Català - Anglès

Ou : white, yolk.

• gunbarrel = canó
• holster = pistolera, cartuchera
• pull the trigger = apretar el gatillo
• "Take aim!" = "apunta"

• barlovento - upwind, windward
• cast off - partir un vaixell
• dockyard = astillero
• forecastle = castillo / camarotes de proa
• foresail
• portside = babor, lado izquierdo del barco
• sotavento - downwind, leeward
• starboard = right side of the boat, estribor
• steerage = ship's cheapest accommodation
• tide - marea

• les 2 roses : House of York

Vocabulary, dictionary

In American English and American Spanish, the term sedan is used (accented as "sedán" in Spanish). The engine compartment, at the front, is covered by the hood; the cargo compartment at the rear is called the trunk. In British English, a car of this configuration is called a saloon. The engine compartment cover is the bonnet, the cargo-compartment boot is at the rear. Hatchback sedans are known simply as hatchbacks (not hatchback saloons); long-wheelbase luxury saloons may be referred to as limousines.

• shrapnel = metralla
• sniper = francotirador

.

• your account payment is soverdue

• fit
  1. fit (a) = en forma
  2. fit (v) = quedar bé (una peça de roba)

• free
  1. libre
  2. gratis

• light
  1. light (a) = clar
  2. light (n) = la llum

• look
  1. look (v) = semblar, aparentar
  2. look (n) = aspecte extern

• match
  1. match (n) = llumí
  2. match (v) = combinar amb

• suit
  1. suit (v) = afavorir (un estil)
  2. suit (n) = vestit (esp. traje)

furlough vs layoff :

• a layoff is basically when your job is terminated. Your job, your benefits, you're not going to return to that employer again.
• a furlough is a leave of absence, your job remains.

• dream a dream of me
• they are terrified of you
• that's so sweet of you
• walk in fear
• tell lies on me
• think of me
• I swear to god
• we were attending the contest on a whim
• she is waiting on you

• character determines fate
• I'm a doer, not a thinker, me
• you stood me up
• tickle your fancy - hazle cosquillas a tu imaginación
• butt out
• what's up ?
• let's see what fate has in store for you
• I will refrain from commenting
• water under the bridge - used to say that something happened in the past and is no longer important or worth arguing about
• it's time to pull up your socks
• ... after a season during which he encountered a motley crew of injuries
• we'll pretend it's a morning wood
• last but not least - an expression to start the last item of a list, emphasising that while it is listed last, it is just as important as the rest of the items
• by the skin of your teeth = por los pelos
• fair enough = d'acord, ho entenc, em sembla be, entesos
• barbed wire - alambre de espino
• carne de cañon = cannon fodder
• mazel tov - a Jewish phrase expressing congratulations or wishing someone good luck
• day late, dollar short, love -
• ass you could bounce a quarter off of ...
• I look forward to your call
• don't pretend like you have a choice
• your approval means everything to me
• It's a shit world out there. You count on no one but yourself. You either sink or you swim.
• he's even more of a twink than in the photo
• is that a hickey on your neck ?
• when are you due ? cuándo das a luz ?
• after (bla bla), Amelia is at a loss ; to be at a loss = not to know what to do or say
• ... she took her own life at the age of just 25
• “to be on the rag” is a slang term for menstruation
• to bear witness
• "the two of you get on ?" {BM-S7E5}

• proverbs

Un hombre entra en un bar y pide un vaso de agua. El camarero saca una pistola y le apunta. El hombre dice "gracias" y sale.

Sonidos es en. Voces animales.

Onomatopeies (cat) + Traductor.

Sustantivo colectivo, colectius

(*) used to produce Whiskey

(#) used to produce Vodka

Poden tenir:

• natural (de temperatura) - could you bring it at room temperature please ?
• fresca - cold water
• del grifo - tap water
• embotellada - bottled water
• sin gas - still water
• sparkling water - con burbujas, con gas

Per la salinitat pot ser : fresh, brackish or briny, "saline" and brine.

• Shock and denial - This is a state of disbelief and numbed feelings
• Pain and guilt ...
• Anger and bargaining ...
• Depression ...
• The upward turn ...
• Reconstruction and working through ...
• Acceptance and hope

• 1 inch = 2,54 cm
• 12 inches equals 1 foot (30,48 cm)
• there are 3 feet in a yard (91,44 cm)
• one chain is 22 yards - the distance between the two wickets on a cricket pitch (20 m)
• a furlog is 10 chains (201 m)
• one mile is 8 furlongs; there are 1760 yards in a mile (1609 m)

• clavo - nail
• martillo - hammer
• llave inglesa - wrench

"Matty : Ned ... no matter what you think, I do love you."

wikipedia , script, url

• You're not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.
• my condolences
• chimes = campanilla
• joint = antro, barucho
• gazebo = glorieta, quiosco

wikipedia

Detective's (crime's) vocabulary

• spanish
  • allanamiento de morada = burglary (?)
  • cómplice
  • cuerpo del delito = body of proof, body of evidence
  • esbirro
  • ganivetada =
  • ley seca = prohibition
  • maltrato
  • secuaz
  • segrest = to kidnap
  • toque de queda =

• english
  • abducted - secuestrado
  • acquited - absuelto
  • affidavit - declaracion jurada
  • alibi - coartada - what gave Simon his alibi ? The shot fired by Jacqueline
  • alimony - pensión alimenticia
  • attorney - abogado - lawyer (An attorney is a lawyer, but a lawyer may not necessarily be an attorney)
  • bail - fianza
  • battery - a criminal offense involving the unlawful physical acting upon a threat, distinct from assault which is the act of creating apprehension of such contact.
  • blackmail - chantaje - The next day she came to you and blackmailed you
  • bootlegging - contrabando de licor
  • bribe - soborno
  • burglary - asalto
  • chum - amigote, compinche, cebo, camarada
  • cold case -
  • coroner - forense
  • crony - amigote, compinche
  • crook - lladre
  • curfew - toque de queda
  • curlpit - culpable
  • defendant - acusado
  • demeanor - comportamiento
  • went to jail for DUI - driving under the influence
  • evidence - prueba
  • felony - delito
  • flash rob - .
  • forgery - falsificació
  • fraud - misrepresentation of information or identity to deceive others
  • frisk - cachear
  • Glasgow smile
  • grifter - estafador
  • gun-running - .
  • hearsay - testimony from an under-oath witness who is reciting an out-of-court statement, the content of which is being offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted.
  • heist - a crime in which valuable things are taken illegally and often violently from a place or person
  • hitman - sicario
  • hitter - .
  • holster - funda de la pistola
  • kidnapping - secuestro
  • larceny - stealing, the crime of taking something that does not belong to you, without illegally entering a building to do so (hurto)
  • leads - pistas
  • leniency -
  • misdemeanor - fechoria, delito menor
  • mistrial - a trial rendered invalid through an error in the proceedings
  • mumblety-peg - old outdoor game played using pocketknives
  • murder - asesinato - intentionally causing the death of another person without extreme provocation or legal justification
  • mugshot - foto policial
  • notice of eviction - aviso de desahucio, de desalojo
  • pimp - proxeneta
  • fired at point blank range - disparó a quemarropa
  • poacher - cazador furtivo
  • probation - libertad condicional
  • pursuit - persecucion
  • ransom - rescate
  • rape - violación
  • restraining order - orden de alejamiento - Court order issued to prohibit an individual from carrying out a particular action
  • robbery - completed or attempted theft, directly from a person, of property or cash by force
  • scalp - arrancar la piel a tiras
  • shill - señuelo
  • slain - to kill by violence
  • slander - calumnia
  • skammer - talego
  • sleuth - detective, sabueso
  • snitch - soplón
  • solicitation - proposicion de prostitucion, etc
  • stab - apuñalar - stabbed to the heart - the maid had been stabbed with a surgical knife
  • stitches - puntos
  • stray bullet - bala perdida
  • subpoena - citación
  • swindle - defraudar, estafar - Linnet was being swindled
  • trustee - fideicomisario / fideicomiso
  • undertaker - enterrador
  • witness - testigo

Algunes frases

• No body, no crime
• I am here at the behest of a client
• You have a regurgitive reaction to mistruthin
• Physical evidence can tell a clear story with a forked tongue

• plea bargain - only 17% of the trials end up in a sentence
• solicitation
• corredor de la mort
• Speakeasy @ prohibition
• Chicago crime types
• Mug Shot. The Smoking Gun, a site with a well known fondness for posting the best and brightest police booking photos, is ringing in the New Year with a run-down of the most memorable mugshots of 2014.
• càstic anglès ...
• gross indecency (uk)

• Rikers, NY

• white : 64% of US population, 39% of incarcerated population
• hispanic : 16% of US population, 19% of incarcerated population
• black : 13% of US population, 40% of incarcerated population

incarceration in the USA

Today, people of color make up 37% of the U.S. population but 67% of the prison population. Overall, African Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested; once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted; and once convicted, they are more likely to face stiff sentences url

Percentages racials als EUA (316 M) :

• blancs - 73 % (233 M)
• negres - 13 % (40 M)
• asian - 5 % (16 M)
• other - 5 % (15 M)

Percentatges penitenciaris als EUA :
In 2014, African Americans constituted 2,3 million, or 34%, of the total 6.8 million correctional population.

Relaciones directas :

• Sebas es el marido de Carmen [husband]
• Carmen es la esposa de Sebas [wife]
• Angel es el padre de Carmen [father]
• Dusia es la madre de Sebas [mother]
• Nicolau es el hijo de Carmen [son]
• Ester es la hija de Cesar [daughter]
• Nicolau es el hermano de Irina [brother]
• Irina es la hermana de Nicolau [sister]

Relaciones indirectas :

• Angel es el abuelo de Nicolau [grandfather]
• Dusia es la abuela de Nicolau [grandmother]
• Irina es la nieta de Dusia [granddaughter]
• Nicolau es el nieto de Dusia [grandson]
• Cesar es el tio de Nicolau [uncle]
• Montse es la tia de Nicolau [aunt]
• Nicolau es el sobrino de Montse [nephew]
• Irina es la sobrina de Montse [niece]
• Oriol es el primo de Nicolau [cousin]
• Cesar es el cuñado de Sebas [brother-in-law]
• Montse es la cuñada de Sebas [sister-in-law]
• Angel es el suegro de Sebas [father-in-law]
• Dusia es la suegra de Carmen [mother-in-law, madre política]
• Cesar es el yerno de Angel [son-in-law]
• stepmother - madrastra
• neboda - sobrina

Baby pillows, bazongas, boobs, boobies, bosoms, breasts, bubbies, butter bags, cats and kitties, che-chees, cream jugs, dugs, dumplings, feedbags, flip-flaps, grapefruits, globes, hand warmers, headlights, hooters, jugs, knockers, melons, mountains, muffins, paps, peaches, pumps, ta-tas, tits, titties,

• To go down on, at Closer
• Tushy - nice firm buttocks of a girl
• boca orella : word of mouth
• box-office bomb or box-office flop : is a film that is considered highly unsuccessful or unprofitable

Chet Pussy: All right, pussy, pussy, pussy! Come on in pussy lovers! Here at the Titty Twister we're slashing pussy in half! Give us an offer on our vast selection of pussy, this is a pussy blow out! All right, we got white pussy, black pussy, Spanish pussy, yellow pussy, we got hot pussy, cold pussy, we got wet pussy, we got [sniffs] smelly pussy, we got hairy pussy, bloody pussy, we got snappin' pussy, we got silk pussy, velvet pussy, nalga high pussy, we even got horse pussy, dog pussy, chicken pussy! Come on, you want pussy, come on in, pussy lovers! If we don't got it, you don't want it! Come on in, pussy lovers!

See LitLove a la nostra biblioteca

Tf 93 689 18 36

Zoom (2022), Atena

e1001's {20151104}

Emails : b.torrelles, Helena, Empar Riera, Toni {201510}, Olga Pujol Huguet, directora des 01/2023 ... fins finals de 2024 Joana, Josefina, Chris

At first, I was a bit surprised about a person who wants to change his name and his reasons for doing it.
Britannica says : "the change in name corresponded to a profound shift in Orwell’s life-style, in which he changed from a pillar of the British imperial establishment into a literary and political rebel."

And then, a second question came on its own : why did he choose "Orwell", where does it come from ?
Same Britannica article spots : "derived from the beautiful river Orwell in East Anglia".

Do you know any other person who did so ?

• Vladimir Ilitx Ulianov - Lenin
• Iossif Vissarionovitx Djugasvili - Stalin
• Liev Davídovich Bronstein - Trotski
• Nicolas Kim Coppola - Nicolas Cage - inspired in Luke Cage
• Marion Robert Morrison - John Wayne
• Margarita Carmen Cansino - Rita Hayworth
• Garry Kimovich Weinstein - Garry Kasparov
• Francisco Gustavo Sánchez Gómez - Paco de Lucía
• Reginald Kenneth Dwight - Elton John
• Farrokh Bulsara - Freddie Mercury
• David Robert Jones - David Bowie
• Allen Konigsberg - Woody Allen
• Robert Zimmerman - Bob Dylan
• Jo Tejada - Raquel Welch
• Norma Jeane Mortenson - Marilyn Monroe
• Samuel Langhorne Clemens - Mark Twain

buzzfeed

wiki

Personatges i simbols :

• Old Major (boar) = Lenin
• Snowball (pig) = Leon Trotski
• Napoleon (pig) = Joseph Stalin
• Squealer : pravda
• Moses (raven) : espia, capellà, organized religion
• Minimus = political poet - represents the takeover of art by propaganda in a totalitarian state that aims to control what its citizens think
• Boxer, Clover : working class
• Jessie, Bluebell, Pincher (+9) (dogs) : secret police
• Mollie (mare, euga) - symbolizes the selfish and materialistic middle-class
• Benjamin (donkey) - represents those who were aware of Stalin’s unjust and oppressive policies but did nothing to try to stop them

Expresions interessants :

• (3/21) his tushes had never been cut
• (28/30) useless for anything except roots
• "foal" pot ser "parir" i "potranca" :
  • after her fourth foal
  • the four foals you bore
• [1] "barn" i "stall" son "establo"
• [2] "stout" (persona = corpulento) i "sturdy" (edificio = macizo) son "robusto"
• [3] "parir" pot ser "whelp" o "foal"
• [4] "azotar" pot ser "flogging" o "lashing"
• "emocionante" aqui es "stirring", pero usualmente es "exciting"
• mangel-wurzel is a beet (remolacha) with a large yellowish root, grown chiefly as cattle (ganado) feed

Few big phrases:

• All the same, there were days when they felt that they would sooner have had less figures and more food.
• These were large sheets of paper which had to be closely covered with writing, and as soon as they were so covered, they were burnt in the furnace.
• The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Few Anthems.

Audio Book : Animal Farm;

Dystopian novel published in 1949

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

wiki, pdf

Three totalitarian super-states – Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia – emerged from a global war

• 2 minutes hate
• ingsoc - political party of the totalitarian government of Oceania
• newspeak - the language of Oceania
• doublethink - act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct
• thoughtcrime - an illegal thought
• memory hole - mechanism for the alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents
• prolefeed - deliberately superficial entertainment including literature, movies and music
• Goldstein's book - The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism

• The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts.
• The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war.
• The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order.
• And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs.

Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

És un autor magnífic, sobre tot en descripcions de personatges :

• Victory Mansions were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years.
• He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.
• He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.
• His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away.
• That’s better, comrade, that’s MUCH better,’ she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first time in several years.
• Syme ... was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you.
• ‘I know what you expect me to say,’ he said. ‘You expect me to say as I’d sooner be young again. Most people’d say they’d sooner be young, if you arst’ ‘em. You got your ‘ealth and strength when you’re young. When you get to my time of life you ain’t never well. I suffer something wicked from my feet, and my bladder’s jest terrible. Six and seven times a night it ‘as me out of bed. On the other ‘and, there’s great advantages in being a old man. You ain’t got the same worries. No truck with women, and that’s a great thing. I ain’t ‘ad a woman for near on thirty year, if you’d credit it. Nor wanted to, what’s more.’
• At the sight of the words I LOVE YOU the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid.
• Winston, at normal times the kind of person who gravitates to the outer edge of any kind of scrimmage, shoved, butted, squirmed his way forward into the heart of the crowd.
• It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part. But at the last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze. It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand. He explored the long fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row of callouses, the smooth flesh under the wrist. Merely from feeling it he would have known it by sight.
• He stopped thinking and merely felt. The girl’s waist in the bend of his arm was soft and warm. He pulled her round so that they were breast to breast; her body seemed to melt into his. Wherever his hands moved it was all as yielding as water. Their mouths clung together; it was quite different from the hard kisses they had exchanged earlier. When they moved their faces apart again both of them sighed deeply.
• In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.
• All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?
• Their first love-making had been simply an act of the will. But after the second time it was different. The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him.
• She gave the tips of his fingers a quick squeeze that seemed to invite not desire but affection.

Distopian novels - Brave New World, Farenheit 451, 1984

2 + 2 = 5

Top

"Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories" (1958) brought together the title novella and three shorter tales: "House of Flowers", "A Diamond Guitar" and "A Christmas Memory" {read "Capote, Truman-The Complete Stories of Truman Capote.epub"}

“House of Flowers” is one of three pieces of short fiction included at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s the story of Ottilie, a young woman from Haiti, whose only power is in deciding which life of submission she will lead, one as a prostitute or one as the wife of Royal Bonaparte, a native from the mountains. What makes this story remarkable, I think, is the double side of Ottilie’s situation. She is strong-minded and feels the power of being able to choose, but the reader sees just how dismal (deprimente, deplorable) her options are. Comentari
Ottilie should have been the happiest girl in Port-au-Prince.

"A Christmas Memory", a largely autobiographical story taking place in the 1930s, was published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1956. It was issued as a hard-cover stand alone edition in 1966 and has since been published in many editions and anthologies.

bio, novel, pdf, glossary, A Xmas Memory {sagpdf}

El escritor Truman Capote (1924-1984) estaba en Palamós (Girona) cuando se enteró de la muerte de Marilyn Monroe. Esa mujer a la que describió cruelmente en una Adorable criatura había aparecido inconsciente sobre su cama el 4 de agosto de 1962. Capote supo del suicidio unos días después por la prensa internacional que llegaba al pueblo mediterráneo. Compró el periódico, una botella de ginebra y regresó consternado al hotel Trias. "¡Mi amiga ha muerto! ¡Mi amiga ha muerto!", repetía desolado al dueño, Josep Colomer. Ese fue el último verano que Capote pasó en Palamós.

Capote pasó tres temporadas en la Costa Brava, que entonces era otra costa, menos construida, más virgen, más oculta. Primero se alojó en el hotel Trias, luego escogió una casa en el centro del pueblo y cuando ya conocía los rincones mágicos y secretos, Capote alquiló una mansión en un pequeño montículo en una cala, frente al mar. Lejos de las jaranas de la corte de intelectuales, actores y ricachones que le rodeaba, Capote escribió las últimas páginas de la novela "A sangre fría", la historia del asesinato de una familia en Kansas; la historia que le destruyó.

En Palamós no despertó grandes pasiones. Capote, ensimismado y atormentado, se paseaba en bata por el pueblo (daba igual si hacía frío o calor), junto a Charlie, su inseparable bulldog, para comprar la prensa, la ginebra y los comestibles. La primera casa en la que vivió luce una placa con sus impresiones: "Esto es un pueblo de pescadores, el agua es tan clara y azul como el ojo de una sirena. Me levanto temprano porque los pescadores zarpan a las cinco de la mañana y arman tanto ruido que ni Rip Van Winkle podría dormir [el protagonista de un cuento de Washington Irving que se quedó dormido 20 años bajo la sombra de un árbol]".

Palamós@El País

Escritor abiertamente homosexual en cuyo historial amoroso no faltaron historias amarillas como su atracción por uno de los asesinos de "A sangre fría", su mayor obra y piedra angular de la literatura de no-ficción

• I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods
• during the war a private telephone was hard to come by
• can you rattle right over here ?
• and there was a croak of excitement in his froggy voice
• I took a taxi in a downpour of October rain
• sure as I'am a man fit to wear britches
• "You like me". "I worship you, mr Arbuck"
• she was never without dark glasses, she was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so
• and her expression, an unrealized yawn, put, by example, a dampener on the excitement I felt over dining at so swanky a place
• she received V-letters by the bale
• after the sun had gone and there were lighted windows in the dusk
• I hate snoops
• at any rate she no longer rang my bell. I missed that; and as the days merged I began to feel toward her certain far-fetched resentments, as if I were being neglected by my closest friend
• his bald freckled head was dwarf-big; attached to it were a pair of pointed, truly elfin ears. He had Pekingese eyes, unpitying and slightly bulged. Tufts of hair sprouted from his ears, from his nose; his jowls were gray with afternoon beard, and his handshake almost flurry.
• but the kid don't know how to live even when she's got the dough
• you're wrong - she is a phony
• I don't mean you, O.J. You're such a slob. You always nigger-lip.
• Well, don't blush, Fred : you didn't say you were a genius
• another thing: if I holler, come zipper me up
• You know those days when you've got the mean reds ? (...) You're affraid and you smell like hell, but you don't know what you're affraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what it is.
• (do you love me ?) Tend to your chores, Rusty.
• It was a young womna, and she entered like a wind-rush, a squall of scarves and jangling gold. "H-H-Holly", she said, wagging a finger as she advanced, "you miserable h-h-hoarder. Hogging all these simply r-r-riveting m-m-men!"
• even the stutter, certainly genuine but still a bit laid on, had been turned to advantage
• The Air Force colonel decamped while her back was turned, and this was the straw too much: he'd asked her to dinner.
• That's the right spirit. I like a man who sees the humor; most of them, they're all pant and puff
• I have a memory of spending many hither and yonning days with Holly
• But I still do it every now and then, sort of to keep my hand in (to steal)
• He brought out a wallet. It was as worn as his lethery hands, almost falling to pieces; and so was the brittle, cracked, blurred snapshot he handed me
• You're rockin' the boat kinda early
• I'm still stealing turkey eggs and running through a brier patch
• Beu, after all, he knows I'm preggers
• and I said: "Do shut up", for I felt infuriatingly left out -a tugboat in drydock while she, glittery voyager of secure destinations, steamed down the harbor with whistles and confetti in the air
• don't think I'm out to lose the heir (heredero)
• mention that to a living soul, darling. I'll hang you by your toes and dress you for a hog
• back at his bar he propped me in the telephone boot with a triple martini and a brandy tumbler full of coins (vaso)
• he shut the suitcase and produced a letter. "My cousin, she ask me leave that for his chum, You will oblige?"

Ara, línies escollides de "House of Flowers", "A Diamond Guitar" i "A Christmas Memory"

• But, Baby, she sighed, and could not express her discontent
• Her mother was dead, her father was a planter who had gone back to France, and she had been brought up in the mountains by a rough peasant family, the sons of whom had each at a young age lain with her in some green and shadowy place
• Ah, said Rosita with swooning eyes, you feel as though pepper has been sprinkled on your heart, as though tiny fish are swimming in your veins.
• Black bees festooned the honeysuckle
• Ottilie, will you have a dip of snuff?
• Royal's house was like a house of flowers; wisteria sheltered the roof, a curtain of vines shaded the windows, lilies bloomed at the door. From the windows one could see far, faint winkings of the sea, as the house was high up a hill; here the sun burden hot but the shadows were cold. Inside, the house was always dark and cool, and the walls rustled with pasted pink and green newspapers. There was oly one room; it ocntained a stove, a teetering mirror on top a marble table, and a brass bed big enough for three fat men.
• She did not mind that on these visits he was gruff with her: she knew that he was showing off before the other men who worked in the fields, and who grinned at her like split watermelons.
• She was underfoot the whole day, and her red, remorseless eyes were seldom shut; but the worst of it, the thing that finally made Ottilie threatento kill her, was the old woman's habit of sneaking up from nowhere and pinching her so hard you could see the fingernail marks.
• Dear, said Rosita when Ottilie had finished dressing up, there's no man alive that wouldn't buy you a whole keg of beer; to think of it, a gorgeous piece like you suffering far away from those who love you.
• Here, dear, let me see your glass again. A toast to old times, and those to be! Tonight Mr. Jamison is going to buy champagne for everybody; Madame is letting him have it at half-price.
• Chewing eucalyptus leaves to sweeten her breath, she felt the chill of twilight twith the air. Yellow deepened the daytime moon, and roosting birds sailed into the darkness of the tree. Suddenly, hearing Royal on the path, she threw her legs akimbo, let her neck go limp, lolled her eyes far back into their sockets. Seen from a distance, it would look as though she had come to some violent, pitiful end; and, listening to Royal's footsteps quicken to a run, she happily thought: This will give him a good scare.
• they tap for turpentine
• you will find it there at the end of a red rutted road, barbed wire spranwling like a vine over its walls
• Mr Schaeffer - for that is what he is called, a mark of special respect - is a lanky, pulled-out man.
• Mr Schaeffer himself does not receive mail, not even at Christmas; he seems to have no friends beyond the prison, and actually he has none there- that is, no particular friend.
• he has a fun-loving face, nimble, clever; and, looking at him, Mr Schaeffer thought of holidays and good times
• Now, recognizing his loneliness, he felt alive. He had not wanted to be alive. To be alive was to remember brown rivers where the fish run, and sunlight on a lady's hair
• sitting cross-leged on a cot, Tico Feo was picking at his guitar with long swaying fingers and singing a song that sounded as jolly as jingling coins
• at daybreak when the guard came to rouse the men, which he did by banging a hammer on the stove, Tico Feo would whimper like a child
• the guard had always to be shouting at Tico Feo, for he spent most of the time trying to lean on things
• sleep jumped beyond them like a jack rabbit, and their eyes lingered ponderingly on the firelight that creaked behind the grating of the stove
• of the seasons, spring is the most shattering: stalks thrusting through the earth's winter-stiffened crust, young leaves cracking out on old left-to-die branches, the falling-asleep wind cruising through all the newborn green
• the guard scowled at him, then blew a whistle
• Tico Feo's blue eyes seemed to swell like bubbles, and when in a voice quieter than the wind sounds in the pine-tops he said, "Tomorrow", these eyes were all that Mr Schaeffer could see
• bird shrills followed the men through the smoky morning woods
• Armstrong sat on a stump, a chew of tobacco lopsiding his face, and his gun pointing into the sun
• Mr Schaeffer did not see the log that lay across the creek
• Mr Schaeffer, for instance, looks much the same, except that there is a thicker frost of white in his hair, and as a result of a broken ankle he walks with a limp
• just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar. A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window
• three hours later we are back in the kitchen hulling a heaping buggyload of windfall pecans
• Caarackle ! A cheery crunch, scraps of miniature thunder sound as the shells collapse and the golden mound of sweet oily ivory meat mounts in the milk-glass bowl < li> the kitchen is growing dark. Dust turns the window ito a mirror: our reflections mingle with the rising moon as we work by the fireside in the firelight. At last, when the moon is quite high, we toss the final hull into the fire and, with joined sighs, watch it catch flame. The buggy is empty, the bowl is brimful (hasta el borde)
• the Freak was a three-legged biddy chicken hatched by one of our own hens
• besides, a person my age shouldn't squander their eyes (despilfarrar)
• including a magical wart-remover (verruga)
• silently, wallowing in the pleasures of conspiracy, we take the bead purse from its secret place and spill its contents on the scrap quilt. Dollar bills, tightly rolled as May buds. Somber fifty-cent pieces, heavy enough to weight a dead man's eyes. Lovely dimes, the liveliest coin, the one that really jingles. Nickels and quarters, worn smooth as creek pebbles. But mostly a hateful heap of bitter-odored pennies.
  Last summer others in the house contracted to pay us a penny for every twenty-five flies we killed. Oh, the carnage of August: the flies that flew to heaven! Yet it was not work in which we took pride. And, as we sit counting pennies, it is as though we were back tabulating dead flies.
• And the next day, having completed our more prosaic (dull) shoping, we set out for Mr Haha's business address, a "sinfull" (to quote public opinion) fish-fry and dancing café down by the river. We've been there before, and on the same errand
• naturally these goings-on happen at night when the colored lights cast crazy patterns and the victrola wails
• "tell you what", he proposes, pouring the money back into our bead purse (cartera de abalorios), "just send me one of them fruitcakes instead"
• Eggbeaters whirl, spoons spin round in bowls of butter and sugar, vanilla sweetens the air, ginger spices it; melting, nose-tingling odors saturate the kitchen, suffuse the house, drift out to the world on puffs of chimney smoke. In four days our work is done. Thirty-one cakes, dampened with whiskey, bask on window sills and shelves
• I don't know the words to mine, just: "Come on along, come on along, to the dark-town strutter's ball"
• Enter: two relatives. Very angry. Potent with eyes that scold (regañar), tongues that scald (escaldar).
• Morning. Frozen rime lusters the grass; the sun, round as an orange and orange as hot-wether moons, balances on the horizon, burnishes the silvered winter woods. A wild tukey calls. A renegade hog grunts in the undergrowth.

