“I might as well tell you —– this affair of Emil’s was a great surprise to me.”
As part of the Children’s Classic Literature Event hosted by Amanda at Simpler Pastimes, the read-along for this year is Emil and The Detectives. I’ve been wanting to read this German translated children’s book for years, so I was very glad when it was chosen.
“The Western Plains of New South Wales are grasslands.”
Imagine a desert, dust from eroded topsoil, heat making images like a blurry glass as it bakes the ground. Succulents dot the landscape like drops of batter on a cookie sheet, while bushes eek out a meagre existence on the landscape. Earth meets sky, the rays of the sun unrelenting, yet there is life, animals and birds, and what’s more, land, where a settler could come to scratch out a modest existence. Into this landscape came the parents of the author, the Kers, her father’s investment in 18,000 acres of drought-stricken land taking their every penny. With no surface water, and only a few clumps of eucalyptus, they began their married life.
Publius Ovidius Naso was born in Sulmo, east of Rome in the year 43 B.C. As a son of an upper middle class family, his father sent him to be educated in Rome to distinguish himself in a career in law or government. Ovid was known as an exemplary rhetorician and worked at minor magisterial posts before quitting his public career to pursue poetry. Immediate success followed his first published elegy and by 8 A.D., the year in which Metamorphoses was published, he was one of the foremost poets of Rome.
Hamlette at The Edge of the Precipice is hosting one of her excellent read-alongs, this time on the most wonderful classic, Jane Eyre.
If you haven’t participated in one of Hamlette’s read-alongs before, you are in for a treat. They progress at such a slow pace, that it allow the reader time to read deeply, mull over what they have read, and come up with insights that would have perhaps been missed with a quicker read. When you finish, you feel like you know the book backwards, forwards, and upside-down. They are so beneficial!
This read-along will begin on May 29th and proceed through the summer until we finish. Having just read Brönte’s Villette and being less than thrilled with it, I’m looking forward to re-visiting one of my all-time favourites.
Please visit this page if you want to see how Hamlette’s read alongs work, and then please join us May 29th. It’s an experience not to be missed!
“I have taken Caliban’s advice. I have stolen their books. I will have run of this isle.”
With the first sentence, in his allusion to Shakespeare’s, The Tempest, Richard Rodriguez sets the tone for his memoir, depicting his life as the son of Mexican immigrants. Is he a monster, an outcast who will use his adversaries’ own weapons to gain power, an identity, and a place in the kingdom?
For April Poetry Month, I’ve been hunting for a poem, a haiku that I wrote when I was fifteen to post here as a personal poetry selection. Well, so far I’ve had no luck finding it, but while searching I found a poem written by my daughter, modelled on the epic, Beowulf, so I thought I would post it instead. She wrote it in grade 5.
Since trying to follow the Anglo Saxon meter (which goes by stress-count [stressed syllables] rather than syllable count, which would be two main stresses in each half of a line) was beyond her at that time, instead she focussed on alliteration and kennings.
Kennings create expressive imagery, using compound words and phrases that identify nouns. They are often colourful to generate evocative images in the mind of the reader. Because of their usual quality, kennings help the listener/reader to remember important happenings or people and also were used to avoid superfluous repetition, making the poem more developed and creative.
And as to the answer to the riddle, you can find it in the following paintings:
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| Nature morte au crabe (1643) Pieter Claesz source Wikimedia Commons |
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| Breakfast with a Crab (1648) Willem Claeszoon Heda source Wikimedia Commons |
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| Still Life (1655-59) Pieter de Ring source Wikimedia Commons |
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| Tortue et crabe (c. 1656) Paolo Porpora source Wikimedia Commons |
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| Still Life with shrimps and crabs on a tin plate (1641) Alexander Adriaenssen source Wikimedia Commons |
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| Albrecht Dürer source Wikimedia Commons |
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| Claude Lorrain source Wikimedia Commons |
Numa becomes king of Rome, and since he has cemented the laws and customs of Rome, he now decides to study the laws of nature. Leaving Cures, he travels to Croton where an elder tells him the story of the founding of the city. Hercules on his way back to Croton, stopped at Cape Lacinium. As he grazed his cattle, he pronounced a prophesy that in two generations time, a city would rise on that spot, and it came to pass. Myscelus, son of Alemon, was born, loved of the gods. One night as he slept, Hercules stood over him, commanding him to seek the distant Aesar. Myscelus found himself in a terrible conflict. It was forbidden him to leave his homeland on pain of death, yet Hercules had issued threats if he did not obey. Myscelus called out to the gods for help and their vote freed him. Reaching Aesar, he established Croton, building walls about it as Hercules commanded, founding this Greek town on Italian soil.
“Begin here.”
Introducing Journal of a Solitude, another out-of-order book for my WEM Biographies Project. I’m finding the remaining biographies heavy on U.S. content, and being a Canadian I wasn’t at all familiar with May Sarton. Born in Belgium, when German troops invaded the country, Sarton’s family fled to England, then to Boston, Massachusetts. As a writer, she wrote a number of novels, poems and memoirs, mostly a commentary on her life and experiences on aging, friendship, depression, lesbianism, doubt, failure, the simple pleasures of life, and other personal musings.
For my second poem during National Poetry Month, I read C.S. Lewis’ Narnian Suite.
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| The Giant Antaeus (1868) Gustave Doré source Wikiart |
There is not much information on this poem to quench our curiosity as to how it ties to Narnia. Tirian in The Last Battle sings a short “Narnian marching song”, very much like it:
“Ho, rumble, rumble, rumble, rumble
Rumble drum belaboured.”
The Last Battle was finished in the spring of 1953 but not published until 1956 and Narnian Suite was written in 1953. Perhaps Lewis simply attempted to take the original marching song and expand it. In any case, it’s all speculation at this point; I may come up with some reference to it as I read through Lewis’ letters (yes, three huge volumes with a fourth soon to be published).
Does anyone think that this poem sounds very much like Tolkien’s poems in The Lord of the Rings? I do, but I am reading The Lord of the Rings presently, so perhaps I have that tone lingering in my head.
My WEM Biographies Project has been thrown out of order by my library who doesn’t carry most of the other titles, so I’ve been forced to wait for them on inter-library loans. Which means that I have no idea when they are going to arrive or which is going to arrive first. After two months, the first book has arrived, Born Again by Charles W. Colson.
Colson occupied a position high-up in the United States government, serving as Special Counsel to Richard Nixon during Nixon’s years in the presidency. Named as one of the Watergate Seven, he was tried and sentenced to one to three years in prison. His autobiography is a story of his rise and fall, and finally his rise again to a higher calling.
