacks the fresh
beauty that is associated with fertility: her breasts are sunken, her face gaunt,
her skin "bloodless." A symbol of the barrenness of their marriage is the red
pickle dish, which Zeena keeps unused on an upper shelf of the china closet.
Mattie's action in getting it down so that Ethan and she can use it - an act that results in its being broken - is symbolic of the threat that the beautiful and fertile Mattie poses to Ethan's marriage.


3.
While images of winter and frozenness characterize Ethan
and Zeena, Mattie is described in terms of warmth and spring.
In Chapter 8, when Ethan is determined to do something to enable him to be with Mattie, the sun comes out and a "pale haze" of spring can be seen, which Ethan associates with Mattie.

4.
Mattie's symbolic colors are sensual, passionate red (her scarf, and the red ribbon she weaves through her hair on her first evening alone with Ethan) and bright, flashing silver (her name). The color red has always carried connotations of sexual sin, hence terms like 'scarlet woman" (a whore or promiscuous woman) and 'red light area' (where the brothels are situated). The symbolism is continued in the red sunsets they watch together on their walks to and from the village, which he sees reflected in her face. The pickle dish that Mattie gets down for her and Ethan to use on their first evening together is red; significantly, Zeena means for it never to be used.

5. Zeena is associated with the Frome household cat.
While she is away in Bettsbridge, the cat becomes her 'agent,' seating itself in her chair between Ethan and Mattie and setting the rocking chair in motion as if Zeena were there herself. Most important, the cat breaks the pickle dish that Zeena prizes above all else and that Mattie has illicitly got down from the closet to make the table attractive for Ethan. The cat thereby exposes Mattie's gesture and, symbolically, her relationship with Ethan. This episode marks a turning point for Zeena, and she resolutely acts to get rid of Mattie.
The fact that Zeena's symbolic animal is the cat reinforces the portrayal of Zeena as a type of wicked witch of fairy tale. Witches kept companion animals, or 'familiars,' and could temporarily take over the bodies of the animals in order to travel about and do their work unseen. By far the most popular 'familiar' animal for a witch was the cat.

6. The elm tree
Some critics see the big elm tree into which Ethan
and Mattie collide in their suicide attempt as a phallic
symbol. Before their suicide pact, both view the tree
with awe, as they know that Ned Hale and Ruth
Varnum were nearly killed by colliding with it when
sledding. But they talk of the tree with bravado, each
claiming that they are not afraid of it. It is clear that
there is a coded message being communicated.
Each is feeling the other out as to whether he or she
has the courage to pursue the illicit relationship. Thus the tree takes on the symbolism of their passionate (potentially sexual) but illicit (and therefore dangerous) relationship. When the suicide pact is arranged, the elm tree becomes a symbol of the first and only resolute decision they make regarding their fate, and it is therefore reasonable to see it as suggestive of Ethan's regained manhood. However, the symbolism is ironically undermined by the fact that it is Mattie, not Ethan, who makes the decision to die together. Ethan merely goes along with what Mattie wants. The final irony is that the tree does not kill the lovers and grant them their tragic apotheosis: it cripples them, unmanning Ethan further and robbing Mattie of any chance of independence.

Tuesday January 26, 2010

If you were absent yesterday, make sure to pick up your copy of Ethan Frome from the library. If you are unable to do so, you may read it on line. In you browser search box, type in Google books Ethan Frome.

Monday January 25, 2010

Your midterm exam is as follows:

English III Honors period 3 is in room A238 on Wednesday beginning at 12:30.
English III Honors period 7 is in room A240 on Wednesday beginning at 12:30.

Period 3 today has a couple of folks that need to perform their Spoon River poem.
All the vocabulary is corrected and grades, with the exception of the midterm, are finished. New marking period!

We are returning Spoon River today and picking up another novella: Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton.

Like Crane's Maggie, Girl of the Streets, this is an example of naturalism. Below is a review of the Natualism movement. Make sure you understand this literary movement.

Some writers of late 19th century went one step beyond Realism. Influenced by the French novelist Emile Zola, the literary movement known as Naturalism developed. According to Zola, a writer must examine people and society objectively and, like a scientist, draw conclusions from what is observed. In line with this, Naturalistic writers view reality as the inescapable working out of natural forces. One’s destiny, they said, is decided by heredity and environment, physical drives and economic circumstances. Because they believe people have no control over events, Naturalistic writers tended to be pessimistic.

For next Monday, please come to class having read Ethan Frome. As you read, note the environmenatal forces, physical drives and economic circumstances that impacted the characters of the eponymous Ethan, his wife Zeena and Maddie Silver. There will be a multiple choice quiz on Monday, which will be recorded as a homework grade. This is very easy, if you have read.

As with last week, we will be writing in the lab on the blog. As a head's up, your question will be: Does the tragedy result from circumstances which the characters have no control over or from avoidable errors in judgment? You will need to details to support your response.

Friday January 22, 2010

Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology performances.

Last opportuntiy to turn in vocabulary 8

Enjoy your weekend.

Thursday January 21, 2010

Very nice work yesterday. All your essays are already graded.
If you were here and did not post (or did not put the essay on my drive), please make sure you see me asap. My grades close tomorrow.

FRIDAY: Spoon River Performances.
do not forget your prop, which may be either literal or metaphorical
When you perform, consider the following.
pacing -vary you speed to convey emotional sincerity
audibility - everyone must be able to hear you clearly
intonation- what words or syllables should be emphasized
articulation- avoid swallowing or garbling your words
body language- play your posture and overall body position to reflect your character. What are your hands doing? Are you sitting or standing or leaning against the wall, chewing on a piece of hay?
facial gestures / eye contact- these are key in engaging your audience
And you should have your piece flawlessly memorized.

PRACTICE IN FRONT OF THE MIRROR..OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
THIS WILL COUNT IN THE 30% CATEGORY.

FRIDAY IS THE LAST DAY TO TURN IN VOCABULARY 8

Wednesday January 20, 2010

In class writing assessment. Please respond on the blog. Do not forget to write your name. There is no need for an MLA heading.

Respond to the following:
What specific parallels of Riis' investigative journalism report entitled How the Other Half Lives do you find in Crane's fictional novella Maggie, Girl of the Streets? Please be specefic in terms of Crane's characters.

Tuesday January 19, 2010

You'll be working in pairs, reviewing the following questions in preparation for tomorrow, when we will be in the 3rd floor lab writing on Stephen Crane's novella Maggie, Girl of the Streets and Jacob Riis' research document How the Other Half Lives. This is a one-class writing assignment. You will have neither access to the novellla nor the document, but will rely on your reading knowledge and the class discussion information.
In addition, you will write your response on the blog.