• dykes = lesbiana (bull-dyke = "masculine" lesbians)
• come along, sister. You're going places
• our girl's going to need fancier shysters than I can afford

• mr Arbuck - The next time a girl wants a little powder-room change, take my advice, darling : don't give her twenty-cents !
• Fred, el "prota"
• Joe Bell - he ran a bar around the corner on Lexington Avenue. Hasn't an easy nature because he's a bachelor and has a sour stomach. He's a hard man to talk to, impossible if you don't share his fixations, of which Holly is one. Some others are; ice hockey, Weimaraner dogs, Our Gal Sunday and Gilbert and Sullivan.
• Jose Ybarra-Jaegar - brasiler
• mr Yunioshi - neighbour who lived on the top floor. Holly rings his bell

• miss Holiday Golightly, Traveling
• I dont want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together. I'm not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it's like

• {pg 37} I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's
• {pg 40} Except I felt I owed it to them to buy some little something (her cards)

Top

• so what is the significance of the snog ?
• beyond an unfamiliar and moderatelly pleasant warmth in the gut
• it would be nice to think that as I've got older times have changed, relationships have become more sophisticated, females less cruel, skins thicker, reactions sharper, instincts more developed. But there still seems to be an element of that evening in everything that has happened to me since; all my other romantic stories seem to be a scrambled version of that first one
• these complaints, you can't help feeling, are kind of ironic. Back then, all we wanted was foreplay, and girls weren't interested. They didn't want to be touched, caressed, stimulated, aroused; in fact, they used to thump us if we tried
• Oi, Fleming, you spastic. Guess who I knobbed last night? ... and I shagged her the first week!
• I scrounged a fag off Mark
• scrubber
• I was fretful about my abilities as a lover
• if I do ok with women, it's not because of the virtues I have, but because of the shadows I don't have
• and most days I feel like a cartoon dog in a kennel
• we never talked about why we suddenly became shriller and louder
• I'm glad I learned to stay home and sulk
• Johnny is our only prelunch customer. This isn't a job for the wildly ambitious
• Dick says Marie lives here now; he read somewhere thad she finds England more open to the kind of music she makes, which means, presumably, that we're cheerfully indifferent rather than actively hostile
• I know enough to know that this is daft
• "Have you got any soul ?" a woman asks the next afternoon
• it's a James Brown single on King, thirty years old, and I begin to prickle with anticipation
• is there anything more adult than sticking with a relationship that's failing apart in the hope that you can put it right ?
• she's not wearing any makeup, and I reckon this is for my benefit {assume}
• so you get loads at the beginning, to show that things are good, positive exciting, and none at the end, to show that things are desperate. Neat, eh?
• and do you know how it comes about ? Because I ask questions. If someone wanted to know how to get off with seventeen women, or more, no less, that's what I'd tell them: ask questions
• T-Bone wouldn't want to share a place with me. I'd cramp his style
• a while back, Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like
• we have on of those conversations where everything clicks, meshes, corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks seem to be nodding in agreement
• all my life I've hated Sundays, for the obvious British reasons (Songs of Praise, closed shops, congealing gravy that you don't want to go near but no one's going to let you escape from) and the obvious international reasons as well, but this Sunday is a corker {remarkable}
• I've missed the part where the guy talks and hands out samples; I've arrived during the part where wine tasting becomes wine drinking and, though every now and again I spot someone swilling the wine around in their mouth and talking bollocks, mostly they're just pouring the stuff down their necks as fast as they can
• where is the justice in this world ? Dick's out on a hot date, Rob's shagging Marie LaSalle, and the best-looking and most intelligent of the lot of them isn't getting anything at all
• It gives us all strength: if someone can just walk in and buy the Sid James Experience album, then surely anything good can happen at any time
• there are men who call, and men who don't call, and I'd much, much rather be one of the latter
• the advertisement used to end with the initimidating postscript "no clackers please", but after a dissapointing response during the first couple of years of the recruitment drive, Barry decided that slackers were welcome after all, to no noticeable effect; perhaps they couldn't get it together to walk from the door to the counter
• you remember when we used to sit in the bar, wondering how life would turn out for us?
• I think he was going through, you know, some kind of what-does-it-all-mean thing, and he wanted to see me, and talk about stuff, and what have you, and I wasn't really up for it. Do all men go through this?
• my friend Clara is coming, and she hasn't got a chap, and she's right up your street. Eight o'clockish?
• it's her bedroom (arty, of course, with a huge abstract painting on one wall and what looks like a rug on another). {animal skin used as a floor covering}
• the difference between these people and me is that they finished college and I didn't (they didn't split up with Charlie and I did); as a consequence, they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self-confident and I am incontinent, they do not smoke and I do, they have opinions and I have lists
• "You are going through one of those what-does-it-all-mean things". She says "what-does-it-all-mean" in an American accent and furrows her brow
• he was a wimp, if that's any consolation {timid or coward}
• but Laura sees Liz and me hovering on the fringe of the group, and comes to us, and thanks us for coming, and holds us both for a long time, and when she lets go of me I feel that I don't neet to offer to become a different person: it has happened already
• I walk out of Laura's dad's funeral in a sulk
• when I nestled into Laura's back in the night, I was afraid because I didn't want to lose her, and we always lose someone, or they lose us, in the end
• I don't want to go back. I've thrown a wobbler too {}
• when my eyebrows are sore, and I have nearly shaken my head off its hinges, and I have walked the best part of a mile on the spot, Laura emerges from the kitchen in a state and tugs me by the arm {bisagre, gozne}
• I could describe every second of every time, and there weren't that many of them, and you'd be hurt, but you still wouldn't understand the first thing about anything that mattered
• you have all the basic ingredients. You're really very likable, when you put your mind to it
• what should I be doing ? Something more than waiting for life to change and keep your options open
• she's talking about detail, clutter, the stuff that stops you floating away
• I don't feel good, not now that it's all over. For an afternoon I was working in a place that other people wanted to come to, and that made a difference to me - I felt, I felt, I felt, go on say it, more of a man, a feeling both shocking and comforting
• and they both look at me fondly
• she's been out with a couple of people for a drink after work, and she's a bit squiffy
• I hadn't thought aboit it before, but I am pleased; nervous and danted
• I don't know why I have to be like this, all stern and sulky and what-business-is-it-of-yours {severo; malhumorado}
• he gives what he fondly imagines to be a demonic, drug-crazed chuckle
• "You seem so cross all the time, though" "I know. I don't get myself"
• "Is there a difference?" "Of course..." Too shrill {estridente}
• "'Baby, let's play house'" "Who's that by?"
• I'm going to jump from rock to rock for the rest of my life until there aren't any rocks left ?
• I've been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to te conclusion that my guts have shit for brains
• are you going to talk to me, or shall I get my paper out?
• I swish the beer around so it'll get really limey
• "shall we go home?" "Don't sulk" {enfurruñarse}

• what is the book about ?
• can you resume the plot ?
• what is the meaning of the title ?
• what part of the book did you like best ?
• what do you think of the sense of humour in the novel ? {offhand humor}
• how many characters are there in the story ?
• what is your favourite one (if any) ? Rob or Laura, Liz or Ray, Dick or Barry, Marie
• why is Laura leaving Rob ?
• what does Laura provide Rob that makes her special ? I'm just trying to wake you up
• what is your quote of the book ? comment its meaning and significance
• do you think only men have "what-does-it-all-mean" thing ?
• what songs mentioned in the book you know ?
• what are your top 3 songs ?
• do you know what a filler is ? do you know/remember any fillers of your youth ? R&R : LR, Led Zep,
• why does Rob reorganize his record collection ? how were your discs organized ?
• what happens at the funeral ?
• have you seen the film ? What do you think about it ?
• why do you think Rob wants to meet his 5 ex-girlfriends ?
• did you know what a "fag" was? "quid" ?
• do you think the couple succeeds ? how do you think the story ends? How would you envisage the story developing now that Laura and Rob are back together?
• can you find any gender differences in the novels characters attitudes ?
• what do you think Rob’s attitudes are to:
  • music
  • women
  • life
  • himself
  • love
  • morality
• what matters most in life for Rob? What do you think he is really looking for?
• how do Rob's previous relationships affect his relationship with Laura in High Fidelity?
• what could be the root cause of Rob’s problems? Is it common to all men in the 90s?
• in what ways does High Fidelity hold up a mirror to life?
• in High Fidelity, what does Dick, Barry, and Rob's working at Championship Vinyl reveal about their personalities
• why is Rob so conflicted about remaining in the relationship with Laura? Does it have more to do with his age or his particular eccentricities? Do you think many men—and women—go through internal struggles similar to Rob’s when it comes to commitment?
• what issues are at the center of Rob’s dissatisfaction with his life? If he had to make a list of the top 5 reasons he was dissatisfied, what would they be?
• why is it so important for Rob to contact and meet the women who have dumped him? Does he find what he was hoping to discover? What does he learn that surprises him?
• Rob, Barry, and Dick have an encyclopedic knowledge of popular music. What are the benefits and liabilities of this particular talent? How do they use that knowledge in social situations?
• why doesn’t Rob stay in regular contact with friends? What is behind his emotional distance from friends and family?
• what is the significance of lists in Rob’s life? Why are they used as a recurring motif in the book?
• on page 247 Rob says "I saw, for the first time, how scared I am of dying, and of other people dying" What role does death—and the fear of death—play in fidelity and infidelity? Is that fear a crutch for Rob, an impediment, or another matter entirely?
• in what ways do Barry and Dick represent different parts of Rob’s personality? In what ways are they completely unique individuals, different than Rob? How does each one help him as a friend? What, if anything, does Rob learn from them?
• compilation tapes—collections of different songs on the same tape—carry a special significance for Rob. What meanings do they embody for him, and what does it mean when he gives someone a tape he’s compiled? What is he really giving to a woman when and if he gives her a new compilation tape?
• is Marie black in the book ? She looks like some woman from tv ...

Enllaços curiosos, si ens sobra temps o tothom està massa seriós...

• http://www.funtrivia.com/en/subtopics/Nick-Hornbys-High-Fidelity-and-Its-Music-110808.html
• http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-high-fidelity/free-quiz.html

wiki 5-item lists

Quotes :

• we're too old to make each other miserable
• scarring myself for life seemed much easier than having to tell Jackie that I had all been a grotesque mistake
• "no problem" : the last words I ever say to somebody I have been reasonably close before our lives take different directions
• the unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are those who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives

Top

{pdfs} Tender is the night, O Russet Witch, The Great Gatsby

A woman would do a thing like that because she felt sympathetic - only a man would do it because he felt responsible.

A breeze was crying down the streets, whisking along battered newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were pricking out all the windows - it was so desolate that one was sorry for the tops of the sky-scrapers lost up there in the dark green and gray heaven, and felt that now surely the farce was to close, and presently all the buildings would collapse like card houses, and pile up in a dusty, sardonic heap upon all the millions who presumed to wind in and out of them.

And she sat in the car with such perfect appropriateness and self-possession that it made him breathless to watch her.

The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never, surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters of youth. For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to aline with less, where we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our recreations to one recreation, our friends to a few to whom we are anæsthetic; ending up at last in a solitary, desolate strong point that is not strong, where the shells now whistle abominably, now are half-heard as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death.

The spirit withers with the skin.

His work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1923.

O Russet Witch pdf

Wiki nice article. Prota : Nick Carraway

• scorn =
• smck = heroin (drug)
• And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees —just as things grow in fast movies— I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
• My own house was an eye-sore = engendro, monstruosidad
• East Egg and West Egg location : The town of West Egg where Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby live corresponds to the real-life place of Great Neck. More specifically, the characters live in the village of Kings Point.
• And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all.
• Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body —he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage —a cruel body.
• The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall.
• Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.
• ‘What you doing, Nick?’ ‘I’m a bond man.’ ‘Who with?’ I told him.
• The knuckle (nudillo) was black and blue.
• "drugs" ?
• com és "ley seca" ?
• advertisement glasses ?
• condecorated at Montenegro

Top

• rams wrapped in thermogene beger no lambs (mendigar, implorar)
• responds by budding
• history is bunk (litera, catre, mentira, patraña
• freedom to be a round pef in a square hole
• you read and you're pierced
• his heart seemed to have disappeared and left a hole. He was empty. Empty, and cold, and rather sick, and giddy.
• go, my brave Ahaiyuta
• the blotched and sagging face twisted grotesquely into a grimace of extreme grief
• I can't make it out
• mend your ways
• as a victim, the Savage posessed, for Bernard, this enormous superiority over the others: that he was accessible
• Henry detected the weariness in those purple eyes, the pallor beneath that glaze of lupus, the sadness at the corners of the unsmiling crimson mouth
• outliving beauty's outward, with a mind that doth renew swifter that blood decays
• from throat to temple she was all one hot blush (sonrojarse, enrojecer)
• the voice was that of a jaunty young Alpha (garboso, gallardo)
• one at a time, and no shoving
• and suddenly it was luminously clear to the Savage what he must do; it was as though a shutter had beed opened, a curtain drawn back
• seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies
• he's being sent to an island. That's to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the peolple who aren't satisfied with ortodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their own.
• happiness is a hard master
• but my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charm has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false - a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth.
• seeing them, the Savage made a grimace
• strumpet
• ajar
• The optimum population is modelled on the iceberg : eight- ninths below the water line, one-ninth above
• Cyprus experiment : 22.000 alpha's
• the noise of 14.000 aeroplanes advancing in open order. But in the Kurfurstendamm and the Eigth Arrondissement, the explosion of the anthrax bombs is hardly louder than the popping of a paper bag
• lend me your ears

• director - Tomakin
• Lenina Crowne
• Henry Foster
• Bernard Marx
• Helmholtz Watson
• Mustapha Mond, resident controller for Western Europe
• Linda
• John, the Savage

Noms russos :

• Poly Trotsky
• Bernard Marx
• Sarojini Engels
• Lenina

Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 5, scene 1, 181–184

Miranda:
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't!

Prospero:
'Tis new to thee.

By "brave" she doesn't really mean "courageous," but rather "handsome" and "noble". Their wrecked ship had struck her as "brave"; her new fiancé Ferdinand looked pretty "brave" too; the whole pack of Italian princes and courtiers (most of them villains) are thus also "brave". Prospero has seen their inner workings, and knows how old this new world is, and how far from brave.

• chapter 3 : quatre discursos barrejats - why ?
  • director
  • Henry Foster
  • Mustapha
  • Lenina & Fanny
• how do they die ? when do they go to the clinic ?

Top

quotes :

• do you feel absolutelly no concern
• real ugly girls have it tough
• he looked like he had a poker up his ass
• innarested in a little tail t'night? Five bucks a throw
• you are trying to chisel me (estafar)

88 in Le Monde's list

Top

• el Toril

Gaudi's work was in fact very conservative rather than radical. His work is based on a return to the natural object, the shell, the wing, the tail, the spine, the leaf, the root.

Top

Wiki on bio, book

4 wifes :

• 1921 Hadley Richardson
• 1927 Pauline Pfeiffer
• 1940 Martha Gellhorn
• 1946 Mary Welsh Hemingway

Best of all he loved the fall
the leaves yellow on cottonwoods
leaves floating on trout streams
and above the hills
the high blue windless skies
. . . Now he will be a part of them forever

Gregory Hemingway, the writer's youngest son, died at Dade County Jail in Florida after battling alcoholism, drug abuse and manic depression.
He had had a sex-change operation and taken a new name, Gloria.
Gregory Hemingway was arrested in 2001 in Key Biscayne, Miami. He died in his cell four days later.
Gregory's eight children - Patrick, Edward, Sean, Brendan, Vanessa, Maria, John and Lorian - later challenged the estate, which would have given most of the assets to Gregory's widow, Ida.

wiki

The book follows the journeys of Frederic Henry, beginning in the summer of 1916 near the front of the Italian resistance in World War I. Henry is a volunteer ambulance driver and also an American, a fact that gets him into trouble throughout the novel. From the outset, readers are aware that Henry is well-liked among his peers and has high personal standards when it comes to working hard and protecting the other men in his outfit. He is injured at the battlefront shortly after seeking out food for his colleagues, and though others try to praise him for his bravery, Henry downplays his courage by remarking that he was injured while "eating cheese". Henry does not boast or use his position as a lieutenant to seek out favors or advance his own agenda.

Henry meets Catherine Barkley, a British nurse, while stationed in an Italian village called Gorzia. The two immediately fall for each other and their relationship deepens when Henry is injured and transferred to an American hospital in Milan. Catherine requests a transfer there and nurses him back to health. The two keep their relationship a secret so that Catherine can work the night shift and spend the nights with Henry. They discuss marriage, but Catherine insists that she would rather wait rather than risk being separated from Henry. As Henry begins to recover, Catherine discovers that she is pregnant. Henry must return to duty and the two determine that they will be back together again soon.

After a few days back at the front, Henry joins the rest of the military units in a retreat back from the front. The slow, tedious journey proves dangerous for Henry, who must plunge into a rushing river to escape being shot by the Italian army who are suspicious of his American ties. He finds his way back to Milan in secret, and then onto Stresa to track down Catherine. They reunite and must flee to avoid Henry's arrest by Italian authorities. They travel by rowboat to Switzerland where they spend the winter in safety as Catherine gets closer to having the baby. As Catherine goes into labor it is clear that she is having trouble. She can tell that she is in danger and tells Henry that she meant to write him a letter in case anything bad should happen during the delivery but never got around to writing it. The doctor tells Henry that a Caesarean operation will be necessary to get the baby out and protect Catherine. The baby is still-born and Catherine dies hours later after hemorrhaging several times. Henry walks back to the hotel alone in the rain.

(source: bookrags.com)

{wiki} The novel is divided into five books. In the first book, Frederic Henry, an American paramedic serving in the Italian Army is introduced to Catherine Barkley, an English nurse, by his good friend and roommate, Rinaldi, a surgeon. Frederic attempts to seduce her, and their relationship begins. Frederic didn't want a serious relationship, but his feelings for Catherine slowly start to grow. On the Italian front, Frederic is wounded in the knee by a mortar and sent to a hospital in Milan, where Catherine is also sent. The second book shows the growth of Frederic and Catherine's relationship as they spend time together in Milan over the summer. Frederic and Catherine fall in love as Frederic slowly heals. After his knee heals, he is diagnosed with jaundice but is soon kicked out of the hospital and sent back to the front after being discovered with alcohol. By the time he is sent back, Catherine is three months pregnant. In the third book, Frederic returns to his unit, and soon discovers morale has severely dropped. Not long afterwards the Austrians break through the Italian lines in the Battle of Caporetto, and the Italians retreat. Due to a slow and hectic retreat, Frederic and his men go off trail and quickly get lost, and a frustrated Frederic kills a sergeant for insubordination. After catching up to the main retreat, Frederic is taken to a place by the "battle police," where officers are being interrogated and executed for the "treachery" that supposedly led to the Italian defeat. However, after seeing and hearing that everyone interrogated has been killed, Frederic escapes by jumping into a river. He heads to Milan to find Catherine only to discover that she has been sent to Stresa. In the fourth book, Catherine and Frederic reunite and spend some time in Stresa before Frederic learns he will soon be arrested. He and Catherine then flee to Switzerland in a rowboat. After interrogation by Swiss authorities, they are allowed to stay in Switzerland. In the final book, Frederic and Catherine live a quiet life in the mountains until she goes into labor. After a long and painful birth, their son is stillborn. Catherine begins to hemorrhage and soon dies, leaving Frederic to return to their hotel in the rain.

• Both Henry and Catherine are sent to a hospital in which city?
  Marseilles Milan San Antonio Seville
• For which country’s army does American Frederic Henry serve?
  Germany’s Italy’s Mexico’s Spain’s
• Henry is afraid of what?
  Snakes Spiders The dark Thunderstorms
• Henry is wounded most severely in the
  arm head leg shoulder
• Into what country do Henry and Catherine flee?
  America Belguim France Switzerland
• The pistol that Henry buys in Milan is used to
  grant Catherine a means of self-defense kill a deserter take a German hostage wound Henry
• What army group does Henry supervise?
  Ambulance drivers and mechanics Army mail carriers Army supply clerks Machine gun operators
• What countries does Frederic Henry’s army oppose during the novel?
  Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany France and Germany France and Spain Mexico and Spain
• What happens to Henry and Catherine’s child?
  It dies as an infant It is adopted at birth It is raised by Catherine It is stillborn (nacido muerto)
• What is the main geographical dichotomy in the book?
  A contrast of cold climates and warm climates A contrast of desert and wetlands A contrast of land and sea A contrast of mountains and plains
• Where is Catherine Barkley from?
  America Australia Mexico Scotland
• Which war serves as the background for "A Farewell To Arms"?
  Mexican-American War Spanish civil war World War I World War II
• Who said the following: "I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see myself dead in it... And sometimes I see you dead in it."
  Catherine Barkley Helen Ferguson Rinaldi
• Who said the following: "You’ll never get married . . . You’ll fight before you marry... You’ll die then. Fight or die. That’s what people do . . . Maybe you’ll be all right, you two. But watch out you don’t get her in trouble. You get her in trouble and I’ll kill you . . . I don’t want her with any of those war babies."
  Catherine Barkley Frederick Henry Helen Ferguson Rinaldi

Cliffs Notes

• What nationality is Frederic Henry (Tenente)?
  French Italin American English
• Who is Rinaldi?
  An ambulance driver A surgeon An Italian soldier A bartender
• What does Catherine do in the war?
  She is a nurse She works at a whorehouse She runs the hospital She is a V.A.D. - Voluntary Aid Detachment = voluntary unit providing field nursing services
  A nurse is like a doctor. It takes a long time to be. A 'V. A. D.' is a short cut.
• Which theme is NOT present in the novel?
  The follies of war The inevitability of death Brotherhood The glory of war
• Which reoccurring image is NOT present in the novel?
  Sunshine Catherine's hair Rain
• Which character has the closest relationship with the Priest?
  Rinaldi Frederic Catherine Gino
• Which war takes place during this novel?
  World War I World War II
• Who does Frederic fall in love with?
  Miss Van Campen Miss Gage Helen Ferguson Catherine Barkley
• Who is the narrator of the novel?
  Rinaldi The Priest Emilio Frederic
• This novel clearly challenges Victorian values. Which choice below is NOT present in the novel, and thus does NOT challenge Victorian values?
  Agnosticism (questions existence of God) Sex outside of marriage Praise (alabar) of war Rejection of sentimentality

Good Reads

wiki

• Of mice and men - 112 pages
  "Now what the hell ya suppose is eatin' them two guys?"
• Travels with Charley (1962) pdf, 288 pages
• La taza de oro - vida de sir Henry Morgan, bucanero

wiki

PDF

Teacher's guide

• Kino, Juana i Coyotino
• Juan Tomas i Apolonia
• Nayarit - estat al Est de Mèxic

• The Grapes Of Wrath - wiki, pdf, 6 formats {***}

Set during the Great Depression (1929-1939), the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California on the "mother road", along with thousands of other "Okies" seeking jobs, land, dignity, and a future.

...

The family takes shelter from the flood in an old barn. Inside they find a young boy and his father, who is dying of starvation. Ma realizes there is only one way to save the man. She looks at Rose of Sharon and a silent understanding passes between them. Rose of Sharon, left alone with the man, goes to him and has him drink her breast milk.

In "Our Man In Havana" there are few words I dont find in my "pocket" LangenScheidt:

• strife - angry or violent struggle; conflict
• bootblacks - limpia botas
• pony-trim
• reins
• curfew
• duenna
• jester
• spooning
• squirt
• broom
• mourner - a person who attends a funeral as a relative or friend of the dead person
• baste
• huff
• cockles

Quiz at Goodreads

PDF or ePUB

Read online
James Mason reads : 1 of 4

• Rollo Martins
  escriptor de novel·les de l'oest americà, ingenu i idealista, que arriba a Viena per una oferta de treball del seu amic Harry Lime.
• Harry Lime
  enigmàtic amic de Rollo, suposadament mort en un accident poc abans de l'arribada de Rollo.
• Anna Schmidt
  amant de Harry Lime i actriu
• Doctor Winkel
  metge que va atendre Harry Lime abans de morir
• Kurtz
  un altre dels associats de Harry Lime
• Harbin
  ordenança de l'hospital militar britànic que treballava per a Harry Lime.
  Era un intermediari en el negoci il·legal de la penicil·lina adulterada que Lime i els seus socis venien al mercat negre.

• Well, I gave her a good time while it lasted
• ... he had only himself to blame

• goil - used as a slang term for "girl" or "woman"
• thaw - the process of melting or a period of warmer weather that causes ice and snow to melt
• glib - superficial, insincere, and often dismissive; it suggests a lack of depth, careful consideration, or genuine understanding

wiki (film) (1948)

The novella explores themes of childhood innocence and perception, the complex and often deceptive nature of adults, and the destructive power of misinterpretation.
The story highlights the unreliable nature of a child's perspective and the lasting impact of witnessing or believing in adult wrongdoing.

Gemini "write a short resum of the book "the fallen idol" of Grahan Greene" :

"The Fallen Idol" by Graham Greene tells the story of young Philippe, the lonely son of an ambassador in London, who idolizes the family's charming butler, Baines. When Baines's stern wife dies in a fall, Philippe believes he has witnessed Baines committing murder while actually witnessing an argument between Baines and his lover.

Torn between his loyalty to Baines and the confusing world of adults and their lies, Philippe tries to protect Baines with half-truths and childish misunderstandings. As the police investigate, Philippe's innocent attempts to help only create more confusion and suspicion, highlighting the tragic gap between a child's perception and the complexities of adult relationships and deceit.

The story explores the loss of innocence and the devastating impact of adult secrets on a child's world.

Frase : Baines tries to tell his wife that he wants out of their marriage.

Graham Greene's "The Fallen Idol" (originally titled "The Basement Room") is a poignant short story about the loss of childhood innocence. It centers on Philip, a lonely young boy whose parents are away, leaving him in the care of the family's butler, Baines, and his stern wife, Mrs. Baines.

Philip idolizes Baines, who entertains him with fantastical stories of adventure. However, Philip soon stumbles upon Baines' secret affair with another woman, Julie. Baines makes Philip promise to keep the secret, inadvertently drawing the boy into a web of adult deception.

When Mrs. Baines discovers the affair, a confrontation ensues, leading to her accidental death (in the film adaptation, though in the original story it's presented more ambiguously as Baines pushing her). Philip, witnessing parts of the event and believing Baines is guilty of murder, tries to protect his beloved butler by lying to the police. His attempts to shield Baines only complicate the investigation, as his well-intentioned but confused fabrications make Baines appear more suspicious.

The story explores themes of loyalty, betrayal, truth versus lies, and the painful disillusionment a child experiences when they realize the imperfections and complexities of the adults they admire. Philip's innocent perspective clashes with the murky realities of the adult world, leading to a profound loss of his naive view of life.

Top

• The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because Naoko never loved me.
• Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.
• When you're surrounded by endless possibilities, one of the hardest things you can do is pass them up.
• "What happens when people open their hearts?" She was enjoying this. "They get better" she said.
• I was happy being alone. But all of a sudden, playing pool with you, I had this feeling that I wished I had had an elder sister like you - really chic and a knockout in a midnight-blue dress and gold earrings and great with a pool cue.
• You're really cute, Midori. So cute the mountains crumble and the oceans dry up.
• I really like you, Midori. A lot. Like a spring bear. You're walking through a field all by yourself one day in spring, and this sweet little bear cub with velvet fur and shiny little eyes comes walking along. And he says to you, "Hi, there, little lady. Want to tumble with me?' So you and the bear cub spend the whole day in each other's arms, tumbling down this clover-covered hill.
• "How much do you love me?" Midori asked. "Enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter"
• But I like you now, Reiko, the way you are, lingering memory or whatever. And what I have to say about it may not make any difference, but I'm really glad that you're wearing Naoko's clothes." Reiko smiled and lit her cigarette with a lighter. "For such a young man, you know how to make a woman happy."
• "Would you rather take them off yourself?" "No, go ahead. But don't be too shocked at all my wrinkles." "I like your wrinkles." "You're gonna make me cry", she whispered.
• Letters are just pieces of paper ... Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.

