Angelo Bonadonna’s Blog
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On the first day of school, the children brought gifts for their teacher.
The florist’s son brought the teacher a bouquet of flowers.
The candy-store owner’s daughter gave the teacher a pretty box of candy.
Then the liquor-store owner’s son brought up a big, heavy box.
The teacher lifted it up and noticed that it was leaking a little bit.
She touched a drop of the liquid with her finger and tasted it.
“Is it wine?” she guessed.
“No,” the boy replied.
She tasted another drop and asked, “Champagne?”
“No,” said the little boy . . . “it’s a puppy.”

Just a neat collection of puns. My favorite is Number 12:

There was a man who entered a local paper's pun contest. He sent in ten different puns, in the hope at least one of the puns would win. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.

A pun on the word "pun." Can anything higher, or more worthy, be achieved by the language using animal?

http://bertc.com/puns.htm

Be sure also to look at Bert Christensen's page of H. L. Mencken quotes:

http://bertc.com/mencken.htm

This is a novel of cold and reflections of the cold. There is the surface and the sub-surface, "inner needs" and "outer situation" (8), the desolate landscape of the soul and the desolate landscape of winter, and and each doubles the other. Chill is heaped on chill, in an endless winter, the same as all other winters, all inexorable, silent, and deadening.

Perhaps the most succinct analysis of Ethan Frome's fate comes from the novel's garrulous coachmen, Harmon Gow, "Guess he's been in Starkfield too many winters" (2-3). To no little extent, the villain of this tale is the landscape and its influences, its bitterness, the "hypnotizing effect of [its] routine" (3)—the inexorable will of winter to penetrate and reproduce itself in all it touches.

I could envision lessons and activities that explore or study various aspects of social networking, but as far as actually using a social network environment to host class work, I tend to agree with my colleague Laurence: "there are some web platforms that may be better left to non-academic uses." The social networks are where the "kids" hang out; there seems something invasive about "going there" as a class—kinda like bringing a class, uninvited, to someone's party; it could work out okay, but it's just . . . weird).

The Unreliable Narrator as Liar v. Unreliable Narrator as Guide

Whenever I think of the concept of the "unreliable narrator" in literature, I think of Edgar Allan Poe, and stories of his like the "Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Using Poe's fiction as a type of manual, my teachers in graduate school taught me how to interrogate a narrator's credibility; I was taught, in essence, to read against the narrative, to look for signs of contradiction, to chart the extremes of obsession, to diagnose mental illness. The typical Poe narrator strategically and rationally tells his story—at least seemingly, or professedly, so at the start. But in focusing on his "reality," his guilt, the perfection of his crime, the intensity of his experience, and so on, he pulls us into a monomania that has afflicted him and distorts his vision; his tale blurs the line between sanity and insanity, and leaves its readers with questions, possibilities, and disturbances.

This posting is a copy of an email sent to Blair Kamin, in response to his Chicago Tribune article, Soldier Field Gets What It Deserves, on the loss of national landmark status for Soldier Field, published on April 24, 2006:

On Apr 4, 2006, at 8:59 PM, Norman Boyer wrote:

Hi, Angelo,
Take a look at Erin Conlon's second "Becoming a Teacher of Reading and Lit" blogs. . . .
Norm