The Age of Innocence -- BBC Radio Drama

BBC Radio 7 is presenting The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton in a radio drama format. BBC Radio usually produces excellent radio plays You can listen by following this link. The Age of Innocence is the novel Jennifer presented. Wharton will be the next novelist we're reading in class. The novel: Ethan Frome.

The Dakota: 1 W 72nd St, New York City

Julianna mentioned in her presentation today that part of Jack Finney's Time and Again is set at the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West. The Dakota is arguably the most famous apartment building in the country. Many famous performers, including John Lennon, lived there. Lennon was shot dead outside the building by a crazed fan in 1980. The Dakota is also one of the most expensive. According to the real estate website, these are average costs of the condos there:

4 Bedrooms from $18,500,000
3 Bedrooms from $14,500,000
1 Bedroom from $5,900,000

(For sake of comparison, you could buy 10-room mansion with all amenities on a 10-acre lot for under $5.9 million in Cincinnati.)

Here are some excerpts from an article describing the Dakota:

The city's most legendary apartment building, the Dakota is a massive fortress-like structure with a large center courtyard and very large apartments with very high ceilings.

With an impressive, arched entrance with sentry box flanked by large planters, the buff-colored building is surrounded by a very attractive and dramatic low cast-iron fence in front of a "dry moat." The four corners of the courtyard, which has a fountain, lead to separate lobbies and passenger elevators. (Service elevators run up the middle of each side of the building.)

The building exudes solidity as well it should since its bottom walls are 28 inches thick, but its profusion of architectural elements and pale yellow brickwork that contrasts with dark brown masonry at the corners produce a lively and graceful appearance of considerable visual interest because of the mix of gables, arches, balconies, oriel windows, dormers, finials and other ornamentation including a flagpole at the top of its park facade.


When it was built in 1884, it towered over the Upper West Side and was an immediate success with all its apartments rented on opening day. Its developer, Edward Severin Clark, an heir to a sewing machine fortune, died two years before it opened. The building's name allegedly reflected the fact that the building was so far removed from the city's established luxury residential areas that it might as well be in the Dakota territory. Its 72nd Street façade, indeed, has an image of a Native American carved on its façade.

Designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh, who would later design the Plaza Hotel, the building had tennis courts and a croquet field on the adjoining 175-foot-long lot on West 72nd Street that was later developed after World War II as a separate apartment building.

Many of residents of its cooperative apartments have been celebrities including John Lennon, the Beatle who was shot outside the building in 1980, Leonard Bernstein, the composer and conductor, Lauren Bacall, the actress, Judy Garland, the singer, William Inge, the playwright, Jo Mielziner, the stage designer, Rex Reed, the columnist.

The 93-unit building's Victorian and Gothic architectural details and ambiance were featured in the popular spooky movie, "Rosemary's Baby," but it is famed more now for its spectacular apartments.

The Dakota is also ranked as New York City’s #7 Most Haunted Place. Many eerie stories are linked with 1 West 72nd Street. In the 60's, the construction workers were said to have seen a ghost of a young boy dressed in a way outdated outfit. And, needless to say, John Lennon was murdered while exiting the front door—some believe that his ghost also visits it from time to time.

Word of the Day: Dun

I noticed that half the class not only missed #37 on the vocabulary test, but those who missed it insisted that the answer was not in the list of choices from which to choose. The word is "dun" and is used in "Bartleby the Scrivener" in the following sentence, when the narrator is commenting upon the mysterious gents who pay visits to Nippers:

I have good reason to believe, however, that one individual who called upon him at my chambers, and who, with a grand air, he insisted was his client, was no other than a dun, and the alleged title-deed, a bill.

Many of you wrote in the little space for the answer: "dullish brown." Now, I ask you: Does "dullish brown" fit in for "dun" in the above sentence? Did Nippers have mysterious dull-brown men stalking him? Uh, no.

So what is "dun"?

Dun: (v) to importune a debtor for payment; to make repeated and insistent demands, especially concerning an overdue payment; (n) one who duns.

So, in the above statement about Nippers, the reader should understand that the man who visited the office was a creditor coming to collect a payment for a debt.