It's a book with

• lots of suicides
• lots of books and music
• lots of unhappy persons
• lots of use of "spring"
  • It's because of you when I'm in bed in the morning that I can wind my spring and tell myself I have to live another good day

Quiz's about the book :

• http://shortlist.com/entertainment/books/the-ultimate-norwegian-wood-quiz
• http://www.goodreads.com/quizzes/results?id=9510-norwegian-wood-quiz
• http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-norwegian-wood/free-quiz.html (difficult)

About the author :

• http://www.barcelonareview.com/69/e_quiz.html (dedicated to Lali)
• http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/books/20-things-you-(probably)-didnt-know-about-haruki-murakami

Top

wiki

• and this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere
• and the fact was that he no longer had any friends
• he wanted to know if God had a language
• the story of the Garden, therefore, records not only tha fall of man, but the fall of language
• because it can no longer perform its function, the umbrella has ceased to be an umbrella
• in his little speech to Alice, Humpty Dumpty sketches the future of human hopes and gives the clue to our salvation: to become masters of the words we speak, to make language answer our needs
• don't count your chickens before they hatch (salir del cascarón)
• he shook it, feeling the uncanny slenderness of her bones, and asked if her name was Norwegian
• the paint becomes exhausted, the city encroaches with its soot (hollín), the plaster (yeso) crumbles within
• the winos (homeless alcoholic) who wash the windshell of your car
• to be inside that music, to be drawn into the circle of its repetitions: perhaps that is the place where one could finally disappear
• the transformation in his appeance had been so drastic that he could not help but be fascinated by it: he had turned into a bum (vagabundo)
• his hair was long and tangled, matted into tufts (mechón) behind his ears, and crawling down in curls (rizo) almost to this shoulders
• he had been one thing before, and now he was another

• "You don't know me", the letter began, "and I apologize for writing to you like this out of the blue"
• Fanshave had been lucky. The woman was beautiful, with dark, intelligent eyes, almost fierce in their steadiness. Thin, not more than average height, and with something slow in her manner, a thing that made her both sensual and watchful, as though she looked out on the world from the heart of a deep inner vigilance. No man would have left this woman of his own free will - especially not when she was about to have his child. That much was certain to me. Even before I stepped into the apartment, I knew that Fanshawe had to be dead
• I was having a hard time of it just then, and the fact was that I did not share this high opinion of myself. I had written a great many articles, it was true, but I did not see that as a cause for celebration, nor was I particularly proud of it. As fas as I was concerned, it was just a little short of hack work. I had begun with great hopes, thinking that I would become a novelist, thinking that I would eventually be able to write something that would touch people and make a difference in thei lives. But time went on, and little by little I realized that this was going to happen. I did not have such a book inside me, and at a certain point I told myself to give up my dreams. It was simpler to go on writing articles in any case. By working hard, by moving steadily from one piece to the next, I could more or less earn a living - and, for whatever it was worth, I had the pleasure of seeing my name in print almost constantly. I understood that things could have been fare more dismal (deprimente) that they were. I was not quite thirty, and already I had something of a reputation. I had begun with reviews of poetry and novels, and now I could write about nearly anything and do a credible job. Movies, plays, art shows, concerts, books, even baseball games - they had only to ask me, and I would do it. The word saw me as a bright young fellow, a new critic on the rise, but inside myself I felt old, already used up. What I had done so far amounted to a mere fraction of nothing at all. It was so much dust, and the slightest wind would blow it away.
• things happened around that time in Fanshawe's family that no doubt made a difference, and it would be wrong not to mention them. Whether they made an essential difference is another story, but I tend to think that everything counts. In the end, each life is no more that the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose
• stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said
• she wore a black silk dress, tiny silver earrings, and had swept back her hair to show the line of her neck. As she walked into the restaurant and saw me sitting at the bar, she gave me a warm, complicitous smile, as though telling me she knew how beautiful she was, but at the same time commenting on the weirdness of the occasion - savoring it somehow, clearly alert to the outlandish implications of the moment. I told her that she was stunning, and she answered almost whimsically that this was her first night out since Ben had been born - and that she had wanted to "look different"
• I was in good form that night. Sophie inspired me, and it didn't take long for me to get warmed up. I cracked jokes, told stories, performed little tricks with the silverware. The woman was so beautiful that I had trouble keeping my eyes off her. I wanted to see her laugh, to see how her face would respond to what I said, to watch her eyes, to study her gestures. God knows absurdities I came out with, but I did my best to detach myself, to bury my real motives under this outslaught of charm. That was the hard part. I knew that Sophie was lonely, that she wanted the comfort of a warm body beside her - but a quick roll in the hay was not what I was after, and if I moved too fast that was probably all it would turn out to be
• All this created an exquisite tension. As the evening progressed, the most casual remarks became tinged with erotic overtones. Words were no longer simply words, but a curious code of silences, a way of speaking that continually moved around the thing that was being said. As long as we avoided the real subject, the spell would not be broken. We both slipped naturally into this kind of banter (chanza), and it became all the more powerful because neither one of us abandoned the charade. We knew what we were doing, but at the same time we pretended not to. Thus my courtship of Sophie began - slowly, decorously, building by the smallest of increments
• "Thank you, doctor," Sophie said. "The operation was a success." "My patiens always survive," I said. "It's the laughing gas. I just turn on the valve, and little by little they get better." "That gas might be habit-forming." "Taht's the point. The patients keep coming back for more - sometimes two or three operations a week. How do you think I paid for my Park Avenue apartment and the summer place in France?" "So there's a hidden motive." "Absolutely. I'm driven by greed." "Your practice must be booming." "It was. But I'm more or less retired now. I'm down to one patient these days - and I'm not sure if she'll be coming back." "She'll be back," Sophie said, with the coyest (evasivo, tímido), most radiant smile I had ever seen. "You can count on it." "That's good to hear," I said. "I'll have my secretary call her to schedule the next appointment." "The sooner the better. With these long-term treatments, you can't waste a moment." "Excellent advice. I'll remember to order a new supply of laughing gas." "You do that, doctor. I really think I need it."
  We smiled at each other again, and then I wrapped her up in a big bear hug, gave her a brief kiss on the lips, and got down the stairs as fast as I could
• I worked hard at courting her.

• turd = zurullo (piece of excrement)
• shabby = raído
• doodle = garabato
• grasshopper = saltamontes
• exegesis = interpretacion de un texto (religioso)
• solace = consuelo
• plump = rechoncho
• jerk = sacudir
• hectic din = estruendo frenético
• throng = tropel
• stammer = balbucear
• omen = presagio
• stroll = pasearse, callejear
• ruse = trampa, ardid
• doze = dormitar
• conked out = stop working
• prissy = remilgado

PDF drive {****}

Top

Khaled Hosseini -

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Discussió :

1. The novel opens with the sentence 'Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami.' How important is that word in the novel? How does her illegitimacy shape Mariam's life?
2. 'The next time Mariam signed her name to a document, twenty-seven years later, a mullah would be present.' (page 49). Khaled Hosseini foreshadows events, both domestic and national, at many points throughout A Thousand Splendid Suns. What effect does this have?
3. 'But it was the women who drew Mariam's eyes the most.' (page 67) What is it that fascinates Mariam about the women of Kabul, and why does it capture her attention? How are women treated by the various regimes that take control of Afghanistan? How are the main female characters portrayed in the novel? To what extent do these portrayals differ from any preconceptions that you may have had about women in Afghanistan?
4. Mariam protests at the idea of marrying Rasheed, begging her father not to force her. What kind of husband does he prove to be? How does she come to feel about him? How does their marriage change? Why do you think Rasheed behaves in the way that he does?
5. 'And in this fleeting, wordless exchange with Mariam, Laila knew that they were not enemies any longer.' (page 224). How is the deep bond between Mariam and Laila forged? How does this bond sustain both of them?
6. How does the observation of Islam in Kabul differ from Mariam's hometown of Herat? What part does religion play in her life? How important is it in the novel?
7. 'To me, it's nonsense - and very dangerous nonsense at that - all this talk of I'm Tajik and you're Pashtun and he's Hazara and she's Uzbek. We're all Afghans and that's all that should matter.' (page 117) Laila's father tells her. How important is this ethnic diversity both in the novel and in what happens to Afghanistan throughout the thirty years the book spans?
8. What is the significance of the novel's title? Why do you think Hosseini chose it?
9. What did you think of the novel's ending?
10. How would you describe Hosseini's writing style? Were there particular passages that impressed you and if so what were they and why?
11. How are the West and the Soviet Union portrayed in the novel? What part do they play in Afghanistan's troubles?
12. Hosseini is an expatriate Afghan. To what extent do you think this has influenced the writing of A Thousand Splendid Suns, and his portrayal of Afghanistan?

48 Trivia Questions at goodreads

wiki : the debut novel of Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini.

• The Kite Runner Chapter 1 (2 min 21)
  25 chapters
• film trailer
  Amir lives in California with his wife Soraya. He receives a call from his uncle Rahim Khan who urges him to travel to Afghanistan and rescue the son of Amir's childhood servant and friend, Hassan.

Hosseini has commented that he considers The Kite Runner to be a father–son relationship story, emphasizing the familial aspects of the narrative, an element that he continued to use in his later works.
Themes of guilt and redemption feature prominently in the novel, with a pivotal scene depicting an act of sexual assault inflicted upon Amir's friend Hassan, which Amir fails to prevent, and which ends their friendship.
The latter half of the book centers on Amir's attempts to atone for this transgression by rescuing Hassan's son two decades later.

Top

Part I: Primeval Night 3 million years B.C., unseen aliens place a monolith (a giant device used by the aliens to investigate other worlds) in Africa. A group of ape-like early human ancestors, led by a character named Moon-Watcher, sees the device. After seeing the device, the group starts creating tools, which in turn gives them an advantage over the wild animals and other tribes. The group's evolutionary leap in thinking (the development of tools), which provides them with food and domination over the other tribes, is due to subliminal psychological influence from the alien monolith.

Part II: TMA-1 In 1999, scientists call Dr. Heywood Floyd to a base on the moon to discuss the presence of a strange magnetic artifact found 40 feet below the surface in one of the moon's craters, which they have named TMA-1, after the crater they found it in (Tycho) and the device's magnetic ability (which alerted them to its presence). The artifact and its origin puzzle the scientists. Its dimensions are too precise to have been formed by nature, but the artifact predates humankind. During a trip to investigate the artifact, which the scientists consider evidence that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, Floyd and the scientists witness a startling event: the sun rises over the crater and, for the first time in three million years, the monolith is hit with sunlight. Activated by the sunlight, the monolith sends a signal toward one of the moons of Saturn. After this burst of activity, the monolith loses its magnetic property.

Part III: Between Planets Once again, the novel leaps forward in time. 18 months have passed since the discovery of the monolith on the moon. It is now 2001 and a mission to Saturn has been organized. The mission, named Discovery One, consists of five men and an artificially intelligent computer named HAL 9000. Three of the men are in a suspended state during the book. Dr. David Bowman and Dr. Francis Poole are awake and in charge of running the spaceship and fixing anything that goes wrong.

PART IV: Abyss One day, HAL informs the crew that they are in danger of losing communication with Earth because the device that points their antenna at Earth is broken. Poole undergoes a risky procedure in a extravehicular pod to fix it, only for Bowman to discover that the original part was fine. When questioned about the mix-up, HAL denies that the fault is his. When HAL tells the crew that the back-up part is also broken, Poole and Bowman try to contact Earth. Earth, by this point, has realized that HAL is not behaving correctly. Unfortunately, HAL scrambles the message and informs the crew that they have definitely lost contact with Earth. Poole dons his suit and goes out of the spaceship again to remove the supposedly broken part of the antenna. While outside, his external pod runs into him. It tears his suit and the rip results in his death.
Bowman suspects HAL killed Poole. He tries to wake the hibernating crew members. He has to threaten to unplug HAL before HAL will give him manual control of the hibernation pods. HAL retaliates by opening the airlocks. Bowman saves himself by donning an emergency spacesuit. He realizes that HAL is behind everything and shuts down his systems. Once Hal is no longer a threat, Bowman contacts Earth and learns that they did not tell him the truth about his mission. They explain that he is supposed to explore one of Saturn's moons, not Saturn. The scientists on Earth hope he will be able to establish contact with whoever put the monolith on the Moon.
The scientists claim that HAL's murderous behavior was just self-defense. He did not want to be disconnected. The earlier behavior, such as misreporting the status of equipment, was due to a malfunction after the scientists asked him to hide the true nature of the mission from Bowman and the rest of the crew.

Part V: The Moons of Saturn Months pass before Discovery One reaches Iapetus, the Saturn moon the scientists pinpointed as the recipient of the moon monolith's signal. Bowman tries to fix up the spaceship, but it is obvious that the spaceship does not have enough oxygen to keep Bowman alive until a rescue spaceship arrives. The hibernation system cannot work without HAL plugged in and a lot of oxygen was lost when HAL opened the airlocks.
As he draws closer to Iapetus, Bowman sees the monolith. It is bigger than the one on the moon. Once he arrives, he takes one of the extravehicular pods and decides to explore it. When he gets closer to the monolith it opens, revealing itself to be a star gate.

Part VI: Through the Star Gate The star gate takes Bowman through what he refers to as The Grand Central Station of the galaxy. He observes other spaceships, planets, and species. Bowman winds up at a hotel suite. The hotel suite has been designed by the aliens based on knowledge they have gleaned from Earth. It is a safe place where they can observe him and help him evolve. Bowman falls asleep. While he sleeps, his mind is wiped and he starts to become an entity known as the 'Star Child', an immortal being who can travel through space.
Bowman-as-Star Child returns to Earth, where he becomes a sort of guardian of humanity. They cannot see him, but he prevents a nuclear warhead from hitting its target. The ending implies that the Star Child, like the monolith, will observe and maybe even subtly interact with humankind during their next stage of evolution.

url

• where on the Moon is an alien device located?
  The crater Copernicus, The Ocean of Storms, The Sea of Crises, The crater Tycho - buried in the crater Tycho
• what TMA-1 stands for ? Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-one
• What triggers TMA-1 to emit a blast of electronic noise?
  The first sunlight to fall upon it
• Which heavenly body is Bowman most instructed to investigate?
  (A) Earth, (B) Jupiter, (C) Saturn, (D) Japetus
• what is the use of the monolith ?
  • apes BC - instrumental in awakening intelligence
  • 1999 (TMA-1) - sends a radio transmission to Japetus (Iapetus), one of the moons of Saturn (film, Jupiter)
  • 2001, Discovery-1 - transportation to an unknown star system
• what major themes are found in the book
  • perils of technology / artificial intelligence
  • evolution
  • space exploration
• what size is Japetus ?
  Japetus is so small - about eight hundred miles in diameter

• Good Reads
• Fun Trivia
• Fun Trivia
• Spark Notes

• do you like Science-Fiction ? Why / why not ?
• what is the best sci-fi book you have ever read ?
  I robot (series), Dune, Even the Gods Themselves
• what is the sci-fi film you like best ?
  Alien, Blade Runner, Total Recall

url

• In the struggle for freedom of information, technology, not politics, will be the ultimate decider.
• Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: (1) It's completely impossible. (2) It's possible, but it's not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along.
• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
• As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
• Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
• I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.
• It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
• It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.
• It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him.
• Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.
• Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
• I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical.
• The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
• The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
• The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.
• There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
• This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.
• When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
• The best proof that there's intelligent life in outer space is the fact that it hasn't come here.
• We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return . The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation . the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began.
• The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life - much less intelligence - beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive; we may well be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms, while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime.
• Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
• The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information - in the sense of raw data - is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.
• There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.

AI related : Turing test

wiki

"5 little pigs" Audiobook (6 h 39 min)

Get Death On The Nile, PDF,

Quiz's :

• quiz school
• QuizMoz (21 q)
• Fun Trivia (10 fluix)
• Rotten Tomatoes (13, print 10 times)
• Fun (10 q)

Teacher notes, answer keys. Teaching notes.

• other detectives we know
• good thriller films
• crime vocabulary

• Did you like the book ?
• Did you finish it ?

• What do you think about the novel ?
  • lots of dialogs, not descriptions
  • complex plot, rich and intriguing - complicated (3 murders)
  • not fair to the reader - detectives have info reader has not

• What do you think about mr Poirot ?
  • elegant
  • educated
  • observador
  • arrogant

  "I am not a middleman. I am a top man', Hercule Poirot said rather arrogantly" @ EPUB, ("with slight arrogance" @ PDF) "Man invented work to avoid having to think"

• do you remember the name of the boat = "S.S. Karnak"
  what does "S.S." mean ? SteamShip ? Sailing Ship. Screw Steamer driven by propellers or screws, often understood to stand for "steamship"

• did you expect the final events ? Did you know who was the murderer ?

• did you find any inconsistent points in the novel ?
  • no explanation on how Simon and Linnet get in love
  • where does 1st bullet go - "I think it went into the table" - pg 171/178
  • how Simon is left alone while being hurt
  • how nobody hears 2 pistol shots : Simon killing Linnet & Simon shooting himself
  • what does letter J do
  • how the pistol is found in the river
  • how Jackie gets the pistol to kill Mrs. Otterbourne

• have you read other A Christies novel's ?
  what kind of characters does she have ? (upper-class)

• do you like thriller novels ? mystery novels ?

• what other detectives you know ?
  • Lindsey Davis : Marco Didio Falco
  • Carvalho : Montalbano
  • Arthur Conan Doyle : Sherlock Holmes vs James Moriarty
  • Philip Kerr : Bernie Gunther
  • Elmer Mendoza & Edgar "El Zurdo" Mendieta
  • Francisco Garcia Pavon : Plinio

• what thriller films do you like ?
  SAG : LA Confidential

wiki

Audiobook (1 h 12 min)

GoodReads

ePDF

• Mr. Satterthwaite goes to Doverton Kingsbourne, to the Addisons. Tom Addison is his old friend, maried to Pilar. They have 2 daughters : Lily and Maria. Lily married a fighter pilot, Simon Gilliatt. Had a son, Roland. Lily was killed. Maria married Dr. Horton, but died in childbirth, her little girl was alled Inez. Pilar died.
• in Kingsbourne Ducis they visit the nearest service station
• he visits The Harlequin Café, next to the post office - it has 2 portions - a shop that sold chine
• he remenbers Mr. Harley Quin - something that was going to happen through him.
• The Duchess of Leith she had had a harlequin breakfast set, big round cups in different colors.
• Mr. Quin comes into the cafe, with Hermes, his dog. I'm only passing by ...
• "As sweet as love, as black as night and as hot as hell - old Arab phrase
• Mrs. Beryl Gilliatt comes into the cafe (Simon Gilliatt's second wife, mother of Timothy) and buys some tea cups.
• they all are having tea. Red cup gets pushed off the table. Timothy gets the blue cup. Timothy is color-blind, as Tom.
• Timothy's Lily's son and Roland is Beryl's and Christopher Eden's son.

Top

mini series, wiki A Year In Provence, published 1989. The film is very diferent from the book, but easy to watch - Marion is very beautiful !

• fortunately for us, the good humor and niceness of our neighbors were apparent even if what they were saying was a mystery.
• one day, we might even be able to talk to each other.
• there is a season for everything in Provence, and the first two months of the year must be devoted to procreation.
• The well-known food of Provence is summer food-the melons and peaches and asparagus, the courgettes and aubergines, the peppers and tomatoes, the aioli and bouillabaisse and monumental salads of olives and anchovies and tuna and hardboiled eggs and sliced, earthy potatoes on beds of multicoloured lettuce glistening with oil, the fresh goat's cheeses
• that night, we ate for England.
• it is well known that the English kill their lamb twice; once when they slaughter it, and once when they cook it.
• "One doesn't eat fox in England?" ... "Ils sont bizarres, les Anglais."
• "The dead get the best view," he said, "because they are there for such a long time"
• What kind of meat does the butcher eat?
• large and noisy cockerel, who crows nonstop for two hours. Cocks must crow.
• two basic requirements for a rural notaire are a blind eye and a diplomatic bladder.
• we were counting on her to take third place, but with impaired vision and no sense of geography this seemed unlikely. (Grande Course de Chevres through the streets of Bonnieux, starting from the Café César)
• my wife, who has a well-founded lack of confidence in my ability to handle any kind of dangerous equipment, pointed out that I hardly needed an electronic sight to shoot myself in the foot.
• after a while, we came to realize that the gun mania was only part of a national fascination with outfits and accoutrements, a passion for looking like an expert.
• never again would I look at a bunch of grapes in a bowl without thinking of backache and sunstroke (pick the table grapes)
• 1.200 litres a 12º
• It had been our first experience of an evening formally dedicated to mass intoxication, and we had enjoyed it enormously. Any friend of the grape was a friend of ours.
• before dinner that night, we tested it, dripping it onto slices of bread that had been rubbed with the flesh of tomatoes. It was like eating sunshine (pa amb tomaquet)
• we had managed somehow to miss the entire Avignon festival, the donkey races at Goult, the accordion competition, Faustin's family outing to the Basses-Alpes in August, the wine festival in Gigondas, the Ménerbes dog show
• the equipment that had caused such consternation to Roger and his parents was a toilette a la Turque
• aioli !

• aim = objectiu
• bumpkins = paletos
• ditch = zanja
• droll = gracioso
• forgeries = falsificacions
• growl = grunyir
• jaunty = garboso
• leap = salto
• oozing = rezumar
• shrine = santuario
• slab of stone = llosa de pedra
• sled = trineu
• slimming = aprimar-se
• snout = hocico
• stopcocks = clau de pas
• stranded = encallat
• thaw = deshielo
• throbbing = palpitante

• what part of the book did you like more ?
• what meal or situation made you laugh ?
  Grande Course de Chevres - goat race
• do you remember any special or funny phrase ?
  That night, we ate for England.
  Any friend of the grape was a friend of ours.
• how large is the property they bought ?
  Most of the six acres of land we had bought with the house was planted with vines
• how many litres of wine do they get from their grapes ?
  Just over one thousand two hundred liters.
• how many restaurants do they visit ?
  • Lambesc (Feb, pg 36)
  • Auberge de la Loube, Buoux (May, pg 87)
  • Aix - Chez Gu (June, pg 99)
  • station café in Bonnieux - Café de la Gare (July, pg 116)
  • Goult (Aug, pg 135)
  • Bistro du Paradou (Nov, pg 178)
  • Auberge de la Loube in Buoux (Dec, pg 194)
• what do they think about french and the guns ?
  the gun mania was only part of a national fascination with outfits and accoutrements, a passion for looking like an expert.
• how do they describe "pa amb tomaquet" ?
  "dripping it (oil) onto slices of bread that had been rubbed with the flesh of tomatoes" ... "It was like eating sunshine"
• in what situation he says "What kind of meat does the butcher eat?"
• where is the village located ?
  It was set above the country road that runs between the two medieval hill villages of Ménerbes and Bonnieux (60 Km north of Marseille, Lubéron)
• what is patois ?
  es una variedad lingüística esencialmente oral, hablada en un ámbito geográfico limitado
• do you know the name of his wife ? (he is Peter)
• why did they do the christmas party ?
  What we should do was to invite the builders to a party to celebrate the end of the job. We fixed a date for the last Sunday before Christmas and sent out the invitations: champagne from 11 o'clock onward.

Top

In One Person - NYT

El prota : en William Abbott, novelist

El estat : Vermont

El riu : Favorite River was a tributary of the Connecticut River

Crushes on the wrong people

His friends :

• Harry Marshall, grandpa in woman's clothes at First Sister Players
• son pare : William Francis Dean, "Franny" - marit de la Mary Marshall
• miss Frost (Alberta) - First Sister Public Library, transsexual librarian & wrestler (Al Frost)
• Richard Abbott - step father
• Jacques Kittredge - wrestler
• Elaine
• Donna - transsexual
• Larry Upton - "are you a top or a bottom, beautifull Bill?"
• Esmeralda Soler - Zufall restaurant
• Tom Atkins - europe - infects his wife Sue

Few new words:

• i have a crush = tengo un flechazo
• Twelfth Night = noche de reyes
• (moral) turpitude = vileza
• sophomore = estudiant de 2on any. 1st year : freshman
• big spoon, small spoon ; pitcher, catcher ; top / down ; dominant / submissive ;
• i'll be the chaperone
• vagina
  • twat
  • snatch
  • quim
  • pussy
  • muff
  • honeypot
  • cunt
  • Mossberg
• varmint - petits mamifers que propaguen plagues
• intercrural - entre piernas
• duck under
• thong - correa
• prig - mojigato = que se escandaliza facilmente

Few nice lines:

• In reading, as in writing, all one needed - that is, in order to have an utterly absorbing journey - was a believable but formidable relationship.
• You can learn a lot from your lovers, but - for the most part - you get to keep your friends longer,a troublesome and mischievous person, especially a child. and you learn more from them. (At least I have.) I would even say that my friend Elaine's mother, Martha Hadley, had a greater influence on me than Lawrence Upton truly had.
• In Aunt Muriel's case, her impeccable enunciation made her entirely credible onstage; she was a perfect parrot, but a robotic and humorless one, and she was simply as sympathetic or unsympathetic as the character she played. Muriel's language was elevated, but her own 'character' was lacking; she was just a chronic complainer.
• "Richard is a pussy-whipped, like all of you men married to those Winthrop women", Miss Frost told him
• I could see him suffering over how "wrong" it could be not to invite me to his wrestling club, just because I was - well, as Uncle Bob would say, a little light in the loafers (mocasines)
• Hippocratic facies was the term for that near-death face - that tightly mask of death, which so many of my friends and lovers who died of AIDS would one day wear.
• "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep" Prospero says (The Tempest, act 4, scene 1)
• My only love sprung from my only hate - Romeo & Juliet

Few interesting books:

• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room
• Tennessee Williams Summer and Smoke
• W. H. Auden - poems
• Wah Whitman - poems
• Lord Byron - poems
• Herman Melville
• E. M. Foster
• Moby Dick
• Howards End
• Marcel Proust - Swann's Way
• Rimbaud - A Season in Hell

Madrid streets :

• Berlín Cabaret y el/la artista se llamaba Psicosis Gonzáles

Top

Freedom

Town : Ramsey Hill

Chapters:

• Good neighbors
• Mistakes were made
  • chapter 1.- Agreeable
  • chapter 2.- Best friends
  • chapter 3.- Free markets foster competition
• 2004
• Womanland
• The nice man's anger
• Enough already
• Bad news
• The fiend of Washington
• Mistakes were made (conclusion)
  • chapter 4.- Six years

Some good phrases:

• depression = strongly disliking yourself
• They were 18 words of body language with which women signified availability and submission
• I think we deserve a little more than the nothing you've been giving us
• We'll cross that bridge when we come to it
• When it became unavoidable that Richard Katz return to the studio with his eager young bandmates and start recording a second Walnut Surprise album - when he'd exhausted all modes of procrastination and flight, first playing every receptive city in America and then touring progressively more remote foreign countries, until his bandmates rebelled at adding Cyprus to their Turkish trip, and then breaking his left index finger while fielding a paperback copy of Samantha Power's seminal survey of world genocide flung too violently by the band's drummer, Tim, across a hotel room in Ankara, and then retreating solo to a cabin n the Adirondacks to score a Danish art film and, in his utter boredom with the project, seeking out a coke dealer in Plattsburgh and taking 5,000 euros of Danish government arts funding up his nose, and then going AWOL for a stretch of costly dissipation in New York and Florida which didn't end until he was busted in Miami for DWI and possession, and then checking himself into the Gubser Clinic in Tallahassee for six weeks of detox and snide resistance to the gospel of recovery, and then recuperating from the shingles he'd taken insufficient care to avoid contract during a chicken-pox outbreak at the Gubser, and them performing 250 hours of agreeably mindless community service at a Dade County park, and then simply refusing to answer his phone or check his e-mail while he read books in his apartment on the pretext of shoring up his defenses against the chicks and drugs that his bandmates all seemed able to enjoy without too serious overdoing it - he sent Tim a postcard and told him to tell the others that he was dead broke and going back to building rooftop decks full-time; and the rest of Walnut Surprise began to feel like idiots for having waited.
• The thing is, Walter said, the land is disappearing so fast that it's hopeless to wait for governments to do conservation. The problem with governments is they're elected by majorities that don't give a shit about biodiversity. Whereas billionaires do tend to care. They've got a skate in keeping the planet not entirelly fucked, because they and their heirs are going to be the ones with enough money to enjoy the planet. The reason Vin Haven started doing conservation on is ranches n Texas was that he likes to hunt the bigger birds and look at the little ones. Self-interest, yeah, but a total win-win. In terms of locking up habitat to save in front development, it's a lot easier to turn a few billionaires than to educate American voters who are perfectly happy with their cable and their Xboxes and their broadband.
• I've spent too much time being mad at you. Do you have any idea? I sent you all those e-mails that you never responded to. I had that whole humiliating one-sided conversation with you.
• The doctor smiled to himself. There's an old ER joke about the mother who comes in with a toddler who's swallowed some pennies. She asks the doctor if the kid's going to be OK, and the doctor tells her "Just be sure to watch for any change in his stool." Really silly joke.
• Every year at tax time, it seems as if the year just past was shorter than the year before it; the years are becomming so similar to each other.
• The coldness entered him through his lips and didn't leave. What was over was over. His delight in the world had died, and thera was no point in anything.

