Friday 27 January 2012

B2 Literary Mayhem No.13 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

before you read this: don't forget to send me your Kerouac translations before Sunday midnight!

Friends,
A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. So, here's what I've got to say:

"For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed." (Ernest Hemingway's Nobel Prize Acceptance speech)

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954 was awarded to Ernest Hemingway "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC_ZksjsnRQ
Words from Ernest Hemingway and music from Fugazi. 
A Come Up, Kinch production.
Gil (Owen Wilson) is introduced to Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) in Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris
Aleksandr Petrov, the one man Army behind this classic adaptation, has achieved so many well deserved prestigious awards for this once in a life time movie.
readings from the novella, plus interviews with folks from Cuba who knew Papa back in the day, including Ernesto Garcia Gutierrez.

Ernest Miller Hemingway
Born: 21 July 1899, Oak Park, IL, USA
Died: 2 July 1961, Ketchum, ID, USA
Residence at the time of the award: USA
Prize motivation: "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style"
Language: English
Ernest Miller Hemingway

Biography

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel,The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.

Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

Friday 20 January 2012

B2 Literary Mayhem No.12 Animal Farm by George Orwell

before you read this: Please do not forget to e-mail/bring your Kerouac translations by Monday23 Jan, 9:30 AM/next class!
do not forget to visit: http://b2literarymayhem.blogspot.com

Dear citizens of the free world,

My name is George Orwell, the father of the term "Big Brother" and I think that "Liberty is telling people what they do not want to hear." And I have an important  fable/fairy tale to share for you to read:

The name of my story is Animal Farm, and as an allegory it might be quite useful for you!

Watch and learn!
Animal Farm is a British animated film by Halas and Batchelor, based on the book of the same name by George Orwell. It was the first British animated feature released worldwide, which, despite the title and Disney-esque animal animation, is in fact a no-holds-barred adaptation of George Orwell's classic

Top Ten Quotes Key quotations from Animal Farm.
Vocabulary from Animal Farm
A list of 363 words from the novel presented in context. Click on the word for its definition and synonyms.





Sunday 15 January 2012

C1/B2 Literary Mayhem - English Magazines in Bratislava

Your classmate asked, so I thought you might be interested too in..English  Magazines in Bratislava

A great source of news on Slovakia in English, is a weekly newspaper called The Slovak Spectator. You can see more

I am pretty sure there are more coffee shops offering English speaking magazines to read with your coffee, but here's one owned by a friend from Canada, Ben Pascoe:

We offer a great selection of English and Slovak language second hand books of all genres. If you are looking for bestsellers, classics, fiction or fantasy, Shakespeare or Star Trek, we have them all. Our collection currently counts more than 9000 titles and continues to grow rapidly.

In addition, you can also come to read one of our many newspapers and magazines. We currently subscribe to: Wall Street Journal Europe, Economist, Sme and Novy Cas.

Also, PantaRhei in Eurovea has a great selection of English Language magazines, I am pretty sure it's not the only one. 
 
  InterpressTop
Panta Rhei Bratislava

Poštová ul., Bratislava

Opening hours:
Mo - Su:08:00 - 20:00 h

  InterpressTop
Panta Rhei Bratislava

Galleria EUROVEA

Opening hours:
Mo - Su:09:00 - 21:00 h


  Bookstores - MODUL

SVET KNIHY, Obchodná ul. Bratislava
MODUL, Laurinská ul. Bratislava

Opening hours: 
Mo - Su:09:00 - 19:00 hod
  PRESS POINT,  OC Hron
Dudvážska 5061
821 07 Bratislava

Opening hours:
Mo - Fr: 
Sa:
Su:
08:00 - 21:00 h
08:00 - 21:00 h
08:00 - 21:00 h

  Stahl Press, Main Railway Station Bratislava
811 04 Bratislava

Opening hours:
Mo - Fr: 
Sa:
Su:
05:00 - 23:00 h
05:00 - 21:00 h
05:00 - 23:00 h

  Stahl Press, Main Bus Station  Bratislava
Mlynské nivy 24
821 02 Bratislava

Opening hours:
Mo - Fr: 
Sa:
Su:
06:00 - 20:00 h
06:00 - 18:00 h
14:00 - 21:00 h

  Viva Shop, Personal Port
Bratislava

Fajnorovo nabrežie
811 02 Bratislava

Opening hours:
Mo - Fr: 
Sa:
Su:
07:30 - 20:00 h
07:30 - 22:00 h
07:30 - 22:00 h

Carrefour Hypermarkets
Shopping Centre 
Polus Bratislava, Danubia Bratislava, Dubeň Žilina, Cassovia Košice

Opening hours:
Mo - Su:07:00 - 22:00 h

  TESCO Hypermarkets
Bratislava, Banská Bystrica, Košice, Levice, Nitra, Pezinok, Piešťany, Poprad, Považská Bystrica, Prešov, Prievidza, Trenčín, Trnava, Žilina

  COOP Jednota Bratislava
TERNO Supermarket

Shopping centre AUPARK Bratislava, EUROPA Banská Bystrica

Opening hours:
Mo - Su:08:00 - 22:00 h

You can also download most of magazines to a reader or an apple device these days, not to mention the torrent sites, or just read them online. Hope I've helped ;)

Friday 13 January 2012

B2 Literary Mayhem No.11 - On The Road by Jack Kerouac


before you read this, please do not forget to fill in the vocabulary quiz on p.2 for our next class

Dear friends on the road,

All life is but a skull-bone and
A pack of ribs through which 
we just keep passing food & fuel
just so's we can burn so
furious  beautiful.

My name is Jack Kerouac and I want to tell you this story about my friend Neal Cassady, whom I call Dean Moriarty in my novel On The Road.
Have a drink, play some jazz music and read the first two chapters from it:

(Week 13 reading)

 (A Penguin Books Amplified Edition for iPad)


Resources:
A clip from the 1985 documentary "Kerouac, the Movie." Jack Kerouac interviewed by Steve Allen in 1959, telling how he wrote the novel in just three weeks on one scroll of paper..
Artistic representation of Jack Kerouac's quote, "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes, 'Awww!'"
Russell Brand continues his epic road trip across America in this free video from BBC Worldwide. Here, the comedian visits the home of jazz poetry, a movement that was created in part by his literary idol Jack Keroauc during the time of writing the generation defining novel 'On the Road'. Brilliant video from BBC documentary 'Russell Brand on the Road'.

Thursday 5 January 2012

B2 Literary Mayhem No.10 - 1951 Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger


Dear snowed-in reader,

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is  where I was born, an what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all--I'm not saying that--but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.


Who am I? My name is Holden Caulfield and I am the storyteller and main character of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, a controversial youth novel published in 1951 and being one of the best novels of the past century.


RESOURCES
The Catcher in the Rye v. On The Road, which we're going to read next week. They're both great books, but this is a great argument.

NOTE
on the first chapter:

STUDY QUESTIONS:
Chapter 1 

1.      What does Holden mean when he says that his brother D.B. is out in Hollywood "being a prostitute"? 
2.      Where is Holden as the story begins? 
3.      Where and what is Pencey Prep? 
4.      How did Holden let the fencing team down? 
5.      Why was Holden being kicked out of Pencey Prep?
6.      What kind of health does Holden appear to be in? 

Chapter 2 

1.      Who is Mr. Spencer and why does Holden visit him? 
2.      What did Spencer do that particularly annoyed Holden? 
3.      What does Holden give us as the reason for "leaving" Elkton Hills? 


An alternative book cover by Rachel Anilyse
An alternative book cover by Rachel Anilyse