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editor
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 Posted: Sun Aug 12, 2007 10:17 am Post subject: PokerPulse Gambler's Guide to English Language (ESL) |
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| Quote: | WELCOME!
PokerPulse Gambler's Guide to English as a Second Language (ESL)
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PokerPulse Gambler's ESL Guide Top Ten English Language Primers:
#1
Start with poetry, the highest literary achievement in language and typically much shorter than fiction.
The Ode Less Travelled
Unlocking the Poet Within
Hardcover AND CD Audio
By British author/actor/adventurer * Stephen Fry
Read by the author
| Quote: | This is not an academic book. It is unlikely to become part of the core curriculum. It may help you with your English exams because it will certainly allow you to be a smart-arse in Practical Criticism papers (if such things still exist) and demonstrate that you know a trochee from a dactyl, a terza from an ottava rima and assonance from enjambment, in which case I am happy to be of service. It is over a quarter of a century since I did any teaching and I have no idea if such knowledge is considered good or useless these days; for all I know it will count against you.
I have written this book because over the past thirty-five years I have derived enormous private pleasure from writing poetry and like anyone with a passion I am keen to share it. You will be relieved to hear that I will not be burdening you with any of my actual poems (except sample verse specifically designed to help clarify form and metre): I do not write poetry for publication, I write it for the same reason that, according to Wilde, one should write a diary, to have something sensational to read on the train. And as a way of speaking to myself. But most importantly of all for pleasure.
This is not the only work on prosody (the art of versification) ever published in English, but it is the one that I should like to have been available to me many years ago. It is technical, yes, inasmuch as it investigates technique, but I hope that does not make it dry, obscure or difficult - after all, 'technique' is just the Greek for 'art'. I have tried to make everything approachable without being loopily matey or absurdly simplistic.
I certainly do not attempt in this book to pick up where those poor teachers left off and instruct you in poetry appreciation. I suspect, however, that once you have started writing a poem of any real shape you will find yourself admiring and appreciating other poets' work a great deal more...(From the excellent Foreward at pgs. xviii-xix) |
#2
Poets are unusually sensitive to the sounds of language as well as syntax and, occasionally, they explain their methods.
A Poetry Handbook
Paperback
By Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. poet Mary Oliver
| Quote: | To make a poem, we must make sounds. Not random sounds, but chosen sounds.
How much does it matter what kinds of sounds we make? How do we choose what sounds to make?
"Go!" does not sound like "Stop!" Also, in some way, the words do not feel the same. "Hurry up!" does not sound or feel like its opposite, "Slow down!" "Hurry up!" rustles with activity, leaps to its final punch. "Slow down!" pours from the tongue, as flat as two plates. Sounds differ. Sounds matter. "No ideas but in things," said William Carlos Williams. And, for our purposes here, no things but in the sounds of the words representing them. A "rock" is not a "stone."
But, why is a rock not a stone? (Opening paragraphs of the chapter entitled, Sound, at p. 19) |
The chapter then goes on to explain beautifully with examples which letter combinations make sounds that have quite certain, if occasionally subtle, well-understood meanings to English-language speakers. An excellent text but recommended for advanced students.
#3
Pursue metrical verse for a deeper, more radical understanding of English:
Rules for the Dance
A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse
By Mary Oliver
| Quote: | Metrical poetry belongs to a certain era - a few centuries - and with every passing year that contained time grows more distant, its methods more estranged from our own. The reader of modern poetry feels at ease with the cadences of conversation. To read Chaucer's poems, now, requires a diligent and even extraordinary effort; it requires, indeed, a specialized knowledge of the language and the versification of Chaucer's time. The same thing, in our age, is happening to metrical poetry. It is no longer a safe bet that students will have been prepared for meter by having heard, over and over the rhythms of Mother Goose. In schools, students are encouraged to follow their own unpatterned expressions, and little if any memorization of metrical poems is now required.