Audio book, PDF. "The dog and the horse", by Voltaire. Complete Zadig.

Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers.

onlineorc :

1. Literary biographer Joseph Krutch argued that Edgar Allan Poe wrote his stories of "ratiocination" in order not to go mad. Meanwhile, the narrator of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" speculates on whether C. Auguste Dupin's genius represents a "diseased intelligence." In what ways do you see a struggle be-tween madness and sanity within the three Dupin tales?
2. Poe introduced the character of Dupin before the word "detective" had even become part of the English language. Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, labeled Poe "the father of detective fiction." In what ways does Dupin conform or diverge from your conception of the modern detec-tive? What similarities do you find between the selections in "The Earliest Detectives" appendix and Poe's detective tales?
3. Literary scholar John T. Irwin argued that Dupin is little more than the sum of his ideas, declaring him a "characterless char-acter" who is "as thin as the paper he is printed on." Matthew Pearl's introduction suggests that Dupin is a richer character because of his mysteriousness, and scholar J. Lasley Dameron has commented that Dupin "is the first popular hero in American fiction who superbly demonstrates mind over matter, or mind over action." Do you agree more with Irwin, or with Pearl and Dameron? In what ways does Dupin succeed or fall short of being a full character?
4. The Prefect of Police adds some comic relief to the Dupin trilogy. What elements of humor did you find in these stories? How did these elements influence the texture and tone of the tales as a whole?
5. The narrator remains nameless throughout the stories but nevertheless is a crucial part of them. How was the narrator's personality and presence important to your reading of the stories? How does he compare as a character to Dupin?
6. Scholars S. K. Wertz and Linda Wertz have pointed out that a true "mystery" is a profound question that cannot be solved, whereas a "puzzle" is a difficulty that only appears to be myste-rious until it is resolved. Consider the three Dupin stories. What are the elements of genuine mystery in these tales, and when does Poe rely more on the model of the puzzle?
7. Discuss the role of witnesses in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." What is the significance of the different languages they report hearing from the murder scene?
8. Writing about "The Purloined Letter," scholar Liahna Babener notes that the methods Dupin resorts to in order to retrieve the lost letter parallel the ways in which Minister D. initially stole it, and that Dupin has motives-financial gain, revenge, rivalry, and political advancement-that are not very different from the Minister's. Do Poe and Dupin tread on ethical boundaries in "The Purloined Letter"? What about in the other two stories? How much does right and wrong matter in Poe's conception of the detective hero?
9. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter" are often considered in tandem, while the middle story, "The Mystery of Marie Roget," is looked at separately. Mystery writer Dorothy Sayers argued that "Marie Roger was the most interesting of the three for the "connoisseur," while other readers, including Poe biographer A. H. Quinn, found it a "comparative failure." How does the middle tale of the trilogy differ form the other two? Which was your favorite of the three tales, and why?

En Carles recomana

• Tell Tale heart
• Anabel Lee

IMDb

Michael Keaton “There rose a fountain once, and there full many a fair flower raised its head.”

Maggie Q “But she who rear’d them was long dead, and in such follies had no part.”

Tamerlane and other poems, pg 54

Top

Links : 5 short stories and 4 more

1. From a view to a kill - Moonraker + A View to a Kill
2. For your eyes only - For your eyes only
3. Quantum of solace
4. Risico
5. The Hildesbrandt rarity - Licence to Kill
6. Octopussy
7. The property of a lady
8. The living daylights
9. 007 in New York

(1) Bond investigates the murder of a motorcycle dispatch-rider and the theft of his top-secret documents by a motorcycle-riding assassin. Bond disguises himself as a dispatch-rider and follows the same journey to Station F as the previous rider: as expected, the assassin attempts to kill Bond. Bond, however, is ready and kills the assassin. He then uncovers the assassin's hidden base of operations.

(2) "For Your Eyes Only" begins with the murder of the Havelocks, a British couple in Jamaica who have refused to sell their estate to Herr von Hammerstein, a former Gestapo officer who is the chief of counterintelligence for the Cuban secret service. They are killed by two Cuban hitmen at the direction of their leader, Major Gonzales; all three work for von Hammerstein. The Havelocks turn out to be close friends of M, who served as the groom's best man during their wedding in 1925. M subsequently gives Bond a voluntary assignment, unconnected to sanctioned Secret Service duties, to travel to Vermont via Canada, find von Hammerstein at his rented estate at Echo Lake and assassinate him as a warning to future criminals who might think to target British citizens. When Bond arrives on the scene, he finds the Havelocks' daughter, Judy, who intends to carry out her own mission of revenge with a bow and arrow. Judy kills von Hammerstein by shooting him in the back with a arrow from 100 yards (91 m) away at the exact moment that he dives into a lake. A shoot-out then occurs between Bond and Gonzales and the two Cuban gunmen. Bond kills all of them and returns to Canada with Judy, who has been wounded during the gunfight.

(3) After completing a mission in the Bahamas, Bond is in Nassau and attends a dinner party at Government House. When the other guests have left, Bond remarks that if he ever marries, he imagines it would be nice to marry an air hostess. The Governor then tells Bond the story of a relationship between a former civil servant, Philip Masters and air hostess Rhoda Llewellyn. After meeting aboard a flight to London, the couple married, and went to live in Bermuda, but after a time Rhoda began a long open affair with the eldest son of a rich Bermudian family. As a result, Masters' work deteriorated, and he suffered a nervous breakdown. After recovering, he was given a break from Bermuda by the governor and sent on an assignment to Washington. Upon his return Masters was determined to end his marriage and he divided their home into two sections, half to each of them and refused to have anything to do with his wife in private—although they continued to appear as a couple in public. He eventually returned to the UK alone, leaving Rhoda with unpaid debts and stranded in Bermuda, a cruel act which he would have been incapable of carrying out just a few months earlier. The governor explains his point to Bond: when the "Quantum of Solace" drops to zero, humanity and consideration of one human for another is gone and the relationship is finished. Despite the success of Masters' plan to take revenge on his unfaithful wife, he never recovered emotionally. After a time, Rhoda married a rich Canadian. The governor then reveals that the dinner companions whom Bond found dull were in fact Rhoda and her rich Canadian husband.

If you don't have that Quantum of Solace in a relationship, you should give up.

(4) Bond is sent by M to investigate a drug-smuggling operation based in Italy that is sending narcotics to England. M instructs Bond to get in touch with a CIA informant, Kristatos, who in turn tells Bond that a man named Enrico Colombo is behind the racket. When Bond sets out to find more information on Colombo, he is captured and brought aboard Colombo's ship, the Colombina. Colombo informs Bond that Kristatos is actually the one in charge of the drug smuggling operation, and that Kristatos is backed by the Russians. Colombo agrees to help Bond by providing information about things "as long as none of it comes back to Italy"; Bond agrees to help Colombo eliminate Kristatos. Bond, Colombo, and his men sail the Colombina to Santa Maria when Kristatos's men are loading another shipment of drugs, they attack Kristatos's ship and adjacent warehouse and discover Kristatos lurking near the warehouse, preparing to detonate a bomb. Kristatos tries to escape, but is killed by Bond.

(5) Bond is on an assignment in the Seychelles Islands; through Fidele Barbey, his influential and well-connected local contact, he meets an uncouth American millionaire named Milton Krest, who challenges the two to aid him in the search for a rare fish, The Hildebrand Rarity. Bond, Barbey, Krest and his English wife, Elizabeth, set off aboard the Wavekrest in search of the fish. During the journey, Bond learns that Milton verbally and physically abuses everyone around him, especially his wife—whom he punishes with the use of a stingray tail he dubs "The Corrector". Krest finds the Hildebrand Rarity and kills it—along with many other fish—by pouring poison into the water. After finding and killing the Hildebrand Rarity, the Wavekrest sets sail for port. Along the way Krest gets very drunk, insults Bond and Barbey and tells his wife he will beat her again with the stingray tail. Later that night, Bond hears Krest choking; investigating, Bond finds that Krest has been murdered—apparently by having the rare fish stuffed down his throat. So as not to be entangled in a murder investigation, Bond throws Krest overboard and cleans up the scene of the crime, making it look as though Krest fell overboard after one of the ropes holding his hammock broke: Bond suspects both Barbey and Mrs. Krest, but is unsure which is responsible. However, when Mrs. Krest invites Bond to sail with her to Mombasa—his next destination—aboard the Wavekrest, he accepts her invitation with reservations.

(6) James Bond is assigned to apprehend a hero of the Second World War implicated in a murder involving a cache of Nazi gold. Bond chooses not to take Smythe into custody immediately, but Smythe's guilt drives him to commit suicide by allowing a scorpion fish to sting him and his "pet" octopus to attack him, bringing on a fatal heart attack.

(7) James Bond investigates a Secret Service employee, Maria Freudenstein, who is a double agent about to be paid by her Russian keepers by auctioning a clock crafted by Peter Carl Fabergé at Sotheby's in her name. The Russians have sent the Resident Director of the KGB in London to attend the auction and underbid for the item to push the price to the necessary value to pay for her services as a double agent. Bond attends the auction in hopes of spotting this man; after he does so, the man is expelled from London as persona non grata.

(8) An unusually morose James Bond is assigned sniper duty to help British agent 272 escape from East Berlin. Bond's duty is to prevent a top KGB assassin codenamed "Trigger" from killing 272 by eliminating the sniper. Bond waits for three nights for the agent to come over no man's land and notices a female orchestra arriving and leaving for practice each night; a beautiful, blonde cellist catches his eye while he waits. When he sees the agent start making his way over the broken ground, he sees the Russian sniper take up position and realises it is the cellist: a split second decision sees Bond deciding instead to shoot the butt of her rifle, preventing her from making the kill. The mission, while successful, is also considered a failure due to Bond's last-second decision, and it ends with Bond hoping that M fires him for it.

(9) A brief tale in which Bond muses about New York City and his favourite recipe for scrambled eggs, during a quick mission to the titular city to warn a female MI6 employee that her new boyfriend is a KGB agent. It is notable for including a rare humorous conclusion and for its mention of Solange, a young lady of Bond's intimate acquaintance who works in a shop, Abercrombie's, "appropriately employed in their Indoor Games Department".

Funny books, easy to read : Alex McCall - the No 1 ladie's detective agency - 1st one; 15 x ePub {sagpdf}

Listen at BBC : The Saturday Big Tent Wedding, A Late Van Just Glimpsed,

Una pura delicia - gràcies, Pere !

Amb els conceptes d'en Clovis Andersen's The Principles of Private Detection

When reading the first book, you quickly come upon the term "Mma" (pronounced "ma") used before a woman’s name and "Rra" (pronounced "ra" with a rolling "r") used before a man’s name. They’re both terms of respect used in the Setswana language. "Mma" is like "Ma’am" or "Madam", or a more respectful form of "Mrs." "Rra" is like "sir", or a very respectful form of "Mr."
"Dumela" can be used before "Rra" and "Mma" to say "hello sir or ma’am"

Mma and Rra are marks of respect and thus are more significant than Mr and Mrs.
Correct form is, 'Dumela mma/rra - le kae?'
You reply, 'Ke teng mma/rra, le kae?'
Plurals are "bomma" and "borra" and you say 'Re teng' (We're fine') if greeted as a couple or a group.

El magnífico elenco :

The proprietor of the Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors

The Secretary of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and cum laude graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College

Mma Silvia Potokwani, matron of the Orphan Farm, and substitute mother, over the years, to almost eight hundred children, each of whose young life had had such a bad beginning, took most things in her stride. Mr J. L. B. Matekoni had once remarked that she was the only woman in Botswana who could be struck by lightning and make the lightning blow a fuse. "And I wouldn't want to be the lion who tried to eat her," he had added. "That lion would learn a lesson, I think."
An exaggeration, of course, but Mma Potokwani had certainly never let the world put obstacles in her path. She had survived the intrussions of bureaucrats, and the indiference and selfishness of those who, having made their money, refused to share it. She had begged and borrowed and scraped in order to provide for the orphans in her care, and prided herself on the fact that none of them, none at all, had gone out into the world without knowing that they were loved and that there was al least one person who wanted them to make something of their lives - one person who believed in them.
"Maybe I can't give them everything they need," she once said to Mma Ramotswe, "but at least they know that I have tried."

• Florence - Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s maid
• foster children - Motholeli, the girl, and Puso, the boy

• The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (1998)
• Tears of the Giraffe (2000)
• Morality for Beautiful Girls (2001)
• The Kalahari Typing School for Men (2002)
• The Full Cupboard of Life (2004)
• In The Company of Cheerful Ladies (2004 – also known as The Night-Time Dancer)
• Blue Shoes and Happiness (2006)
• The Good Husband of Zebra Drive (2007)
• The Miracle at Speedy Motors (2008)
• Tea Time for the Traditionally Built (2009)
• The Double Comfort Safari Club (2010)
• The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party (2011)
• The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection (2012)
• The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon (2013)
• The Handsome Man's De Luxe Cafe (2014)
• The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine (2015)
• Precious and Grace (2016)
• The House of Unexpected Sisters (2017)
• The Colours of All the Cattle (2018)

• (1) A woman sees more that a man sees, that is well known
• (2) A man who is well looked-after becomes fatter. They are just like cattle. That is well known.
• (2) You would be just as bad. Once women are married to men, they start to complain. It is a well-known fact. Ask any married man.

We don’t forget, thought Mma Ramotswe.
Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are.

Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill. These were its assets: a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, and an old typewriter. Then there was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe—the only lady private detective in Botswana—brewed redbush tea. And three mugs—one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need? Detective agencies rely on human intuition and intelligence, both of which Mma Ramotswe had in abundance. No inventory would ever include those, of course.

But there was also the view, which again could appear on no inventory. How could any such list describe what one saw when one looked out from Mma Ramotswe’s door? To the front, an acacia tree, the thorn tree which dots the wide edges of the Kalahari; the great white thorns, a warning; the olive-grey leaves, by contrast, so delicate. In its branches, in the late afternoon, or in the cool of the early morning, one might see a Go-Away Bird, or hear it, rather. And beyond the acacia, over the dusty road, the roofs of the town under a cover of trees and scrub bush; on the horizon, in a blue shimmer of heat, the hills, like improbable, overgrown termite mounds.

She was a good detective, and a good woman. A good woman in a good country, one might say. She loved her country, Botswana, which is a place of peace, and she loved Africa, for all its trials. I am not ashamed to be called an African patriot, said Mma Ramotswe. I love all the people whom God made, but I especially know how to love the people who live in this place. They are my people, my brothers and sisters. It is my duty to help them to solve the mysteries in their lives. That is what I am called to do.

Everything, thought Mma Ramotswe, has been something before.

But he died before he could say anything more, and Mma Ramotswe fell on his chest and wept for all the dignity, love and suffering that died with him.

Everything you wanted to know about a person was written in the face, she believed. It’s not that she believed that the shape of the head was what counted—even if there were many who still clung to that belief; it was more a question of taking care to scrutinise the lines and the general look. And the eyes, of course; they were very important. The eyes allowed you to see right into a person, to penetrate their very essence, and that was why people with something to hide wore sunglasses indoors. They were the ones you had to watch very carefully.

Maybe if you started doing something instead of just sitting in a chair you might like it a bit more. There are lots of melons to grow down there.

Some people cannot bear news like that. They think they must live forever, and they cry and wail when they realise that their time is coming. I do not feel that, and I did not weep at that news which the doctor gave me. The only thing that makes me sad is that I shall be leaving Africa when I die. I love Africa, which is my mother and my father. When I am dead, I shall miss the smell of Africa, because they say that where you go, wherever that may be, there is no smell and no taste.

Every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map.

Some people think of God as a white man, which is an idea which the missionaries brought with them all those years ago and which seems to have stuck in people’s mind. I do not think this is so, because there is no difference between white men and black men; we are all the same; we are just people. And God was here anyway, before the missionaries came. We called him by a different name, then, and he did not live over at the Jews’ place; he lived here in Africa, in the rocks, in the sky, in places where we knew he liked to be. When you died, you went somewhere else, and God would have been there too, but you would not be able to get specially close to him. Why should he want that?

That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.

They taught us Funagalo, which is the language used for giving orders underground. It is a strange language. It is a language which is good for telling people what to do. There are many words for push, take, shove, carry, load, and no words for love, or happiness, or the sounds which birds make in the morning.

• 26 - mother dies - railway line
• 27 - Obed's cousin
• 37 - cousin's wedding (2 busos)
• 39 - art competition - theme : "Life in Botswana of Today" - goat, not cattle
• 43 - living with cousin - clerk fired
• 48 - Note Mokoti
• 60 - house at Zebra Drive
• 61 - Mma Makutsi
• 62 - bush tea
• 86 - mr J. L. B. Matekoni
• 105 - The Principles of Private Investigation, by Clovis Andersen (or The Principles of Private Detection)
• 137 - marry me (J.B.Matekoni)
• 147 - Medecine in Charlie Gotso's car
• 154 - Hector wants to marry her (bolt factory owner)
• 163 - snake on the road
• 175 - dr Gulubane - identifies bones

• 5 - Happy Bapetsi - father comes back (blood need)
• 63 - missing man - Peter Malatsi (crocodile)
• 71 - vanished boy - Molai
• 82 - bad debt
• 82 - husband and parfum
• 85 - long distance calls
• 96 - mr Palilar Sundigar Patel - Nandira and Jack - does he exist?
• 125 - Mma Pekwane - husband steals a car
• 138 - Alice and Kremlin Busang - suspicious husband - "fat tart"
• 153 - Solomon Moretsi - finger loss - Hector Lepodise - bolt factory owner - 4.000 pula
• 183 - Chalie Gotso's - medecine from a witchdoctor

• 52 - he was not a good man, she could tell that, but she might change him

• What is Mma Ramotswe's first name? Tahlia, Sweetness, Charity, Precious
• What country are the stories set in? Ghana, Botswana, Gabon, Gambia
• Mma Ramotswe's father, the late Obed Ramotswe, was a kind and wise man. Besides his daughter, what was very dear to him? His pipe, His cattle, His trumpet, His bible
• Mma Ramotswe's little white van, which she loves so much, had once belonged to: Her father, Her first husband Note, Her friend Grace Makutsi, The orphanage in Gaborone
• What is the name of the street on which Mma Ramotswe buys a house? Tlokweng Road, Zebra Drive, The Old Lobatse Road, Sebele Drive,
• Grace Makutsi graduated from what college? Women's University in Africa, Gulu University for Women, Botswana College of Business and Secretarial School, Botswana School of Finance and Banking
• Grace has a weakness for _________. Shoes, Smoking, Gambling, Chocolate
• What does Mr. J.L.B Matekoni do for a living? He is a carpenter, He is a car mechanic, He is a butcher, He owns a furniture store
• Who is Fanwell? Grace Makutsi's fiancee, One of the children at the orphanage, The younger of the two apprentice car mechanics, A Bushman tracker
• "Tea, of course, made the problem seem smaller, as it always does." What kind of tea does Mma Ramotswe drink? Mint tea, Assam tea, Bush tea, Darjeeling tea

Maybe you did not find what “bush tea” is ...

Wiki book, pdf {sagpdf}

Summary & Study Guide

• Mrs Andrea Curtin (american embassy) - ten years ago I lost my son, Michael
  Picture with : Cephas Kalumani. Oswald Ranta. Mma Soloi.
  Oswald Ranta is living here in Gaborone. He is a lecturer in the Department of Rural Economics in the University.
  Carla Smit
• Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni brings home two orphan/foster children : Motholeli and Puso
• man at the brewery who was anxious about his brother
• tracing of a company accountant who had sold most of the company’s assets and then disappeared
• Mma Makutsi is promoted to assistant detective
• Mr Letsenyane Badule - "Honest Deal" butchery - I think my wife is seeing another man

• You are very kind and I am a very lucky person.
• Mma Ramotswe passed the money over to Mna Potsane, who thanked her, clapping both hands in a sign of gratitude.
• Some people are slow to give. It is something to do with how their mothers brought them up.
• Mma Ramotswe said nothing. She was very close, she felt, to understanding what had happened, but she could no express it, and she could not tell why she knew.
• Often she awoke at this hour of the night, and lay alone in the darkness, she would search her memory to retrieve some recollection of him that had eluded her: some scrap of conversation, some gesture, some shared experience. Every memory was a precious treasure to her, fondly dwelt upon, sacramental in its significance.
• Was it right to do the wrong thing to get the right result ?
• His look was guarded now, and she smelt off him that unmistakable, acrid smell of a person experiencing fear.
• The giraffe gives its tears to the women and they weave them into the basket.

  Ramon : tears are the only thing a mother can give to a dead child

Mma Ramotswe suddenly laughed. “Well, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni,” she said. “Nobody could say of you that you are not a kind man. You are, I think, the kindest man in Botswana. What other man would do that? I do not know of one, not one single one. Nobody else would do that. Nobody.”

He stared at her. “You are not cross?”

“I was,” she said. “But only for a little while. One minute maybe. But then I thought: Do I want to marry the kindest man in the country? I do. Can I be a mother for them? I can. That is what I thought, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.”

• where wil Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni live when they marry ?
• what is the name of the sister and brother orphaned in the bush ?
• do you think mr Oswald is a womanizer ? mistreating women
• do you know what blackmail is ? chantaje, extorsion
• what part of the truth they dont tell to mr Badule ?
• what is the meaning of the "tears of the giraffe" ? we all have something to give
• do you know the meaning of "dumela" ? hello; good morning
• do you know what "stale enquiry" is ?
  The client is given false hopes because a detective is working on the case, and the agent himself feels committed to coming up with something because of the client’s expectations.
• both Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni adhere to the old fashioned values - any examples
• both Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni can not say "no"
• why is Motholeli on a wheelchair ? her tuberculosis had damaged her bones
• whay was Florence concerned if she had to go off and work in a hotel ?
  she would not be able to entertain her men friends in that same way. Under the current arrangement, men were able to visit her in the house while her employer was at work—without his knowledge, of course, and they were able to go into Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s room where there was the large double bed which he had bought from Central Furnishers. It was very comfortable—wasted on a bachelor, really—and the men liked it. They gave her presents of money, and the gifts were always better if they were able to spend time together in Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s room. That would all come to an end if anything changed.

• What does Carla Smit manage? A hotel, a bar, a lab, an office.
• Whom did the person Florence meet at the take out restaurant live with? A woman with a goat. A man with a chimpanzee. A woman with 3 children. A man with 3 children.
• What did Badule's wife have so the son could have a good education? An affair. A massage. A whip. A baby.

book rags

• What distinguishes Tears of the Giraffe from most other mysteries? What qualities make it such a charming and affirmative book? In what ways does Mma Ramotswe differ from such archetypal detectives as Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, and Philip Marlowe?
• Mrs. Curtain says that when she first came to Africa, she had "the usual ideas about it —a hotchpotch of images of big game and savannah and Kilimanjaro rising out of the cloud . . . famines and civil wars and potbellied, half-naked children staring at the camera, sunk in hopelessness"
  How does her experience of Africa alter these ideas? Why does she feel that "everything about my own country seemed so shoddy and superficial when held up against what I saw in Africa"? What deeper and truer understanding of Africa does the novel itself offer readers who might share Mrs. Curtain's preconceptions?
• Mma Ramotswe knows that Mrs. Curtain's case—finding out what happened to her son ten years ago— is what is referred to in The Principles of Private Detection as "a stale enquiry"
  Why does she accept the case, in spite of that? What special empathy does she feel for Mrs. Curtain?
• When Mr J.L.B. Matekoni wonders why his apprentice mechanics take everything for granted, a friend explains, "Young people these days cannot show enthusiasm. . . . It's not considered smart to be enthusiastic".
  Is this an accurate observation? Where else does the novel demonstrate this kind of understanding of human behavior?
• Why does Mr J.L.B. Matekoni allow himself to be talked into adopting the orphans? What specific memory enables him to open his heart to them? What does this act say about his character?
• Mma Ramotswe thinks that "the Americans were very clever; they sent rockets into space and invented machines which could think more quickly than any human being alive, but all this cleverness could also make them blind"
  What is it that she thinks Americans are blind to? Is she right? How do her own values differ from those of mainstream America?
• Tears of the Giraffe poses some difficult moral dilemmas for Mma Ramotswe.
  Should one always tell the truth, or is lying sometimes the better choice? Does a moral end justify immoral means? Which cases raise these questions? How do Mma Ramotswe and her assistant Mma Makutsi answer them?
• When Mma Ramotswe prepares her accounts for the end of the financial year, she finds that "she had not made a lot of money, but she had not made a loss, and she had been happy and entertained. That counted for infinitely more than a vigorously healthy balance sheet. In fact, she thought, annual accounts should include an item specifically headed Happiness, alongside expenses and receipts and the like. That figure in her accounts would be a very large one, she thought" [p. 225].
  What enables Mma Ramotswe to live happily? How would most American CEOs and CFOs respond to the accounting innovation she suggests in the above passage?
• How is Mma Ramotswe able to solve the mystery of Mrs. Curtain's son's disappearance? What role does her intuition play in figuring out what happened to him? Why is this information so important for Mrs. Curtain?
• When Mma Potokwane tells Mr J.L.B. Matekoni that their pump makes a noise, "as if it is in pain," he replies that "engines do feel pain. . . . They tell us of their pain by making a noise". Later, he tells his apprentice, "you cannot force metal. . . . If you force metal, it fights back".
  What do these statements reveal about Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's character? About his approach to being a mechanic? Are his assertions merely fanciful or do they reveal some deeper truth about the relationship between the human and the inanimate world?
• One of Mma Makutsi's classmates at the Botswana Secretarial College tells her that "men choose women for jobs on the basis of their looks. They choose the beautiful ones and give them jobs. To the others, they say: We are very sorry. All the jobs have gone".
  In what ways does Tears of the Giraffe suggest ways around the stifling roles dictated by "brute biology"? What examples does it provide of girls and women overcoming the restrictions placed on them and assuming traditionally male roles?
• The housemother of the orphanage explains to Motholeli, "We must look after other people. . . . Other people are our brothers and sisters. If they are unhappy, then we are unhappy. If they are hungry, then we are hungry" [p. 124].
  In what ways does the novel demonstrate this ethic in action? How is this way of relating to other people different from the starker examples of American individualism?
• In what ways are Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and Mma Ramotswe well-suited to each other? How do they treat each other in the novel? How do they complement each other?
• In what ways is Tears of the Giraffe as much about family relationships as it is about solving crimes? How does the novel provide emotionally satisfying resolutions to the parental pain that both Mrs. Curtain and Mma Ramotswe have suffered?

url

wiki, epub, pdf.

Few questions

• what problems must mma Ramotswe face in this book and how does she solve them ?
  • where they might live
    They move to Zebra Drive
  • bankrupcy
    Mma Makutsi is promoted as Assistant Manager of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors
  • Mr J.L.B. Matekoni suffers from depression

  To-do list : dealing with Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had moved to the top of her list of tasks, followed by the garage, the investigation into the Government Man’s brother’s difficulties, and the move to the new office.

• what episodes has this book ?
  • rra Pula, mr Rain, finds a boy in the trees ... with a smell of a lion - Mataila
  • Government Man - 2 brothers, the one living to a cattle post, and Mogadi
  • Mr Moemedi “Two Shots” Pulani and Miss Beauty and Integrity contest : Motlamedi Matluli, Gladys Tlhapi, Makita Phenyonini, and Patricia Quatleneni
    • What are the main values which Africa can show to the world ?
    • What do you want to do with your life ?
    • Is it better to be beautiful than to be full of integrity ?

