Politics & the English Language

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2012-02-10T13:13:00.000-08:00

The Things They Carried

2012-02-10T08:20:00.000-08:00

The Most Dangerous Game

2012-02-10T07:49:00.000-08:00

The Most Dangerous Game

Written By: Richard Connell

Background on the author:

Born on October 17th, 1893, Connell grew up in New York state. He attended Georgetown College for one year, leaving to become his father's secretary. After his father's death in 1912, Connell returned to school at Harvard, graduating in 1915 as the editor of both Harvard Lampoon and The Crimson. "The Dangerous Game," written in 1924, was the second of twenty-two short stories and screen stories written by Connell. Connell is also credited to thirteen screenplays and screen writes along with four novels.

Portion of story used:

--"It came to me as an inspiration what I must do," the general went on.

"And that was?"

The general smiled the quiet smile of one who has faced an obstacle and surmounted it with success. "I had to invent a new animal to hunt," he said.

"A new animal? You're joking." "Not at all," said the general. "I never joke about hunting. I needed a new animal. I found one. So I bought this island built this house, and here I do my hunting. The island is perfect for my purposes--there are jungles with a maze of traits in them, hills, swamps--"

"But the animal, General Zaroff?"

"Oh," said the general, "it supplies me with the most exciting hunting in the world. No other hunting compares with it for an instant. Every day I hunt, and I never grow bored now, for I have a quarry with which I can match my wits."

Rainsford's bewilderment showed in his face.

"I wanted the ideal animal to hunt," explained the general. "So I said, `What are the attributes of an ideal quarry?' And the answer was, of course, `It must have courage, cunning, and, above all, it must be able to reason."'

"But no animal can reason," objected Rainsford.

"My dear fellow," said the general, "there is one that can."

"But you can't mean--" gasped Rainsford.

"And why not?"

"I can't believe you are serious, General Zaroff. This is a grisly joke."

"Why should I not be serious? I am speaking of hunting."

"Hunting? Great Guns, General Zaroff, what you speak of is murder."

The general laughed with entire good nature. He regarded Rainsford quizzically. "I refuse to believe that so modern and civilized a young man as you seem to be harbors romantic ideas about the value of human life. Surely your experiences in the war--"

"Did not make me condone cold-blooded murder," finished Rainsford stiffly.

Laughter shook the general. "How extraordinarily droll you are!" he said. "One does not expect nowadays to find a young man of the educated class, even in America, with such a naive, and, if I may say so, mid-Victorian point of view. It's like finding a snuffbox in a limousine. Ah, well, doubtless you had Puritan ancestors. So many Americans appear to have had. I'll wager you'll forget your notions when you go hunting with me. You've a genuine new thrill in store for you, Mr. Rainsford."

"Thank you, I'm a hunter, not a murderer."

......

The job was finished at last, and he threw himself down behind a fallen log a hundred feet away. He did not have to wait long. The cat was coming again to play with the mouse.

Following the trail with the sureness of a bloodhound came General Zaroff. Nothing escaped those searching black eyes, no crushed blade of grass, no bent twig, no mark, no matter how faint, in the moss. So intent was the Cossack on his stalking that he was upon the thing Rainsford had made before he saw it. His foot touched the protruding bough that was the trigger. Even as he touched it, the general sensed his danger and leaped back with the agility of an ape. But he was not quite quick enough; the dead tree, delicately adjusted to rest on the cut living one, crashed down and struck the general a glancing blow on the shoulder as it fell; but for his alertness, he must have been smashed beneath it. He staggered, but he did not fall; nor did he drop his revolver. He stood there, rubbing his injured shoulder, and Rainsford, with fear again gripping his heart, heard the general's mocking laugh ring through the jungle.--

Soundtrack:
"Monster"- Kanye West

"For Real"- Okkervil River

"Woods"- Bon Iver

Brownies

2012-02-09T17:57:00.000-08:00

From ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2003). Edited by Stephen Tate. Narrated by Paul Shaunessy. Dialogue spoken by Amanda Schlegel. Soundtrack selected by Chrissy Durkin and Amanda Schlegel.

