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SHS Art and Science Trip Photos

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Tragedy and the Common Man
By ARTHUR MILLER
February 27, 1949

In this age few tragedies are written. It has often been held that the lack is due to a paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection. For one reason or another, we are often held to be below tragedy-or tragedy above us. The inevitable conclusion is, of course, that the tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the very highly placed, the kings or the kingly, and where this admission is not made in so many words it is most often implied.

Attributes of a Tragic Hero
Arthur Miller on the 50th Anniversary of Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller: Present at the Birth of a Salesman
Death of a Salesman Discussion Questions
Metaphors in Death of a Salesman
Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener
American Playwright Arthur Miller Dies at 89
New York Times Tribute to Arthur Miller
Reviews of Miller's Plays
Chronology of a Friendship: Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, and The Blacklist

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: A Celebration By Joyce Carol Oates

Death of a Salesman essay prompts

We the characters

Why I Wrote the Crucible
New Yorker Magazine
October 21, 1996

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Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Continue reading "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front By Wendell Berry" »

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The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
Biographical notes on T.S. Eliot

Hypertext and Audio of Eliot's The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

Fragmentation in The Waste Land: Why T.S. Eliot Tears Down London Bridge
By Emily Hilligoss

Hypertext version of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" at The Prufrock Papers

"I hate to see that evening sun go down."
T. S. Eliot is said the best line of iambic pentameter in English was not in Shakespeare but in W. C. Handy's St. Louis Blues

Much of T.S. Eliot's poetry brings to mind the poems of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg

Wired for Books Interview with Allen Ginsberg

Howl: The Poem That Changed America

NPR : Revisiting Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' at 50

Allen Ginsberg - NYTimes Featured Author

States of Altering Consciousness
Ginsberg's COLLECTED POEMS 1947-1980 reviewed

Ginsberg's Tennis Shoes

Photographs from the Allen Ginsberg Trust

Read a poem a day selected by Billy Collins at Poetry 180

Knopf Poem-a-Day

Today's Poem from Poetry Daily

"Poetry" By Marianne Moore

"The Red Wheel Barrow" and "This is Just to Say" By William Carlos Williams

Poetry Finder Tool

Poetry in Motion

Poet Laureate, Kay Ryan - U.S. Library of Congress

Magnetic Poetry Online

Poetry Photographs on Flickr

Poem Starters

Poem in Your Pocket Day - April 30

It is difficult
to get the news from poems,
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
- W.C.Williams

Spoon River Anthology to memorize.
(Alternate source: Spoon River Anthology on Bartleby.com).

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The Valley of the Ashes
Rober Moses and The Great Gatsby
The Perfect Hour
Park Avenue in the Jazz Age
When the Rich-Poor Gap Widens, ‘Gatsby’ Becomes a Guidebook - NYTimes August 31, 2006
F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography
F. Scott Fitzgerald Portfolio
1925 New York Times Review of The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary
Fitzgerald Topics at the NYTimes
"Echoes of the Jazz Age" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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YouTube - Vera Hall - Trouble So Hard

Recordings of Vera Hall at The Library of Congress made by Alan Lomax

Moby Interview where he talks about linguistic philosophy.

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My Name Is Jim Dine, 1992

A sweet high school love story, "A Long Walk to Forever" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., included in the collection Welcome to the Monkey House. First published in Ladies' Home Journal, 1960.

And here's an equally sweet poem - "Upon Julia's Clothes" by Robert Herrick.

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Bruce Springsteen discusses his inspirations, his new album and his Super Bowl set. Few musicians anywhere consummate symbolic occasions and mass events better than Mr. Springsteen. He’s used to working on a stadium scale, and for decades his concerts have been nonstop singalongs that perfectly embody the yearning for community in his lyrics. In an era when pop hits can be as ephemeral as a deleted MP3 file, Mr. Springsteen has spent much of his career laboring to write durable songs about American dreams, from “Born to Run” to “Promised Land.”

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AMERICAN MEMORY:
The Grapes of Wrath: Scrapbooks and Artifacts
How to Cite Sources from American Memory
Documenting America - Photographs of the Great Depression
Dust Bowl During the Great Depression
Voices from the Dust Bowl - The Migrant Experience
California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties
What is an Ethnographic Field Collection? - Introduction to Field Techniques - How to Do Fieldwork

Continue reading "Steinbeck and the Dustbowl" »

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‘Praise Song For The Day’ by Elizabeth Alexander
A poem for Barack Obama's presidential inauguration.

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other's
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Continue reading "‘Praise Song For The Day’ by Elizabeth Alexander" »

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Will.i.am's America's Song

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Pete Seeger, 89, and Bruce Springsteen feeding the crowd the lines to Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" at the We Are One inaugural concert in Washington, D.C., yesterday. (Mandel ngan/afp/getty images). More photos from the boston.com and NPR.

From Books, New President Found Voice
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI NYTimes January 19, 2009
Much has been made of Mr. Obama’s eloquence — his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.

Some of President-elect Barack Obama’s favored reading matter as mentioned in this article:
- The Bible
- “Parting the Waters,” Taylor Branch
- “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Gandhi’s autobiography
- “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin
- “The Golden Notebook,” Doris Lessing
- Lincoln’s collected writings
- “Moby-Dick,” Herman Melville
- “Song of Solomon,” Toni Morrison
- Works of Reinhold Niebuhr
- “Gilead,” Marilynne Robinson
- Shakespeare’s tragedies

From Emmett Till to Barack Obama - The civil rights movement culminates in the election of America's first black president.

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Today is the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1809). He became a writer, but nobody paid much attention to him until his poem "The Raven" appeared in the New York Evening Mirror in 1845, and he suddenly became a celebrity. Children followed him down the street chanting, "Nevermore, nevermore!" And he was asked to recite the poem at all sorts of gatherings.

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On J.D. Salinger - Except perhaps for Mark Twain, no other American writer has registered with such precision the humor — and the pathos — of false sophistication and the vital banality of big-city pretension.

David Brooks referring to Gatsby - As D. H. Lawrence wrote, America “starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth.” . . . this desire has played out in American literature, from Melville’s Billy Budd to Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, and in politics, from Jackson to Kennedy to Obama.

Eric Roth in the Winter issue of All Story on the literary origins of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - It is said the idea came from a notion articulated by Mark Twain about the end of life being such a pain in the ass, and why couldn't we in God's great design have grown in the opposite direction: from old to young. We needn't discuss how youth may be wasted on the young, but suffice to say the Mark Twain piece was given to F. Scott by his editor, one Maxwell Perkins. That, along with dandling a new baby—with all the sights and smells an infant brings—and an empty pocket or two, must have twirled around Fitzgerald's fertile brain and a story was born.

Fitzgerald's original story is here.

Poems by Billy Collins and other New York region poets.

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