Yes, dun does has another meaning. It is a kind of horse of a dullish brown color. But again, Nippers was visited by a creditor, not a horse.

Term Paper: Important Dates

Here are some important dates regarding the 3-Book Term Paper project. I advise that you refresh your memory as to the scope and focus of this project. It is easy to lose sight of the primary goals when completing a project over multiple quarters. Please refer to the handout "Three-Books Project Info," which is available here in PDF format. And now the dates:

Third Quarter
Monday, Feb. 15: 2nd Book Data Sheet due
Monday, March 8: 3rd Book Data Sheet due
Thursday, March 11: Guiding Question & Working Thesis Statement due

Fourth Quarter
Monday, March 29: Thesis Statement + Note Cards due
Thursday, April 15: Final Outline due
Thursday, April 22: Final Research Paper due in MLA format

N.B. This is a tentative schedule and subject to change, but none of the due dates will be changed to earlier dates than appear here. In March you will be given a full research packet, which will include all specifications for research, note-taking, and writing. Classes from April 12-21 will be dedicated to completing the outline and final research paper.

Shape Poetry, Concrete Poetry

When we finish with our unit on Herman Melville, we will be moving on to poetry for a while as you continue to read your three books for the term paper assignment. Since Penelope asked today about poems that take the shape of their subject, I thought I'd provide a few examples. As far as I can tell, there's no other name for this style of gimmick poetry other than "shape poetry" or "concrete poetry." This is defined as a poem in which the typographical arrangement of words on the page is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on.

In the examples above, the male poem is intended to resemble a dumbbell, and the female poem is intended to resemble an hourglass. What can you come up with?

Word of the day: Puddinghead

Pudding head (puddenhead, pudd'nhead): a person who is not very bright; dolt, dullard, pillock, poor fish, stupe, berk, blockhead, bonehead, dunce, dunderhead, hammerhead, knucklehead, loggerhead, lunkhead, muttonhead, numskull, nitwit

Many historians believe that the term “pudding head” came from the American colonial belief that if children learning to walk fell frequently and hit their heads, they could scramble their brains, making them like the consistency of pudding, thereby becoming “pudding heads.” In Colonial Williamsburg’s Children’s glossary, it adds that toddlers were often and lovingly referred to as “little pudding heads."

Some children, in fact wore pudding caps to prevent them from becoming pudding heads!

pudding cap in Australia

A pudding cap is a stuffed roll placed on a toddler’s head and tied in the back. It was worn for the same reason children today wear helmets — to protect the brain from damage in a fall.

In several Flemish and Dutch paintings of the early 17th century toddlers of the 1620-30’s are depicted wearing their pudding caps. A drawing by Pieter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) shows a toddler wearing one that is a sausage shaped padded roll of fabric, tied at the back of the head. There is one narrow ribbon stretched across the top of the head (from side to side, not front to back) and continues as ties under the chin. There is a linen cap under the pudding cap.

There's even a movement in Australia to require all children in day care to wear a pudding cap. Don't believe it? Read here.

You may have noted the irony in Pudd'nhead Wilson: though our eponymous character is given the nickname of a dunce because of his initial "half-dog" comment (and his subsequent obsession with collecting fingerprints), he turns out to be among the smarter folk of his day, at least when it comes time to defending the innocent.

3-Book Term Presentation Order

The presentations will be given in chronological order, from oldest book to newest. You should be prepared to take good notes and ask intelligent questions, because you will be quizzed on the material presented. Here's how the order shapes up:

Larry
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain(1889)

Elizabeth
Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain (1894)

Mike
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)

Marcella
My Antonia by Willa Cather (1918)

Jennifer
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton(1920)

Joseph
Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo(1939)

Olivia
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison(1952)

Annmarie
The Outsider by Richard Wright(1953)

Naomi
A Separate Peace by John Knowles(1959)

Gabriela
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee(1960)

Ashley
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller(1961)

Peter
Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck(1962)

Sean
The Chosen by Chaim Potok(1967)

Julianna
Time and Again by Jack Finney(1970)

Other New York City Stories & Authors

Washington Square Park, Triumphal Arch

Despite the facts that "Bartleby the Scrivener" was set in Manhattan and that Melville has a close connection to New York City himself, he is not generally regarded as a New York City author. The Realists (post-1865) who came after the days of Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, were more apt to use New York City as a setting for their novels and short stories -- telling of the lives of the upper crust of society as well as the immigrant poor. So, who are the New York City realists who followed Melville?

