Assignments for Oct 6

For your Scribbler assignment, write about your Writing Space. 300 words (note this is longer than your usual Scribbler pieces).

You might find useful these Guardian profiles of Writers' Rooms.

For your other Assignment, please write 800 words or so on a personal encounter with a work of art. For this piece, you need to visit a museum and look at an original artwork (no reproductions) and then write a personal reaction to it. Your essay could be emotional, intellectual or philosophical. Just make it personal. And please include some background on the work beyond its title. Do a little research onthe artist, genre, the story of the work itself. Just a short paragraph explaining the work's provenance.

You might find interesting the Art Blog by Bob. The posts here are all first rate. And he has lots of useful art links, as well.

pendigestatery interludicule

For your Scribbler assignment, please come up with word histories for five of Blackadder's words missing from Johnson's Dictionary. Pick any five of these eight words/phrases:

contrafribblarities

anus-peptic

phrasmotic

compunctious

pericombobulation

interphrastically

pendigestatery interludicule

velocitous extramuralisation

Be as detailed as the examples of word histories that I read in class. Also, have fun with it.

Some more examples of real word histories:

World Wide Words' Weird Words

Fun with Words

or try looking looking up some books on Etymology, Word Origins or Word Histories in the library. The Connely Library has books by Charles Earle Funk and Wilfred Funk and Michael Quinion among many others.

book review links

For Monday night, could you also read this piece by Steve Wasserman in the Columbia Journalism Review. It's a long piece and you don't have to read the entire thing, but read the beginning, maybe skim the middle and read the ending. We'll talk about it on Monday night. You don't have to bring a print a copy of it, but do jot down some notes from it.

And for your edification:

Here is the Steve Weinberg guide to teaching book reviewing and here are John Updike's rules for reviewing that I read to you in class.

You may also find useful some of the links in the left column (just scroll down) of Critical Mass, the NBCC blog, including

George Orwell on book reviews.

On reviewers' notes.

this Q&A with my former editor at the Inq, Frank Wilson, opens by mentioning Heaney's poem "Digging."

this week's assignments

Hope you are all finished or have finished your books for review. By Sunday at noon, please email to me:

1) the opening paragraph of your review and
2) your review notes (a page or two of notes about what you will include in your review)

Don't be late with this. I need to prepare which ones we're going to use for class on Monday night. And I consider this AN ASSIGNMENT, meaning if you don't have these things to me by Sunday, I'll think you'll have lost your mind and you could fail the course. You are not allowed to miss assignments.

Please bring paper copies of this assignment to class, as well.

Also, your Scribbler assignment is to write about the Seamus Heaney poem, "Digging." A personal reaction, an analysis, anything you'd like. 200-250 words.

Assignments due Sept 15

For Monday night, please complete

Assignment #2 The Philly Columnist. Write a piece as if you were a columnist for a Philadelphia newspaper. Approx 900 words.

Scribbler piece: 200-250 word reaction to the Samuel Johnson quotation, "Invent first, and then embellish."

Read the book reviews linked in the previous blog post. Print them out, bring them to class and be prepared to talk about them. How are they put together?

You should also try to finish the book you are going to review, as that will be the next piece you write.

Dancing ON the Stars

For those of you who are Eagles fans, meet my new hero, Charlie Croasdale.

Scribbler piece

Your 200-250 word Scribbler piece for next week is a reaction to, or rumination on this quotation from Samuel Johnson:

"Invent first, and then embellish."

The quotation in context from Boswell's Life of Johnson:

"[I]n the labour of composition, do not burthen your mind with too much at once; do not exact from yourself at one effort of excogitation, propriety of thought and elegance of expression. Invent first, and then embellish. The production of something, where nothing was before, is an act of greater energy than the expansion or decoration of the thing produced. Set down diligently your thoughts as they rise, in the first words that occur; and, when you have matter, you will easily give it form: nor, perhaps, will this method be always necessary; for by habit, your thoughts and diction will flow together."

Book reviews

Here are a couple book reviews to print, read and prepare to discuss next week. Both are my own (I haven't found any from the papers this week that I like):

http://bibliothecary.squarespace.com/my-book-reviews/2008/4/29/varney-the-vampire-by-james-malcolm-rymer.html?printerFriendly=true

http://bibliothecary.squarespace.com/my-book-reviews/2008/2/24/sheppard-lee-by-robert-montgomery-bird.html?printerFriendly=true

I'll keep looking for a couple more, so keep your eyes peeled to the blog for another update.

Beware Google Chrome

Ed Champion, a great book critic and litblogger, has revealed that using the new Google browser, Chrome, may be hazardous to your intellectual property:

So Google has released a new browser called Chrome. But I’ll never use it. And it’s because Chrome’s EULA wishes to take anything that I type into my browser window (which would include, ahem, this blog entry, any email I access through the Web, and just about anything else involving the Internet) and give it to Google for them to use for any purpose

Read Ed's entire post here.