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Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Week of 3/16-3/18 Finish Stories
Quiz---Animal Dreams,FINISH READING FOR MONDAY!!!!!!
Class periods will be used for finishing In the Lake of the Woods stories...
END OF MARKING PERIOD
Class periods will be used for finishing In the Lake of the Woods stories...
END OF MARKING PERIOD
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Week of 3/9-3/13 Animal Dreams, Stories
Continue to work on short stories.
Read to page 165 Animal Dreams for Monday.
Workshop Zoe Johnson's story.
Read to page 165 Animal Dreams for Monday.
Workshop Zoe Johnson's story.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Quotes from Animal Dreams
Quotations from Animal Dreams
by Barbara Kingsolver, 1990
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (SOUND FAMILIAR!!!!!)
There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Terms like that, "Humane Society," are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Codi: "So you think we all just have animal dreams. We can't think of anything to dream except our ordinary lives."
Loyd: "Only if you have an ordinary life. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves? ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Codi: "Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop?
Loyd: "No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway."
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams, referring to cliff dwellings
Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Loyd: "It has to do with keeping things in balance. It's like the spirits have made a deal with us. We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests."
Codi: "Like a note you'd send somebody after you'd stayed in their house?"
Loyd: "Exactly like that. 'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one.'"
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
The truth needs so little rehearsal. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
by Barbara Kingsolver, 1990
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (SOUND FAMILIAR!!!!!)
There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Terms like that, "Humane Society," are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Codi: "So you think we all just have animal dreams. We can't think of anything to dream except our ordinary lives."
Loyd: "Only if you have an ordinary life. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves? ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Codi: "Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop?
Loyd: "No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway."
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams, referring to cliff dwellings
Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Loyd: "It has to do with keeping things in balance. It's like the spirits have made a deal with us. We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests."
Codi: "Like a note you'd send somebody after you'd stayed in their house?"
Loyd: "Exactly like that. 'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one.'"
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
The truth needs so little rehearsal. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Critical Praise for Animal Dreams
When first published in 1990, Animal Dreams received a highly positive response from reviewers. Many admired the subtle, interlocking complexities of plot and theme, the vividly described southwestern setting, the satisfying development of character, and Kingsolver's compassion and humor. Lisa See, in Publishers Weekly, said that Kingsolver had "taken all of her previous themes—Native Americans, U.S. involvement in Nicaragua, environmental issues, parental relationships, women's taking charge of their own lives—tossed them into a literary pot and created a perfectly constructed novel."
Paul Gray, in Time, described the novel as "an entertaining distillation of eco-feminist materials." Although he regarded Codi as too "preachy" at times, he also commented that "There is enough fun in this novel, though, to balance its rather hectoring tone."
High praise came from Carolyn Cooke in the Nation:
Animal Dreams ... is dense and vivid, and makes ever tighter circles around the question of what it means to be alive, how to live rightly and sweetly even as we feel the confining boundaries of the skin, the closing walls of past and present, with memory like a badly wired lamp, spitting sparks and shorting out.
Cooke especially admired the portrait of Doc Homer, in which "Kingsolver brilliantly delineates the quality of a dissolving but wholly practical mind." Although Cooke suggested that the paradisal symbolism of Grace was "heavy-handed," she added that Kingsolver "redeems herself with her clear and original voice, her smart, plucky women, her eye for the nuances of personality and the depth of her social and moral concerns. Kingsolver can help you learn how to live."
For Jane Smiley, in the New York Times Book Review, Kingsolver "demonstrates a special gift for the vivid evocation of landscape and of her characters' state of mind." Smiley did comment, however, that Kingsolver was only partially successful in shaping all the issues she covered into a "larger vision." In choosing to concentrate on exploring Codi's despair, rather than the more dramatic plots, such as Hallie's adventures in Nicaragua and the campaign against the Black Mountain mining company,
Ms. Kingsolver . . . frequently undermines the suspense and the weight of her book. First-person narration can be tricky, and Ms. Kingsolver falls into its trap: Codi comes across too often as a whiner, observant of others but invariably more concerned with her own state of mind.