As a result, students and other readers of Milton, of Shakespeare, of Wordsworth, of Wilfred Owen, even of Frost, come to the poems, frankly, with tin ears. They cannot scan. They don't know an iamb from an anapest. They read for comprehension and hear little if anything of the interwoven pleasures of the sound and the pattern of the poem, which are also deeply instructive concerning the statement of the poem, along with the meanings of the words themselves. Not knowing how to listen, they read the poem but they do not hear it sing, or slide, or slow down, or crush with the heel of sound, or leap off the line, or hurry, or sob, or refuse to move from the self-pride of the calm pentameter no matter what fire is rustling through it.
... Without an understanding of this music, Shakespeare is only the sense we can make of him; he is the wisdom without the shapeliness, which is one half of the poem.
So, most of all, I wrote this book to help readers of metrical poems enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure. I hope their understanding and pleasure of metric poetry will be deepened and complicated, so much so that their response to the poems becomes not only comprehension, but comprehension accompanied by a felt experience. (From the Foreward at pgs. viii-ix) |
Another excellent text by poet Oliver to bring even the most reluctant language student to an understanding of the relationship between metrics and meaning. Again, not for the feint-hearted.
#4
Seek, listen, emulate.
From the Ultimate High-Stakes Gamble:
At Blackwater Pond
Clothbound Audio CD
Poems by Mary Oliver featuring selections from in order House of Light, Dream Work, Why I Wake Early, House of Light, New and Selected Poems Vols. I and II, White Pine and Owls and Other Fantasies
Read in a slow, clear, sonorous and purposeful voice by the poet
A classic!
| Quote: | ... As the world changes from the long winter into spring, and everything takes on a freshness and a spiritual meaning, just so poetry can quicken, enliven the interior world of the listener.
Much of the work of a poet is a mystery, but the last labor is clear; it is the deliverance of the poem. Often this happens through a manuscript or a book, but it can occur in a vocal way also. Has everyone at some time looked up the original meaning of performance? It means, says Webster, "to finish, to complete." The poem is meant to be given away, best of all by the spoken presentation of it; then the work is complete. Which makes performance sound, does it not, like part of the life-work of the poem, which I think it is. As if the poem itself had an independent life, or the endless possibility of its own life, in minds other than the poet's, which I think it has.
When I step onto a stage to read poems, the anticipation and even the hope of the audience is palpable. The people sitting quietly in the chairs - they have come not to rest, but to be awakened. They have come for some worthwhile news.
But, as I say, there are other ways to fall into the enchantment besides the live reading. I once read a story about an old couple in New York City; the wife kept house, and the husband went every day to the public library and read, and copied into a notebook, the poems of Keats. He had fallen under the spell of the English poet - these were the poems he loved, and would have written if he could have written poems at all. His wife in the evening read his notebook, and found the poems astonishing and, also, thinking her busband had written them himself in the solitude of the library, she could not believe she had such good fortune, to be married to such a man. (From Performance Notes included along with color photos of the poet in the woods probably near her home) |
#5
Learn from peers.
From the Ultimate High-Stakes Gamble:
About Alice
Hardcover
By Calvin Trillin
| Quote: | Around the time Alice and I met, the coverage of American racism finally burst out of its regional boundaries; Northern universities were beginning to look into what they were doing to educate minority students who were, by conventional measurements, not qualified for admission. Alice got involved in a small program of that sort at Hofstra, and in 1967 whe moved to City College to teach in a program called SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge), which employed remedial courses and tutoring and counseling stipends as a way to integrate underprepared students. A friend of hers at Hofstra, Mina Shaughnessy, went to City with her, and for the next dozen years they were allies in the intense struggle over the role that a place like the City University of New York should play in what was sometimes known as remedial education.