Discussion Questions for
Stephen Crane’s Maggie, Girl of the Streets and Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives With a partner discuss the following, using the chart to take notes.
1. How was city life like in the late 19th century?
2. How did the immigrants react to the conditions they faced?
3. Were men and women treated differently?
4. What sort of evocative language and imagery do we find in these works?
5. What was life like for the children?
6. Do we treat immigrants or the impoverished better today?




On Thursday, we'll read some of the poems that no one has selected from Spoon River.
On Friday, you'll perform your piece.
Don't forget that vocabuary 8 is due Friday. This is the last day you'll be able to turn it in, as they need to be corrected and recorded before the midterm on Wednesday afternoon.

Bonus: 25 points note the map of Manhattan above. Why is it described as the Cities of New York and Brooklyn? Leave your response under the hole punch by the computer.

Sunday January 17, 2010

For anyone who was absent Friday, so did not pick up a copy of Spoon River Anthology- hence did not select a poem- go to this link and you you'll find all the poems on line. Choose one that no one from your class has selected.


http://www.bartleby.com/people/Masters.html

Friday January 15, 2010

Chapter 8 vocabulary handout today. (Yes, we have skipped 7, but shall go back to it!) This is due Friday January 22. That's our last day of classes this term.

NEW ITEM: In class you will be picking up a copy of Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology. Please browse through the poems and select one you would like to memorize. Post your selection on the blog. There are to be no duplicates; so first come, first choice. Next Friday, you will perform the poem. I will give you a rubric next week. In addition, please find a prop to accompany your selection. AGAIN: YOU MUST POST YOUR CHOICE; NO DUPLICATES

For Tuesday, make sure you have read Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives. There will be a short writing response in the lab on Wednesday

Thursday January 14, 2010

We are moving on (finally) to realism / naturalism and regionalism.
In class we are looking at the film version of of the short story An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. This is an example of realism. This French version does an excellent job of objectifying the situation. Unlike naturalism (as in Maggie, Girl of the Streets), the focus is not on the environmental circumstances that overwhelm the individual, so that he has no control of his life. This character had control and make choices that ultimately lead to his current circumstances.

The following is a copy of the class handout. Make sure you are familiar with this introductory material.
Introduction to Realism, Naturalism and Regionalism.

The Civil War and its aftermath left Americans less certain about the future than ever before, diminishing their belief in a unity of national purpose. The buoyant spirits of Emerson and the wild imaginings of Poe seemed out of date to many, especially to young writers. In the South, the Jeffersonian dream of a nation of farmers lay shattered like the land itself. The South would have to rebuild on a different foundation, and it would be a long, arduous task.

THE REALISTIC MOVEMENT

Realistic fiction remains popular today, and it may seem strange that it was once controversial. Realistic writers saw themselves as being in revolt against Romanticism. How did Realism originate? There had been Realistic writers in France for some time, notably Honore de Balzac, Stendhal and Gustave Flaubert. Although these writers and others had great influence, American Realism had roots in this country, in the experiences of war, on the frontier, and in the cities. Science played a part as well. The objectivity of science struck many writers as a worthy goal for literature. Just as important, perhaps, was a general feeling that Romanticism was wearing thin.

NATURALISM

Some writers of this period went one step beyond Realism. Influenced by the French novelist Emile Zola, the literary movement known as Naturalism developed. According to Zola, a writer must examine people and society objectively and, like a scientist, draw conclusions from what is observed. In line with this, Naturalistic writers view reality as the inescapable working out of natural forces. One’s destiny, they said, is decided by heredity and environment, physical drives and economic circumstances. Because they believe people have no control over events, Naturalistic writers tended to be pessimistic. Only a few American writers embraced Naturalism. One who did was Stephen Crane, whose first novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, published in 1893, is the earliest Naturalistic novel by an American writer.

REGIONALISM

The third significant literary movement that developed during the latter half of the 19th century was REGIONALISM. Through the use of regional dialect and vivid descriptions of the landscape, the Regionalist sought to capture the essence of life in the various regions of the growing nation.
Examples: Mark Twain “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”
Kate Chopin: “The Story of an Hour”
Bret Harte “The Outcasts of Poker Flats”

Poetry: Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology.




As you watch the film clips, please list ten objective details the camera picks up. These will count as a quiz grade. You are responsible for this material.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jLxlyTrAC4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sWk2bY-Qj4&feature=PlayList&p=37316E28F006BC2E&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D__Q7G16cog&feature=related


HOMEWORK FOR MONDAY: Jacob Riis "How the Other Half Lives"

Please note that along with this material, you will have absolutely needed to have read "Maggie" to complete our in class work. So, if you have not read Crane's novella, please do so.

Riis material (in case you loose yours or are absent)

Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). How the Other Half Lives. 1890.

I. Genesis of the Tenement



HELL’S KITCHEN AND SEBASTOPOL.

