Read-Think-b4-u-Write

Canto IV - Circle One: Limbo In the last post Danté had reached the shore of Acheron just past Hell's gate and then promptly fell asleep. He wakes up on the other side of the river, refreshed and ready to continue his journey. Virgil is by his side and guides Danté through Limbo, the first circle of Hell. It is Virgil's home and the home of the unbaptized, although some occupants have ascended to Paradise, one-time occupants like Moses, Abraham, and David. On the surface, Limbo is not a bad place. It is made up green meadows and a castle with seven gates representing the seven virtues that these virtuous pagans practiced in their daily lives. What are the seven virtues, you ask? Prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope and charity. Virgil meets up with his compatriots Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, all famous writers of the classic world, and they hold a short conclave and then adopt Danté as one of their own. Wow, pretty gutsy for a guy who hasn't eve...

Introduction Danté's  Inferno is a self-help guide book that can aid you as you navigate your way through Hell (with a capital H). In 2015, most students may find this work challenging, but if you think of how Danté is relevant today that can help make The Inferno one of your best reads yet. Some things to keep in mind, Danté wrote YOU into The Divine Comedy, an epic poem of 14,233 lines. That may sound like a lot of reading, but they are short 3-line verses (tercets) divided into 100 cantos (verses) and we are only going to look at Hell (34 cantos). So keep an eye out for friends, family, and yourself as we make our descent. The Inferno  is very descriptive and we'll look at many illustrations to help see what Danté was trying to show us, like the picture above. Danté's Hell is based on varying circles, or levels, with the worst sinners at the bottom. Everyone in Hell gets the punishment they deserve, and the farther down one is located in Hell, the worse the p...

Reading Twilight , Harry Potter (take that Harold Bloom), Hunger Games , and Watchmen , for that matter, will improve your brain. Don't believe me? Let's ask the experts. ABC News is reporting that scientists are using some of their most sophisticated tools to peer inside the human brain to see what happens when we engage in the process of reading, and they are finding a number of surprises: -- Reading is a very complex task that requires several different regions of the brain to work together. -- But surprisingly, we don't use the same neural circuits to read as we grow from infants to adults. So our brains are constantly changing throughout our lives. -- It appears possible that reading can improve the "connectivity" between the various brain circuits that are essential to understanding the written word. -- And there is recent evidence that simply reading a good novel can keep that enhanced "conne...

Have you read Lord of the Rings ? How about The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye ? If you have then you are reading banned books. In honor of Banned Books Week (Sept. 30) here are the top twenty banned "classic" books according to the American Library Association (ALA) . 1. The Great Gatsby , by F. Scott Fitzgerald 2. The Catcher in the Rye , by J.D. Salinger 3. The Grapes of Wrath , by John Steinbeck 4. To Kill a Mockingbird , by Harper Lee 5. The Color Purple , by Alice Walker 6. Ulysses , by James Joyce 7. Beloved , by Toni Morrison 8. The Lord of the Flies , by William Golding 9. 1984 , by George Orwell 11. Lolita , by Vladmir Nabokov 12. Of Mice and Men , by John Steinbeck 15. Catch-22 , by Joseph Heller 16. Brave New World , by Aldous Huxley 17. Animal Farm , by George Orwell 18. The Sun Also Rises , by Ernest Hemingway 19. As I Lay Dying , by William Faulkner 20. A Farewell to Arms , by Ernest Hemingway Why are books b...

Did you read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in high school or college? Did you have a hard time keeping track of who is who? SomethingSoSam.com created a slick art deco Gatsby Character Map to help you keep track. But SomethingSoSam didn't stop there, there are also some graphics of memorable Gatsby quotes , like this one: To finish off this trilogy of visual fun, here is a video with a little bit more about the Gatsby characters . . . A Look Into the Characters of The Great Gatsby from SomethingSoSam on Vimeo . It's obvious this graphic artist is passionate about The Great Gatsby . Warner Brothers would be well served to hire SomethingSoSam to create the posters for their movie slated for release December 2012. It is billed as an "American 3D romantic drama film", and stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan and Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson....

21 Classics That Make for Great Beach Reads includes some new classics and perennial favorites. So before you take your summer trip, pack your towel, slap on some sunscreen, and grab a book. Some favorites: 1. Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston hits most of the usual beats of a contemporary beach read — love, danger, tragedy, and finding personal strength in rough times — but stands apart for its historical significance and hauntingly gorgeous prose. Written at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, for modern readers the story of Janie Crawford’s eventful, not always satisfying life offers up some excellent lessons in America’s racial and gender history. If you didn't read this in high school you should have. A real page turner. 2. The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin Beachy bibliophiles who want a little splash of sci-fi with their sun might want to give this classic thriller about a mysterious Connecticut suburb where all the wives lose their ambit...