"By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions a blend of ice cream:strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.

...

But the rest of the girls didn't stop; they only laughed louder. It was the word "Caucasian" that got them all going. One day at school, about a month before the Brownie camping trip, Arnetta turned to a boy wearing impossibly high-ankled floodwater jeans and said, "What are you? Caucasian?"" The word took off from there, and soon everything was Caucasian. If you ate too fast you ate like a Caucasian, if you ate too slow you ate like a Caucasian. The biggest feat anyone at Woodrow Wilson could do was to jump off the swing in midair, at the highest point in its arc, and if you fell (as I had, more than once) instead of landing on your feet, knees bent Olympic gymnast-style, Arnetta and Octavia were prepared to comment. They'd look at each other with the silence of passengers who'd narrowly escaped an accident, then nod their heads, whispering with solemn horror, "Caucasian."

Even the only white kid in our school, Dennis, got in on the Caucasian act. That time when Martez stuck a pencil in the socket, Dennis had pointed and yelled, "That was so Caucasian!""

Soundtrack:

"Mushaboom" - Feist

"Go Outside" - Cults

"Never Miss A Beat" - Kaiser Chiefs

"Electric Avenue" -Eddy Grant

"Young Folks" - Peter Bjorn and John

The School (Dean)

2012-02-09T13:24:00.000-08:00

From Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories (1981). Read by Jeremy Dean and Orange Class.

Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that ... that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems ... and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.

It wouldn’t have been so bad except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes – well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that ... you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too disturbed.

With the herb gardens it was probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater. The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them probably ... you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren’t looking. Or maybe ... well, I don’t like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died, and the salamander ... well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic bags.

Of course we expected the tropical fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they’re belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it.

We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy...

...One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of –

I said, yes, maybe.

They said, we don’t like it.

I said, that’s sound.

They said, it’s a bloody shame!

I said, it is.

They said, will you make love now with Helen (our teaching assistant) so that we can see how it is done? We know you like Helen.

I do like Helen but I said that I would not.

We’ve heard so much about it, they said, but we’ve never seen it.

I said I would be fired and that it was never, or almost never, done as a demonstration. Helen looked out the window.

They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.

I said that they shouldn’t be frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value everywhere. Helen came and embraced me. I kissed her a few times on the brow. We held each other. The children were excited. Then there was a knock on the door, I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly.

Soundtrack:

Bob Marley and The Wailers, "You Can't Blame the Youth"

Paul Simon, "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard"

The Pixies, "Weird At My School"

The Jackson Five, "ABC"

Countdown Orchestra, "In the Mood For Love"

The White Stripes, "We're Going to Be Friends'

The Tell-Tale Heart- Edgar Allan Poe

2012-02-09T12:20:00.000-08:00

Edgar Allan Poe: 1809-1849

From Edgar Allan Poe's In the Shadow of the Master (1843). Narrated by Caroline Sandall and Benjamin Joseph. Dialog spoken by Gretchen Diede. Technical support and functioning worked on by Caroline Sandall, Benjamin Joseph, Gretchen Diede, and Laura Polanco.

The Tell-Tale Heart

TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story.

It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain, but, once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture -- a pale blue eye with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me my blood ran cold, and so by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever...

Just at twelve, I looked upon him while he slept...

It was the beating of the old man's heart...

he was stone, stone dead...

The noise continually increased...

louder...