THE first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth, though a generation passed before the writing was deciphered. It was the “rear house,” infamous ever after in our city’s history. There had been tenant-houses before, but they were not built for the purpose. Nothing would probably have shocked their original owners more than the idea of their harboring a promiscuous crowd; for they were the decorous homes of the old Knickerbockers, the proud aristocracy of Manhattan in the early days. 1
It was the stir and bustle of trade, together with the tremendous immigration that followed upon the war of 1812 that dislodged them. In thirty-five years the city of less than a hundred thousand came to harbor half a million souls, for whom homes had to be found. Within the memory of men not yet in their prime, Washington had moved from his house on Cherry Hill as too far out of town to be easily reached Now the old residents followed his example; but they moved in a different direction and for a different reason. Their comfortable dwellings in the once fashionable streets along the East River front fell into the hands of real-estate agents and boarding-house keepers; and here, says the report to the Legislature of 1857, when the evils engendered had excited just alarm, “in its beginning, the tenant-house became a real blessing to that class of industrious poor whose small earnings limited their expenses, and whose employment in workshops, stores, or about the warehouses and thoroughfares, render a near residence of much importance.” Not for long, however. As business increased, and the city grew with rapid strides, the necessities of the poor became the opportunity of their wealthier neighbors, and the stamp was set upon the old houses, suddenly become valuable, which the best thought and effort of a later age have vainly struggled to efface. Their “large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation, the rate of rent being lower in proportion to space or height from the street; and they soon became filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary itself.” It was thus the dark bedroom, prolific of untold depravities, came into the world. It was destined to survive the old houses. In their new rôle, says the old report, eloquent in its indignant denunciation of “evils more destructive than wars,” “they were not intended to last. Rents were fixed high enough to cover damage and abuse from this class, from whom nothing was expected, and the most was made of them while they lasted. Neatness, order, clean-liness, were never dreamed of in connection with the tenant-house system, as it spread its localities from year to year; while reckless slovenliness, discontent, privation, and ignorance were left to work out their invariable results, until the entire premises reached the level of tenant-house dilapidation, containing, but sheltering not, the miserable hordes that crowded beneath mouldering, water-rotted roofs or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars.” Yet so illogical is human greed that, at a later day, when called to account, “the proprietors frequently urged the filthy habits of the tenants as an excuse for the condition of their property, utterly losing sight of the fact that it was the tolerance of those habits which was the real evil, and that for this they themselves were alone responsible.” 2
Still the pressure of the crowds did not abate, and in the old garden where the stolid Dutch burgher grew his tulips or early cabbages a rear house was built, generally of wood, two stories high at first. Presently it was carried up another story, and another. Where two families had lived ten moved in. The front house followed suit, if the brick walls were strong enough. The question was not always asked, judging from complaints made by a contemporary witness, that the old buildings were “often carried up to a great height without regard to the strength of the foundation walls.” It was rent the owner was after; nothing was said in the contract about either the safety or the comfort of the tenants. The garden gate no longer swung on its rusty hinges. The shell-paved walk had become an alley; what the rear house had left of the garden, a “court.” Plenty such are yet to be found in the Fourth Ward, with here and there one of the original rear tenements. 3
Worse was to follow. It was “soon perceived by estate owners and agents of property that a greater percentage of profits could be realized by the conversion of houses and blocks into barracks, and dividing their space into smaller proportions capable of containing human life within four walls. … Blocks were rented of real estate owners, or ‘purchased on time,’ or taken in charge at a percentage, and held for under-letting.” With the appearance of the middleman, wholly irresponsible, and uterly reckless and unrestrained, began the era of tenement building which turned out such blocks as Gotham Court, where, in one cholera epidemic that scarcely touched the clean wards, the tenants died at the rate of one hundred and ninety-five to the thousand of population; which forced the general mortality of the city up from 1 in 41.83 in 1815, to 1 in 27.33 in 1855, a year of unusual freedom from epidemic disease, and which wrung from the early organizers of the Health Department this wail: “There are numerous examples of tenement-houses in which are lodged several hundred people that have a prorata allotment of ground area scarcely equal to two square yards upon the city lot, court-yards and all included.” The tenement-house population had swelled to half a million souls by that time, and on the East Side, in what is still the most densely populated district in all the world, China not excluded, it was packed at the rate of 290,000 to the square mile, a state of affairs wholly unexampled. The utmost cupidity of other lands and other days had never contrived to herd much more than half that number within the same space. The greatest crowding of Old London was at the rate of 175,816. Swine roamed the streets and gutters as their principal scavengers. 1 The death of a child in a tenement was registered at the Bureau of Vital Statistics as “plainly due to suffocation in the foul air of an unventilated apartment,” and the Senators, who had come down from Albany to find out what was the matter with New York, reported that “there are annually cut off from the population by disease and death enough human beings to people a city, and enough human labor to sustain it.” And yet experts had testified that, as compared with updown, rents were from twenty-five to thirty per cent, higher in the worst slums of the lower wards, with such accommodations as were enjoyed, for instance, by a “family with boarders” in Cedar Street, who fed hogs in the cellar that contained eight or ten loads of manure; or a one room 12 x 12 with five families living in it, comprising twenty persons of both sexes and all ages, with only two beds, without partition, screen, chair, or table.” The rate of rent has been successfully maintained to the present day, though the hog at least has been eliminated. 4
Lest anybody flatter himself with the notion that these were evils of a day that is happily past and may safely be forgotten, let me mention here three very recent instances of tenement-house life that came under my notice. One was the burning of a rear house in Mott Street, from appearances one of the original tenant-houses that made their owners rich. The fire made homeless ten families, who had paid an average of $5 a month for their mean little cubby-holes. The owner himself told me that it was fully insured for $800, though it brought him in $600 a year rent. He evidently considered himself especially entitled to be pitied for losing such valuable property. Another was the case of a hard-working family of man and wife, young people from the old country, who took poison together in a Crosby Street tenement because they were “tired.” There was no other explanation, and none was needed when I stood in the room in which they had lived. It was in the attic with sloping ceiling and a single window so far out on the roof that it seemed not to belong to the place at all. With scarcely room enough to turn around in they had been compelled to pay five dollars and a half a month in advance. There were four such rooms in that attic, and together they brought in as much as many a handsome little cottage in a pleasant part of Brooklyn. The third instance was that of a colored family of husband, wife, and baby in a wretched rear rookery in West Third Street. Their rent was eight dollars and a half for a single room on the top-story, so small that I was unable to get a photograph of it even by placing the camera outside the open door. Three short steps across either way would have measured its full extent. 5


TENEMENT OF 1863, FOR TWELVE FAMILIES ON EACH FLAT 2 D. dark L. light. H. halls.

There was just one excuse for the early tenement-house builders, and their successors may plead it with nearly as good right for what it is worth. “Such,” says an official report, “is the lack of houseroom in the city that any kind of tenement can be immediately crowded with lodgers, if there is space offered.” Thousands were living in cellars. There were three hundred underground lodging-houses in the city when the Health Department was organized. Some fifteen years before that the old Baptist Church in Mulberry Street, just off Chatham Street, had been sold, and the rear half of the frame structure had been converted into tenements that with their swarming population became the scandal even of that reckless age. The wretched pile harbored no less than forty families, and the annual rate of deaths to the population was officially stated to be 75 in 1,000. These tenements were an extreme type of very many, for the big barracks had by this time spread east and west and far up the island into the sparsely settled wards. Whether or not the title was clear to the land upon which they were built was of less account than that the rents were collected. If there were damages to pay, the tenant had to foot them. Cases were “very frequent when property was in litigation, and two or three different parties were collecting rents.” Of course under such circumstances “no repairs were ever made.” 6



The climax had been reached. The situation was summed up by the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor in these words: “Crazy old buildings, crowded rear tenements in filthy yards, dark, damp basements, leaking garrets, shops, outhouses, and stables 3 converted into dwellings, though scarcely fit to shelter brutes, are habitations of thousands of our fellow-beings in this wealthy, Christian city.” “The city,” says its historian, Mrs. Martha Lamb, commenting on the era of aqueduct building between 1835 and 1845, “was a general asylum for vagrants.” Young vagabonds, the natural offspring of such “home” conditions, overran the streets. Juvenile crime increased fearfully year by year. The Children’s Aid Society and kindred philanthropic organizations were yet unborn, but in the city directory was to be found the address of the “American Society for the Promotion of Education in Africa.” 7