Edith Wharton is probably the most prolific and well-regarded of them. Several of her novels are set in New York City -- Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, and Old New York; Stephen Crane's Maggie of the Streets, Henry James' Washington Square, and John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer are others. Although Willa Cather is best known for her prairie novels and short stories, she set several of her stories (e.g., "Paul's Case" and "Neighbour Rosicky") at least partially in New York City, usually in order to contrast big town lifestyles with small town attitudes.

This semester we will next be getting into the realm of realism by reading Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, and Willa Cather, although not their New York stories.

Required Reading: The Dead Letter Office

The lawyer-narrator in "Bartleby" comments, "Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men?" Melville quite purposefully gives only one fact about Bartleby, his perplexing scrivener -- and even that fact is ambiguous being that it is only based on hearsay. Bartleby's previous job is said have been as a sorter in the Dead Letter Office in the post office.

So, what's the Dead Letter Office? Here's an informative 1992 article from the National Postal Museum, giving a brief history of the office. This is required reading:

In the years before World War I thousands of letters handled by this country's postal service went undelivered. They ended up in the waste bin because they were addressed improperly or incompletely, or were illegible. When local postal workers were stumped about what to do with a letter they couldn't deliver they forwarded the stray mail to the Dead Letter Office.

This wasn't the letter morgue you might imagine. Here, the misguided missives were not simply forgotten. Instead, a group of skilled dead letter detectives set about to discover the correct destinations so that the mail might get delivered.

one day's collection of "dead letter"

Basically, dead letter clerks handled three types of mystery mail: Misdirected letters, which were those which had all of the right information necessary to get them delivered, but for some reason were sidetracked, largely either because they weren't handled correctly by postal employees or had been abandoned at the designated post office; "Blind Readings," so called because to the average postal worker the address would appear as though it was read blindfolded; and prank mail.

Only the Dead Letter Office had the authority to open letters which couldn't seem to get delivered. Once opened, the contents of letters were considered sacred, so much so that the dead letter clerks were—and still are—forbidden to read any more of the communications than absolutely necessary to determine where the letters should go.

At the end of the 19th century it was not uncommon for the clerks in the Dead Letter Office to handle as many as 23,000 pieces of "dead" mail daily. Unfortunately, scarcely more than 40 percent of these letters ultimately got to the proper destination, although not for lack of effort. The rest generally were sold as scrap paper.

Continue reading...

Bartleby: The First American 'Office Space' Drama?

Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" presents the first known mention of a cubicle-like office space in American literature. The cubicle in its present form made its appearance in 1968, the invention of Robert Propst -- who lived to regret his invention despite the fact that it made him millions. It is now a $3 billion per year business. Before he died Propst denounced and disowned the invention, calling it "monolithic insanity" among other epithets.

Dilbert

Here's a 2006 article called "Trapped in Cubicles," published in Fortune magazine:

Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called "monolithic insanity."

Propst is the father of the cubicle. More than 30 years after he unleashed it on the world, we are still trying to get out of the box. The cubicle has been called many things in its long and terrible reign. But what it has lacked in beauty and amenity, it has made up for in crabgrass-like persistence.

Reviled by workers, demonized by designers, disowned by its very creator, it still claims the largest share of office furniture sales--$3 billion or so a year--and has outlived every "office of the future" meant to replace it. It is the Fidel Castro of office furniture.

So will the cubicle always be with us? Probably yes, though in recent years individuals and organizations have finally started to chart productive and economical ways to escape its tyranny.

Continue reading article...