From the start, some senior professors had been muttering about the decline of standards. As academic jobs began to dry up, some younger faculty members - people who had looked forward to a life of dropping graceful apercus about "The Waste Land" to enthralled students on ivy-covered campuses - were dispirited or even enraged at finding themselves instead in gritty urban universities, correcting seemingly endless errors in grammar and syntax. Alice and Mina, who were there because they wanted to be, had a completely different response. It was encapsulated in the title of a speech with which Mina, then a start in a field that hadn't been expected to produce any stars, electrified an annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, in 1975: "Diving In." Instead of throwing up her hands in despair at all the errors her students made, Mina had analyzed four thousand essays, found patterns of errors that could be addressed, and explained all this, in a tone of optimism and commitment and absolute confidence, in a book called Errors and Expectations. In later years, when Alice was producing programs for educational television, she'd occasionally take an unusual teaching job - at Phoenix House, the drug-treatment program, for a while, and for one semester at Sing Sing - and she always took it for granted that people who wanted to learn could be taught, no matter what their background. (-- pgs. 34-36) |
Errors and Expectations:
A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing
Paperback
By Mina P. Shaugnessy
| Quote: | | In more recent years, Shaughnessy’s work has been criticized for a variety of reasons: categorizing only the errors of finished products (rather than the errors of each draft) and focusing so completely on error, among others. In spite of such criticism, Errors and Expectations continues to be regarded as a groundbreaking work and is generally referred to as the definitive text in basic writing. -- Wikipedia |
Sounds like a corker! We'll post our review when we are able to obtain a copy. Jan. 17/08 we finally spotted a copy! Please check back soon for updates.
We'll continue adding to our list of English pronunciation and writing guides. Please check back soon for updates.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2954#2954.
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| Posted: Sun Sep 02, 2007 2:00 pm Post subject: |
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Learn to speak English like an American private eye:
Sirius / XM Satellite Radio
Channel 118 Family Classics
Subscription Service
Complete Show Listings, including free downloads and trial offers.
| Quote: | We can't say enough about satellite radio service, especially this station, which features excellent pre-TV radio series from a bygone era when elocution lessons were still an important part of public education, when censorship mercifully precluded four-letter words, when movie dialogue was accessible without deafening surround sound volume. Here are a few of our favorites:
Yours truly, Johnny Dollar
Nightbeat
Philo Vance
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A PokerPulse special favorite:
The Mystery Club Collection
A Shipment of Mute Fate, narrated by Dragnet's Jack Webb and more
Audio Cassette
Published 1997 by Adventures in Cassettes, a division of Metacom Inc., 5353 Nathan Lane, Plymouth, MN 55442, http://www.aic-radio.com
| Quote: | | Fabulous 12-cassette compilation of which PokerPulse appears to be the sole owner. Tapes appear to have no other presence on the Web, though we'll continue to investigate. Please check back for update. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2985#2985
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2007 2:03 pm Post subject: |
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Select a good dictionary or two:
From Unusual Bets:
Welcome to the Monkey House
By our dearly departed captain Kurt Vonnegut
Audio CD
Narrated by David Strathairn, Maria Tucci, Bill Irwin, Tony Roberts and Dylan Baker, all competent U.S. actors, though Roberts is the best, in our view
| Quote: | I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway's dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everybody can spell and truly understand. Mr. Hotchner, was it a frazzled wreck? My own is a tossed salad of instant coffee and tobacco crumbs and India paper, and anybody seeing it might fairly conclude that I ransack it hourly for a vocabulary like Arnold J. Toynbee’s. The truth is that I have broken its spine looking up the difference between principle and principal and how to spell cashmere. It is a dear leviathon left to me by my father – Webster’s New Dictionary of the English Language, based on the "International Dictionary" of 1890 and 1900. It doesn't have radar in it, or Wernher von Braun or sulfathiazole, but I know what they are. One time I actually took sulfathiazole.
