Mistakes of your fathers

via http://instagr.am/p/lmBFf/

This photo, which backgrounds a statue of Thomas Jefferson with the names of the slaves he owned, reminded me of Douglass's address to Congress:

The destiny of unborn and unnumbered generations is in your hands. Will you repeat the mistake of your fathers, who sinned ignorantly? or will you profit by the blood-bought wisdom all round you, and forever expel every vestige of the old abomination from our national borders?

Most striking to me is the gap between what Douglass was fighting for in his address and Jefferson's own, most famous words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. 

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Friday's Questions

I feel like if I met Walt Whitman at a party I would think, "that guy is annoying and pretentious." When I expressed these thoughts to my boyfriend he was confused explaining that Whitman is one of his favorites. Am I ignorant? Incapable of understanding great writing? Or is it okay that Walk Whitman is just not up my alley?

What would I have done if I was African American and in the situation that the majority of African Americans were after the war? 

What if Lincoln lived?

The Emily Dickinson poems seem very dark. Is it talking about murder? Death? Or both?

When do you think writers understand the cause behind a shift in style? Specifically from romanticism to realism.

When Walt Whitman refers to God is his poem, “Songof Myself” does he believe in a God similar to the Christian God? Was he a Christian? 


What was life like for Emily Dickinson?


Is it really possible to separate Whitman’s ideology from his poetry even though this was an important reason behind his poetry?



When I finished the article, I wondered why, throughout this time in history, slave owners were so intent on catching runaway slaves.

I know during traumatic times (even in the personal life), people cling to what is most important to them. Is that some of the essence of romantic writing?

The best summation of Whitman I've read today ...

... is by Chelsea:

"He's on the side of humanity."

Dickinson and her dashes

Mss. version of "Wild Nights"

Kamilla Denman on Dickinson's dashes:

Dickinson's transition from a dominant use of the exclamation mark to a preference for the dash accompanied her shift from ejaculatory poems, which seem outcries aimed with considerable dramatic effect at God or others, to poems where the energies exist more in the relationships between words and between the poet and her words. In this intensely prolific period, Dickinson's excessive use of dashes has been interpreted variously as the result of great stress and intense emotion, as the indication of a mental breakdown, and as a mere idiosyncratic, female habit. Though these speculations are all subject to debate, it is clear that in the early 1860s Dickinson conducted her most intense exploration of language and used punctuation to disrupt conventional linguistic relations, whether in an attempt to express inexpressible psychological states or purely to vivify language.

Blog assignment for Thursday

Post 1: Getting started
Due: Thursday, January 26, 11pm

Please create your blog and email me (scottweaver@cwidaho.cc) the URL no later than Thursday, 11pm. Please post at least two questions that arose from the Post-Bellum packet, the previous class’s discussion, etc.

"Do not descend among professors and capitalists"

Here's a clip from a pretty amazing PBS documentary about Whitman. It provides a good gloss of the poem "Song of Myself," how it came to be and what it means in American poetry.



The documentary is available in its entirety, here, if you don't mind Spanish subtitles.

What good blogs look like

Below are a number of previous blogs kept by students that turned out to be particularly great. What makes them so great? You'll have to take a look for yourself, but in my opinion, these blogs stand out for three  reasons:

1. Good Writing -- If you read through some of the posts, you'll see the authors took a lot of time and thought to develop and express their ideas.

2. Good Use of Media -- Most of these blogs use pictures and video to their advantages. This is the point of having a blog. It's a visual, dynamic medium. The blogs below each realized this and used media to draw readers in and make their points.

3. Unique Voices -- Reading through these blogs, you not only see that each writer's done a lot of work, but you also begin to get a sense for them as people. Their personalities and voices come out, whether they are sarcastic, skeptical, etc. Remember, these blogs aren't for a single reader; they're out there for the world to see. Make them interesting, and make them yours.

Examples of good blogging

1. Hip to B Square
2. Jake's Blog 
3. The Blog 
4. English Lit
5. The History of Hip

Bad Web Writing

       Now that you're all officially bloggers, it's a good idea to think about how your writing is working to communicate to your reader. There are some small yet important differences between the ways we read on the page and the ways we read on the web.
       Therefore, it's important that we as writers acknowledge these differences and develop a style of writing that's unique for the web. Here are four best practices:Keep paragraphs short: While our eyes are accustomed to large blocks of texts on the page (especially if you're a college student in the humanities), our eyes have a much harder time reading large chunks of texts on the screen. So it's a good idea to write in short paragraphs. A good rule of thumb is to keep paragraphs to a maximum of four sentences. White space is your friend. 
        Write for scannability: One of the ways we read differently on the screen is that we tend to scan words on the screen faster (and less in-depth) than words on the page. Ever wonder why that 1000-word, one-paragraph email never got read? This is why. Check out Best Practices for Web Writing.

It's not spring yet . . .

. . . but it's finally snowing in Boise. I drove to work today thinking about this poem:

Spring Snow

BY WILLIAM MATTHEWS

Here comes the powdered milk I drank

as a child, and the money it saved.

Here come the papers I delivered,

the spotted dog in heat that followed me home

and the dogs that followed her.

Here comes a load of white laundry

from basketball practice, and sheets

with their watermarks of semen.

And here comes snow, a language

in which no word is ever repeated,

love is impossible, and remorse. . . .

Yet childhood doesn’t end,

but accumulates, each memory

knit to the next, and the fields

become one field. If to die is to lose

all detail, then death is not

so distinguished, but a profusion

of detail, a last gossip, character

passed wholly into fate and fate

in flecks, like dust, like flour, like snow.

William Matthews, “Spring Snow” from Rising and Falling. Copyright © 1979 by William Matthews. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.