Cubicle office life has been the comic and tragic-comic subject of some contemporary entertainments such as the cartoon Dilbert and a recent movie called Office Space. The movie features a character named Milton, a guy who was laid off, but didn’t know it and kept working at the company even when they corrected a clerical error that kept paying him. Here's an interesting tidbit from the real world: A story from New Jersey is basically the opposite of that. Anthony Armatys accepted a job at a telecom company called Avaya in 2002, then changed his mind. However, he’d already been added to the company payroll, and it didn’t occur to anyone to take him off of it. Five years later,in 2007, someone finally realized Armatys had been collecting a paycheck for not working. He pleaded guilty to a count of theft as part of a plea bargain.

Wall Street, 1850's

Wall Street, 1850's

Our next tale -- Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street -- is set primarily on Wall Street in New York's finance district during the 1850's. The view above shows Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street and the old Custom House, seen at right with flag--today the Sub-Treasury--and a number of bank buildings in the Greek Revival style of architecture. Both Trinity Church and the old Custom House are both mentioned in Melville's story.

Wall Street, 1902

Wall Street, financial heart of the nation, is itself but little more than a third of a mile long from its head at Broadway to its foot at the East River, although its name is applied to a small district lying to the north and south. Functionally, Wall Street is a complex mechanism developed to provide the centralized banking and credit facilities and the efficient securities market place that modern industry and commerce demand. Walled in by towering structures, the street, by historical coincidence, is well named.

Wall Street Financial District, lower Manhattan

Wall Street, 2006

At this place in 1653, Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Amsterdam, ordered a protective wall built across what was then the colony's northernmost limit. It was not long before the city had pushed past this barrier, and under British rule the district flourished as a center of government and fashion. Following the Revolution, Wall Street became for a year the seat of the Federal Government, and here were located the establishments of such statesmen and leaders of commerce as Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. Read on...

The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne

"A Christmas Snow" by Tate Hamilton

Some reading for a snowy weekend:

The Snow Image: A Childish Miracle
(from Twice-Told Tales)
By Nathaniel Hawthorne

One afternoon of a cold winter's day, when the sun shone forth with chilly brightness, after a long storm, two children asked leave of their mother to run out and play in the new-fallen snow. The elder child was a little girl, whom, because she was of a tender and modest disposition, and was thought to be very beautiful, her parents, and other people who were familiar with her, used to call Violet. But her brother was known by the style and title of Peony, on account of the ruddiness of his broad and round little phiz, which made everybody think of sunshine and great scarlet flowers. The father of these two children, a certain Mr. Lindsey, it is important to say, was an excellent but exceedingly matter-of-fact sort of man, a dealer in hardware, and was sturdily accustomed to take what is called the common-sense view of all matters that came under his consideration. With a heart about as tender as other people's, he had a head as hard and impenetrable, and therefore, perhaps, as empty, as one of the iron pots which it was a part of his business to sell. The mother's character, on the other hand, had a strain of poetry in it, a trait of unworldly beauty,--a delicate and dewy flower, as it were, that had survived out of her imaginative youth, and still kept itself alive amid the dusty realities of matrimony and motherhood.

continue reading story...

Snow Update -- Exam, Bee, Everett Shinn

"Snowstorm on 34th Street," Everett Shinn

Since we are enjoying a snow day today, we won't have a chance to review for the final exam in class. (Larry, yes, we were going to review a la Jeopardy.)

The semester exam for American Literature is scheduled for Tuesday, January 12, 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.

The exam will be issued in two segments: multiple choice section at 10:00, and writing section at 11:00. You will have to turn in the mc segment before 11:00. Since this section will not take you that long to complete, you will have a break before beginning the writing segment, which will include 10 short answer response questions.

I have prepared a semester exam study sheet for you. You will find a copy of this on your desk when you return to school. You may also download it from the website in PDF format here.

N.B. The exam is closed-book, meaning that you will not be using book annotations or data sheets on the exam. All you will need is a pen.

Spelling Bee Update
If we have school on Friday, we will hold the Bee after Mass, around 10:00 a.m. as planned. I'll still need some of you to help me set up the room. Jennifer, will you bring the sound system? Anyone want to volunteer to videotape the Bee? I'm looking for someone to give me raw footage. I am planning to make a short documentary about the Bee. Sean and Marcella, I have papers I need to give you for judging.