And now I have this enormous and beautiful new bomb from Random House. I don’t mean bomb in any pejorative sense or in any dictionary sense for that matter. I mean that the book is heavy and pregnant and makes you think. One of the things it makes you think is that any gang of bright people with scads of money behind them can become appalling competitors in the American-unabridged-dictionary industry. They can make certain that they have all the words the other dictionaries have, then add words which have joined the language since the others were published, and then avoid mistakes that the others have caught particular hell for.
... When Mario Pei reviewed the savagely-bopped third revised edition of the "Merriam-Webster" for The Times in 1961, he complained of the "residual prudishness" which still excluded certain four-letter words, "despite their copious appearance in numerous works of contemporary 'literature' as well as on restroom walls." Random House has satisfied this complaint somewhat. They haven't included enough of the words to allow a Pakistani to decode Last Exit to Brooklyn, or Ulysses, either - but they have made brave beginnings, dealing wisely, I think, with the alimentary canal. I found only one abrupt verb for sexually congressing a woman, and we surely have Edward Albee to thank for its currency, though he gets no credit for it. The verb is hump, as in "hump the hostess."
If my emphasis on dirty words so early in this review seems childish, I can only reply that I, as a child, would never have started going through unabridged dictionaries if I hadn't suspected that there were dirty words hidden in there, where only grownups were supposed to find them. I always ended the searches feeling hot and stuffy inside, and looking at the queer illustrations - at the trammel wheel, the arbalest, and the dugong.
Of course, one dictionary is as good as another to most people, who use them for spellers and bet-settlers and accessories to crossword puzzles and Scrabble games. ... (From New Dictionary, Disc 4, read by Tony Roberts, pgs. 118-119 in the book) |
| Quote: | | Quote: | Last Exit to Brooklyn
DVD
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| Quote: | Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
DVD
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The authority for most writers:
The Oxford English Dictionary
The Compact Edition
Hardcover
Our own desk copy:
Concise Oxford Dictionary
Update 2007:
COUNTRY LIFE
Magazine Subscription
The First Dictionary
Eluned Price traces the life of a lexicographer
whose court case could have changed English
history.
Aug. 7/07
| Quote: | Robert Cawdrey was a country priest in the parish of Luffingham, Rutland, more than 400 years ago. A sleepy sinecure, you might think, where a pastor might enjoy a comfortable life. Not so Cawdrey. He was a dogged man of didactic zeal whose politico-religious beliefs culminated in a court case of enormous constitutional importance and left him without a living. If Cawdrey had won his case in 1591, the head of Charles I might not have rolled half a century later.
The story of Cawdrey has resurfaced because the Bodleian Library has republished A Table Alphabeticall, the title he gave to what is, in effect, the first English dictionary, with an introduction by John Simpson, current editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Printed in 1604, his Table precedes Bullokar (1606), Coles (1676) and other idols of lexicographers, before Dr Johnson boldly went where no man had gone before (1755) with the first comprehensive dictionary. ...
... Simpson describes him as a Puritan, but Cawdrey's attitudes, especially toward hierarchy, are typically Presbyterian. It is telling that it was the latter that Elizabeth perceived as a threat to the monarchy and the episcopacy.
Hauled up in 1587 before the Court of High Commission, the ecclesiastical court headed by the Bishop of London, Cawdrey stood trial for 10 weeks. ...
Cawdrey retaliated - in the law courts. The action he brought challenged the authority of the ecclastiastical commissioners and revolved around the legal right of the queen to empower them. This raised the question of the extent of her imperial prerogative: could it override statute and common law? In the end the judges decided that 'by the ancient laws of this realm, the kingdom of England is an absolute empier and monarch.' They upheld the divine right of the Crown and reaffirmed its theocratic imperium.