XV. The Problem of the Children

THE problem of the children becomes, in these swarms, to the last degree perplexing. Their very number makes one stand aghast. I have already given instances of the packing of the child population in East Side tenements. They might be continued indefinitely until the array would be enough to startle any community. For, be it remembered, these children with the training they receive—or do not receive—with the instincts they inherit and absorb in their growing up, are to be our future rulers, if our theory of government is worth anything. More than a working majority of our voters now register from the tenements. I counted the other day the little ones, up to ten years or so, in a Bayard Street tenement that for a yard has a triangular space in the centre with sides fourteen or fifteen feet long, just room enough for a row of ill-smelling closets at the base of the triangle and a hydrant at the apex. There was about as much light in this “yard” as in the average cellar. I gave up my self-imposed task in despair when I had counted one hundred and twenty-eight in forty families. Thirteen I had missed, or not found in. Applying the average for the forty to the whole fifty-three, the house contained one hundred and seventy children. It is not the only time I have had to give up such census work. I have in mind an alley—an inlet rather to a row of rear tenements—that is either two or four feet wide according as the wall of the crazy old building that gives on it bulges out or in. I tried to count the children that swarmed there, but could not. Sometimes I have doubted that anybody knows just how many there are about. Bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers right along in summer whom no one seems to know anything about. When last spring some workmen, while moving a pile of lumber on a North River pier, found under the last plank the body of a little lad crushed to death, no one had missed a boy, though his parents afterward turned up. The truant officer assuredly does not know, though he spends his life trying to find out, somewhat illogically, perhaps, since the department that employs him admits that thousands of poor children are crowded out of the schools year by year for want of room. There was a big tenement in the Sixth Ward, now happily appropriated by the beneficent spirit of business that blots out so many foul spots in New York—it figured not long ago in the official reports as “an out-and-out hogpen”—that had a record of one hundred and two arrests in four years among its four hundred and seventy-eight tenants, fifty-seven of them for drunken and disorderly conduct. I do not know how many children there were in it, but the inspector reported that he found only seven in the whole house who owned that they went to school. The rest gathered all the instruction they received running for beer for their elders. Some of them claimed the “flat” as their home as a mere matter of form. They slept in the streets at night. The official came upon a little party of four drinking beer out of the cover of a milk-can in the hallway. They were of the seven good boys and proved their claim to the title by offering him some. 1
The old question, what to do with the boy, assumes a new and serious phase in the tenements. Under the best conditions found there, it is not easily answered. In nine cases out of ten he would make an excellent mechanic, if trained early to work at a trade, for he is neither dull nor slow, but the short-sighted despotism of the trades unions has practically closed that avenue to him. Trade-schools, however excellent, cannot supply the opportunity thus denied him, and at the outset the boy stands condemned by his own to low and ill-paid drudgery, held down by the hand that of all should labor to raise him. Home, the greatest factor of all in the training of the young, means nothing to him but a pigeon-hole in a coop along with so many other human animals. Its influence is scarcely of the elevating kind, if it have any. The very games at which he takes a band in the street become polluting in its atmosphere. With no steady hand to guide him, the boy takes naturally to idle ways. Caught in the street by the truant officer, or by the agents of the Children’s Societies, peddling, perhaps, or begging, to help out the family resources, he runs the risk of being sent to a reformatory, where contact with vicious boys older than himself soon develop the latent possibilities for evil that lie hidden in him. The city has no Truant Home in which to keep him, and all efforts of the children’s friends to enforce school attendance are paralyzed by this want. The risk of the reformatory is too great. What is done in the end is to let him take chances—with the chances all against him. The result is the rough young savage, familiar from the street. Rough as he is, if any one doubt that this child of common clay have in him the instinct of beauty, of love for the ideal of which his life has no embodiment, let him put the matter to the test. Let him take into a tenement block a handful of flowers from the fields and watch the brightened faces, the sudden abandonment of play and fight that go ever hand in hand where there is no elbow-room, the wild entreaty for “posies,” the eager love with which the little messengers of peace are shielded, once possessed; then let him change his mind. I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club, seen instincts awaken under their gentle appeal, whose very existence the soil in which they grew made seem a mockery. I have not forgotten the deputation of ragamuffins from a Mulberry Street alley that knocked at my office door one morning on a mysterious expedition for flowers, not for themselves, but for “a lady,” and having obtained what they wanted, trooped off to bestow them, a ragged and dirty little band, with a solemnity that was quite unusual. It was not until an old man called the next day to thank me for the flowers that I found out they had decked the bier of a pauper, in the dark rear room where she lay waiting in her pine-board coffin for the city’s hearse. Yet, as I knew, that dismal alley with its bare brick walls, between which no sun ever rose or set, was the world of those children. It filled their young lives. Probably not one of them had ever been out of the sight of it. They were too dirty, too ragged, and too generally disreputable, too well hidden in their slum besides, to come into line with the Fresh Air summer boarders. 2