• bones frases :
  • Remember what Clovis Andersen says: every story has two sides
  • Can one be the friend of a person who behaves badly ?
  • It occurred to Mma Ramotswe that such behaviour was no more than ignorance; an inability to understand the hopes and aspirations of others. That understanding, thought Mma Ramotswe, was the beginning of all morality. If you knew how a person was feeling, if you could imagine yourself in her position, then surely it would be impossible to inflict further pain. Inflicting pain in such circumstances would be like hurting oneself.
  • In the first place, there was the old Botswana morality, which was simply right. If a person stuck to this, then he would be doing the right thing and need not worry about it.
  • Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should live in a way which made you feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists, she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti, for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even knowing it.

    Sartre propone la idea de que "Todos los existencialistas tienen en común la doctrina fundamental de que la existencia precede a la esencia", es decir, que no hay una naturaleza humana que determine a los individuos, sino que son sus actos los que determinan quiénes son, así como el significado de sus vidas.
    El existencialismo defiende que el individuo es libre y totalmente responsable de sus actos. Esto incita en el ser humano la creación de una ética de la responsabilidad individual, apartada de cualquier sistema de creencias externo a él.

  • Stand on your toe. That is what one said in Setswana if one hoped that something would happen. It was the same as the expression which white people used: cross your fingers.
  • That is the story of my life. I am an ordinary girl from Botswana, but it is very lucky to have three lives. Most people only have one life.
  • If you have a system which tells you where you are, then you will never be lost.
  • Mma Ramotswe accepted her large slice of cake and looked at the rich fruit within it. There were at least seven hundred calories in that, she thought, but it did not matter; she was a traditionally built lady and she did not have to worry about such things.
  • We do need somebody else in this life, thought Mma Ramotswe; we need a person whom we can make our little god on this earth, as the old Kgatla saying had it. Whether it was a spouse, or a child, or a parent, or anybody else for that matter, there must be somebody who gives our lives purpose.
  • The first rains had come, and the parched brown veld was turning green, giving sweet grass to the cattle and the wandering herds of goats. The tiny white van had no radio—or no radio that worked—but Mma Ramotswe knew songs that she could sing, and she sang them, the window open, the crisp air of morning in her lungs, the birds flying up from the side of the road, plumage glistening; and above her, empty beyond emptiness, that sky that went on for miles and miles, the palest of blues.
  • The sun would not be up for half an hour or so, but there was enough light to make things out and it grew stronger and clearer every moment. The trees were still indistinct, dark shapes, but the branches and the leaves would soon appear in detail, like a painting revealed. It was a time of day that she loved, and here, in this lonely spot, away from roads and people and the noise they made, the loveliness of her land appeared distilled. The sun would come before too long and coarsen the world; for the moment, though, the bush, the sky, the earth itself, seemed modest and understated.

• llocs, noms :
  • he said in Setswana
  • what Motswana does not like cattle ?
  • she thinks she owns Gaborone

pdf

• Satisfaction Guaranteed Detective Agency - Cephas Buthelezi. Ex-CID.
• Mr. Molefelo, a civil engineer

• I must remember, thought Mma Ramotswe, how fortunate I am in this life; at every moment, but especially now, sitting on the verandah of my house in Zebra Drive, and looking up at the high sky of Botswana, so empty that the blue is almost white.
  ... With these things in one’s life, one might well say that nothing more was needed.
• It would be very difficult being married to him; a somnolent experience, in fact, and Mma Ramotswe enjoyed life too much to want to sleep through it.
• “Mma Makutsi,” Mma Ramotswe began after her assistant had delivered the cup of freshly made tea to her desk, “are you happy?”
  “What I’m really wanting to find out,” went on Mma Ramotswe, “is whether you’re happy in your ... in yourself. Are you getting what you want out of life?”
  “Rich people are just people,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I have not met a rich person yet who isn’t just the same as us. Being happy or unhappy has nothing to do with being rich.” Mma Makutsi nodded. “So now I think that happiness comes from somewhere else. It comes from somewhere inside.”

  “And the heart?” ventured Mma Ramotswe. “Does the heart not come into it?” There was a silence. Mma Makutsi looked down, tracing a pattern with her finger on a dusty corner of her desktop. “The heart is the place where love happens,” she said quietly.

• “And there is something else you must remember,” Mma Ramotswe said. “There is something else that you must remember for the rest of your life. Sir Seretse Khama said that every person in Botswana, every person, is of equal value. The same. That means you, too. Everyone. You may be an orphan girl, but you are as good as anybody else. There is nobody who can look at you and say, I am better than you. Do you understand that?”
• He liked the early evening, when the heat had gone out of the sun and it was pleasant to walk about in the last hour or so before dusk set in.
• “You are a very kind man, Rra,” she said. “I am not called beautiful every day. It is nice when that happens.”
• What really counts are the things that you have done to people.

There was a verandah to the side of the house, and somebody had thoughtfully placed shade netting over the side of this. That would be a good place to sit, thought Mma Ramotswe, and one might even drink tea there, on a hot afternoon, and feel the sun on one's face, but filtered by the shade netting. And then the thought occurred to her that all Gaborone, the whole town, might be covered with shade netting, help aloft on great poles, and that this would keep the town cool and hold in the water which people put on their plants. It would be comfortable under this shade netting in summer, and then when winter came, and the air was cooler, they could roll back the shade netting to let in the winter sun, which would warm them, like the smile of an old friend.

For that is what makes our pain and sorrow bearable - this giving of love to the others, this sharing of the heart.

What was money ? Nothing. A human conceil, so much smaller a thing that love, and frienship, and the pursuit, no matter how pointless, of hope.

Against the gradually darkening sky, the branches of the trees traced a pattern of twigs and leaves- a pattern of such intricacy and delicacy that those standing below might look up and wonder why the world can be so beautiful and yet break the heart.

18 Discussion Questions :

• The New York Times Book Review has noted, "As always in Alexander McCall Smith's gentle celebrations of life in this arid patch of southern Africa, the best moments are the smallest."
  Discuss how this is true. Does your reading of these novels inspire you to appreciate the small, precious moments and things in your own life?
• Why is Precious Ramotswe so attached to her little white van, even after it is long gone?
  What is it about certain physical objects for us? Do you have one particular object, large or small, that you are especially attached to? Why? Is it the object itself that you cling to or is it to the memories that you have associated with it?
• Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni is always referred to as "that fine man" or "that excellent man, proprietor of Tloweng Road Speedy Motors."
  What makes him fine and excellent? And why is his job always attached to his name, even by his wife?
• How much importance do you put on efficiency? Why does Mma Ramotswe think that, "if efficiency were the only value in this life, then we would be content to eat bland, but nutritious food everyday."
  What other values are equally, if not more important in this life-in work and in play?
• It is very clear, over the course of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, that "Charlie (Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni's apprentice) did not follow the old Botswana ways."
  What does this mean? What are the "old Botswana ways"? Who does follow them?
• Mma Ramotswe says "Each of us had something that made it easier to continue in a world that sometimes, just sometimes, was not as we might wish it to be"
  What is that you need to get your mind off anxieties or problems in your own life?" a drive in the country? a quiet cup of tea"?
  Why do we all need these small pleasures to release us from looming problems and issues?
• Mma Ramotswe remembers witnessing with her father a group of birds being attacked by a snake, and he encouraged her not to do anything. Why? What lesson was he teaching young Precious?
• Mma Ramotswe periodically quotes from Clovis Anderson's The Principles of Private Detection. One she particular believes in and repeats is "the more you listen, the more you learn"
  What is it about this book and the pithy sayings it offers that appeals to Mma Ramotswe in moments of indecision? Do you have a book you turn to when you need reassurance or pleasure?
• There is much talk of beef stews and pumpkins and cake in these novels, and in one instance in The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party, Mma Ramotswe thinks about dinner and says, "Life was very full."
  Describe some of the dishes you remember in the novel.
• Do you think Mma Ramotswe makes the right decision to turn to Mpho's mother when the little boy shares the secret of the crime he committed? What would you have done in this predicament?
• Discussions about the differences between men and women come up quite a bit in the novels, and in this novel in particular.
  What are some of the stereotypes that various characters discuss? Do you agree with them?
• Mma Ramotswe appreciates the people in her life: her husband, her assistant detective/friend, her father.
  "That we have the people we have in this life, rather than others, is miraculous, she thought, a miraculous gift."
  Discuss the people in your life that you are most thankful for and why.
• Discuss how Grace Makutsi and Mma Ramotswe react differently to Charlie and his problem. Why is Grace more judgmental that her boss? Why do you think Mma Ramotswe is more successful in dealing with Charlie?
• Mma Ramotswe tells Charlie she likes him, and she reflects that all humans need to hear that others like them, need to have the pleasure of knowing and hearing that others care about them. Why is she so kind to Charlie after all he has done?
• The Christian Science Monitor has written that in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels, "Kindness is paramount." Do you agree with this? And what do you think Alexander McCall Smith is trying to promote by writing these "kind" novels?
• Discuss the titles of each of the chapters and the title of the book. What do these offer to the experience of reading the novel? Do you think Alexander McCall Smith has fun coming up with these titles?
• Mma Ramotswe walks around her garden every morning and evening, noticing the flowers, trees, and birds. She also revels in the beauty of the Botswana countryside. Discuss the importance of nature in this novel.
• Alexander McCall Smith is clearly a master wordsmith. Why do you think he chooses to use relatively simple language and plot lines in his novels? How does the language and rhythm correspond to the message of the novels? Connect this to one of the final sentences of the novel, "simple questions-and simple answers-were what we needed in life." What is Alexander McCall Smith saying about life?

• There were other sounds, though, and these were the sounds that can be heard in every house if one has the time to listen: the sighing of the wind under the door; the rattle of leaves against a pane of glass; the faint rhythm of a dripping tap.
• It is a very good thing to make a list like that - to remind yourself of what you have.
• Mma Ramotswe decided to sit down. She was not particularly tired - it was simply one of those occasions when she felt like sitting down. There was no reason why one should be always be on the move. That was half the trouble with the world, she thought: not enough people took the time to sit down for a few minutes and look up at the sky or at whatever it was that was before you - a herd of cattle, perhaps, or a stretch of bush dotted with acacia trees, or the sinking of the evening sun into the Kalahari.
  You did not have to sit for long; even a few minutes was enough to remind you that if you spend your life rushing about, then the years would slip through your fingers without your really noticing it until suddenly they were gone and you were old and before long it would be that moment that comes to everybody - the time to leave Botswana for ever.
• Perhaps there was some sort of lemon juice for inside beauty ... And even as she thought of it, she realized what it was: love and kindness. Love was the lemon juice that cleansed and kindness was the aloe that healed.
• This free beauty treatment came at the cost of a favor. Well, that was how the world worked, and she knew that she should not be surprised. Life was a matter of exchanges; you did things for people and they did things for you.
• The people in the shadows are no match for people who are not afraid of light.
• There was a large green cot in one corner of this room, a changing table and a tall chest full of baby supplies: powder and creams and neat piles of wooden clothing. There was also a wonderfull, evocative smell of a small human creature - a smell of softness, a smell of milk, a smell of life just beginning.
• There was no need for words, for there are times when words can only hint at what the heart would wish to say.
• That is what we should be to one another: light that shines whatever the darkness of loss. Always.
• Two teams of six, running and wriggling with all the energy that young boys can muster, battled over a somewhat deflated old leather ball, urging each other on exuberantly and raising a cloud of dust that darted about the pitch like a tiny, localised tornado.
• He went over those words in his mind. All men can benefit. It would make a wonderful slogan for anything - even for a beer advertisement.
• Men might believe that food appeared miraculously in the kitchen, but women, Mma Ramotswe included, knew better than that. They could hardly forget that there was a lot of trudging around shops to be done, and the choosing of this item rather than that one, which sometimes involved squeezing things to determine ripeness, or sniffing them to gauge freshness.
• They remained silent after that, sitting in the silence of a friendship that was the greatest and deepest and most valuable friendship that either of them had ever had, or ever would have.
• The tiny white van had been washed by the downpour, and now stood sparkling and resplendent, as if some passing evangelist had choosen to baptise it, had sought to make it without sin.

• Progress in learning a job was made through encoragement, not censure.

Top

wikipedia

Top

Wikipedia on Lindsay Boxer (inspector), novel

Women's Murder Club is formed by 4 women :

• Lindsay Boxer       - police inspector
• Claire Washburn     - forensic-pathologist
• Cindy Thomas        - reporter
• Jill Bernhart-Mayer - Assistant District Attorney (dead)
• Yuki Castellano     - attorney

Other :

• Warren Jacobi - Lindsay partner in police

Main characters in the book :

• Michael Campion
• July Moon

Some facts

• Lindsay Boxer is a homicide detective for the San Francisco Police Department
• Lindsay is five foot ten
• She was a sociology major and graduated from San Francisco State, to which she transferred from Berkeley when she found out that her mother had breast cancer
• She loves beer and butterscotch praline ice cream
• She has a border collie named Martha
• She enjoys running, loves to read travel books and mysteries and her secret hobby is tai chi
• Lindsay has been divorced once and is now married to long-time boyfriend Joseph Molinari
• She has a younger sister named Cat and a father named Marty, who was also a member of the SFPD. Marty left Lindsay's mother when Lindsay was 13
• Lindsay has a tattoo of a one-inch gecko on her left buttock (nalga)

Did you notice "Fahrenheit 451" comes up in page 5 ?

Lali (dis)liked "she's bright enough to boil eggs"

These intense, demanding cases bring Lindsay and Rich closer and Lindsay will find herself on the brink of an emotional meltdown

Top

The novel {sagpdf} is divided into three parts: "The Hearth and the Salamander", "The Sieve and the Sand", and "Burning Bright".

451 ºF are 233 ºC.
0 ºC = 32 ºF (congelació). 100 ºC = 212 ºF (ebullició). Així, 100 graus C corresponen a 180 graus F - els graus F tenen mes detall.
Only used is USA, Bahamas, Belize, Cayman Islands and Palau (Micronesia).

Main characters

• Guy Montag - fireman, prota
• Clarisse McClellan - new neighbour
• Mildred - Montag's wife
• colegues - Beatty (captain), Stoneman and Black
• Faber - old man (leaves for St Louis)
• Granger -

A poem (47) from Dover Beach

Nice sentences

• (1) This one, with gratitude, is for DON CONGDON
• (2) He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact.
• (2) One time, when he was a child, in a power-failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon ....
• (4) There's dew on the grass in the morning.
• (4) "Are you happy?" she said.
• (17) Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine.
• (29) What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right?
• (38) Nobody listens any more. I just want someone to hear what I have to say.
• (39) We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy
• (39) Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget.
• (39) The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
• (50) Who are a little wise, the best fools be.
• (58) His lungs were like burning brooms in his chest. His mouth was sucked dry from running. His throat tasted of bloody iron and there was rusted steel in his feet.
• (64) He could feel the Hound, like autumn, come cold and dry and swift, like a wind that didn't stir grass, that didn't jar windows or disturb leaf-shadows on the white sidewalks as it passed.
• (67) The land rushed at him, a tidal wave.
• (68) He was a thing of brush and liquid eye, of fur and muzzle and hoof, he was a thing of horn and blood that would smell like autumn if you bled it out on the ground.
• (73) He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.
• (73) Everyone must leave something behind when he dies.
• (73) "Stuff your eyes with wonder," he said, "live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal."

Dubtes

• [1] - IT WAS A PLEASURE TO BURN
  • With the brass nozzle in his fists -
  • playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning
  • to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history
  • stolid head - flematico, impasible
  • He strode in a swarm of fireflies
  • He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house.
  • Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame
  • a minstrel man - juglar
  • squeaking halt - chirrido
  • waft - rafaga, soplo
  • stir - remover
  • slender - esbelto, delgado
  • Her dress was white and it whispered.
  • awe - temor
  • (5) french windows
  • glint - brillo, destello
  • (6) flare - destello, llamarada
  • (6) trench - zanja
  • mallet - mazo
  • (7) earnestly - seriamente
  • wad - fajo, taco, relleno
  • (8) (sleep-) lozenge - pastilla
  • (10) dandelions - diente de leon
  • chin - menton, barbilla
  • (11) threat - amenaza
  • (Mechanical) Hound - perro de caza - metal dog, procaine needle
  • (19) railing - barandilla, pasamanos
  • (20) I didn't mean to startle you - sobresaltar, asustar
  • (24) A child feigning illness - fingir, simular
  • (25) "That's water under the bridge" - aixo es aigua passada
  • (25) It smoulders for days - arde durante dias
  • (29) You can't build a house without nails and wood - clavos
  • (29) daredevil = temerario
  • (30) We have our fingers in the dyke = dique
  • (30) limp hand - mano flojona
  • (31) Go take the beetle =
  • (32) sag = caer, hundirse
  • (32) nudge = codazo, empujon
• [33] - THE SIEVE AND THE SAND
  • (33) sieve = colador, cedazo
  • (34) shoo - ahuyentar
  • (36) shriek = chillar, aullar, gritar
  • (41) and wadded the paper under Faber's gaze -
  • (42) newspapers dying like huge moths -
  • (46) I plunk the children in school nine days out of ten -
• [52] - BURNING BRIGHT
  • (53) Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules -
  • (53) looking in now at this queer house -
  • (54) his face smeared with soot -
  • (54) Look where they got you, in slime up to your lip. If I stir the slime with my little finger, you'll drown !
  • (70) We have ways to shake down your clinkers for you.

• (50, Lady Macbeth)
  For these were the hands that had acted on their own, no part of him, here was where the conscience first manifested itself to snatch books, dart off with job and Ruth and Willie Shakespeare, and now, in the firehouse, these hands seemed gloved with blood.
• (55, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar)
  Speech away. What'll it be this time? Why don't you belch Shakespeare at me, you fumbling snob? `There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats, for I am arm'd so strong in honesty that they pass by me as an idle wind, which I respect not!' How's that?
• (Romeo and Juliet, act 5, scene 3)
  Romeo (speaking to the tomb) - You horrible mouth of death! You’ve eaten up the dearest creature on Earth. Now I’m going to force open your rotten jaws and make you eat another body.
• “la vida es un cuento narrado por un idiota, lleno de ruido y de furia, que nada significa”.

Concepte, films

An antonym of utopia, the blueprint for an ideal society with no crime or poverty (Thomas More)

Films : Blade Runner, Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, The Matrix, The Road,

BNW vs Fah

• (34, time) We've started and won two atomic wars since 1960
• (61, place) get in touch with me in St. Louis

• So it was the hand that started it all . . . His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms . . . His hands were ravenous.

  This passage from “The Hearth and the Salamander” refers to Montag’s theft of books from the old woman’s house. Montag guiltily portrays his actions as an involuntary bodily reflex. He describes his crime as automatic and claims it involves no thought on his part. He blames his hands for several other crimes in the course of the book, and they become a powerful symbol for Montag’s instincts of rebellion, will, and moral imperative. Montag’s thoughtless actions here are akin to Mildred’s unconscious overdose, as they are the result of some hidden sense of dissatisfaction within him that he does not consciously acknowledge.

  Montag regards his hands as infected from stealing the book and describes how the “poison works its way into the rest of his body.” Montag uses the word “poison” to refer to his strong sense of guilt and wrongdoing. Later, the novel incorporates a reference to Shakespeare, as Montag compulsively washes his hands at the fire station in an attempt to cleanse his guilt. His feeling they are “gloved in blood” is a clear reference to Lady Macbeth. Montag’s hands function as a symbol of defiance and thirst for truth.

• We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the constitution says, but everyone made equal. A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind.

  Captain Beatty speaks these lines toward the end of “The Hearth and the Salamander” while explaining the revisionist history of firemen to Montag in his home. It is important to note that Beatty’s whole speech has an ironic sound. He defends the disintegration of authenticity in a passionate, almost regretful tone. He is willing to defend the “equalization” of society while still remaining educated himself, and denounces the use of books as weapons while freely using them that way himself. Because of these ambiguities, Beatty is the most complex character in the book, and he uses his book-educated mind, his “loaded gun,” to manipulate Montag mercilessly. One wonders, as Faber does, if he chose his job after a fall from faith in books, as he claims, or to enable himself to gain legal access to books through his position of authority.

• Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores.

  Faber speaks these words to Montag toward the beginning of “The Sieve and the Sand,” as he explains the importance of books. Faber tells Montag that it’s not the books themselves that Montag is looking for, but the meaning they contain. The same meaning could be included in existing media like television and radio, but people no longer demand it. According to Faber, Montag is really in search of “quality,” which the professor defines as “texture”—the details of life, that is, authentic experience. People need quality information, the leisure to digest it, and the freedom to act on what has been learned. Faber’s comment that a book has “pores” also evokes the sieve in the title “The Sieve and the Sand.” Trying to fill your mind by reading books is like trying to fill a leaking bucket, because the words slip from your memory before you can even finish reading anything.

• It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. . . . It’s a mystery. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences . . . clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later. Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical.

  Beatty speaks these lines to Montag outside Montag’s home in “Burning Bright,” right before Montag burns him to death with the flamethrower. He muses about the mystical nature of fire, its unexplained beauty, and the fascination it holds for people. With characteristic irony, Beatty, who has just accused Montag of not considering the consequences of his actions, then defines the beauty of fire as its ability to destroy consequences and responsibilities. What he describes is very nearly a cult of fire, a fitting depiction of their society’s devotion to cleanliness and destruction. Unfortunately, Montag turns Beatty’s philosophy against him by turning the flamethrower on his boss, inflicting an “antibiotic, aesthetic, practical” death.

• The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time . . . Time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burnt!

  In this passage, Montag muses on the sun as he escapes the city and floats down the river in “Burning Bright.” Montag sees the stars for the first time in years, and he finally enjoys the leisure to think that Faber told him he would need in order to regain his life. He starts by considering the moon, which gets its light from the sun, then considers that the sun is akin to time and burns with its own fire. If the sun burns time (and, thus, burns away the years and the people) and he and the firemen continue to burn, everything will burn. These thoughts lead him to the conclusion that since the sun will not stop burning, he and the firemen must stop. In these lines, Bradbury repeats the word “burning” to communicate the sense of revelation that Montag experiences as he considers this and to subtly suggest that the ex-fireman must now redefine his ingrained conceptions of fire and burning, and, therefore, his identity and purpose.

url

• Why do you think Beatty hates books?

  It is obvious that Beatty has spent a considerable portion of his life not just reading but passionately absorbed in books. His facility with literary quotations by itself demonstrates this. The first place to look for an answer to this question is in his statements to Montag about why books are dangerous and worthless. For example, he tells Montag that books do not give definite answers, that they contradict themselves and one another, and that different people can “use” them to make absolutely contradictory points. Generalizing from these statements, we can infer that he has become frustrated with books because they don’t have one stable meaning. They are too complex and can be interpreted in multiple ways, so nobody can really be said to have mastered them. Beatty may dislike books because he wants to be the one in control of the answers. This inference can be connected to the major theme of “The Sieve and the Sand”: the process of reading may be likened to a person trying to fill a bucket that has holes in its bottom; it may be frustrating and does not guarantee the reader access to a tangible meaning. While the sieve and sand image is used to describe the frustrations Montag experiences, it might provide clues to Beatty’s frustrations as well.

• Read the poem “Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold. In what ways is it significant that Montag reads this particular poem to Mildred and her friends?

  The speaker in “Dover Beach” relates that his world used to be filled with and surrounded by faith, like an ocean (the “sea of faith”), but that this sea has receded, and faith has abandoned his world. There are many ways to interpret the speaker’s statement, but one fairly definite meaning is that the speaker has lost the religious belief that used to sustain him. He tells the woman he is speaking to that they must cling to one another, because all that they have now that faith has abandoned the world is each other. The reader should be able to relate this much of the poem to the novel by comparing the world of the novel with the world of the poem. Is the world of the novel a world that has been abandoned by faith? What would that mean? Next, the reader should ask whether there is a corollary between the couple in the poem and the world of the novel. Is Montag asking his wife for something similar to what the speaker in “Dover Beach” asks for? Is he likely to get it from Mildred, or from any of these women? Why or why not?

url

• According to Beatty, who was the first fireman? - Established, 1790, to burn English-influenced books in the Colonies. First Fireman: Benjamin Franklin
  • George Washington
  • Benjamin Franklin
  • Thomas Jefferson
  • John Adams

• What piece of literature does Montag have memorized? - (70) Montag’s role is to memorize the Book of Ecclesiastes
  • The Catcher in the Rye
  • Flowers for Algernon
  • The Old Testament
  • 1984

Top

Read wiki (by chapter). Get it {sagpdf}

I think you have to know what POUM (cat) was. Its leaders were Joaquín Maurín (1935-36), Andreu Nin (1936-37), Julián Gorkin (1937-39) and Wilebaldo Solano (1947-80).