This landmark in constitutional law was the real importance of Cawdrey's case ... as had the judgment gone the other way, the monarchy would not have been an imperial sovereignty shouldered by divine right. Yet this was what James I relied upon, as did his son, Charles I, to catastrophic result. (-- p. 72) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3015#3015
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| Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2007 2:51 pm Post subject: |
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Learn to write essays on English literature like an English major:
The History of English Literature
CD Audio
By British author and English teacher since 1973, Perry Keenlyside
Read by celebrated British actor Derek Jacobi and Cast
| Quote: | I have tried to convey here something of the texts - and contexts - of the major writers in the English literary canon, quoting enough to give a flavour of each author and attempting to show a little of how they represent or express the age in which they lived. Many of us (myself included) find it helpful to be reminded who was alive and writing at a certain time, and who were his or her contemporaries: the very speed of this survey may provide a clearer overview of changes and developments through the centuries.
A history like this inevitably begs the question: what is literature, and how does it differ from other kinds of writing? It is impossible to provide a satisfactory short answer, but here goes...Literature is writing which is born of a consciously artistic intent to creat something not only expresses a perceived truth about the human condition, but also tries to do so in a manner which is aesthetically satisfying and productive of pleasure. (From the liner note by Keenlyside, whose last sentence was rudely excised midway by the often careless publisher, Naxos, which nevertheless releases a good number of excellent audiobooks). |
... or come up with an excuse as charming as this one:
Making History
Hardcover
By Stephen Fry
| Quote: | …Had I the patience and the discipline I should have chosen literature. But, while I can read Middlemarch and The Dunciad or, I don’t know, Julian Barnes or Jay McInerney say, as happily as anyone, I have this little region missing in my brain, that extra lobe that literature students posess as a matter of course, the lobe that allows them the detachment and the nerve to talk about books (texts, they will say) as others moight talk about the composition of a treaty or the structure of a cell. I can remember at school how we would read together in class an Ode by Keats, a Shakespeare sonnet or a chapter of Animal Farm. I would tingle inside and want to sob, just at the words, at nothing more than the simple progressoion of sounds. But when it came to writing that thing called an Essay, I flubbed and floundered. I could never discover where to start. How do you find the distance and the cool to write in an academically approved style about something that makes you spin, wobble and weep?
I remember that child in the Dickens novel, Hard Times, I think it is, the girl who had grown up with carnival people, spending her days with horses, tending them, feeding them, training them and loving them. There’s a scene where Gradgrind (it is Hard Times, I’ve just looked it up) is showing off his school to a visitor and asks this girl to define ‘horse’ and of course the poor scrap dires up completely, just stutters and fumbles and stares hopelessly in front of her like a mong.
‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ Gradgrind says and turns with a great sneer to the smart little weasel, Bitzer, a cocksure street kid who’s probably never dared so much as pat a horse in his life, gets a kick out of throwing stones at them I expect. This little runt stands up with smirk and comes out pat with ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth …’ and so on, to wild applause and admiration.
‘Now girl number twenty you know what a horse its,’ says Gradgrind.
Well, each time I was asked to write an essay at school, with a title like ‘Wordsworth’s Prelude is the Egotism with the Sublime: Discuss’ I felt, when I got back my paper marked E or F or whatever, as if I were the stuttering horse-lover and the rest of the class, with their As and Bs were the smart-arsed parroting runts who had lost their souls. You could only write sucessfully about books and poems and plays if you didn’t care, really care, about them. Hysterical schoolboy wank, for sure, an attitude compounded of nothing but egotism, vanity and cowardice. But how deeply felt. I went through all my schooldays convinced of this, that ‘literary studies’ were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days. You can’t talk about movies now without a methodology. Once they start offering courses, you know the field is dead. (From the chapter entitled, Making Coffee, at pgs. 4-6) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3016#3016
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| Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 4:02 pm Post subject: |
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The Voltaire method - English in three months with the bard!