(must listen to audio to find out what happens next)

Soundtrack:

1. Phantom of the Opera Overture

2. Revenge- Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse (Feat. The Flaming Lips)

3. Haunted- Taylor Swift

4. Lovers Eye- Mumford and Sons

5. Heartbeat- Effect found on youtube

6. The Warewolf (Dubstep Mix)- Figure

The Lottery

2012-02-09T12:08:00.001-08:00

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson
(Read by Adrienne Jackson, Alexa Haverlah, and Brooke Becker)

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th. But in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.
The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play, and their talk was still of the classroom and the teacher, of books and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix-- the villagers pronounced this name "Dellacroy"--eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys. The girls stood aside, talking among themselves, looking over their shoulders at the boys, and the very small children rolled in the dust or clung to the hands of their older brothers or sisters.
Soon the men began to gather, surveying their own children, speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes. They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed. The women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk. They greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip as they went to join their husbands. Soon the women, standing by their husbands, began to call to their children, and the children came reluctantly, having to be called four or five times. Bobby Martin ducked under his mother's grasping hand and ran, laughing, back to the pile of stones. His father spoke up sharply, and Bobby came quickly and took his place between his father and his oldest brother.
The Lottery was conducted...

"Golden Glass"

2012-02-09T12:07:00.000-08:00

Podcast performance by Hailey Garber, Aly Blumhagen, and Harrison Garber

Alma Luz Villanueva is an American poet who was born in Lompoc, California on October 4, 1944. Villanueva’s writing reflects of Chicano, Mexican American, Native American, and Yaqui ethnicities. She is known for her personal tone and unifying line of thought, illustrated through her poems, narratives, and plays. Villanueva writes to expose her readers to her belief of the nature of women, contrasting the alienated modern world based on masculine principles. This feministic perspective was revolutionary for Chicano literature. However, Villanueva did not grow up with this fame, she wrote to her readers saying, “Although I deal with suffering, injustice, and human weakness, my final impression is always that of the joy of life and of confidence in a larger, almost scared, scheme of things”. Growing up, Villanueva never knew her German father and was solely raised by her Mexican mother and grandfather. Villanueva was inspired by her grandfather, due to his college degree in philosophy, works of poetry, and job editing the Hermosillo, a Mexico newspaper. In addition, Villanueva was exposed to writing at any early age because her mother worked for creative writing programs at many universities in California, including the University of California Santa Cruz, Cabrillo College, Stanford University, and numerous others. Villanueva’s work includes: Soft Chaos, Luna’s California Poppies, Vida Poetry, Desire, Weeping Woman: La Llorona and Other Stories, Naked Ladies, Planet with Mother, May I?, The Ultraviolet Sky, Life Span, and Blood Root. Many of these books received awards, such as, the American Book Award for her novel The Ultraviolet Sky in 1989, PEN Oakland Fiction Award for the novel Naked Ladies in 1994, the Latin American Book Award for her poem “word up”, and the Chicano/Latino Prize in 1976 and 1977.

The Masque of the Red Death

2012-02-09T06:34:00.001-08:00

From The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe (1842).

Podcast performed by Jessica Harmon

THE “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour...

...And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darknes and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Soundtrack:

Sergei Prokofiev, "Suite No. 1 From Romeo & Juliet"

Sergei Prokofiev, "Suite No. 2 From Romeo & Juliet"

Hills Like White Elephants

2012-02-07T08:55:00.001-08:00

The hills across the valley of the Ebrol were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.
"What should we drink?" the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.
"It's pretty hot," the man said. "Let's drink beer."
"Dos cervezas," the man said into the curtain.
"Big ones?" a woman asked from the doorway.
"Yes. Two big ones."
The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glasses on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

"They look like white elephants," she said.

"I've never seen one," the man drank his beer. "No, you wouldn't have."

"I might have," the man said. 'just because you say I wouldn't have doesn't prove anything."
The girl looked at the bead curtain. "They've painted something on it," she said." What does it say?"
"Anis del Toro. It's a drink."
"Could we try it?"
The man called "Listen" through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.
"Four reales."
"We want two Anis del Toro."
"With water? "
"Do you want it with water?"
"I don't know," the girl said. "Is it good with water?"
"It's all right."
"You want them with water?" asked the woman.
"Yes, with water."
"It tastes like licorice," the girl said and put the glass down.
"That's the way with everything."
"Yes," said the girl. "Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe."
"Oh, cut it out."
"You started it," the girl said. "I was being amused. I was having a fine time."
"Well, let's try and have a fine time."
"All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn't that bright?"
"That was bright."
"I wanted to try this new drink. That's all we do, isn't it--look at things and try new drinks?"
"I guess so."
The girl looked across at the hills.
"They're lovely hills," she said. "They don't really look like white elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees."
"Should we have another drink?"
"All right."
The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.
"The beer's nice and cool," the man said.
"It's lovely," the girl said.
"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said. "It's not really an operation at all."
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in."
The girl did not say anything.
"I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural."
"Then what will we do afterward?"
"We'll be fine afterward. Just like we were before."
"What makes you think so?"
"That's the only thing that bothers us. It's the only thing that's made us unhappy."
The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads.