• [pg 2] December 1936
• [pg 6] the whole barracks was in the state of filth and chaos to which the militia reduced every building they occupied and which seems to be one of the by-products of revolution
• we ate at long trestle-tables out of permanently greasy tin pannikins, and drank out of a dreadful (pavoroso, espantoso) thing called a porrón
• [pg 14] how forlorn its faded colours looked! Where were the handsome bulls and the handsome bullfighters now? It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays; for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists
• [pg 14, gener 1937] Barbastro, Siétamo, Alcubierre (Huesca), Monte Pocero (pg 27), Monte Trazo (pg 40), Monflorite - Torre Lorenzo y Torre Fabian (pg 50)
• [pg 16] It struck me that they were indistinguishable from ourselves, except that they wore khaki overalls.
• german Mauser dated 1896
• [pg 17] maricón, Nancy-boy
• [pg 18] I dreaded (temer) the cold much more than I dreaded the enemy
• [pg 18] You cannot possibly conceive what a rabble (chusma) we looked
• On the higher slopes nothing grows except stunted (enano) shrubs (arbusto) and heath (brezo)
• {war terms} trench (zanja), take aim (apuntar), loophole, limestone, sentry (centinela), dud (falso) cartridge, parados (elevation behind a fortified place), cock my rifle (amartillar), stray bullet (bala perdida, pg 50), rifle bolt (cerrojo, pg 74)
• Trench warfare 5 important things: firewood, food, tobacco, candles and the enemy
• [pg 24] often I used to gaze round the wintry landscape and marvel at the futility of it all
• [pg 31] I was wearing a thick vest (chaleco) and pants, a flannel shirt, two pullovers, a woollen jacket, a pigskin jacket, corduroy breeches (pantalons de pana), puttees (polaines), thick socks, boots, a stout trench-coat, a muffler (bufanda), lined leather gloves and a woollen cap
• [pg 32] Dirt is a thing people make too much fuss about
• [pg 35] And beyond this there was the complete lack of war materials of every description. The badness of our weapons was so astonishing that it is worth recording in detail
• [pg 36] pull-through ?
• [pg 41] Moors ? Moros, suposo
• [pg 42] But sometimes the dawn breaking behind the hill-tops in our rear, the first narrow streaks of gold, like swords slitting the darkness, and then the growing light and the seas of carmine cloud stretching away into inconceivable distances, were worth watching even when you had been up all night, when your legs were numb from the knees down, and you were sullenly reflecting that there was no hope of food for another three hours.
• [pg 44] Being unable to kill your enemy you shouted at him instead. This method of warfare is so extraordinary that it needs explaining.
• [pg 47] You always, I notice, feel the same when you are under heavy fire–not so much afraid of being hit as afraid because you don’t know where you will be hit. You are wondering all the while just where the bullet will nip you, and it gives your whole body a most unpleasant sensitiveness.
• [pg 41] Sentry-go, patrols, digging; mud, rain, shrieking winds, and occasional snow. It was not till well into April that the nights grew noticeably warmer. Up here on the plateau the March days were mostly like an English March, with bright blue skies and nagging winds. The winter barley was a foot high, crimson buds were forming on the cherry trees (the line here ran through deserted orchards and vegetable gardens), and if you searched the ditches you could find violets and a kind of wild hyacinth like a poor specimen of a bluebell.
• [pg 45, smile] His account of the Government rations was apt to be a little imaginative. ’Buttered toast!’–you could hear his voice echoing across the lonely valley. ’We’re just sitting down to buttered toast over here! Lovely slices of buttered toast!’
• [pg 49] One day I set my teeth and crawled into the river to have my first bath in six weeks.
• [pg 50] The shells the Fascists were firing at this period were wretchedly bad. Although they were 150 mm. they only made a crater about six feet wide by four deep, and at least one in four failed to explode.
• [pg 50] It seemed that the Fascists always heard mass before going into action.
• [pg 51] Last year’s crops had never been touched. The unpruned vines were snaking across the ground, the cobs on the standing maize had gone as hard as stone, the mangels and sugar-beets were hyper-trophied into huge woody lumps. How the peasants must have cursed (maldecir) both armies!
• [pg 53, action] The Shock Troops took the Manicomio by storm.
• [pg 53, manies] I have had a big experience of body vermin of various kinds, and for sheer beastliness the louse beats everything I have encountered.
• [pg 54, manies] The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seams (costura) of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out (salir del cascaron) and breed families of their own at horrible speed. I think the pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice.
  In war all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae – every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles.
• [pg 55] Towards the end of March I got a poisoned hand that had to be lanced and put in a sling (cabestrillo, Monflorite).
• [pg 55] An American who had come to join the International Column on a ship that was torpedoed by an Italian submarine, told me how he was carried ashore wounded, and how, even as they lifted him into the ambulance, the stretcher-bearers pinched his wrist-watch.
• [pg 57] Spring was really here at last. The blue in the sky was softer, the air grew suddenly balmy. The frogs were mating noisily in the ditches. Round the drinking-pool that served for the village mules I found exquisite green frogs the size of a penny, so brilliant that the young grass looked dull beside them. Peasant lads went out with buckets hunting for snails, which they roasted alive on sheets of tin.
• [pg 57] Civil war is a queer (estrafalario) thing
• [pg 58] The village girls were splendid vivid creatures with coal-black hair, a swinging walk, and a straightforward, man-to-man demeanour which was probably a by-product of the revolution.
• [pg 58] There was a kind of harrow that took one straight back to the later Stone Age. It was made of boards joined together, to about the size of a kitchen table; in the boards hundreds of holes were morticed, and into each hole was jammed a piece of flint (silex, pedernal) which had been chipped into shape exactly as men used to chip them ten thousand years ago.
  It made me sick to think of the work that must go into the making of such a thing, and the poverty that was obliged to use flint in place of steel.
• [pg 59] To the Spanish people, at any rate in Catalonia and Aragón, the Church was a racket (fraude, chanchullo) pure and simple. And possibly Christian belief was replaced to some extent by Anarchism, whose influence is widely spread and which undoubtedly has a religious tinge (matiz).
• [pg 60] The whole move was beautifully planned.
• [pg 62] If there is one thing I hate more than another it is a rat running over me in the darkness.
• [pg 67] Out of the darkness a plaintive voice suggested: ’Couldn’t we arrange for the Fascists to wear white armlets instead?’
• [pg 69] When you are creeping at that pace you are aware as an ant might be of the enormous variations in the ground; the splendid patch of smooth grass here, the evil patch of sticky mud there, the tall rustling reeds that have got to be avoided, the heap of stones that almost makes you give up hope because it seems impossible to get over it without noise.
• [pg 75] These poor unpaid conscripts seemed to own nothing except blankets and a few soggy (empapado) hunks (trozo) of bread.
• [pg 75] Certainly the din (estruendo) of firing had grown very much louder.
• [pg 76] I remember feeling a deep horror at everything: the chaos, the darkness, the frightful din, the slithering to and fro in the mud, the struggles with the bursting sand-bags–all the time encumbered with my rifle, which I dared not put down for fear of losing it.
• [pg 81] I had thought earlier in the night that you can’t run when you are sodden from head to foot and weighted down with a rifle and cartridges; I learned now you can always run when you think you have fifty or a hundred armed men after you.
• [pg 82]

• what year was Orwell in the Aragon front (Gener 1937 - 26 Abril 1937)
• how many cartridges does he fire in Monte Pocero (3)
• what is the singular of "lice" (louse, piojo)
• what date are their guns (1896) ? And shells (1917) ?
• what is the diferences between those types of "polaina" : puttees / gaiter / leggins

El triángulo orwelliano de Barcelona :

1. Hotel Continental (La Rambla, 138)
2. Hotel Rivoli (La Rambla, 128) - sede del Comité Ejecutivo del POUM, frente al Teatro Poliorama
3. plaza de George Orwell, entre Escudellers i Avinyó - "plaza del Tripi" : primer espacio público de Barcelona controlado por cámaras de videovigilancia municipales

Top

Wiki, read it here [/], no "Copy And Paste"; or Google books, neither "Copy And Paste"

He was born as Truman Streckfus Persons to a salesman Archulus Persons and young Lillie Mae (September 30, 1924). His parents divorced when he was four and he went to live with his mother's relatives in Monroeville, Alabama. He was a lonely child who learned to read and write by himself before entering school. In 1933, he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her new husband, Joseph Capote, a Cuban-born businessman. Mr. Capote adopted Truman, legally changing his last name to Capote and enrolling him in private school. After graduating from high school in 1942, Truman Capote began his regular job as a copy boy at The New Yorker. During this time, he also began his career as a writer, publishing many short stories which introduced him into a circle of literary critics. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in 1948, stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks and became controversial because of the photograph of Capote used to promote the novel, posing seductively and gazing into the camera.

Capote began writing as a young child and had won an award for his short story, Old Mrs. Busybody when he was only twelve. While living in Monroeville, Alabama with relatives, he formed a lifelong friendship with Harper Lee, who would later help him on his novel In Cold Blood. Truman's mother had remarried to Joseph Capote, and Truman adopted the surname in 1933, after moving to New York. His formal education was first at Trinity School and then St. Joseph Military Academy. After moving to Greenwich, Connecticut in 1939, Capote attended Greenwich High School and began to write for the school newspaper. In 1942, the family moved to New York City and Truman attended the Franklin School, graduating the following year. During that year, he also worked for The New Yorker as a copyboy. In 1945, after a conflict with Robert Frost, Capote was fired and returned to Alabama. He was a prolific writer and contributed numerous stories and articles to all of the major magazines of the day, including Harper's Bazaar, The Atlantic Monthly, etc. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, appeared in 1948 and helped Capote's rise to fame. Success followed success and Capote began working on screenplays with equal triumph. In 1958, he produced Breakfast at Tiffany's, an iconic work that received rave reviews. Some years later, in 1965, he wrote In Cold Blood, the story of the brutal murder of a farming family in Kansas. He labelled it a non-fiction novel, and the critics labelled it a masterpiece. In 1975, Capote published La Cote Basque 1965, which revealed the secrets of many of his friends and led to his cultural downfall. Nevertheless, Capote continued to produce successes such as the best-seller Music for Chameleons in 1980. A drug and alcohol abuser for years, Capote died of liver cancer and drug intoxication (August 25, 1984, aged 59). His other works include A Tree of Night and Other Stories (1949), House of Flowers (1950), The Grass Harp (1951), Beat the Devil (1953), The Muses Are Heard (1956), The Thanksgiving Visitor (1968), The Dogs Bark (1973), One Christmas (1983) and Answered Prayers (1986 Posthumous).

By the late 1970s, Truman Capote’s life had turned into the kind of gossipy drama he relished. He was stuck in a strained, celibate relationship. His pill-popping, binge-drinking, coke-snorting ways had soared to new heights, leading not only to a number of stints in rehab, but also to a series of embarrassing episodes on television, including one talk-show appearance when he raised the possibility of killing himself. Esquire’s publication of chapters from his long-awaited novel Answered Prayers, with its insider’s view into high society, cost him his standing among his fellow elites. His anxiety—or as Holly Golightly referred to it, “the mean reds”—was through the roof. And still worse, he wasn’t writing.
Capote ultimately put together a collection of essays and stories that effectively captured all of his interests as a writer, and, more importantly, revealed more about him as a person than anything else he ever wrote. Though less remembered than the popular Breakfast at Tiffany’s or the stunning In Cold Blood, Music for Chameleons is a richer experience, not least because of its startling candor. In its pages, Capote emerges as a complex figure wrestling with many, many demons, a man who mocks his own saintly aspirations without quite giving them up.

Music for Chameleons is Capote’s most idiosyncratic book, his flat-out weirdest, but it’s also his most honest, and, in many ways, his best. It’s a shaky testament to a complex figure, and the battle with himself that he would never quite win.
Capote’s plan for Music for Chameleons is deceptively simple: “I set myself center stage.”

The first part, eponymously titled, features the kind of smooth-as-butter prose for which Capote first became famous The story “Mojave” contains lines like, “He had not been of much help as an analyst, and as a lover—well, once she had watched him running to catch a bus, two hundred and twenty pounds of shortish, fiftyish, frizzly-haired, hip-heavy, myopic Manhattan Intellectual, and she had laughed: how was it possible that she could love a man so ill-humored, so ill-favored as Ezra Bensten?”
It’s a reminder that Capote still retained the consummate skills of a stylist whose earlier stories in Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar had won over the literary world decades earlier.

If part one speaks to Capote’s earlier fiction, second part, named “Handcarved Coffins”, functions as a companion piece to the true-crime story In Cold Blood— it’s a fascinating yarn (cuento, historia) filled with mysteries and human detail.

In part three, the real project of the book becomes clear: It’s an elaborate self-portrait, told through autobiographical fiction, fictionalized journalism, and the lenses of other characters.

In these gems of reportage Truman Capote takes true stories and real people and renders them with the stylistic brio we expect from great fiction. Here we encounter an exquisitely preserved Creole aristocrat sipping absinthe in her Martinique salon; an enigmatic killer who sends his victims announcements of their forthcoming demise; and a proper Connecticut householder with a ruinous obsession for a twelve-year-old he has never met. And we meet Capote himself, who, whether he is smoking with his cleaning lady or trading sexual gossip with Marilyn Monroe, remains one of the most elegant, malicious, yet compassionate writers to train his eye on the social fauna of his time.

The biggest attraction to this collection is "Handcarved Coffins", an excellent account of serial killing in a small town. By turns mysterious, frustrating, tense, and bizarre, the accounting details Capote's relationship with the FBI agent assigned to the case, who has in turn romantically assigned himself to one of the potential victims. The modus operandi of the killer is original and very upsetting. The identity of the killer does not appear to be in question; what arises over the course of the piece is a dual portrait of a haunted agent and an arrogant, infuriatingly entitled potential serial killer.

The real jewel in this collection, the reason why it's getting three-stars, is A Beautiful Child. The transcript of the day Capote spent with Marilyn Monroe is absolutely fantastic. It portrays a side of Monroe that we never really got to see, we see her as a human being. It is utterly wonderful and strangely poetic.

Composed of 14 short stories, Capote made himself a character in each. In the last one, in fact, he appeared as 2 characters conversing with each other.

Music for the Chameleons. 3 STARS
The narrator is a guest in a lovely house in Martinique. There is an aristocratic lady in the house and she takes care of chameleons. She plays music for them to emit different colors. I am not sure what Capote's exact message is but I thought that the colors of the chameleons symbolize the ever-changing opinion of the aristocrats with regards to the aboriginals in the island.

Mr. Jones. 2 STARS
So, who was Mr. Jones and why did he disappear so suddenly? What was Capote's motive in telling his reader that the narrator saw him in the train again? I just did not get it. I know there is a point there somewhere but sorry.

A Lamp in the Window. 4 STARS
I liked the ending. It was unexpected. I like it when Capote shows his quirkiness, i.e., his fun side. We know he was gay and gays are fun people. So, this story comes off as sincere and fun too. But don't get me wrong, this is not funny. Know what I mean?

Mojave. 3 STARS
An old masseur who is left all alone in a desert by his prostitute wife while he is urinating. In their trailer is the wife's lover whose hair is full of smelly pomade. Despite what the wife did, the elderly man says that he still loves his wife. This reminded me of gay men who knew all along that they were being fooled by their lovers and yet they were blind. So pathetic yet we all know this happens, gay or straight.

Hospitality. 3 STARS
Seems like this one is a true-to-life experience of Capote while growing up during the Depression. I just wondered where they got all those food while many Americans go hungry like what I read in Out of the Dust and of course book:The Grapes of Wrath|4395].

Dazzle. 4 STARS
Very funny childhood story of a gay boy Capote. He teased the reader on what he would ask the witch for. I thought I knew and then Capote made a twist but still I got it right. This is a breakthrough story because in here, Capote made known to the world that when he was young, (view spoiler)

A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime. 4 STARS
A well-loved politician in an small town in the South has been discovered to be the mastermind for the killing of members of the committee. The said committee denied his huge track of land the proper irrigation since the river was diverted. I liked the story telling and the playfulness of Capote's character (yes, he is in the story just like the other stories in this book) especially the references to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton's male characters. I should read a Wharton and resume my reading of Austen books.

A Day's Work. 3 STARS
Capote joins and observes a girl Friday cleaning the houses of the rich and famous in Italy. Not all of them are rich and famous but with juicy stories. There is a reality TV show like this, I think.

Hello Stranger. 4 STARS
"Shades of Humbert Humbert," says Capote but George Claxton doesn't read books because he hates literature. When they were young, Capote did all the book reports of George while the later did all his assignments in Algebra. Capote flunked first year Algebra thrice even with the help of a tutor! I think I can relate to this. Not in my case, but someone dear.

Hidden Gardens. 2 STARS
I got distracted by the shift in narratives. All I understood was a guy with a huge prick and he put it on the girl who inquired about it and the girl's hair turned white overnight (because of intense pressure). Maybe Capote meant this to be a joke and I took it seriously?

Derring-do. 2 STARS
Maybe I was just too tired while reading this part late last night. It seemed like another In Cold Blood criminal case this time with a serial killer facing execution soon. Other than that, this one did not leave anything in my mind.

Then It All Came Down. 3 STARS
This one also has similarities with some scenes in Capote's In Cold Blood. Well, this book was his follow up to that best-selling novel of him, right? In here, Capote is conversing with an inmate in the maximum-security cell block. The inmate, Robert Beausoleil, was charged of multiple murder. In the conversation, Capote or CP is namedropping; claiming to have met Lee Harvey Oswald, Priscilla Johnson, etc. Based on Wiki, party-boy Capote hobnobbed with the rich and famous.

A Beautiful Child. 4 STARS
Ha! This is the cutest story here. Marilyn Monroe, the sex goddess during Capote's time, appears as herself talking with our genius writer. It reminds me of beautiful girls in the campus with gay man as sidekick or bestfriend. This made me want to read a book about Marilyn Monroe. The way she expresses herself here is... cute!

Nocturnal Turnings, or How Siamese Twins Have Sex. 5 STARS
Don't be misled by the title. There is nothing obscene here. They slept in the end. "They" means Capote and Capote. Two personas in one body. They talk to each other and unlike the angel and the demon, the ying and yang, they are not completely opposites. So, you have to really take time to read their banters. Brilliant and funny. Very Capote.

You can read all these 20 histories

The Walls Are Cold, A Mink of One’s Own, The Shape of Things, Jug of Silver, Miriam, My Side of the Matter, Preacher’s Legend, A Tree of Night, The Headless Hawk, Shut a Final Door, Children on Their Birthdays, Master Misery, The Bargain, A Diamond Guitar, House of Flowers, A Christmas Memory, Among the Paths to Eden, The Thanksgiving Visitor, Mojave, One Christmas

Here {sagpdf}

• she is tall and slender, perhaps seventy, silver-haired, soigné, neither black nor white, a pale golden rum color.
• we are drinking iced mint tea slightly flavored with absinthe
• the women - I've seen some amazingly beautiful women. Supple, suave, such beautifully haughty postures; bone structure as fine as cats. Also, thy have a certain alluring aggressiveness.
• {black mirror} What did they use them for? To refresh their vision. Renew their reaction to color, the tonal variations.
• {lobsters} it was tasless as chalk, and so tough to chew that I lost a filling.
• virtually naked women parading themselves
• {french} Ce soir, ce soir nous danserons sans chemise, sans pantalons
  Absinthe? Un peu? A mite.
• Marc Blitzstein, killed by two portuguese sailors

• slender, black-haired, and with a distincive face; a pale, lean face, high cheekbones, and with a birthmark on his left cheek, a small scarlet defect shaped like a star. He wore gold-rimmed glasses with pitch-black lenses; he was blind, and crippled too - the use of his legs had been denied him by a childhood accident.
• he has bright eyes, blue as a peacock's.

• if our situations had been revesed, I doubt that I would have had the courage, to say nothing of the generosity.
• I guess you think I'm a bit dotty

'Imagine that,' he said. 'Leaving a seventy-years-old blind man stranded alone in the desert. Teh dollars in my pocket, and no another rag to my name. Women are like flies: they settle on sugar or shit. I'm not saying I'm sugar, but she's sure settled for shit now. My name is George Schmidt.'

• Jaime Sanches and Carlos and Angelita
• Hulga and Freddy Feo and Ivory Hunter and mr Schmidt
• dr Bentsen and George, George and Sarah (she), dr Bentsen and Mary Rhinelander

Mary Ida Carter and uncle Jennings

• missionary
• convict, mr Bancroft
• Zilla Ryland and Jed and mr Smith

• Mrs Ferguson fascinated everyone, she fascinated me
• I don't want to be a boy. I want to be a girl.

A nonfiction account of an american crime

• Prairie Motel
• Jake Pepper - he was partial to Dickens, Melville, Trollope, Mark Twain
• coffin with a picture of George and Amelia Roberts [1st and 2nd victims]
• Baxters and Hogans burned to ashes [3nd and 4th victims]
• Clem Anderson [5th victim]
• dr Parsons [6th victim]
• Robert Hawley Quinn - assassí
• miss Adelaide Mason [7th victim - accidental death by drowning]
• special comitee members (judge Hatfield) :
  • Addie
  • Clem Anderson
  • George and Amelia Roberts
  • dr Parsons
  • the Baxters
  • Tom Henry - filling station - voted against
  • Oliver Jaeger - postmaster
• In Venice one is always in costume and wearing a mask; that is, you are not yourself, and not responsibl for your behavior. It wasn't the real me who arrived in Venice at five in the afternoon and before midnight boarded a train bound for Istanbul. It all began in Harry's Bar, as so many Venetian escapades do.
• Now, in October, the landscape was gloriosly different: the macadam highway was like a skinny black sea dividing the golden continent; on either side, the sun-bleached stubble of threshed wheat flamed, rippled with yellow colors, sable shadows under a cloudless sky. Bulls pranced about theses pastures; and cows, among them mothers with new calves, grazed, dozed.
• The way I look at it is: it was the hand of God. God's work. His will.

The sway of her hips, the loose movements of her fruity breasts, her contralto voice, the fragility of her hand-gestures: all ultra seductive, ultra feminine without being effeminate.

Her power resided in her attitude: she behaved as though she belived she was irresistible; and whatever her opportunities may have been, the style of the woman implied an erotic history complete with footnotes.

Her eyes were brown, but the various illumination - firelight, candles on the table - colored them, made them cat-yellow. In the distance the caged canaries sang, and snow, fluttering at the windows like torn lace curtains, emphasized the conforts of the room, the warmth of the fire, the redness of the wine.

She winked at Jak, and tilting her head back, swallowed all her wine in one swoop; she did this with astonishing grace, an agility that revealed a lovely throat. Jake, winking back, directed a smoke ring toward her, and the empty oval, floating through the air, seemed to carry with it an erotic message.

He sported extensive high-heel boots, but even without them the man measured over six feet, and if he had stood straight, instead of assuming a stooped, slope-shouldered posture, he would have presented a fine tall figure. He had long simianlike arms; the hands dangled to his knees, and the fingers were long, capable, oddly aristocratic. I recalled a Rachmaninoff concert; Rachmaninoff's hands were like Quinn's. Quinn's face was broad but gaunt, hollow-cheeked, weather-coarsened - the face of a medieval peasant, the man behind the plow with all the woes of the world lashed to his back. But Quinn was no dumb, sadly burdened peasant. He wore thin wire-rimmed glasses, and these professional spectacles, and the grey eyes looming behind their thick lenses, betrayed him; his eyes were alert, suspicious, intelligent, merry with malice, complacently superior. He had a hospitable, fraudulently genial laugh and voice. But he was not a fraud. He was an idealist, an achiever; he set himself tasks, abd his tasks were his cross, his religion, his identity; no, not a fraud - a fanatic; and presentl, while we were still gathered on the veranda, my sunken memory surfaced: I remembered where and in what form I had met Mr. Quinn before.

Bobby Joe Snow, evangelist - 50 years earlier

Her hair, center-parted and too black to be true, was slicked to her narrow skull. Her face was like a fist: tiny features tightly bunched together. Her head was too big for her body - she wasn't fat, but she weiged more that she should, and most of her overweight was distributed between her bossom and her belly. But she had slender, nicely shaped legs, and she was weering a pair of very prettily beaded Indian moccasins.

• so, early in August, I flew Swissair to Switzerland, and lolled away several weeks in an Alpine village, sunbathing among eternal snows.
• Anyway, pne day when one of these black moods descended, I hired a car and drove via the Grand St. Bernard pass into Italy and on to Velice.
• I had just ordered a martini when who should slam through the swinging doors but Gianni Paoli, an energetic journalist whom I had known in Moscow when he had been a correspondent for an Italian newspaper; together, aided by vodka, we had enlivened many a morose Russian restaurant. Gianni was in Venice en route to Istanbul; he was catching the orien Express at midnight.
• but I didn't go home; things happened. I encountered an old friend in Istanbul, an archaelogist who was working on a "dig" on the Anatolia coast in southern Turkey; he invited me to join him, he said I would enjoy it, and he was right, I did. I swam enery day, leraned to dance Turkish folk dances, drank ouzo and danced outdoors all night every night at the local bito; I stayed two weeks.
• afteward I traveled by boat to Athens, and from there took a plane to London, where I had a suit fitted. It was Ocober, almost autumn, before I turned the key that opened the door of my New York apartment.

• Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth
• Of all the creatures that were made, man is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one--the solitary one--that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices--the most hateful. He is the only creature that has pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. Also--in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind.
  - Mark Twain's Autobiography
• A Coffin for Dimitros, a book by Eric Ambler
• Graham Greene was a first-class writer. Until the Vatican grabbed him. After that, he never wrote anything as good as Brighton Rock

1979, April - Second Av, New York City. Mary Sanchez is a professional cleaning woman, 57-years old.

1. Mr Andrew Trask, East 73rd Street
2. Miss Edith Shaw - magazine editorial staff
3. Mr and Mrs Berkowitz
4. Mrs Kronkite

Then she sighs and perches on the edge of the bed and from her satchel takes out a small tin box containing an assortment of roaches; selecting one, she fits it into a roach-holder and lights up, dragging deeply, holding the smoke down in her lungs and closing her eyes.

But after smoking the whole of one of Mary's roaches, and while halfway thrugh another, I felt as though seized by a delicious demon, embraced by a mad marvelous merriment: the demon tickled my toes, scratched my itchy head, kissed me hotly with his red sugary lips, shoved his fiery tongue down my throat. Everything sparkled; my eyes were like zoom lenses;

December 1977, NY restaurant, The Four Seasons. George Claxton and Gertrude. Linda Reilly and message in a bottle, living with Mr and Mrs Henry Wilson.

George removed his dark glasses and polished them with a napkin. Now I understood why he wore them. It wasn't because of the yellowed whites engraved with swollen red veins. It was because his eyes were like a pair of shattered prisms. I have never seen pain, a suffering, so permanently implanted, as if the slip of a surgeon's knife had left him forever disfigured.

Jackson Square, New Orleans; 26 March 1979. Big Junebug Johnson - Oh, don't let me commence, married to Jim O'Reilly.

One of my girl friends told me that her brother had told her Ed Jenkins had the biggest peter anybody evew saw. He was nice-looking, but a scrawny fellow, not much taller than you, and I didn't believe it, so one day, joking him, I said 'Ed Jenkins, I hear you have one helluva peter', and he said, 'Yeah, I'll show you', and he did, and I screamed; he said 'And now I'm gonna put it in you', and I said "Oh, no you ain't" - it was big as a babys arm holding an apple. Lord's mercy! But he did. Put it in me. After a terrific tussle.

As for this "Jockey" business, it was a nickname I owed to Ginger Brennan.

A piano is playing. I can't decide where it's comming from: strong fingers playing a striding, riding-it-on-out piano:
"I want, I want..." That's a black man singing; he's good - "I want, I want a mamma, a big fat mamaa, I want a big fat mama with the meat shakin' on her, yeah!"

How you doin'? Just taking it easy.
You're cute. Everybody's entitled to their opinion.
I'll show you a good time. We'll have fun. I don't think so.

Late 16th century: from late Middle English dorryng do 'daring to do'

November, 1970; LA International Airport.

The cause of my predicament had its roots in a series of conversations I'd conducted a year earlier with Robert M., a slender, slight, harmless-looking young man who was then a prisoner on Death Row at San Quentin, where he was awaiting execution, having been convicted of thress slayings: his mother, a sister, both of whom he had beaten to death, and a fellow prisoner, a man he had strangled while he was in jail awaiting trial for the two original homicides.

Why were they so interested in my acquaintance with Robert M.? One of the detectives handed me a slim but exceedingly legal-looking document. It was a subpoena ordering me to appear ar Robert M.'s trial, presumably as a witness for the prosecution.

Still, I had a destination in mind, and a plan. High in the San Jacinto moutains, midway between Palm Springs and San Diego, there's a grim little vilage named Idylwyld.

There, striding past my tiny glass-doored prison, is a haughty, beautiful Amazon wearing a zillion dollars' worth of diamonds and golden sable, a start surrounded by a giddy, chattering entourage of gaudily dressed chorus boys. And who is this dazzling apparition whose plumage and presence are creating such a commotion among the passers-by ? A friend ! An old, old friend!

Pearl Bailey, married to Louis Bellson.

Let's make a wish. I wish I could always be as happy as I am at this very moment.

Place : San Quentin prison, California. Occupant : Robert Beausoleil.

It all began with the murder of Gary Hinman, a middle-aged professional musician who had befriended various members of the Manson brethren (correligionarios) and who, unofrtunately for him, lived alone in a small isolated house in Topanga Canyon.
It was then that Manson and his chums (amigotes), in the hopes of freeing Beausoleil, conceived the notion of commiting a series of homicides similar to the Hinman affair.

Time: 28 April 1955. Scene: the chapel of the Universal Funeral Home at Lexington Avenue and Fifty-second Street, NYC.

An interesting galaxy packs the pews: celebrities, for the most part, from an intenational arena of theater, films, literature, all present in tribute to Constance Collier, the English-born actress who had died the previous day at the age of seventy-five.

I dont think she's an actress at all, not in any traditional sense. What she has - this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence - could never surface on the stage.

Where's the john ?
And pop a pill ?

What do you want to smoke ? A reefer (porro)?

Did I ever tell you about the time I saw Errol Flynn whip out his prick and play the piano with it ? Everybody says Milton Berle has the biggest schlong (as opposed to a schlort) in Hollywood.

So we moseyed toward Third Avenue. As we neared P.J.Clarke's saloon, I sugested P.J.'s might be a good place to refresh ourselves.

I like to dance naked in front of mirrors and watch my titties jump around. There's nothing wrong with them. But I wish my hands weren't so fat.

I've never had a home. Not a real home with all my own furniture.

Who's the most attractive woman you know ? No contest. Barbara Paley. Hands down.
"Babe Paley had only one fault," commented her one-time friend Truman Capote. "She was perfect. Otherwise, she was perfect."

I'va always known Errol zigzagged.

Our route carried us through the Bowery. Tiny pawn-shops and blood-donor stations and dormitories with fifty-cent cots and tiny grim hotels with dollar beds and bars for whites, bars for blacks, everywhere bums (vagabundo), bums, young, far from young, ancient, bums squatting curbside, squatting amid shattered glass and pukey debris, bums slanting in doorways and huddled like penguins at street corners. Once, when we paused for a red light, a purple-nosed scarecrow weaved toward us and began swabbing the taxi's windshield with a wet rag clutched in a shaking hand. Our protesting driver shouted Italian obscenities.

I bet you'd tell them I was a slob. A banana split.
Of course. But I'd also say ... you are a beautiful child.

We tried to go to sleep around midnight, but we were too tense. So you said why don't we jack off, and I said yes, that ought to relax us, it usualy does, so we jacked off and went right to sleep. Sometimes I wonder : Whatever would we do without Mother Fist and her Five Daughters ? They've certainly been a friendly bunch to us through the years. Real pals.

Billy Grahm, Werner Erhard, Masters and Johnson, Princess Z - they're all full of horse manure. But the Reverend Billy is just so full of it.

Bitch List / Strong Dislike List - Strongly Like List

She said : "Los Angeles is the perfect place to live - if you're Mexican."

Self interviev:

• I was affraid to breathe. I felt if I moved my foot one scintilla, the beasts would spring forward to rip me apart.
• Those are instances of specific terror. Still, our real fears are the sounds of footsteps walking in the corridors of our minds, and the anxieties, the phantom floatings, they create.
• A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

Conversationists:

• Gore Vidal
• Cecil Beaton
• Baroness Blixen - Isak Dinesen : Out of Africa
• Christopher Isherwood
• Colette
• Marilyn Monroe, when she felt sufficiently relaxed and had had enough to drink, as Harry Kurnitz
• Diana Vreeland

When I was eighteen I met the person whose conversation has impressed me the most, perhaps because the person in question is the one who has most impressed me : Willa Cather.