Alice in Peepland is the Chicago Tribune's 2011 (People's choice) winner. What a misnomer! Of course, this is the Peeple's choice winner! This is the Dispeep version, there's no Johnny Peep as the Mallow Hatter to scare the goo out of you. We can clearly see Alice as she waits for the Queen of Carnuba to wax the groundpeep through the Jackrabbit of Spades.

I dropped Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno in my carry-on bag—it’s a pirate story about a slave revolt that could be labeled narrative nonfiction. For some reason, it reminded me of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen . Obviously, there’s Watchmen ’s comic-within-comic pirate story, “The Black Freighter” where the stranded protagonist falls prey to insanity causing him to become as corrupt as the pirates he has escaped. But more than that, Cereno ’s final section entitled “From a Narrative of Voyages and Travels . . .” is filled with pseudo documents, such as legal transcripts, depositions, and diary entries. The Watchmen is interspersed with bogus documents from fictional crime reports and psychological files to a celebrity autobiography entitled Under the Hood . It’s busy in Denver . . . I only caught a few of titles around me. A teenage boy in a red sweatshirt is devouring The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I thought this so weird (teenagers reading diet books?) t...

As a child we are frightened by creepy clowns and the evil hiding under our beds or the bogeymen inhabiting our closets. Our threshold for terror lies in the innocence of childhood. From walking home in the dark after a vampire film festival to getting lost at the shopping mall, dread dwells in the unexpected as we climb the scaffolds of our mind to the noose of terror that awaits us. What's your fondest childhood fear?

A half-dozen riders on a super packed train at 11:30 p.m. and I were perusing the program from Tosca . BTW a great production. Lado Ataneli as the evil, Scarpia, and Adrianne Pieczonka as the pious, Tosca, were fab. The weirdest scene-yup, that's the one. Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey was being read by a post modern Peter Pan in the tightest dark-green Levis ever, and pointy-toed suede Hush Puppies, topped by a rat pack style fedora. A tattered copy of Dreams from My Father by the Pres was being passed back and forth by a couple who got off in Berkeley. BART Transit Connection was being interpreted by a group of teenage Asian tourists who practiced saying, "Excuse me" every 30 seconds or so. BTW, Pleasant Hill and Pleasanton are two different places. And then, of course, the ever present business man with a manila folder propped on his knees reading memos containing columns of numbers. Geez it's midnight on Friday, as Jimmy Cliff would say, ...

No. 1 : Sir Peepsalot or King Arthur and the Peeps of the Round Table A rousing tale of knightly peeps on a quest for the sword, Excalipeep. Only the true heir of Peepselot can remove the sword from the stone and prove himself worthy to rule Mallowland. Of course it's no.1 - What did you expect from a Renaissance lit enthusiast? No 2: The Wizard of Peeps Can Doropeep make it to the Emerald City? Will the Cowardly Peep find his courage? Will the Tin Peep find a heart? Will the Scarepeep get the brains he always wanted? Although how much good marshmallow brains will do him is questionable. No. 3: Snow White and the Seven Peeps There's no accounting for taste and Peeps do have a penchant for fairy tales with sugary sweet endings where the charming Prince Peep awakes his beloved with a saccharin kiss. Other best sellers on the Peep Times list: 3 Cups of Marshmallow Tea - One peep's mission to promote peace . . . one confection at a time. American Born Peep - a firs...

. . . or what I could see from my seat without looking like a stalker freak! I love to observe what people read at airports, unemployment lines, Bart trains, the laundromat, wherever you have to wait around. I finished CW Gortner's The Last Queen - excellent read (see a short review on my links page) and started Leonardo's Swans by Karen Essex. For those Hunter/Jumper folk out there, Essex paints a great scene of Beatrice jumping a gap in the city walls. The adrenaline will feel familiar. So far, so good. A woman in a charcoal gray suit sitting across from me was reading A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels and Other Subversive Spirits by Carol and Dinah Mack. Food and Wine Magazine - I thought this was the most popular magazine in flying heaven, until I went to an airport souvenir shop and noticed it there, and then saw it at every shop in the concourse. Now that's a contract I'd like to have. The Milford Journal - a long way from home. Atlas...