Rosellen Brown in the Massachusetts Review admired the narrative voice of Codi ("amused and amusing, capable of intricate and engaging detail") and declared that Animal Dreams was "a rich book, generous in its perceptions and judgments," although she faulted Kingsolver's "tendency to idealize her characters," noticeable especially in Loyd Peregrina and other Native American or Hispanic characters. No such caveats were offered by the reviewer for the Antioch Review, who wrote that "Kingsolver has a wonderful way of blending historical facts and myths (Indian lore) with present-day concerns and insights into how children react to the world around them."
Animal Dreams won a PEN fiction prize and the Edward Abbey Ecofiction Award in 1991. Since then, it has been the subject of two articles in scholarly journals that explore Kingsolver's sense of place and community and her environmental themes. And in 1999, Mary Jean DeMarr explored the themes and characters of the novel, and gave it a brief feminist reading, in her book, Barbara Kingsolver: A Critical Companion.
In its range of concerns, from the need to engage in political issues and to protect the environment, to the healing value of family and community, Animal Dreams is typical of the themes that are important to Kingsolver as a writer. The novel continues to win new readers and critical respect, as Kingsolver's reputation as one of America's most significant contemporary writers continues to grow.
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Paul Gray, in Time, described the novel as "an entertaining distillation of eco-feminist materials." Although he regarded Codi as too "preachy" at times, he also commented that "There is enough fun in this novel, though, to balance its rather hectoring tone."
High praise came from Carolyn Cooke in the Nation:
Animal Dreams ... is dense and vivid, and makes ever tighter circles around the question of what it means to be alive, how to live rightly and sweetly even as we feel the confining boundaries of the skin, the closing walls of past and present, with memory like a badly wired lamp, spitting sparks and shorting out.
Cooke especially admired the portrait of Doc Homer, in which "Kingsolver brilliantly delineates the quality of a dissolving but wholly practical mind." Although Cooke suggested that the paradisal symbolism of Grace was "heavy-handed," she added that Kingsolver "redeems herself with her clear and original voice, her smart, plucky women, her eye for the nuances of personality and the depth of her social and moral concerns. Kingsolver can help you learn how to live."
For Jane Smiley, in the New York Times Book Review, Kingsolver "demonstrates a special gift for the vivid evocation of landscape and of her characters' state of mind." Smiley did comment, however, that Kingsolver was only partially successful in shaping all the issues she covered into a "larger vision." In choosing to concentrate on exploring Codi's despair, rather than the more dramatic plots, such as Hallie's adventures in Nicaragua and the campaign against the Black Mountain mining company,
Ms. Kingsolver . . . frequently undermines the suspense and the weight of her book. First-person narration can be tricky, and Ms. Kingsolver falls into its trap: Codi comes across too often as a whiner, observant of others but invariably more concerned with her own state of mind.
Rosellen Brown in the Massachusetts Review admired the narrative voice of Codi ("amused and amusing, capable of intricate and engaging detail") and declared that Animal Dreams was "a rich book, generous in its perceptions and judgments," although she faulted Kingsolver's "tendency to idealize her characters," noticeable especially in Loyd Peregrina and other Native American or Hispanic characters. No such caveats were offered by the reviewer for the Antioch Review, who wrote that "Kingsolver has a wonderful way of blending historical facts and myths (Indian lore) with present-day concerns and insights into how children react to the world around them."
Animal Dreams won a PEN fiction prize and the Edward Abbey Ecofiction Award in 1991. Since then, it has been the subject of two articles in scholarly journals that explore Kingsolver's sense of place and community and her environmental themes. And in 1999, Mary Jean DeMarr explored the themes and characters of the novel, and gave it a brief feminist reading, in her book, Barbara Kingsolver: A Critical Companion.
In its range of concerns, from the need to engage in political issues and to protect the environment, to the healing value of family and community, Animal Dreams is typical of the themes that are important to Kingsolver as a writer. The novel continues to win new readers and critical respect, as Kingsolver's reputation as one of America's most significant contemporary writers continues to grow.
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Animal Dreams Week of 3/2
For Wednesday, please read to Ch. 5
continue to work on your Lake of the woods story.
Workshop Keonia's short story!!!!
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Tuesday 2/24 Lake of the Woods quiz
Handout questions about In the Lake of the Woods.
View powerpoints.
Work on essay (Question 8 or 9) or short story. Essay due on Thursday.
View powerpoints.
Work on essay (Question 8 or 9) or short story. Essay due on Thursday.
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