With such human instincts and cravings, forever unsatisfied, turned into a haunting curse; with appetite ground to keenest edge by a hunger that is never fed, the children of the poor grow up in joyless homes to lives of wearisome toil that claims them at an age when the play of their happier fellows has but just begun. Has a yard of turf been laid and a vine been coaxed to grow within their reach, they are banished and barred out from it as from a heaven that is not for such as they. I came upon a couple of youngsters in a Mulberry Street yard a while ago that were chalking on the fence their first lesson in “writin’.” And this is what they wrote: “Keeb of te Grass.” They had it by heart, for there was not, I verily believe, a green sod within a quarter of a mile. Home to them is an empty name. Pleasure? A gentleman once catechized a ragged class in a down-town public school on this point, and recorded the result: Out of forty-eight boys twenty had never seen the Brooklyn Bridge that was scarcely five minutes’ walk away, three only had been in Central Park, fifteen had known the joy of a ride in a horse-car. The street, with its ash-barrels and its dirt, the river that runs foul with mud, are their domain. What training they receive is picked up there. And they are apt pupils. If the mud and the dirt are easily reflected in their lives, what wonder? Scarce half-grown, such lads as these confront the world with the challenge to give them their due, too long withheld, or—. Our jails supply the answer to the alternative. 3
A little fellow who seemed clad in but a single rag was among the flotsam and jetsam stranded at Police Headquarters one day last summer. No one knew where he came from or where he belonged. The boy himself knew as little about it as anybody, and was the least anxious to have light shed on the subject after he had spent a night in the matron’s nursery. The discovery that beds were provided for boys to sleep in there, and that he could have “a whole egg” and three slices of bread for breakfast put him on the best of terms with the world in general, and he decided that Headquarters was “a bully place.” He sang “McGinty” all through, with Tenth Avenue variations, for the police, and then settled down to the serious business of giving an account of himself. The examination went on after this fashion: 4
“Where do you go to church, my boy?” 5
“We don’t have no clothes to go to church.” And indeed his appearance, as he was, in the door of any New York church would have caused a sensation. 6
“Well, where do you go to school, then?” 7
“I don’t go to school,” with a snort of contempt. 8
“Where do you buy your bread?” 9
“We don’t buy no bread; we buy beer,” said the boy, and it was eventually the saloon that led the police as a landmark to his “home.” It was worthy of the boy. As he had said, his only bed was a heap of dirty straw on the floor, his daily diet a crust in the morning, nothing else. 10
Into the rooms of the Children’s Aid Society were led two little girls whose father had “busted up the house” and put them on the street after their mother died. Another, who was turned out by her step-mother “because she had five of her own and could not afford to keep her,” could not remember ever having been in church or Sunday-school, and only knew the name of Jesus through hearing people swear by it. She had no idea what they meant. These were specimens of the overflow from the tenements of our home-heathen that are growing up in New York’s streets to-day, while tender-hearted men and women are busying themselves with the socks and the hereafter of well-fed little Hottentots thousands of miles away. According to Canon Taylor, of York, one hundred and nine missionaries in the four fields of Persia, Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt spent one year and sixty thousand dollars in converting one little heathen girl. If there is nothing the matter with those missionaries, they might come to New York with a good deal better prospect of success. 11
By those who lay flattering unction to their souls in the knowledge that to-day New York has, at all events, no brood of the gutters of tender years that can be homeless long unheeded, let it be remembered well through what effort this judgment has been averted. In thirty-seven years the Children’s Aid Society, that came into existence as an emphatic protest against the tenement corruption of the young, has sheltered quite three hundred thousand outcast, homeless, and orphaned children in its lodging-houses, and has found homes in the West for seventy thousand that had none. Doubtless, as a mere stroke of finance, the five millions and a half thus spent were a wiser investment than to have let them grow up thieves and thugs. In the last fifteen years of this tireless battle for the safety of the State the intervention of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has been invoked for 138,891 little ones; it has thrown its protection around more than twenty-five thousand helpless children, and has convicted nearly sixteen thousand wretches of child-beating and abuse. Add to this the standing army of fifteen thousand dependent children in New York’s asylums and institutions, and some idea is gained of the crop that is garnered day by day in the tenements, of the enormous force employed to check their inroads on our social life, and of the cause for apprehension that would exist did their efforts flag for ever so brief a time. 12
Nothing is now better understood than that the rescue of the children is the key to the problem of city poverty, as presented for our solution to-day; that character may be formed where to reform it would be a hopeless task. The concurrent testimony of all who have to undertake it at a later stage: that the young are naturally neither vicious nor hardened, simply weak and undeveloped, except by the bad influences of the street, makes this duty all the more urgent as well as hopeful. Helping hands are held out on every side. To private charity the municipality leaves the entire care of its proletariat of tender years, lulling its conscience to sleep with liberal appropriations of money to foot the bills. Indeed, it is held by those whose opinions are entitled to weight that it is far too liberal a paymaster for its own best interests and those of its wards. It deals with the evil in the seed to a limited extent in gathering in the outcast babies from the streets. To the ripe fruit the gates of its prisons, its reformatories, and its workhouses are opened wide the year round. What the showing would be at this end of the line were it not for the barriers wise charity has thrown across the broad highway to ruin—is building day by day—may be measured by such results as those quoted above in the span of a single life.

