Oh, the places you can go

If you could visit any of the setting locations from any of the books, where would you go?  Why?

It's easier to discuss stuff when you don't have to look at people...

Now that you are done reading (I'm sure of it), which of the characters in the three books would you most want to meet?  Be friends with?  Would any of them go to Saul and like it?  Can you imagine any of them in your current life?

Do you see yourself in any of these characters?

Discuss.

Questions from your colleagues

Here are some questions about All the Pretty Horses which I think you all can discuss with each other:

1.  What's up with the untranslated Spanish?  What effect is McCarthy going for?
2.  Ditto with the lack of quotation marks--besides generating reader confusion, what purpose is served by not being able to keep track of who's speaking? 
3.  Why do Rawlins and John get locked up?  What is the sequence of events that lead up to their incarceration?
4.  What BIG IDEAS is McCarthy working with in this novel?  What truth about life or how the world works can you glean from the book?  What do you predict for John's future?

(REMEMBER TO DO THE QUESTIONS FOR EACH BOOK AS YOU GO!!!)

All the Pretty Horses: What the heck is going on in the first 7 pages?

What repeats?  Who's "he," and why is there no antecedent to that pronoun?  Doesn't that break a grammatical rule right off the bat?  And where's the punctuation in that big paragraph on p. 5?  Where and when does this take place and how do you know?

Welcome, AP Lit class of 2012-13!

You got the email, you saw the questions, you cursed me for ruining a perfectly lovely first day of summer vacation.  Remember, you are the few, the proud, the going-to-be-reading-all-summer.  There is really no finer activity.

Jabberwocky Redux

What follows are student-created poems which began as "nonsense poems" written using at least eight words which the students did not know. After the students discovered the real meanings of the words they had previously used solely for their sound and/or associative values, they had to then reconstruct a poem using words related to the original terms' actual meanings, and within the universe of their creations, these poems needed to make sense.

Here's my example, and following in the comments, their creations.

Poem one:

orgeat kerfs
dibble in
samisen tondo,
plagal the mesic
illuviation, and
berk in agamic
euphorbia.


Poem two (the revision based on actual word meanings)

Paint this:
on a banjo's
circular face,
a syrup of sweet
almond
seeking slits and
holes,
infusing the pitch,
suspended
in moist foolishness,
in the midst of asexual shrubs.

Betrayal

Who's to blame for the destruction of Thornfield? Who is the betrayer? Who is the betrayed? Are those roles static or shifting in each novel? Discuss.