Like all authentic conversationists, she was an excellent listener, and when it was her turn to talk, she was never garrulous (charlatán, parlanchín), but crisply pointed.

Some questions

• do you have any favorite spectator sport ?
• do you have many sexual fantasies ?
• have you ever considered suicide ?
• do you believe in God, or at any rate, some higher power ?
• if you could be granted one wish, what would it be ?

But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

• stark = rígid
• cherless = trist
• periwinkle = bígaro, azul pálido
• lanky = llargarut
• forlorn = triste, desolado
• he shifted the chessmen about
• hinged (lid) = frontisses, bisagra, goznes (tapa)
• sizzler = dia muy caluroso
• when I'd had a snootfull = to be drunk
• fireflies = cuques de llum
• better pour yourself a stiff one = rígid, fuerte, cargado
• prankster = bromista
• jagged gash = ferida irregular
• it was around dusk = era al voltant del vespre
• I am losing my marbles =
• chuckle = reírse entre los dientes
• lozenge = rombo, píldora
• rambling = disperso
• stew = estofado, guisado
• the tension between them was as taut as the steel wire that had severed Clem's head
• sprained an ankle = esquinç en un turmell
• a man had whittled that coffin = tallar
• quarrel = pelea, disputa
• simmering = hervir/cocerse a fuego lento
• I lit out of here like a bear with a bumblebee up his ass = borinot, abejorro
• britches = patalon bombacho
• riding crop = fusta
• limber as a willow wand = àgil com una vareta de salze
• affidavit = declaració jurada
• they fingers mingled = barrejar-se
• what they got was a load of buckshot = el que van aconseguir va ser una càrrega de perdigons
• I hear you're a chess player. I don't find too many games. How about us getting together? We'll have a drink and play a couple of games.
• he jutted his jaw
• so she is a stakeout = vigilancia
• eerily = deathly quiet, siniestramente, de forma espeluznante/escalofriante, bizarramente
• veranda = porche
• this granite cavelike wall hused a fireplace big enough to roast a brace of oxen = un parell de bous
• badinage = broma
• doodad = cosa, cosita
• hefty = pesado, obusto
• rinsed = enjuagar
• you couldn't swat a fly with the evidence they've got = matar una mosca
• I gotta blow my honker = sonarme la nariz
• the gist of it was = el quid de la questión, punto esencial
• she was splashed with freckles from top to bottom = peca
• Wow, did those guys scoot = largarse, correr rapidamente

Top

The centrepiece of Hanif Kureishi's brilliant new collection of fiction delves into the fascinating concept of personal identity, and the extent to which this is rooted in our physical being.

Alien wiki : The main character's exclusive focus on the materiality of human existence raises questions of identity, the burden of old age, and the promise of eternal youth.

"After a bit you realize there's only one invaluable commodity. Not gold or love, but time."

Book review : "You're as young as you feel".

Wikibio.

• "What people want is to be known"

• he could only bring up his kids, as people seemed to do most things in the end, as an example and guide

• supose that a couple moved in upstairs who were very similar to you. Not only similar, but were exactly the same
• what do we do in the evenings but watch TV and bicker ?

• if you think the living are difficult to deal with, the dead can be worse
• "There's no cure for living"

• for days he had been fearful of this night but wanted to believe he was ready

• girls were holding trays of champagne, mulled wine and mince pies - bandejas de champán, vino caliente y pasteles de carne picada
• video tape

• Wallace was not only what was commonly described as an 'accident', there had been no necessity for his birth at all
• you need charm to get by in this world
• it was long before they ran out of ideal moments
• how did you learn to be a parent ?

• Mrs Blake (blind) and Ali

Top

Wiki. Study guide : a summary, themes, quotes, essay questions, quizzes. Full movie 1975 (1:05), subs - Movie specially for class 9 CBSE, with Tim Curry and Michael Palin.

pdf, {sagpdf}

• it was so rough that the passengers had to be tied into their berths (litera)
• giddiness = vahído, mareo, vértigo
• they used to give me a clump on the side of the head
• meals : steak and onions, and rhubarb pie
• seek out some quaint, forgotten nook (recoveco)
• the optimist of the party kept dwindling with Harris
• I'm quite willing to let you scull (remar) for a bit if you want to
• not at all; good egg
• blazer = chaqueta
• Slowly the golden memory of the dead sun fades from the hearts of the cold, sad clouds. Silent, like sorrowing children, the birds have ceased their song, and only the moorhen's plaintive cry and the harsh croak of the corncrake stirs the awed hush around the couch of waters where the dying day breathed out her last.
  From the dim woods on either bank, Night's ghosty army, the grey shadows, creep out with noisless tread to chase away the lingering rearguard of the light, and pass, with noisless, unseen feet, above the waving river-grass, and through the sighing rushes; And Night, upon her sombre throne, folds her black wings above the darkening world, and from her phantom palace, lit by the pale stars, reigns (holds sway) in stillness.
• And we sit there, by its margin, while the moon, who loves it too, stoops down to kiss it with a sister's kiss, and throws her silver arms aroind it clingingly; and we watch it as it flows, ever singing, ever whispering, out to meet its king, the sea.
• After supper, you find your tobacco is damp, and you cannot smoke. Luckily you have a bottle of the stuff that cheers and inebriates, if taken in properly quantity, and this restores to you sufficient interest in life to induce you to go to bed.
• We therefore decided that we would sleep out on fine nights, and hotel it, and inn it, and pub it, like respectable folks, when it was wet, or when we felt inclined for a change.
• Harris said he'd had enough oratory for one night, and proposed that we should go out and have a smile, saying that he had found a place, round by the square, where you could really get a drp of Irish worth drinking.
• You know we are on the wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do without.
• Cheese, like oil, makes too much of itself. It wants the whole boat to itself. You can't tell whether you are eating apple pie, or German sausage, or strawberries and cream. It all seems cheese. There is too much odour about cheese.
  A few moments passed, and then the old gentleman began to fidget (?)
• I'll have half-a-crown's worth of brandy, neat, if you please (12 ½p)
  A crown was worth five shillings (25 p). There were four crowns to the pound.
  Sovereign: gold coin of the same valu as the pound.
  A guinea was worth £ 1.05
• I decline to live any longer in the same house with them.
• Then Harris packed the strawberry jam on top of a tomato and squashed it, and they had to pick out th e tomato with a teaspoon.
  And then it was George's turn, and he trod on the butter.
• we snarled at one another in this strain for the next few minutes
• I don't know why it should be, I am sure, but the sight of another man asleep in bed when I am up maddens me. It seems to e so shoking to see the precious hours of a man's life - the priceless moments that will never come back to him again - being wasted in mere brutish sleep.
  There was George, throwing away in hideous sloth the inestimable gift of time; his valuable life, every second of which he would have to account for hereafter, passing away from him, unused. He might have been up stuffing himself with eggs and bacon, irritating the dog, or flirting with the slavery, instead of sprawling here, sunk in soul-clogging oblivion (olvido).
• What a lark (broma) !
• we would dress ourselves in flimsy (delgado) things
• the Boots stopped as he was passing - man-servant employed in hotels and inns to clean customer's boots and shoes. The best-known fictional boots is Sam Weller in Dicken's The Pickwick Papers
• prow = proa
• (pg 80, 99/392) Give us a hand here, can’t you, you cuckoo; standing there like a stuffed mummy, when you see we are both being suffocated, you dummy!
• It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs. We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so. It dictates to us our emotions, our passions. After eggs and bacon, it says, “Work!” After beefsteak and porter, it says, “Sleep!” After a cup of tea (two spoonsful for each cup, and don’t let it stand more than three minutes), it says to the brain, “Now, rise, and show your strength. Be eloquent, and deep, and tender; see, with a clear eye, into Nature and into life; spread your white wings of quivering thought, and soar, a god-like spirit, over the whirling world beneath you, up through long lanes of flaming stars to the gates of eternity!
  After hot muffins, it says, “Be dull and soulless, like a beast of the field — a brainless animal, with listless eye, unlit by any ray of fancy, or of hope, or fear, or love, or life.” And after brandy, taken in sufficient quantity, it says, “Now, come, fool, grin and tumble, that your fellow-men may laugh — drivel in folly, and splutter in senseless sounds, and show what a helpless ninny is poor man whose wit and will are drowned, like kittens, side by side, in half an inch of alcohol.” We are but the veriest, sorriest slaves of our stomach.
• dreaming that I had swallowed a sovereign, and that they were cutting a hole in my back with a gimlet, so as to try and get it out.
• The day has been so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and of bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then Night, like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon our fevered head, and turns our little tear-stained faces up to hers, and smiles; and, though she does not speak, we know what she would say, and lay our hot flushed cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone.
• (end of chapter 9) Once upon a time, through a strange country, there rode some goodly knights, and their path lay by a deep wood, where tangled briars grew very thick and strong, and tore the flesh of them that lost their way therein. And the leaves of the trees that grew in the wood were very dark and thick, so that no ray of light came through the branches to lighten the gloom and sadness. And, as they passed by that dark wood, one knight of those that rode, missing his comrades, wandered far away, and returned to them no more; and they, sorely grieving, rode on without him, mourning him as one dead. Now, when they reached the fair castle towards which they had been journeying, they stayed there many days, and made merry; and one night, as they sat in cheerful ease around the logs that burned in the great hall, and drank a loving measure, there came the comrade they had lost, and greeted them. His clothes were ragged, like a beggar’s, and many sad wounds were on his sweet flesh, but upon his face there shone a great radiance of deep joy. And they questioned him, asking him what had befallen him: and he told them how in the dark wood he had lost his way, and had wandered many days and nights, till, torn and bleeding, he had lain him down to die. Then, when he was nigh unto death, lo! through the savage gloom there came to him a stately maiden, and took him by the hand and led him on through devious paths, unknown to any man, until upon the darkness of the wood there dawned a light such as the light of day was unto but as a little lamp unto the sun; and, in that wondrous light, our way-worn knight saw as in a dream a vision, and so glorious, so fair the vision seemed, that of his bleeding wounds he thought no more, but stood as one entranced, whose joy is deep as is the sea, whereof no man can tell the depth. And the vision faded, and the knight, kneeling upon the ground, thanked the good saint who into that sad wood had strayed his steps, so he had seen the vision that lay there hid. And the name of the dark forest was Sorrow (luto, arrepentimiento, tristeza); but of the vision that the good knight saw therein we may not speak nor tell.
• “Well, who’s going to be first in?” said Harris at last. There was no rush for precedence.
• I did not altogether like to give in, though I did not relish the plunge. There might be snags about, or weeds, I thought. I meant to compromise matters by going down to the edge and just throwing the water over myself; so I took a towel and crept out on the bank and wormed my way along on to the branch of a tree that dipped down into the water. It was bitterly cold. The wind cut like a knife. I thought I would not throw the water over myself after all. I would go back into the boat and dress; and I turned to do so; and, as I turned, the silly branch gave way, and I and the towel went in together with a tremendous splash, and I was out mid-stream with a gallon of Thames water inside me before I knew what had happened.
• The sun had got more powerful by the time we had finished breakfast, and the wind had dropped, and it was as lovely a morning as one could desire. It is a fine summer morning — sunny, soft, and still. But through the air there runs a thrill of coming stir.
• Round the camp-fire in the market-place gather still more of the Barons’ troops, and eat and drink deep, and bellow forth roystering drinking songs, and gamble and quarrel as the evening grows and deepens into night. The firelight sheds quaint shadows on their piled-up arms and on their uncouth forms. The children of the town steal round to watch them, wondering; and brawny country wenches, laughing, draw near to bandy ale-house jest and jibe with the swaggering troopers, so unlike the village swains, who, now despised, stand apart behind, with vacant grins upon their broad, peering faces. And out from the fields around, glitter the faint lights of more distant camps, as here some great lord’s followers lie mustered, and there false John’s French mercenaries hover like crouching wolves without the town. And so, with sentinel in each dark street, and twinkling watch-fires on each height around, the night has worn away, and over this fair valley of old Thame has broken the morning of the great day that is to close so big with the fate of ages yet unborn.
• Slowly the heavy, bright-decked barges leave the shore of Runningmede. Slowly against the swift current they work their ponderous way, till, with a low grumble, they grate against the bank of the little island that from this day will bear the name of Magna Charta Island. And King John has stepped upon the shore, and we wait in breathless silence till a great shout cleaves the air, and the great cornerstone in England’s temple of liberty has, now we know, been firmly laid.
• CHAPTER XII. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn
• Have you ever been in a house where there are a couple courting? It is most trying.
• “Oh, well, we can’t help it. We must rough it. You must give us a shake-down in the billiard-room.”
  “Very sorry, sir. Three gentlemen sleeping on the billiardtable already, and two in the coffee-room. Can’t possibly take you in to-night.”
• The landlady met us on the doorstep with the greeting that we were the fourteenth party she had turned away within the last hour and a half. As for our meek suggestions of stables, billiard-room, or coal-cellars, she laughed them all to scorn: all these nooks had been snatched up long ago. Did she know of any place in the whole village where we could get shelter for the night? “Well, if we didn’t mind roughing it — she did not recommend it, mind — but there was a little beershop half a mile down the Eton road ”. We waited to hear no more; we caught up the hamper and the bags, and the coats and rugs, and parcels, and ran. The distance seemed more like a mile than half a mile, but we reached the place at last, and rushed, panting, into the bar. The people at the beershop were rude. They merely laughed at us. There were only three beds in the whole house, and they had seven single gentlemen and two married couples sleeping there already. A kind-hearted bargeman, however, who happened to be in the tap-room, thought we might try the grocer’s, next door to the Stag, and we went back. The grocer’s was full. An old woman we met in the shop then kindly took us along with her for a quarter of a mile, to a lady friend of hers, who occasionally let rooms to gentlemen. This old woman walked very slowly, and we were twenty minutes getting to her lady friend’s. She enlivened the journey by describing to us, as we trailed along, the various pains she had in her back. Her lady friend’s rooms were let. From there we were recommended to No. 27. No. 27 was full, and sent us to No. 32, and 32 was full. Then we went back into the high road, and Harris sat down on the hamper and said he would go no further. He said it seemed a quiet spot, and he would like to die there. He requested George and me to kiss his mother for him, and to tell all his relations that he forgave them and died happy.
  We asked this heavenly messenger (as we discovered him afterwards to be) if he knew of any lonely house, whose occupants were few and feeble (old ladies or paralysed gentlemen preferred), who could be easily frightened into giving up their beds for the night to three desperate men; or, if not this, could he recommend us to an empty pigstye, or a disused limekiln, or anything of that sort. He did not know of any such place — at least, not one handy; but he said that, if we liked to come with him, his mother had a room to spare, and could put us up for the night.
• We tackled the cold beef for lunch, and then we found that we had forgotten to bring any mustard.
• lumber ?
• was yours the steam launch or the houseboat ? No, it was the double sculling skiff.
• {Shelley} No longer where the woods to frame a bower, with interlaced mix and meet, or where with sound like many voices sweet, waterfalls leap among wild islands green, which frames for my lone boat a low retreat of moss-grown trees and weeds, shall I be seen, but beside thee, where my heart has ever been.
• you can always tell an old river hand by the way he likes to give others a chance
• meals : whitebait, cutlet, piece of Stilton, pate, sole with white sauce, smoked trout, mutton with capers,
• it was the dead body of a woman. It lay lightly on the water. And the face was sweet and calm. Of course it was the old, old vulgar tragedy. She had loved and been deceived, or deceived herself. She had wandered about the woods by the river's bank and finally stretched out her arms to the silent stream that had known her sorrow and her joy. And the old river had taken her into its gentle arms and had laid her weary (fatigado) head upon its bosom, and had hushed (acallar) away the pain.

• cheese
• (43) have / want
• (48) maze
• (51) boat girls dress
• (55) tombs
• (60) Harris comic song
• (62) towed - by girls - "there is never a dull moment in the boat while girls are towing (remolcar) it"
• (79) canvas
• (82) stomach
• (e-pg 119) courting
• (124) room rent
• (126) pine aple tin

• (121) Old Windsor
• Boveney
• (125) Monkey Island
• (127) Maidenhead
• (131) Marlow

Top

wiki

In Conrad's haunting tale, Marlow, a seaman and wanderer, recounts his physical and psychological journey in earch of the enigmatic Kurtz. Traveling to the heart of the African continent, he discovers how Kurtz has gained hi sposition of power and influence over the local people. Marlow's struggle to understand what has happened involves him in a radical quetioning of not only his own nature and values but the nature and values of his society.
A masterpiece of twentieth-century writing, "Heart Of Darkness" explores the workings of consciouness as well as the grim realities of imperialism.

pdf {sagpdf}

From Matadi to Nselemba, near Stanley Pool. Pool Malebo és el començament de la part navegable del Riu Congo, ja que just una mica més avall el riu descendeix en una sèrie de ràpids coneguts com les cascades Livingstone (32 ràpids, 260 metres en 150 Km).

Marlow is the most important of Conrad's transtextual characters

Conrad intentionally made Heart of Darkness hard to read. He wanted the language of his novella to make the reader feel like they were fighting through the jungle, just like Marlow fought through the jungle in search of Kurtz.

• yawl or yole (clinker built boat) : yola, embarcación de 2 palos
• surf - onatge
• scow - gabarra : flat-bottomed boat with a blunt bow = vaixell de fons pla amb una proa arrodonida
• helmsman = timoner
• sounding-pole : pal/sonda per mesurar la profunditat; "poleman"
• Starboard = estribor, derecha. Babor, izquierda = port side.
• Proa = bow. Popa = stern.
  Aft = (adjective or adverb meaning) towards the stern (rear) of the ship. The difference between aft and stern is that aft is the inside (onboard) rearmost part of the vessel, while stern refers to the outside (offboard) rearmost part of the vessel.
  Afore = proa.
• tusk = colmillo
• beckon = hacer señas a alguien para que se acerque
• screech = a loud and very high sound
• Martini-Henry : a breech-action (retrocarrega) military rifle. Early firearms were almost entirely muzzle-loading (boca).
• scoundrel - canalla, patán

Carvel built or carvel planking is a method of boat building where hull planks are fastened edge to edge, gaining support from the frame and forming a smooth surface. Carvel construction enables greater length and breadth of hull and superior sail rigs.

The smoother surface of a carvel boat gives the impression at first sight that it is hydrodynamically more efficient. The lands of the planking are not there to disturb the streamline. This distribution of relative efficiency between the two forms of construction is an illusion: For given hull strength, the clinker boat is lighter, because it has far less heavy timber framing. It, therefore, displaces less water, so it has less to push aside while moving. The reduced displacement could be used to make the lines finer so as to make the passage through the water easier still.

• (9) They were men enough to face the darkness.
• (10) He broke off. Flames glided in the river, small green flames, red flames, white flames, pursuing, overtaking, joining, crossing each other— then separating slowly or hastily.
  That is, ship's lights and their reflections. Sailing vessels carried a green light on the starboard side and a red one on the port side; streamers carried, in addition, a white light on or in front of the foremast (palo de trinquete).
• They were all there. The supernatural being had not been touched after he fell. { white men as God }
• red ... blue ... green ... oange ... purple ... yellow
  Late nineteenth-century maps of the world tended to use a colour code to indicate colonial possessions ; red for British territories, blue for French, orange for Portuguese, green for Italian, purple for German and yellow for Belgian.
• (18) Two youths with foolish and cheery countenances were being piloted over, and she threw at them the same quick glance of unconcerned wisdom as the poor devils went in and out unsuspecting on their way to pit of perdition (la fossa de perdició). She seemed to know all about them and about me, too. An eerie feeling came over me. She seemed uncanny and fateful. Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. AVE! Old knitter of black wool. MORITURI TE SALUTANT. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again—not half, by a long way.
• ‘I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his disciples’ (facetious tag) he said sententiously, emptied his glass with great resolution, and we rose
• (21) Good heavens! and I was going to take charge of a two-penny-half-penny river-steamboat with a penny whistle attached!
• (22) The labourer is worthy of his hire [Lucas 10:7] - Porque el obrero es digno de su salario
• (22 ) It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are
• (22) I left in a French steamer, and she called in every blamed port they have out there
  Conrad traveled from Bourdeaux and made its first stop at Tenerife. The boat subsequently called at Dakar, Conacry, Freetown, Grand Bassam on the Ivory Coast, Grand Popo in Dahomey, Libreville and, finally, Banana, before moving up Banana Creek to Boma.
• the sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam - el sol era ferotge, la terra semblava brillar i degotar amb vapor
• once we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast (vaixell de guerra). There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts.
• We called at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair. Nowhere did we stop long enough to get a particularized impression, but the general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me. It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares - Era com un cansat pelegrinatge entre inicis de malsons
• He was a young man, lean, fair, and morose, with lanky hair and a shuffling gait = Era un home jove, prim, just i de mal humor, amb el cabell desgarbat i un caminar arrossegant els peus.
• Marlow departs with a caravan to travel on foot some two hundred miles into the wilderness to the Central Station, where the steamboat that he is to captain is based. When he arrives, he is shocked to learn that his steamboat had been wrecked two days earlier. After fishing his boat out of the river, Marlow is frustrated by the months it takes to perform the necessary repairs, made all the slower by the lack of proper tools and replacement parts at the station.
• But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted (llegar a conocer) with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.
• The rapids were near, and an uninterrupted, uniform, headlong, rushing noise filled the mournful stillness of the grove, where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved, with a mysterious sound—as though the tearing pace of the launched earth had suddenly become audible.
• I respected the fellow. Yes; I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His appearance was certainly that of a hairdresser’s dummy; but in the great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance. That’s backbone. His starched collars and got-up shirt-fronts were achievements of character. He had been out nearly three years; and, later, I could not help asking him how he managed to sport such linen (ropa del hogar). And he was devoted to his books, which were in apple-pie order. { It is generally believed to be an English corruption of the French nappes pliées, “neatly folded linen” }
• big flies buzzed fiendishly, and did not sting (picar), but stabbed (puñalada)
• As he weighed sixteen stone I had no end of rows with the carriers.
  In the UK, a stone is a unit of weight that equals 14 pounds (0,45 Kg, 16 ounces [28,3 grams]). Therefore, sixteen stone means 224 pounds or about 102 kilograms.
• The next morning I started the hammock off in front all right. An hour afterwards I came upon the whole concern wrecked in a bush—man, hammock, groans, blankets, horrors. The heavy pole had skinned his poor nose. He was very anxious for me to kill somebody, but there wasn’t the shadow of a carrier near.
• A neglected gap was all the gate it had, and the first glance at the place was enough to let you see the flabby devil was running that show.
• One of them, a stout, excitable chap with black moustaches, informed me with great volubility and many digressions, as soon as I told him who I was, that my steamer was at the bottom of the river.
• The steamer was sunk. They had started two days before in a sudden hurry up the river with the manager on board, in charge of some volunteer skipper, and before they had been out three hours they tore the bottom out of her on stones, and she sank near the south bank.
• He inspired uneasiness (malestar)
• I don’t like work — no man does — but I like what is in the work — the chance to find yourself. Your own reality — for yourself, not for others — what no other man can ever know.
• Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage.
• Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sand-banks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side.
• (94/162) But my feet felt so very warm and wet that I had to look down. The man had rolled on his back and stared straight up at me; both his hands clutched that cane. It was the shaft of a spear that, either thrown or lunged through the opening, had caught him in the side, just below the ribs; the blade had gone in out of sight, after making a frightful gash; my shoes were full; a pool of blood lay very still, gleaming dark-red under the wheel; his eyes shone with an amazing lustre.
• (102/162) The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings— we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ The curious part was that he had apparently forgotten all about that valuable postscriptum, because, later on, when he in a sense came to himself, he repeatedly entreated me to take good care of ‘my pamphlet’ (he called it), as it was sure to have in the future a good influence upon his career.
• (110/162) One good screech will do more for you than all your rifles. They are simple people.
• (126/162) She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.
• Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. A whole minute passed, and then she made a step forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed her. The young fellow by my side growled. The pilgrims murmured at my back. She looked at us all as if her life had depended upon the unswerving steadiness of her glance. Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at the same time the swift shadows darted out on the earth, swept around on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy embrace. A formidable silence hung over the scene.
• He rose, unsteady, long, pale, indistinct, like a vapour exhaled by the earth, and swayed slightly, misty and silent before me; while at my back the fires loomed between the trees, and the murmur of many voices issued from the forest.
• In front of the first rank, along the river, three men, plastered with bright red earth from head to foot, strutted to and fro restlessly. When we came abreast again, they faced the river, stamped their feet, nodded their horned heads, swayed their scarlet bodies; they shook towards the fierce river-demon a bunch of black feathers, a mangy skin with a pendent tail—something that looked a dried gourd; they shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language; and the deep murmurs of the crowd, interrupted suddenly, were like the responses of some satanic litany.
• (145/162) One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, "I am lying here in the dark waiting for death". The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, ‘Oh, nonsense!’ and stood over him as if transfixed.
  Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: ‘The horror! The horror!’
• (146/162) Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is— that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness.
• (147) And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.
• (148) I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.
• (149) His mother had died lately, watched over, as I was told, by his Intended (promesa).
• (152) She seemed ready to listen without mental reservation, without suspicion, without a thought for herself.
• (155) But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday—nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time—his death and her sorrow—I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together—I heard them together.
• (157) But with every word spoken the room was growing darker, and only her forehead, smooth and white, remained illumined by the inextinguishable light of belief and love.
• (159) "I have been very happy—very fortunate—very proud", she went on. "Too fortunate. Too happy for a little while. And now I am unhappy for—for life".
• (161) 'I heard his very last words’ I stopped in a fright.
  "Repeat them", she murmured in a heart-broken tone. "I want—I want—something—something—to—to live with".
  "His last word—to live with", she insisted. "Don’t you understand I loved him—I loved him—I loved him!""
  I pulled myself together and spoke slowly. "The last word he pronounced was—your name".

• the chief of the Inner Station
• Kurtz — that means short in German
• He was an insoluble problem

• "whited sepulchre" of Brussels
• knitting women in Company offices
• french warship
• man trying to fill bucket (cubo) with hole in it
• Marlow vs Kurtz
• "The Horror ! The Horror !"
  Cedric Watts observes this exclamation is probably the most famous Conradian crux. Not only have different critics offered different readings of it, but Marlow himself offers a range of interprtations.
  • Kurtz is passing a moral judgement on his own actions and this judgement upon the adventures of his soul is an affirmation, a moral victory
  • Kurtz judgement of his actions is more ambivalent, condemning his actions but also registering the temptation
  • Kurtz is passing judgement on human nature
    No eloquence could have been so wthering to one’s belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity
  • Kurtz is passing judgement on all existence
    That wide and immense stare embracing, condemning, loathing all the universe
  • Accurate recounting of the horror arising from the methods and effects of colonialism in the Congo Free State.
  • [***] This line is often said to refer to the atrocities Conrad himself witnessed in Congo as it suffered under the colonial administration of the Belgians (Leopold II)
• who is Arlequin ?

• (71/162) We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.
• (141/162) The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and Kurtz’s life was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time. . . . I saw the time approaching when I would be left alone of the party of ‘unsound method.’
• The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky— seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
• the potential darkness that lies in all human hearts
• Conrad's exploration of the darkness potentially inherent in all human hearts
• Marlow's initial point: "Civilized" Europe was once a "dark place," and it has only become more morally dark through the activities of institutions like the Company.