XX. The Working Girls of New York

OF the harvest of tares, sown in iniquity and reaped in wrath, the police returns tell the story. The pen that wrote the “Song of the Shirt” is needed to tell of the sad and toil-worn lives of New York’s working-women. The cry echoes by night and by day through its tenements: Oh, God! that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!

1
Six months have not passed since at a great public meeting in this city, the Working Women’s Society reported: “It is a known fact that men’s wages cannot fall below a limit upon which they can exist, but woman’s wages have no limit, since the paths of shame are always open to her. It is simply impossible for any woman to live without assistance on the low salary a saleswoman earns, without depriving herself of real necessities… It is inevitable that they must in many instances resort to evil.” It was only a few brief weeks before that verdict was uttered, that the community was shocked by the story of a gentle and refined woman who, left in direst poverty to earn her own living alone among strangers, threw herself from her attic window, preferring death to dishonor. “I would have done any honest work, even to scrubbing,” she wrote, drenched and starving, after a vain search for work in a driving storm. She had tramped the streets for weeks on her weary errand, and the only living wages that were offered her were the wages of sin. The ink was not dry upon her letter before a woman in an East Side tenement wrote down her reason for self-murder: “Weakness, sleeplessness, and yet obliged to work. My strength fails me. Sing at my coffin: ‘Where does the soul find a home and rest?”’ Her story may be found as one of two typical “cases of despair” in one little church community, in the City Mission Society’s Monthly for last February. It is a story that has many parallels in the experience of every missionary, every police reporter and every family doctor whose practice is among the poor. 2
It is estimated that at least one hundred and fifty thousand women and girls earn their own living in New York; but there is reason to believe that this estimate falls far short of the truth when sufficient account is taken of the large number who are not wholly dependent upon their own labor, while contributing by it to the family’s earnings. These alone constitute a large class of the women wage-earners, and it is characteristic of the situation that the very fact that some need not starve on their wages condemns the rest to that fate. The pay they are willing to accept all have to take. What the “everlasting law of supply and demand,” that serves as such a convenient gag for public indignation, has to do with it, one learns from observation all along the road of inquiry into these real woman’s wrongs. To take the case of the sales-women for illustration: The investigation of the Working Women’s Society disclosed the fact that wages averaging from $2 to $4.50 a week were reduced by excessive fines, “the employers placing a value upon time lost that is not given to services rendered.” A little girl, who received two dollars a week, made cash-sales amounting to $167 in a single day, while the receipts of a fifteen-dollar male clerk in the same department footed up only $125; yet for some trivial mistake the girl was fined sixty cents out of her two dollars. The practice prevailed in some stores of dividing the fines between the superintendent and the time-keeper at the end of the year. In one instance they amounted to $3,000, and “the superintendent was heard to charge the time-keeper with not being strict enough in his duties.” One of the causes for fine in a certain large store was sitting down. The law requiring seats for saleswomen, generally ignored, was obeyed faithfully in this establishment. The seats were there, but the girls were fined when found using them. 3
Cash-girls receiving $1.75 a week for work that at certain seasons lengthened their day to sixteen hours were sometimes required to pay for their aprons. A common cause for discharge from stores in which, on account of the oppressive heat and lack of ventilation, “girls fainted day after day and came out looking like corpses,” was too long service. No other fault was found with the discharged saleswomen than that they had been long enough in the employ of the firm to justly expect an increase of salary. The reason was even given with brutal frankness, in some instances. 4
These facts give a slight idea of the hardships and the poor pay of a business that notoriously absorbs child-labor. The girls are sent to the store before they have fairly entered their teens, because the money they can earn there is needed for the support of the family. If the boys will not work, if the street tempts them from home, among the girls at least there must be no drones. To keep their places they are told to lie about their age and to say that they are over fourteen. The precaution is usually superfluous. The Women’s Investigating Committee found the majority of the children employed in the stores to be under age, but heard only in a single instance of the truant officers calling. In that case they came once a year and sent the youngest children home; but in a month’s time they were all back in their places, and were not again disturbed. When it comes to the factories, where hard bodily labor is added to long hours, stifling rooms, and starvation wages, matters are even worse. The Legislature has passed laws to prevent the employment of children, as it has forbidden saloon-keepers to sell them beer, and it has provided means of enforcing its mandate, so efficient, that the very number of factories in New York is guessed at as in the neighborhood of twelve thousand. Up till this summer, a single inspector was charged with the duty of keeping the run of them all, and of seeing to it that the law was respected by the owners. 5
Sixty cents is put as the average day’s earnings of the 150,000, but into this computation enters the stylish “cashier’s” two dollars a day, as well as the thirty cents of the poor little girl who pulls threads in an East Side factory, and, if anything, the average is probably too high. Such as it is, however, it represents board, rent, clothing, and “pleasure” to this army of workers. Here is the case of a woman employed in the manufacturing department of a Broadway house. It stands for a hundred like her own. She averages three dollars a week. Pays $1.50 for her room; for breakfast she has a cup of coffee; lunch she cannot afford. One meal a day is her allowance. This woman is young, she is pretty. She has “the world before her.” Is it anything less than a miracle if she is guilty of nothing worse than the “early and improvident marriage,” against which moralists exclaim as one of the prolific causes of the distress of the poor? Almost any door might seem to offer welcome escape from such slavery as this. “I feel so much healthier since I got three square meals a day,” said a lodger in one of the Girls’ Homes. Two young sewing-girls came in seeking domestic service, so that they might get enough to eat. They had been only half-fed for some time, and starvation had driven them to the one door at which the pride of the American-born girl will not permit her to knock, though poverty be the price of her independence. 6



SEWING AND STARVING IN AN ELIZABETH STREET ATTIC.

The tenement and the competition of public institutions and farmers’ wives and daughters, have done the tyrant shirt to death, but they have not bettered the lot of the needle-women. The sweater of the East Side has appropriated the flannel shirt. He turns them out to-day at forty-five cents a dozen, paying his Jewish workers from twenty to thirty-five cents. One of these testified before the State Board of Arbitration, during the shirtmakers’ strike, that she worked eleven hours in the shop and four at home, and had never in the best of times made over six dollars a week. Another stated that she worked from 4 o’clock in the morning to 11 at night. These girls had to find their own thread and pay for their own machines out of their wages. The white shirt has gone to the public and private institutions that shelter large numbers of young girls, and to the country. There are not half as many shirtmakers in New York to-day as only a few years ago, and some of the largest firms have closed their city shops. The same is true of the manufacturers of underwear. One large Broadway firm has nearly all its work done by farmers’ girls in Maine, who think themselves well off if they can earn two or three dollars a week to pay for a Sunday silk, or the wedding outfit, little dreaming of the part they are playing in starving their city sisters. Literally, they sew “with double thread, a shroud as well as a shirt.” Their pin-money sets the rate of wages for thousands of poor sewing-girls in New York. The average earnings of the worker on underwear to-day do not exceed the three dollars which her competitor among the Eastern hills is willing to accept as the price of her play. The shirtmaker’s pay is better only because the very finest custom work is all there is left for her to do. 7
Calico wrappers at a dollar and a half a dozen—the very expert sewers able to make from eight to ten, the common run five or six—neckties at from 25 to 75 cents a dozen, with a dozen as a good day’s work, are specimens of women’s wages. And yet people persist in wondering at the poor quality of work done in the tenements! Italian cheap labor has come of late also to possess this poor field, with the sweater in its train. There is scarce a branch of woman’s work outside of the home in which wages, long since at low-water mark, have not fallen to the point of actual starvation. A case was brought to my notice recently by a woman doctor, whose heart as well as her life-work is with the poor, of a widow with two little children she found at work in an East Side attic, making paper-bags. Her father, she told the doctor, had made good wages at it; but she received only five cents for six hundred of the little three-cornered bags, and her fingers had to be very swift and handle the paste-brush very deftly to bring her earnings up to twenty-five and thirty cents a day. She paid four dollars a month for her room. The rest went to buy food for herself and the children. The physician’s purse, rather than her skill, had healing for their complaint. 8
I have aimed to set down a few dry facts merely. They carry their own comment. Back of the shop with its weary, grinding toil—the home in the tenement, of which it was said in a report of the State Labor Bureau: “Decency and womanly reserve cannot be maintained there—what wonder so many fall away from virtue?” Of the outlook, what? Last Christmas Eve my business took me to an obscure street among the West Side tenements. An old woman had just fallen on the doorstep, stricken with paralysis. The doctor said she would never again move her right hand or foot. The whole side was dead. By her bedside, in their cheerless room, sat the patient’s aged sister, a hopeless cripple, in dumb despair. Forty years ago the sisters had come, five in number then, with their mother, from the North of Ireland to make their home and earn a living among strangers. They were lace embroiderers and found work easily at good wages. All the rest had died as the years went by. The two remained and, firmly resolved to lead an honest life, worked on though wages fell and fell as age and toil stiffened their once nimble fingers and dimmed their sight. Then one of them dropped out, her hands palsied and her courage gone. Still the other toiled on, resting neither by night nor by day, that the sister might not want. Now that she too had been stricken, as she was going to the store for the work that was to keep them through the holidays, the battle was over at last. There was before them starvation, or the poor-house. And the proud spirits of the sisters, helpless now, quailed at the outlook. 9
These were old, with life behind them. For them nothing was left but to sit in the shadow and wait. But of the thousands, who are travelling the road they trod to the end, with the hot blood of youth in their veins, with the love of life and of the beautiful world to which not even sixty cents a day can shut their eyes—who is to blame if their feet find the paths of shame that are “always open to them?” The very paths that have effaced the saving “limit,” and to which it is declared to be “inevitable that they must in many instances resort.” Let the moralist answer. Let the wise economist apply his rule of supply and demand, and let the answer be heard in this city of a thousand charities where justice goes begging.

