Tag Archives: poet

Why Can’t We Teach Shakespeare Better?

by Harvey50Gffjqmb Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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After writing about a common misconception regarding a particular scene in Julius Caesar, Mark Kleiman offers a footnote:

Like many Boomers, I had to read Julius Caesar in the 10th grade; not really one of the Bard’s better efforts, but full of quotable passages and reasonably easy to follow. (As You Like It, by contrast, if read rather than watched, makes absolutely no sense to a sixt Shakespeare wrote great musicals.) This would have been a perfect scene to use as an example of dramatic irony. But I doubt my teacher had any actual idea what the passage was about, and the lit-crit we read as “secondary sources” disdained anything as straightforward as explaining what the play was supposed to mean or how the poet used dramatic techniques to express that meaning.

This was my experience too, but in college. I remember enrolling in a Shakespeare class and looking forward to it. In my case, I actually had a fairly good high school English teacher, but still, Shakespeare is tough for high schoolers. This would be my chance to really learn and appreciate what Shakespeare was doing.

Alas, no. I got an A in the class, but learned barely anything. It was a huge disappointment. To this day, I don’t understand why Shakespeare seems to be so difficult to teach. Was I just unlucky?

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Why Can’t We Teach Shakespeare Better?

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Are We in a New Golden Age of Journalism?

by euro9 Posted on January 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It was 1949. My mother—known in the gossip columns of that era as “New York’s girl caricaturist”—was freelancing theatrical sketches to a number of New York’s newspapers and magazines, including the Brooklyn Eagle. That paper, then more than a century old, had just a few years of life left in it. From 1846 to 1848, its editor had been the poet Walt Whitman. In later years, my mother used to enjoy telling a story about the Eagle editor she dealt with who, on learning that I was being sent to Walt Whitman kindergarten, responded in the classically gruff newspaper manner memorialized in movies like His Girl Friday: “Are they still naming things after that old bastard?”

In my childhood, New York City was, you might say, papered with newspapers. The Daily News, the Daily Mirror, the Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal…there were perhaps nine or 10 significant ones on newsstands every day and, though that might bring to mind some golden age of journalism, it’s worth remembering that a number of them were already amalgams. The Journal-American, for instance, had once been the Evening Journal and the American, just as the World-Telegram & Sun had been a threesome, the World, the Evening Telegram, and the Sun. In my own household, we got the New York Times (disappointingly comic-strip-less), the New York Post (then a liberal, not a right-wing, rag that ran Pogo and Herblock’s political cartoons) and sometimes the Journal-American (Believe It or Not and The Phantom).

Then there were always the magazines: in our house, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, Look, the New Yorker—my mother worked for some of them, too—and who knows what else in a roiling mass of print. It was a paper universe all the way to the horizon, though change and competition were in the air. After all, the screen (the TV screen, that is) was entering the American home like gangbusters. Mine arrived in 1953 when the Post assigned my mother to draw the Army-McCarthy hearings, which—something new under the sun—were to be televised live by ABC.

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Are We in a New Golden Age of Journalism?

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The Renewable Fuel Choice

by Posted on February 7, 2013

The Renewable Fuel Choice

Posted 7 February 2013 in

National

Do you want to have a choice when it comes to fueling up your car? To have the option of using fuel that is cleaner, renewable and often, cheaper? If you are like the majority of Americans in this new poll, you do – 64% of people said they supported the RFS requirement that renewable fuel be incorporated into our nation’s fuel supply.

It’s too bad that some on Capitol Hill don’t agree with these Americans, and are, in fact, working counter to our best interests by trying to change the RFS. Attacks against the RFS ignore the reality that Americans want choice and they want alternatives to oil.

The companies of Fuels America are meanwhile working to create those alternatives; Congress must protect the RFS to ensure that Americans can have access to the clean fuels being developed.

To see the cellulosic industry at work you need merely look at the raft of companies that completed building facilities or started production in recent months. These include Abengoa, KiOR and INEOS Bio, to name a few. Meanwhile, DuPont, POET and others are preparing for new cellulosic ethanol projects in the months and years to come.

Those are just a handful of the projects planned or underway. Check out our infographic for an overview of more cellulosic innovation cropping up around the country and visit E2’s new website, Fueling Growth, for a map of more than 80 advanced renewable fuel projects.

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The Renewable Fuel Choice

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Week in the News: Exciting Progress in Producing Renewable Fuel from Plant Residue, Wood Scraps

by Posted on February 1, 2013

Week in the News: Exciting Progress in Producing Renewable Fuel from Plant Residue, Wood Scraps

Posted 1 February 2013 in

National

The week may be over, but February’s just begun! Here are this week’s top stories in renewable fuel:

The Associated Press covers the exciting progress the renewable fuel industry has made toward commercial production of fuels made from plant residue, wood scraps or garbage.
A piece in AOL Energy debunks five myths about renewable fuel.
Jeff Lautt, CEO of POET, writes an op-ed in The Argus Leader on the real truths about ethanol.
The oil lobby released a new study, falsely claiming that 15 percent ethanol blends damage car engines, and the Renewable Fuels Association offered a detailed rebuttal.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota’s BioTechnology Institute have “developed a technique to ‘trick’ common iron-eating bacteria into capturing electrons” as part of a process to create renewable fuel.

That’s all for now – have a happy Friday!

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Renewable fuel is more important than ever – driving economic growth in communities that need it, improving our nation’s energy security and attracting millions in new technology dollars to invest in America’s future.

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Week in the News: Exciting Progress in Producing Renewable Fuel from Plant Residue, Wood Scraps

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