Delay contingency: If we have a one-hour or two hour delay tomorrow, we will begin the Spelling Bee 15-minutes or so after school starts.

Snow day contingency: If we have another snow day tomorrow, we will hold the Bee Tuesday morning after assembly. We should be finished before the exam at 10:00, so you can all still be involved.

Since the snow is coming down, let me introduce you to American's number one snow storm painter: Everett Shinn. He is a Realist painter, which means he depicted life as he saw it. He is known for his New York City snowstorm scenes among other interesting work. Here is some of his work:

Enjoy the snow.

Encapsulation Projects

We definitely had some interesting and entertaining "encapsulations." I put the word in quotation marks because most of the projects seemed to be closer to abridged dramatizations.

Here are some strengths I saw/heard in the projects:

1. Subtle inclusion of Hawthornian literary elements and characters from stories other than the one being dramatized -- e.g., bare-branches forest scene, the minister's black veil, Hester & Pearl, Georgiana (in Lady Eleanore), etc.

2. Inclusion -- subtle or otherwise -- of elements that resonate with the class: e.g., a character reading from Clerestory, the return of Soapy, reference to "those whom we do not mention."

3. Use of varied accents and speech patterns to differentiate characters, especially in the audio presentations.

4. In some cases, excellent costumes (e.g., Lady Eleanore), props (e.g., Birthmark), and setting (e.g., Rappaccini's Daughter)

5. And, in at least one case (Birthmark), excellent frame composition (e.g.,painting reflected in the armoir mirror), lighting and sound.

6. Use of soundtrack music (e.g., Happy Days) and subtle humor.

The common weaknesses I suspect are more a product of the limited availability of time and technical expertise: e.g., sound ("turn down sound on the waterfalls"), lighting ("my, it sure is dark in this house"), sound ("I think we may need to use subtitles"), and sound ("would someone please stop the cars from driving down our street?").

Suggestions for future reference:

1. Oft-times, less is more. Limit the number of actors and characters involved.

2. Pay careful attention to what's going on in the background! It is easy to get too involved with the foreground. But viewers notice the background of every shot just as much as the foreground. Again: Less is more. Choose backgrounds that are simple and not distracting to what's going on in the foreground.

3. Carrying around scripts in a movie is, um, not the best technique. Memorize lines or use queue cards like the Birthmark people did (though, be careful of the wandering eye).

4. Don't let the credits and theme music overshadow your project. Integrate.

Lady Eleanore's Mantle is available on Youtube. Click the window above to view. Or, if you'd like to see the bloopers, click on the window below. NOTE: If any other projects are online, please let me know and I'll link to it here. If you'd like me to post it, send me your video file -- and I will post it for purposes of posterity and immortalization.

Encapsulation -- Preview: Lady Eleanore's Mantle

Encapsulation projects are due on Tuesday -- a week from today -- in case anyone needs a reminder. Film projects should be ready on DVD format by then. Let me know if you need to make alternative arrangements. For now, I see one of the projects has its own trailer. From the Hof-Con-Son triumvirate, Lady Elenore's Mantle.

American Christmas Stories

scene from "Gift of the Magi"

If you think that all the best Christmastime stories are not American, consider a few of these short stories from great American authors for some seasonal reading (with thanks to Wacky Anne):

Gift of the Magi by O. Henry
The Burglar's Christmas by Willa Cather
A Christmas Dinner Won in Battle by Stephen Crane
The Twelfth Guest by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
The Christmas Banquet by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Christmas Dinner by Washington Irving

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Clause

Francis P. Church's editorial, "Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus" was an immediate sensation, and became one of the most famous editorials ever written. It first appeared in the The New York Sun in 1897, more than a hundred years ago, and was reprinted annually until 1949 when the paper went out of business. It was in response to a letter from an 8-year-old girl

Dear Editor:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, "If you see it in The Sun, it's so." Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O'Hanlon

The Editor replies: Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood. -- Francis P. Church