January 13, 20010

Essays on Emerson and Thoreau are due today.

January 12, 2010

We are in the third floor computer lab these next two days.

The essay assignment is as follows:

Discuss the advantages of conforming or not conforming to society's expectations, using the ideas as stated in Emerson's Self-Reliance and the excerpt from Thoreau's Walden. You may use the writer's essays and your notes.

Please make sure to use MLA format with correct pagination and a header.

This is due at the close of class on Wednesday.

Monday January 11, 2010

QUIZ TODAY ON MAGGIE, GIRL OF THE STREETS.

If you are absent, please listen to the following, noting how the lyrics tie into Thoreau's ideas.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cy6iwP9Ux3A

Oh, it's a mystery to me
We have a greed with which we have agreed
And you think you have to want more than you need
Until you have it all you won't be free

Society, you're a crazy breed
Hope you're not lonely without me...

When you want more than you have
You think you need...
And when you think more than you want
Your thoughts begin to bleed
I think I need to find a bigger place
Because when you have more than you think
You need more space

Society, you're a crazy breed
Hope you're not lonely without me...
Society, crazy indeed
Hope you're not lonely without me...

There's those thinking, more-or-less, less is more
But if less is more, how you keeping score?
Means for every point you make, your level drops
Kinda like you're starting from the top
You can't do that...

Society, you're a crazy breed
Hope you're not lonely without me...
Society, crazy indeed
Hope you're not lonely without me...

Society, have mercy on me
Hope you're not angry if I disagree...
Society, crazy indeed
Hope you're not lonely without me...



In class, we are reviewing the excerpt from Thoreau's Walden.

On Tuesday and Wednesday we are in the third floor lab, responding in essay format to Emerson's Self-Reliance and the excerpt from Walden. You should bring your documents and notes with you. The essay is due at the close of class on Wednesday.

Thursday January 7, 2010

Walden Pond from Pine Hill, by Herbert W. Gleason, circa 1900.



Reminder: tomorrow we are sharing the haikus. Please make sure you have yours posted on the site. There is no paper involved with this assignment.

You received a copy of Stephen Crane's Maggie Girl of the Street on Wednesday. This is homework to be read by Monday. Expect a quiz. Note particularly the literary elements: characters, setting, plot, tone, point of view, dialogue and theme.

On Tuesday and Wednesday of next week we will be in the 3rd floor computer lab. You will write an essay to be completed in class by Wednesday. The topic will be on Emerson and Thoreau.

We are reading Self-Reliance today. There is a copy in yesterday's blog. We will also begin an excerpt from Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond. You have a class handout, but there is a copy below.

If you are absent, please make sure you watch the short video on Thoreau as per the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhP7PKoRmmY

The following are the questions concerning Self-Reliance that we'll talk about in class. Being able to comfortably answer them will assure you understand the essay and help you in your own writing next week.
Reflections on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance
Make sure you can respond comfortably to the following questions.

1. According to the first paragraph, at what conviction does every person arrive?



2. According to the second paragraph, what must every person accept?



3.How does Emerson describe society?


4. What is Emerson’s comment about consistency? What does he mean?



5. What does he mean when he comments, “no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till”?



6. Why, according to Emerson, should people trust themselves?



7. How does Emerson believe people should be affected by the way others perceive them?


8. According to Emerson, in what way is it true that “to be great is to be misunderstood?”




Where I Lived, and What I Lived for from Walden by Henry David Thoreau




AT A CERTAIN season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each farmer's premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher price on it — took everything but a deed of it — took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk — cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on.(1) This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat? — better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well, there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, wood-lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow, perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
[2] My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several farms — the refusal was all I wanted — but I never got my fingers burned by actual possession. The nearest that I came to actual possession was when I bought the Hollowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife — every man has such a wife — changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for I had carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the farm for just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With respect to landscapes,
"I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute."(2)

[3] I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.
[4] The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were: its complete retirement, being, about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field; its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, nawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I should have; but above all, the recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the house-dog bark. I was in haste to buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made any more of his improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was ready to carry it on; like Atlas,(3) to take the world on my shoulders — I never heard what compensation he received for that — and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it; for I knew all the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted, if I could only afford to let it alone. But it turned out as I have said.
[5] All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large scale — I have always cultivated a garden — was, that I had had my seeds ready. Many think that seeds improve with age. I have no doubt that time discriminates between the good and the bad; and when at last I shall plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed. But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.
[6] Old Cato,(4) whose "De Re Rusticâ"(5) is my "Cultivator,"(6) says — and the only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage — "When you think of getting a farm turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go round it once. The oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is good." I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last.



[7 As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.
[8] When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on Independence Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough, weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night. The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited a year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus (7) is but the outside of the earth everywhere.
[16] I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."(17)
[17] Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy,(18) made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan (19) simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers,(20) and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. [18]
[23] Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.


Notes
1. E.B. White wrote of this sentence: "A copy-desk man would get a double hernia trying to clean up that sentence for the management, but the sentence needs no fixing, for it perfectly captures the meaning of the writer and the quality of the ramble."
2. William Cowper (1731-1800) English poet, hymnist, The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk (italics by Thoreau, who was a surveyor) - back
3. in Greek mythology Atlas supported the heavens on his shoulders -
4. Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 B.C.) Roman agricultural author -back
5. De Re Rustica (Agriculture), by Roman authors Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 BC) and Marcus Terentius Varro (116 BC-27 BC) –
6. publications of Thoreau's time, such as the Boston Cultivator or the New England Cultivator - back
7. in Greek mythology, home of the gods -
8. 5th century Hindu epic poem -
9. another name for the Hindu god Krishna -
10. Cassiopeia's Chair, Pleiades, and Hyades are constellations, Aldebaran and Altair are stars - back
11. anonymous, published 1610 - back
12. in Roman mythology, the goddess of dawn - back
13. another name for Confucius - back
14. Iliad and Odyssey, attributed to Homer, 8th cent. B.C. Greek epic poet - back
15. Brahmin religious books - back
16. statue in ancient Egypt said to produce music at dawn - back
17. Westminster Catechism - back
18. group of European states, 1815-1866 - back
19. like the Spartans of ancient Greece, disciplined, austere - back
20. wooden railroad ties that support the rails - back
21. chorea, a nervous disorder characterized by involuntary movements - back
22. river in Arkansas and Louisiana - back

Wednesday January 6, 2010

We'll begin class by finishing up the last three presentations for each class on Black Boy, after which we'll begin reading an excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self Reliance. Emerson was an essayist, a poet, an orator and, more than anything else a philosopher. During the 1830's and 1840's, Emerson and a small group of intellectuals gathered regularly to discuss philosophy, religion and literature. This group, which came to be known as the Transcendalist Club, developed a philosophical system that stressed intuition, individuality and self-reliance. I hope at this point you are making the connection with Romanticism, for really this is a spirtitul off shoot.




