Lackey's Class Links: 11/01/2005

Mark Twain's Birthday

Mark Twain's Seventieth Birthday Speech
Bio comes close to hitting mark on Twain's life
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Mark Dawidziak Plain Dealer Staff Writer
Born to Trouble: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on PBS
River of Song series on PBS - music along the Mississippi River

Huck Finn Online

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Introduction by Toni Morrison from the Oxford Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Teaching Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Mark Twain: Voice of America Review by GEOFFREY WOLFF NYTimes, October 2, 2005
'Mark Twain' By RON POWERS NYTimes, October 2, 2005
Say it Ain't So By Jane Smiley
Huck Finn in the Classroom By Nat Hentoff
Banned in Concord By Myra Jehlen

NYTimes on the influence of Elmira, New York on Twain's life and fiction - Huck Finn's Birthplace, Along the Mighty Chemung. NPR's Lost and Found Sound did a piece once about Mark Twain's guitar
Mark Twain in His Times.
Shedding writer's block - on the value of writerly solitude.
Mark Twain and Walt Whitman
Some great Mark Twain Quotations
Interview with Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Mark Twain photographs at the George Eastman House
Huck Finn Themes & Essential Questions
Huck Quotations from Cliff's Notes
More Quotations from Huck Finn
Suggested Essay Questions

Arlo Guthrie: Remembering 'Alice's Restaurant'

NPR : Arlo Guthrie, Remembering 'Alice's Restaurant'
On Thanksgiving forty years ago, Arlo Guthrie dumped a pile of trash. The minor crime made him ineligible for the draft. In 1967, he immortalized the saga in "Alice's Restaurant." Debbie Elliott hears the story behind the song.

Dead Poets Society - Death of a Romantic

List of Poems in Dead Poets Society

The Columbus Dispatch - Weekender

Pair of ‘Daily Show’ writers full of mirth in victory
Last night at the Algonquin Hotel, the Thurber House of Columbus awarded the 2005 Thurber Prize for American Humor to Jon Stewart and the Daily Show writers for their best-selling America (The Book).

The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for Humor

The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for Humor
The Kennedy Center awarded the eighth annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor to Steve Martin on Sunday, October 23 at 8 p.m. in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. The award, named to honor one of America's—and the world's—greatest humorists, featured a star-studded ceremony which will broadcast nationwide on Wednesday, November 9 at 9pm on PBS.

Zonker at Walden Puddle

Zonker Harris
From Doonesbury @ Slate Magazine
Copyright ©2005 G.B. Trudeau
Click here to see Zonker at Walden Puddle

The Beat Goes On

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
New York Times Magazine
November 26, 2005

Born with the Chip

Library Journal - Born with the Chip

Web Evaluation Rubrics

Teaching Media Literacy in the Age of the Internet - Kathy Schrock
Web Evaluation for Secondary Grades
Center for Digital Literacy WebMAC Senior Evaluation Tool
WWW CyberGuide Ratings for Content Evaluation
Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask and Web Page Evaluation Checklist from UCBerkeley
Five criteria for evaluating Web pages
Website Evaluation Form

Self-Reliant Individual Essay

Read the Emerson and Thoreau selections in your anthology.
Your task is to investigate a contemporary individual whose life demonstrates either Emerson or Thoreau's definition of the self-reliant individual. This person's life should show their response to a particular social or political issue which challenges conventional beliefs or practice.
Browse Innovators of Our Time - Smithsonian Magazine's 35 Who Made a Difference. Another place to look for information is Time Magazine's 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century
Write a 350 word persuasive essay explaining how this contemporary individual embodies Emerson or Thoreau's definition of self-reliance. Use the following outline
I - Introduction
A. First quotation by Emerson or Thoreau
B. Explain quotation
C. How does the quotation describe your individual?
II - Descibe their life's accomplishments - How does this individual demonstrate their beliefs?
III - Why is this person a self-reliant individual - How does he or she reflect the beliefs of Emerson or Thoreau?
IV - What is this person's philosophy of life?
V - Conclusion
A. Second quotation by Emerson or Thoreau
B. Explain quotation
C. How does the quotation describe your individual?
Search for quotations by Emerson or Thoreau
Essays should be typed, use MLA formatting and include a correct MLA citation of sources.
Submit final draft to TurnItIn.com

Open Outline Here

Literature of Place

Essays by Thoreau and Emerson
Thoreau and Emerson Links
Transcendentalism Defined
Excerpts from Thoreau’s Walden:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Walden Pond State Reservation
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Model of Thoreau's Cabin

Walden e-text and Various Thoreau Links

Annie Dillard - Living Like Weasels and Write Till You Drop

Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It
A Literature of Place - Barry Lopez
Nature writing is not about nature, says the author--it is about the removal of nature from our lives and communities, it is about morality, it is about the immense power of place in forming character and hope.
Engagement - Terry Tempest Williams
With a foreign policy run amok, the coming election offers a chance to question the simplistic view that what is good for business is good for humanity.
Top Ten Reasons: Why we'll always need a good story - Scott Russell Sanders
We have been telling stories to one another for a long time, perhaps for as long as we have been using language, and we have been using language, I suspect, for as long as we have been human. In all its guises, from words spoken and written to pictures and musical notes and mathematical symbols, language is our distinguishing gift, our hallmark as a species.
Our Land, Our Literature: Literature - Scott Russell Sanders
And then there's Edward Abbey - Desert Solitaire, a video clip, and