1. Heart of Darkness opens in what setting? (A) A boat on the Congo River (B) A boat on the Thames River (C) The Company’s offices in Brussels (D) The Outer Station
2. Where does Kurtz die? (A) At the Inner Station (B) In Brussels (C) Aboard Marlow’s steamer (D) In the jungle
3. What does Marlow discover atop the fence posts at the Inner Station? (A) Human heads (B) Monkey skulls (C) Dead infants (D) The Company flag
4. The Company trades primarily in (A) Gold (B) Slaves (C) Bananas (D) Ivory
5. Which of the following receives Kurtz’s “Report” after his death? (A) Marlow’s aunt (B) Kurtz’s “Intended” (C) A representative of the Company (D) A journalist
6. Most of Marlow’s adventures take place in (A) Kenya (B) Rhodesia (C) The Congo (D) England
7. Which of the following is not something that Marlow gives to the Russian trader? (A) Food (B) Gun cartridges (C) Tobacco (D) Shoes
8. What do the men at the Central Station hear about the fate of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition? (A) That they have been successful and are returning with lots of ivory (B) That the expedition’s pack animals are dead (C) That the men have been ambushed and killed by natives (D) That the expedition has found Kurtz
9. At the end of his “Report” on the natives, Kurtz writes: (A) “Exterminate all the brutes!” (B) “God help us!” (C) “No more death!” (D) “God save the King!”
10. What one thing does Marlow need to repair his wrecked steamer? (A) Steel plates (B) A new boiler (C) Tools (D) Rivets
11. Which of the following does not accompany Marlow on his journey up the river from the Central Station? (A) The chief accountant (B) The general manager (C) The cannibals (D) The pilgrims
12. How does Marlow’s helmsman die? (A) He is killed and eaten by the cannibals. (B) He is shot by an angry pilgrim. (C) He is impaled on a spear thrown from the riverbank. (D) He falls overboard and drowns.
13. The Company is (A) English (B) French (C) Dutch (D) Belgian
14. At the Company’s offices Marlow encounters (A) Kurtz (B) Kurtz’s fiancée (C) Two old women knitting (D) A Russian trader
15. Why are the cannibals aboard the steamer hungry? (A) The pilgrims threw their rotting meat overboard. (B) There are no humans for them to eat. (C) They have no way to make a fire to cook their food. (D) They are fasting for religious reasons.
16. Who is ultimately responsible for the attack on the steamer? (A) The Russian trader (B) The general manager (C) Kurtz (D) Marlow
17. Marlow’s predecessor with the Company dies as a result of a quarrel over (A) Ivory (B) Hens (C) A card game (D) A woman
18. The last person Marlow sees in Brussels is (A) The president of the Company (B) His aunt (C) Kurtz’s cousin (D) Kurtz’s fiancée
19. Who helps Marlow to get a job with the Company? (A) Kurtz (B) The Director of Companies (C) His father (D) His aunt
20. What does the Russian trader leave downriver for the approaching steamer? (A) Firewood (B) Water (C) A map (D) Food
21. Before he goes to Africa, Marlow has been on a voyage through (A) The South Pacific (B) Asia (C) Central America (D) Alaska
22. Where does Marlow encounter the “grove of death”? (A) Brussels (B) The Outer Station (C) The Central Station (D) The Inner Station
23. The chief accountant’s most notable characteristic is (A) His bald head (B) His spotless white clothing (C) His shining black shoes (D) His unusual hat
24. At the Central Station the native laborers burn (A) A hut full of trade goods (B) Marlow’s steamer (C) The chief accountant’s quarters (D) The surrounding forest
25. What are Kurtz’s last words? (A) “Exterminate all the brutes!” (B) “The horror! The horror!” (C) His fiancée’s name (D) “God help me!”

Spark Notes

• The character of the Manager is based upon what real person? Camille Delcommune
• What appears to be the main function of the Brickmaker at Central Station? Managing the exportation of ivory
• Who said the following: “We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. The Harlequin
• Who said the following: “This man has enlarged my mind.” The Accountant

Cliffs Notes

1. Marlow's adventures take place in + The African Congo The European Congo The South American Congo The Asian Congo
2. The direct audience narrator is Director + Passenger on Thames ship Lawyer Marlow
3. Marlow's connection to the Company is brought about under the influence of his Fiancee + Aunt Sister Mother
4. The natives in the story are constantly described in terms of + Animals Insects Laborers None of the above
5. The main reason Marlow admires the Chief Accountant is because of his + Impeccable dress Kindly disposition Good work ethic Revolutionary ideas
6. Who is Marlow's direct supervisor? + Manager Kurtz Chief Accountant Brickmaker
7. Marlow can be seen as the ________ of this story. + Protagonist Observer Narrator Antagonist
8. most valuable commodity in the Congo is Sandstone Silver + Ivory Gold
9. What negative term does Marlow use to describe the Manager? Insecure Arrogant Cruel + Hollow (hueco)
10. The Russian, Kurtz's devoted companion, arrived in the Congo on a ________ ship. French Spanish + Dutch English
11. When he was young Marlow had an obsession with Travel books Microscopes Balls + Maps
12. The best words to describe the first glimpse of the Congo shore are + Dark and desolate Warm and inviting Confusing and misty Strange and unpredictable
13. When Marlow receives his Company physical, he is asked if he has a family history of Depression Chicken pox Polio + Insanity
14. The Congo experience has caused Marlow to become a + Fresh water sailor Storekeeper Salt water sailor None of the above
15. Kurtz's frightening consumption with the Congo is a negative side effect of excessive + Colonization Slavery Greed Curiosity
16. Marlow's appearance on the Thames ship can best be described as Unsure and pale Red and healthy + Emaciated and sallow Bright and jovial
17. The transience of Marlow mainly refers to his ability to move between Bosses Ships + Classes Countries
18. Marlow is given the position of __________ with the Company. + Skipper Helmsman Manager Accountant
19. When the young boy with vacant eyes approaches Marlow, he is offered + A ship biscuit A piece of white string A piece of cake A sip of brandy
20. The blind-folded woman in Kurtz's sketch carries a Scale + Torch Candle Purse
21. During the journey into the interior, Marlow's excitement is related to The wilderness around him + The upcoming meeting with Kurtz His new friendships His enviable ship
22. The Manager can be defined as Kurtz's + Archenemy Disciple Best friend Colleague
23. The Manager's main interests lie in Saving Kurtz from the natives + Amassing wealth Expelling Marlow from the Congo Stopping slavery
24. In the eyes of Marlow, what does his journey down the river symbolize? Movement into the future Lack of movement Movement in the present + Movement in the past
25. The crew of the ship is composed of Natives + Cannibals Pilgrims None of the above
26. In the deserted dwelling Marlow finds A book It is never identified A ring Paintings
27. The less desirable ivory is known as Spikes Fossil Beige Dud
28. When Marlow throws the dead steerman overboard, the pilgrims are appalled by his Callousness Strength of religion Waste of good food Brute strength

Grade Saver 1 2

• Conrad's first and second languages were Polish and French, with his third language, English, not acquired until he was 20.
• Léon Rom - some have argued served as the inspiration for Kurtz
• The character of the Manager is based upon what real person? Camille Delcommune
• King Leopold's Ghost - Adam Hochschild - book and film documentary
• Apocalypse Now - Coppola's film is based on this book

Top

Bio ; book details. Read it. Also, Jason Coleman's opinion.

She was awared 2013 Nobel in Literature. Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade". Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style.

Alice Munro has taught us to find literary pleasure in leaping over time, in the odd swerves life takes, in the unexpected sources of comfort and sustenance, and in the idiosyncratic arrangements made for human happiness.

Johanna, a plain, poor, unmarried woman, works as a housekeeper for Mr. McCauley and his granddaughter Sabitha. Sabitha's mother is dead, and her father, Ken Boudreau, lives elsewhere in poverty, frequently pleading with his father-in-law for money. She is friends with Edith, a blacksmith's daughter who feels bored with her constricting blue-collar lifestyle. Edith devises a hoax in which she and Sabitha forge love letters from Sabitha's father to Johanna. Johanna, convinced by the letters that Ken will marry her, uses her substantial savings to travel to his remote location in rural Canada. She discovers that Ken has fallen ill, and, lovingly, she nurses him back to health. Having realized that Ken cannot control his own life, Johanna takes charge and arranges for them to start a new life. Ken, impressed by Johanna's resolve and by her savings, does not question her decisions. Several years later, Edith learns that Ken and Johanna have married and had a child. She is confused by the consequences of her hoax, but soon focuses once more on her desire to escape her parents' lifestyle and show everyone who she really is.

The title story is a masterpiece, a miracle of structure, character and plot, in which two teenage girls write prank letters to a housekeeper and thus set off a chain of events that changes and creates lives.

She goes to Gdynia, Saskatchewan.

Jinny, a middle-aged woman with cancer, travels with her husband Neal from a medical appointment. She has received startling news, but her husband does not appear concerned. Instead, Neal flirts with Helen, the young woman whom they have hired to help around the house while Jinny undergoes chemotherapy. He insists that they pick up Helen's shoes from the home of her friends even though Jinny wants to return home immediately. Jinny refuses to leave the car when they arrive at the friends' trailer home, but Neal decides to join them for a meal. She thinks over what she learned from the doctor: her cancer, which she had assumed to be fatal, is receding. Eventually, the friends' teenage son Ricky approaches Jinny in the car. Jinny allows him to drive her away into the fields, where they kiss on a floating bridge. This small act of retaliation against Neal rejuvenates Jinny, who now feels able to face the possibility of her survival.

The narrator reminisces about Alfrida, her father's nonconformist cousin who worked as an advice columnist in the city. Alfrida seems urbane and sophisticated to the young narrator, who views her with admiration. Once the narrator attends college, however, she distances herself from Alfrida and avoids her frequent dinner invitations. The narrator's only visit to Alfrida is marked by the narrator's condescension toward Alfrida's poverty and lack of cultivation. The dinner, however, does make one lasting impression. Alfrida recalls how her mother died of severe burns caused by an exploding lamp. She had wanted to see her mother but was denied by relatives; Alfrida responded by saying that her mother would have wanted to see her if their places were reversed. Later in life, the narrator transforms this incident into a short story that offends the elderly Alfrida. She receives no more information about Alfrida until Alfrida's illegitimate daughter appears at the funeral of the narrator's father. The daughter tells the narrator that Alfrida grudgingly admired the narrator's writing, although Alfrida thought that the narrator wasn't as smart as she thought she was. This revelation causes the narrator to return to the evening of her last dinner with her father's cousin. Afterward she had gone to a coffee shop where, drinking the coffee and watching the middle-class men and women around her, the narrator had thought that this was what she truly wanted out of life.

• Alfrida gave a great, approving laugh, showing her festive teeth.
• And in order not to have to do that, I would pretty well have to stay clear of the people I used to know.
• Particularly when it was somebody like Alfrida - somebody who had lost all importance in my life.
• I must've thought I was a pretty big cheese, musn't I ? She would want to see me. This was a part of the story I had never heard. And the minute I heard it, something happened.
• She said you were kind of a cold fish.
• This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.

Nina returns home to discover that her husband Lewis, a retired science teacher, has committed suicide. He had developed a neurological disorder, and he and Nina had planned the suicide to avoid unnecessary suffering. Nina, however, did not expect him to die while she was away, and unsuccessfully searches the room for a suicide note. She notifies medical authorities, but eliminates any evidence of suicide. Lewis, an aggressive atheist, had been forced to resign for refusing to teach creationism, and he did not want his enemies to think he killed himself as a result. Nina entrusts the funeral arrangements to Ed, a local undertaker whom she once kissed at a party. While embalming the body, Ed discovers a small note in Lewis's pocket that he gives to Nina. Instead of the expected farewell, it contains satirical verse that ridicules Lewis's creationist adversaries. Nina spreads Lewis's ashes outside of town, where she experiences a sense of newfound comfort as she rids herself of her deceased husband's remains.

Lewis, the former high school teacher who commits suicide in "Comfort," is another of Munro’s escapees—only it’s oblivion he escapes into. The dead in Munro’s work often have a vaguely sinister quality to them, death rendering them not only absent but different. Finding him dead, Lewis’s wife Nina searches the bedroom for clues as if it were the cell of an escaped prisoner: there’s the undeniable, and somewhat menacing, sense here of a clean getaway.

• How is Lewis ? Coasting - ir en punto muerto
• Just the same, it seemed impossible that he would not still have something to say to her
• And a fair wind to your arse
• Genesis is a hodgepodge of tribal self-aggrandizement and theological notions mainly borrowed from other, better cultures
• Old Codger = old man
• They were a pair of people with no middle ground
• Doing this was like wading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the very first icy swim, in June.

• each of the trees on the place had likewise an attitude and a presence - the elm looked serene and the oak threatening, the maples friendly and workaday, the hawthorn old and crabby.
• in my feelings for Mike the localized demon was transformed into a diffuse excitement and tenderness spread everywhere under the skin, a pleasure of the eyes and ears and a tingling contentment, in the presence of the other person. I woke up every morning hungry for the sight of him, for the sound of the well driller's truck as it came bumping and rattling down the lane. I worshipped, without any show of it, the back of his neck and the shape of his head, the frown of his eyebrows, his long, bare toes and his dirty elbows, his loud and confident voice, his smell. I accepted readily, even devoutly, the roles that did not have to be explaned or worked out between us - that I would aid and admire him, he would direct and stand ready to protect me.
• our pregnancies had dovetailed nicely, so that we could manage with one set of maternity clothes.
• we looked for the Pilot Star, close beside the second star in the handle of the Big Dipper (Osa Mayor)

• they reminded her of those faint impressions you can sometimes make out on the sideways in spring - shadows, left by wet leaves plastered there the year before

Pierre and Meriel go to Jonas's burial. Meriel visits Aunt Muriel, her mother's friend. Goes to Stanley Park with doctor Eric Asher.

• how to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives
• the rhododendron hedge was in bloom

• is that a dress or a frill around your bum ?
• her laugh was sweet and rough like brown suger

Grant, a retired university professor, and his wife, Fiona, have been together for decades. Their marriage has been mostly happy, although Grant's frequent affairs have deeply hurt his wife. But Fiona develops Alzheimer's disease, forcing Grant to commit her to a nursing home. After a thirty-day waiting period, Grant visits Fiona and discovers that she has forgotten him and initiated a relationship with another patient, Aubrey. He wonders whether this affair might not be revenge for his former affairs, but Grant accepts it as unavoidable. Eventually, however, Aubrey's wife Marian withdraws Aubrey from the home. Fiona's condition quickly deteriorates, and Grant confronts Marian, pleading with her to let Aubrey see Fiona. Marian refuses, citing the difficulty of handling Aubrey and her own scant financial resources; Grant also perceives that Marian feels alone without her husband. Disappointed, Grant returns home, but finds that Marian has since invited him to a singles' dance. He realizes that a relationship with Marian will enable him to reunite Aubrey and Fiona, and he accepts. Grant soon visits Fiona to inform her that Aubrey will see her again. Fiona, however, has briefly recovered her memory and recognizes her husband. She accuses him of leaving her behind, to which he responds, "Not a chance."

• staunch - devoto, acérrimo
• bereft - despojado, privado
• flummox - despistat
• wanton reasons - sin sentido
• stagger - tambalearse
• stubborn as sludge - terco como el barro/lodo
• shrub - arbusto
• duvet - edredón
• shin - espinilla (parte del pié)
• undertaker - director de funeraria
• whiff - olorcillo
• stoop - encorvarse
• gaudy - ostentoso, chabacano, ordinario, cridaner
• tawdry - chabacano, de mal gusto, cursi, bajo, sordido, despreciable
• old twaddle - necedad, chorrada
• ruckus - embolic
• bridge abutment - pilar d'un pont
• smitten - enamorado, afectado
• creed - credo, fe
• their children balked at going there - oponerse
• mink - visón
• skunk - mofeta
• smell of carrion - carroña
• we got shingles and smashed them dead
• veer - girar bruscamente
• rampage - desmadrarse, devastar
• sump - carter
• gumption - agallas
• shroud - sudario
• unspoiled - virgen
• lump - masa (de un cuerpo)
• linen - ropa blanca
• pang - calambre, pinchazo, espasmo
• vapid - soso, insípido
• teat - pezón, tetilla
• remnant - resto, remanente, retal
• snip - cortar (el pelo)
• boisterous - bullicioso, ruidoso
• dill pickle - pepinillo escabechado
• bangle - pulsera
• purse - cartera

Top

wiki

Since Mrs Curren addresses her daughter in her letters as "you", the reader feels directly addressed

Mrs Curren, Florence, Bheki, Hope and Beauty, mr Vercueil.

• A visitor, visiting himself on me on this of all days
• They were not so many of these homeless people in your time. But now they are part of life here. Do they frighten me ? On the whole, no. A little beginning, a little thieving; dirt, noise, drunkenness; no worse. It is the roaming gangs I fear, the sullen-mouthed boys, rapacious as sharks, on whom the first shade of the prison house is already beginning to close. Children scorning (despreciar) childhood, the time of wonder, the growing time of the soul. Their souls, their organs of wonder, stunted, petrified. And on the other side of the great divide their white cousins soul-stunted too, spinning themselves tighter and tighter into their sleepy cocoons. Swimming lessons, riding lessons, ballet lessons; cricket on the lawn; lives passed within walled gardens guarded by bulldogs; children of paradise, blond, innocent, shining with angelic light, soft as putti. Their residence the limbo of the unborn, their innocence the innocence of bee grubs, plump and white, dreched in honey, absorbing sweetness through their soft skins. Slumbrous their souls, bliss-filled, abstracted.
• He did something that shocked me. With a straight look, the first direct look he has given me, he spat a gob of spit, thick, yellow, streaked with brown from the coffee, onto the concrete beside my foot. Then he thrust the mug at me and sauntered off.
• We sicken before we die so that we will be weaned from our body.
• Hours later I woke befuddled and cold, fumbled my way upstaris, got into bed without undressig.
• The gutters sag where screws have rusted away or pulled loose from the rtten wood. The roof tiles are heavy with moss. A house built solidly but without love, cold, inert now, ready to die. Whose walls the sun, even the African sun, has never succeeded in warming, as though the very brick, made by the hands of convicts, radiate an intractable sullenness.
• I hid my chagrin (disgusto)
• Do you know how to prune (podar) ?
• The bones prized above all by archacologists, I remember, are those gnarled with disease or splintered by an arrowhead: bones marked with a history from a time before history.
• So I played Bach for him, as well as I could. When the last bar was played I closed the music and sat with my hands in my lap contemplating the oval portrait on the cover with its heavy jowls, its sleek smile, its puffy eyes. Pure spirit, I thought, yet in how unlikely a temple ! Where does that spirit find itseld now ? In the echoes of my fumbling performance receding through the ether ? In my heart, where the music still dances ? Has it made its way into the heart too of the man in the sagging trousers eavesdropping at the window ? Have our two hearts, our organs of love, been tied for a brief while by a cord of sound ?
• I'll post your parcel for you
• I would sink into the indifferent squalor of old age
• His job was to pounce on a chicken, swing it upside down, grip the struggling body between his knees, twist a wire band around its legs, and pass it on to a second, younger man, who would hang it, squawking and flapping, on a hook on a clattering overhead conveyor that took it deeper into the shed, where a third man in oilskins splashed with blood gripped its head, drew its neck taut, and cut it through with a knife so small it seemed part of his hand, tossing the head in the same movement into a bin full of other dead heads.
• But my mind would not leave the farm, the factory, the enterprise where the husband of the woman who lived side by side with me worked, where day after day he bestrode his pen, left and right, back and forth, around and around, in a smell of blood and feathers, in an uproar of outraged squawking, reaching down, scooping up, gripping, binding, hanging. I thought of all the men across the breadth of South Africa who, while I sat gazing out of the window, were killing chickens, moving earth, barrowful upon barrowful; of all the women sorting oranges, sewing buttonholes. Who would ever count them, the spadefuls, the oranges, the buttonholes, the chickens ? A universe of labor, a universe of counting; like sitting in front of a clock all day, killing the seconds as they emerged, counting one's life away.
• "Stop it!" I shouted down at them. They paid me no heed.
• Children of iron, I thought. Florence herself, too, not unlike iron. The age of iron. After which comes the age of bronze. How long, how long before the softer ages return in their cycle, tha age of clay, the age of earth ?
• When Florence saw Vercueil waiting, she bridled.
• In silence we waited in the car, Vercueil and I, like a couple married too long, talked out, grumpy.
• I say to myself : I have brought a child into the world, I have seen her to womanhood, I have seen her safely to a new life: that I have done, that can never be taken from me.
• The confort, the love should flow forward, not backward. That is a rule, another of the iron rules. When an old person begins to plead for love everything turns squalid.
• But when you bear a child from your own body you give life to that child. Above all to the first child, the firstborn. Your life is no longer with you, it is no longer yours, it is with the child. That is why we do not realy die: we simply pass on our life, the life that was for a while in us, and are left behind.
• It was not a clasp, not a long touch; it was the merest brush, the merest lingering of my fingertips on the back of his hand. But I felt him stiffen, felt an angry electric recoil.
  For your mother, who is not here, I said within myself. Aloud I said: "Be slow to judge"
• not a flock: a herd [flock = rebaño] [herd = manada, rebaño]
• Thucydides : what can happen to our humanity in time of war
• The feet worst of all: the horny, caked toenails.
• For that is, after all, what one wants in the end: someone to be there, to call to in the dark.
• Die ou kruppel dame met die kaffertjies = l'anciana lesionada amb kaffertjies
• Hope and Beauty - it was like living in an allegory
• balaclava hat = "verdugo"
• The crab had stopped gnawing
• Living, said Marcus Aurelius, calls for the art of the wrestler, not the dancer. Staying on your feet is all; there is no need for pretty steps.
• Ugliness: what is it but the soul showing through the flesh ?
• I am still casting around for something to do with it.
• I am not by myself. You are the one who is by himself.
• From the side of her shadow husband your mother writre. Forgive me if the icture offends you. One must love what is nearest. One must love what is to hand, as a dog loves.
• nec ripas datur horrendas et rauca fluenta
  transportare prius quam sedibus ossa quierunt.
  centum errant annos volitantque haec litora circum;
  tum demum admissi stagna exoptata revisunt.
• Decency: the inexplicable: the ground of all ethics. Things we do not do. We do not stare when the soul leaves the body, but veil our eyes with tears or cover thm with our hands. We do not stare at scars, which are places where the soul has struggled to leave and been forced back, closed up, sewn in.
• He took me in his arms and held me with mighty force, so that the breath went out of me in a rush. From that embrace there was no warmth to be had.

Wiki book

• richly enigmatic, with regular flashes of Coetzee's piercing intelligence
• it ultimately falls prey to the emptiness it describes
• may best be interpreted as "postmodern allegory", in which the deconstruction of suspicion is embodied, paradoxically, in a reconstruction of purpose
• in the final pages, the boy, decked out in an adult-sized magician’s cape and prescription sunglasses after partially blinding himself, invites strangers to join him in a new life

• Literateur : Nietzsche, Socrates, Heraclito, Platon
• LA Times :
  I don't read J.M. Coetzee for pleasure. To be fair, I'm not sure anyone does. The 2003 Nobel laureate writes from his head more than his heart, framing novels that are philosophical and austere, books that break down the world in highly rational ways. Over the course of his career, he's been compared to Beckett and Kafka, although despite the occasional nod in their direction. He lacks their appreciation of humor, of life as essentially absurd.
• FT

• What is the significance of the title? Are there any parallels with the very little we know about the childhood of Jesus, or any of his life? Or is the novel providing a new rendering of his childhood? Or are we to take a less literal interpretation of the title?
• What kind of place is the country that Simón and David find themselves in? For example, is it a utopia or dystopia? Would you want to live there?
• After Marciano dies in the fire, Simón tries to comfort David by telling him that Marciano has found peace and is ‘looking forward to the next life. It will be a great adventure for him, to start anew, washed clean’ (185–6). Is this what has happened to Simón and David? Are we then to think that this new country is an afterlife? How heavenly is it?
• Why don’t we find out the characters’ back-stories, especially what happened to David’s mother? Are we to agree with Ana who tells Simón that they should be "wash[ing] themselves clean of old ties, letting go of old attachments, not pursuing them" (29). Does Simón do this in the end?
• "I am not the kind of person who suffers from memories," (73) Elena tells Simón. Later he responds that he holds onto the shadows of his memories, and would not use the word "suffer". Do you think that humans "suffer" from their memories?
• Simón often finds the new world and its inhabitants anodyne, and lacking in weight. What is not anodyne about this new place? Which characters have more passion and substance? How do such people affect Simón and David?
• In this "bloodless" world, Daga literally draws blood when he stabs Álvaro. What do you make of his character? Why is David drawn to him?

url

1. pg 3, Soraya
2. pg 11, Melanie Isaacs, alumna
3. pg 50, sa filla, Lucy
4. pg 65, Bev Shaw, veterinaria
5. pg 75, asalt
6. pg 132, Desirée, germana ; Doreen, mare ;
7. pg 141, Cape Town
8. pg 144, Elaine Winter, jefa de su antiguo departamento
9. pg 151, Rosalind

Alguna bona frase :

• Cuanto más cambian las cosas, más idénticas permanecen.
• No puedo evitar la sensación de que, en comparación con la maternidad, la paternidad es un asunto un tanto abstracto.
• El amor sáfico: una excusa para ganar peso.

Top

Okonkwo seeks to overpower his mediocre chi by working hard. He is profoundly afraid of failure. As a result, he is unable to balance the feminine energy of love with the masculine energy of material success. Okonkwo often suppresses his feminine side as he pursues his goals and angers the Earth goddess Ani.

Top

Labourchere criticized Wilde as an "effeminate phrasemaker"

Bio

• 1854, October 16 - born in Dublin.
• 1874 - graduation
• 1884, May 29 - married Constance Lloyd and had 2 sons : Cyril (born in 1885) and Vyvyan (born in 1886).
• His conversion to homosexuality probably came about in 1886/7 with a young man who was to remain a lifelong friend, Robert Ross.
• 1895, May 25 - Wilde and Alfred Taylor convicted of gross indecency sentenced for two years' hard labour

  The "hard labour" consisted of many hours of walking a treadmill

• 1900, November 30 - dies in Paris, at age of 46 of cerebral meningitis (infection of the lining of the brain) caused by syphilis.

  L'Hôtel (then "Hôtel d'Alsace") - 13, Rue Des Beaux Arts, 75006 Paris. Métro: Saint-Germain-des-Prés

• legendary last words are "Either this wallpaper goes, or I do"
• buried in Père Lachaise cemetery

Obres

• 1878 - Ravenna
• 1881 - Poems
• 1888 - The happy prince and other tales
• 1889 - The decay of lying
• 1891 - The picture of Dorian Gray
• 1891 - Lord Arthur Savile's crime and other stories
• 1891 - Intentions
• 1891 - Salome
• 1892 - The house of Pomegranates
• 1892 - Lady Windermere's fan
• 1893 - A woman of no importance
• 1893 - the Duchess of Padua
• 1894 - The sphinx
• 1895 - An ideal husband
• 1895 - The importance of being Earnest
• 1898 - The ballad of Reading Gaol

Frases :

• women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.
• it takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing.
• my dear young lady - there was a great deal of truth, I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty while you said it, which is much more important.
• women give to men the very gold of their lives. But they invariably want it back in such very small change.
• nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humour in the woman, or the want of it in the man.
• a kiss may ruin a human life.

pdf

Characters

• Basil Hallward (killed by Dorian)
• Dorian Gray
• Lord Henry "Harry" Wotton
• Sibil Vane
• James Vane (killed by Dorian)
• Alan Campbell (shoots himself dead)
• lord Fermor
• Adrian Singleton

Interesting points :

• In the following eighteen years, Dorian experiments with every vice, influenced by a morally poisonous French novel

  The narrative does not reveal the title of the French novel, but, at trial, Wilde said that the novel Dorian Gray read was À Rebours ('Against Nature', 1884), by Joris-Karl Huysmans.

• Oscar Wilde said that, in the novel three of the characters were reflections of himself:
  • Basil Hallward is what I think I am
  • Lord Henry is what the world thinks of me
  • Dorian is what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps
• Dorian makes no deal, but, who is the Devil in this novel ? Lord Henry I'd say
• the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing.
• pre-publication deletions that Stoddart and his editors made to the text of Wilde's original manuscript were:
  • (i) passages alluding to homosexuality and to homosexual desire;
  • (ii) all references to the fictional book title Le Secret de Raoul and its author, Catulle Sarrazin; and
  • (iii) all "mistress" references to Gray's lovers, Sibyl Vane and Hetty Merton.

wiki

• cliff notes
• spark notes
• grade saver
• soft schools

Oscar Wilde's Salome, composed in French in 1891, represents both an episode in the history of celebrity and a dramatization of celebrity's theatrical structure. The play first entered the orbit of stardom when Sarah Bernhardt, internationally hailed as the world's greatest actress, agreed to play the title role in 1892; its author had long been a celebrity, known as much for his artfully crafted persona as for his published writings.

Bernhardt, Wilde, and Salome, a play in which almost every character is both fan and idol, were all defined by the volatile conjunctions shared by theatricality and celebrity: the asymmetrical interdependence of actors and audiences, stars and acolytes, exhibition and attention, distance and proximity, absolutism and democracy, exemplarity and impudence, worship and desecration, and presence and representation.

jstor,

El cuadre es de Gustave Moreau : hammer ucla {2 videos}