The following is the material we are covering in class. Please familarize yourself with the writing, if you are absent.

Excerpt from Self-Reliance 1841

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on the plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. It is not without pre-established harmony, this sculpture in the memory. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. Bravely let him speak the utmost syllable of his confession. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. It needs a divine man to exhibit anything divine. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance, which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be noble clay under the Almighty effort let us advance on Chaos and the dark…
Society everywhere is in a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Whoso would be a man, must be a non-conformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world…
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Out upon your guarded lips! Sew them up with pockthread, do. Else if you would be a man speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be misunderstood! Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Tuesday January 5


In class work: as groups you are presenting the five questions pertaining to Wright's Black Boy with three specific textual examples as per the assignment from December 15 that was due yesterday and unfortunately many folks chose to ignore. They are now a test grade of zero.

Today's work will go in as a class participation grade.

Thank you for those who have already posted their haikus. Remember to use the 5-7-5 syllabic format in three lines.

Monday January 4, 2010

RICHARD WRIGHT
Please take a look as well at January 1

Black Boy responses due today.....we're moving on.

In class we are looking at the Wright's Haikus. See selection below, if you are absent.

The Haiku format is a form of poetic expression based
on Zen Buddhism. This was developed from the ancient
Chinese models from the 15th and 16th centuries. Haiku
are normally restricted to three lines with a maximum of
17 syllables in a 5-7-5 syllabic pattern.

Japanese artists, under the influence of Zen philosophy,
developed a form with no contrived rhymes, no metrical shackles
and no title. They tended to use few words as possible to express
their feelings, and the resultant precise focus (being closer to
the complete silence of the cosmic consciousness) intensifies insight
into the heart of the experience. As a distinguished Zen historian says,
“When a feeling reaches its highest pitch, even seventeen syllables may be too many.”

Assignent due by Friday- by class time- on the blog. You are to write your own haiku, using proper format and feeling. Make sure you include your name for credit. We'll share these. In order to get credit, you must use the blog. There is to be no paper turned in!

Wright's Haikus as per class handout.


Haiku’s by Richard Wright

1
I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.


3
Keep straight down this block,
Then turn right where you will find
A peach tree blooming.


7
Make up you mind, Snail!
You are half inside your house,
And halfway out!


11
You moths must leave now;
I am turning out the light
And going to sleep.


16
All right, You Sparrows;
The sun has set and you can now
Stop your chattering!


18
Sparrow's excrement
Becomes quickly powdery
On sizzling pavements.


20
The dog's violent sneeze
Fails to rouse a single fly
On his mangy back.


21
On winter mornings
The candle shows faint markings
Of the teeth of rats.

22
With a twitching nose
A dog reads a telegram
On a wet tree trunk.


24
The webs of spiders
Sticking to my sweaty face
In the dusty woods.


30
A bloody knife blade
Is being licked by a cat
At hog-killing time.


31
In the falling snow
A laughing boy holds out his palms
Until they are white.


50
One magnolia
Landed upon another
In the dew-wet grass.


51
As the sun goes down,
a green melon splits open
And juice trickles out.


53
A sparrow's feather
On a barb of rusty wire
In the sizzling heat.


57
Sleety rain at night
Seasoning swelling turnips
With a tangy taste.

58
Heaps of black cherries
Glittering with drops of rain
In the evening sun.

67
The day is so long
That even noisy sparrows
Fall strangely silent.


75
Spring begins shyly
With one hairpin of green grass
In a flower pot.


78
An apple blossom
Trembling on a sunlit branch
From the weight of bees.


93
Leaving its nest,
The sparrow sinks a second,
Then opens its wings.


95
Like a fishhook,
The sunflower's long shadow
Hovers in the lake.


97
In the setting sun,
Each tree bud is clinging fast
To drying raindrops.


101
Quickly vanishing,
The first drops of summer rain
On an old wood door.
117
The crow flew so fast
That he left his lonely caw
Behind in the fields.


120
Crying and crying,
Melodious strings of geese
Passing a graveyard.


134
One autumn evening
A stranger enters a village
And passes on through.


142
A wounded sparrow
Sinks in clear cold lake water,
Its eyes still open.


144
Amidst the flowers
A China clock is ticking
In the dead man's room.


171
With indignation
A little girl spanks her doll, –
The sound of spring rain.


172
The scarecrow's old hat
Was flung by the winter wind
Into a graveyard.


175
Coming from the woods,
A bull has a lilac sprig
Dangling from a horn.

January 1 2010

How many of us will miswrite the date these next couple weeks, but time is relative- only until there are assignments looming. As a reminder, everyone is to turn in their responses to Black Boy this Monday, the exception being those who read the first section of The Fountainhead. If you have forgotten th the questions, look back on the blog for December 15. We are spending only Monday on this material. Midterms are looming, and the term is extremely short. I am in the midst of finishing your Thanatopsis rewrites. Well done!

The French songwriter Jacques Brel wrote the following. It is lovely message I wish to share with you all as a nod to the New Year.

Our Deepest Fear.......

Je vous souhaite des rêves à n'en plus finir
Et l'envie furieuse d'en réaliser quelques uns.
Je vous souhaite d'aimer ce qu'il faut aimer
Et d'oublier ce qu'il faut oublier.
Je vous souhaite des passions. Je vous souhaite des silences.
Je vous souhaite des chants d'oiseaux au réveil
Et des rires d'enfants.
Je vous souhaite de résister à l'enlisement, à l'indifference, aux vertus négatives de notre époque.
Je vous souhaite surtout d'être vous!


Our Deepest Fear.......(English translation)
My wish for you is that you have a neverending series of dreams and a furious desire to realize a few of them.
My wish for you is that you love what must be loved and forget what must be forgotten.
I wish you passions. I wish you silences.
My wish for you is that you hear the songs of birds and the laughter of children at your awaking.
My wish for you is that you resist the downtroddenness, the indifference, the negative virtues of our era. My wish for you especially is that you be YOU!