......

Music:

When My Time Comes - Dawes

40 Day Dream - Edward Sharp and Magnetic Zeros

Up Soundtrack

Light is Like Water

2012-02-01T13:06:00.002-08:00

From Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1992).

Podcast performed by Jeremy Dean, Patrick O'Hare, Brooke Becker, Ta'Ron Middleton, and Gray Randolph. (Click post title or subscribe to our podcast to listen!)

At Christmas, the boys once again asked for a rowing boat.

'All right,' said their father, 'we'll buy it when we get back to Cartagena.'

Toto, who was nine years old, and Joel, who was seven, were more determined than their parents thought.

'No,' they said in chorus. 'We need it here and now.'

'But,' said their mother, 'the only navigable water here is what comes out of the shower.'

She and her husband were right. Their house in Cartagena de Indias had a terrace with a dock on the bay, and a shed that could hold two large yachts. Here in Madrid, on the other hand, they were crowded into a fifth-floor apartment at 47 Paseo de la Castellana. But in the end neither of them could refuse, because they had promised the children a boat, complete with sextant and compass, if they won the third-year prize in primary school, and they had. So their father bought everything and said nothing to his wife, who was more reluctant to pay gambling debts than he was. It was a beautiful aluminium boat with a gold stripe at the waterline...

...The next Wednesday, while the parents were watching The Battle of Algiers, people walking along the Paseo de la Castellana saw a cascade of light falling from an old building hidden among the trees. It spilled over the balconies, poured in torrents down the facade, and rushed along the great avenue in a golden flood that lit the city all the way to the Guadarrama.

Called to deal with the emergency, firemen forced open the door on the fifth floor and found the apartment brimming with light all the way to the ceiling. The sofa and armchairs covered in leopard-skin were floating at different levels in the living-room, among the bottles from the bar and the grand piano with its Manila shawl fluttering half submerged like a golden manta ray. Household objects, in the fullness of their poetry, were flying through the kitchen sky on their own wings. Brass instruments, which the children used when they were dancing, were drifting among the brightly coloured fish freed from their mother's aquarium, the only creatures lively and happy in the vast illuminated marsh. All the toothbrushes were floating in the bathroom, along with Papa's condoms and Mama's jars of cream and spare dentures, and the television set from the master bedroom was afloat on its side, still tuned to the final part of the midnight movie for adults.

At the end of the corridor, Toto was sitting in the stern of the boat, all at sea, clutching the oars tightly with his mask on and only just enough air to reach the lighthouse he was searching for, while Joel was bobbing in the prow, still charting the north star with his sextant; and floating throughout the house were their thirty-seven classmates, eternalised in the moment of peeing into a pot of geraniums, or singing the school song with the words changed to make fun of the headmaster, or sneaking a glass of brandy from Papa's bottle. For they had turned on so many lights at the same time that the apartment had flooded, and the whole fourth-year class at the elementary school of Saint Julian the Hospitaler had drowned on the fifth floor of 47 Paseo de la Castellana. In Madrid, Spain, a remote city of burning summers and icy winds, with no ocean or river, whose landbound population had never mastered the science of navigating on light.

Soundtrack:

Galaxy 500, "Tugboat"

Karen O and the Kids, "Sailing Home"

Phosphorescent, "Hej, Me I'm Light"

Iron & Wine, "Someday the Waves"

The Pixies, "Where is My Mind?"

Nick Cave, "The Boat Song"