Chain Gang

The Chain Gang stories turned out quite well -- from glorifiedl escargot to a battle of walruses to a Russian creeper who gets what's coming to him, and everything in between, it was all very interesting. For future reference, in case you want to play this writing game at home with friends or family, here's what we did for our Chain Gang stories (you can always adjust the time periods and number of writers involved):

Writer #1 (5 minutes): Exposition -- establish protagonist(s), setting, and opening situation
Writer #2 (6 minutes): Introduce a conflict
Writer #3 (7 minutes): Develop the conflict in one or two incidents
Writer #4: (8 minutes): Climax -- incident that serves as a turning point
Writer #5: (9 minutes): Falling Action to Resolution

Writer #1 re-writes the whole story for clarity and consistency and gives it a title.

If you'd like to see another version of a Chain Gang in action, BBC Radio 7 recently finished a 13-part Chain Gang radio play, but I like the one they produced in 2007. It's called "Picture This" -- and here's the opening situation from episode one:

"It's a digital camera," Gary said helpfully, as Deena stared down at her birthday present.

"So I see." Deena pointed out, rather gently she thought, that she'd been angling for a holiday in Paris, something romantic. She'd rather hoped she'd be unwrapping a Eurostar ticket, quite frankly.

Gary shrugged. You had to take photos in Paris, hadn't you? But after buying the camera he couldn't afford the holiday as well. "Look, it's got telescopic zoom!"

That evening, she gave in and installed it on her computer. "Welcome, Deena!" flashed the screen in colourful writing, and in spite of herself, she was impressed. "Click here for your photos!"

Of course she knew the gallery would be empty, but she clicked anyway. And blinked. There it was, a picture of herself and Gary, smiling and waving. Over her shoulder she could see the Eiffel Tower.

Dazedly she scrolled through the album. Notre Dame. Montmartre. Gary joking around with a baguette. Happy pictures. Impossible pictures, of a holiday they hadn't taken.

And then Deena froze. Gary filled the screen again, but no longer clowning; instead, blood trickling from his mouth, eyes staring out at her vacantly. It was a picture of his death.

Go to episode 2...

Collective Nouns for Birds

crèche of penguins

You've heard of a "flock of birds" but did you know that each species of bird has its own collective noun? The Audubon Society has compiled a comprehensive list of collective nouns for birds. Here are just a few examples:

aerie of eagles
ascension of larks
band of jays
bevy of doves
bouquet of pheasants (when flushed)
brace of ducks
brood of chickens
cast of hawks
chain of bobolinks
charm of finches
colony of vultures
company of parrots
conspiracy of ravens
crèche of penguins
murder of crows
mustering of storks
parliament of owls
plump or waterfowl
raft of ducks
rafter of turkeys
sedge of bitterns

See the whole list...

Encapsulation Scripts

Feathertop takes a bow

I am posting the encapsulation scripts here so that you can all read through them over the short Christmas vacation. Familiarize yourselves with the stories, and certainly offer any helpful comments or suggestions should you have any.

The Birthmark [PDF]
"Let the attempt be made at whatever risk. Danger is nothing to me. This hateful mark makes me the object of your horror and disgust. Either remove this dreadful hand, or take my wretched life!"

The Bosom Serpent [PDF]
"Oh, there is poisonous stuff in any man’s heart sufficient enough to generate a brood of serpents. I myself have only one, some people have giant hordes, but you have none in your bosom, therefore you cannot sympathize with the rest of the world. It gnaws me! It gnaws me!"

Lady Eleanore's Mantle [PDF]
"Nay, your Excellency shall not strike him. When men seek only to be trampled upon, it were a pity to deny them a favor so easily granted -- and so well deserved!"

Ethan Brand [PDF]
"Leave me, ye brute beasts, that have made yourselves so, shriveling up your souls with fiery liquors! I have done with you. Years and years ago, I groped into your hearts and found nothing there for my purpose. Get ye gone!"

Rappaccini's Daughter [PDF]
"I know this wretched girl better than you know her yourself! She is as poisonous as she is beautiful! Rappaccini was a vile enough man to offer up his daughter to this fatal life! What then will be your fate? Rappaccini will not stop at anything!"

I am still in need of the script for "Feathertop." Pedro?