Passionate Minds
The great love affair of the Englightenment, featuring the scientist Émilie du Châtelet, the poet Voltaire, sword fights, book burnings, assorted kings, seditious verse, and the birth of the modern world
Hardcover
By David Bodanis
| Quote: | ... As he later admitted to the one to whom he was always honest, Nicolas Thieriot, "I was without a penny, sick to death of a violent flu, a stranger, alone, helpless, in the midst of a city (London), wherein I was known nobody. I could not make bold to see our ambassador in so wretched a condition."
It was at this point that Voltaire's luck turned. In Paris the year before, he had met a passing English trader, Everard Fawkener, back from several years in Syria trading silk garments between Europe and India. Most educated Frenchmen had snubbed Fawkener for being a mere tradesman, but not Voltaire. He'd chatted with Fawkener about his business, and the archaeological sites he'd poked around in Syria, and now, in England, seemingly by chance - or with a little help from Voltaire - they met again. Fawkener had a mansion in the bucolic wonderland of Wandsworth, a country town with its own windmills outside of London. Voltaire needed a place to stay. He knew that there were a number of French-speaking emigres in London, and with his literary reputation he could probably find one among them to stay with. If he did that, though, he wouldn't learn much of England: he'd stay immersed in emigre politics, and emigre arguments, and an emigre's ever more out-of-date language. He was too proud to do that, yet he was too proud to scurry back to Paris and beg to be accepted by the French authorities again.
Why couldn't he learn English well enough to become a great author in England instead?
Fawkener had no idea what he was letting himself in for. Voltaire invited himself over and stayed for a week, and then another week, and then another, and yet another: he was transforming into that horror of the English countryside: The Guest Who Never Leaves. But he had one goal - to learn English perfectly - and he'd found the ideal place to do it.
He began ("thirty and one of july a thousand seven hundred twenty and six") by keeping a journal, carefully noting down verbs of interest. (emphasis added) "Mr. Scuttlars history," he slowly printed in English,"... He cured his wife of the spleen with a good fucking." Then Voltaire struck out the word fuking and above it thoughtfully wrote the shorter variant fuk, to be sure he got the spelling right. When he needed help in pronunication he made his way to the theatre at Drury Lane, where the prompter loaned him a copy of that night's Shakespeare script, so he could mouth the words to himself while listening to the actors speak them. (emphasis added)
He kept on going to the theatre, and he kept up his journal, and just three months after moving in with Fawkener, the no longer indolent Voltaire had it cracked. By October he casually wrote a firend the following note, in English: "I intend to send you two or three poems of Mr. Pope, the best poet of England, and at present, of all the world. I hope you are acquainted enough with the English tongue, to be sensible of all the charms of his works." ... (From Exile and Return, pgs. 54-55) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2007 2:06 pm Post subject: |
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The Holly Golightly Method - study French!
From The Big Apple:
Breakfast at Tiffany's
A Short Novel and Three Short Stories
Hardcover
By Truman Capote
| Quote: | "Well," she said, with a mouthful of apple, "you may have read about him in the papers. His name is Sally Tomato, and I speak Yiddish better than he speaks English; but he's a darling old man, terribly pious. He'd look like a monk if it weren't for the gold teeth; he says he prays for me every night. Of course he was never my lover; as far as that goes, I never knew him until he was already in jail. But I adore him now, after all I've been going to see him every Thursday for seven months, and I think I'd go even if he didn't pay me. This one's mushy," she said, and aimed the rest of the apple out the window. "By the way, I did know Sally by sight. He used to come to Joe Bell's bar, the one around the corner: never talked to anybody, just stand there, like the kind of man who lives in hotel rooms. But it's funny to remember back and realize how closely he must have been watching me, because right after they sent him up (Joe Bell showed me his picture in the paper. Blackhand. Mafia. All that mumbo jumbo: but they gave him five years) along came this telegram from a lawyer. It said to contact him immediately for information to my advantage."
"You thought somebody had left you a million?"
"Not at all. I figured Bergdorf was trying to collect. But I took the gamble and went to see this lawyer (if he is a lawyer, which I doubt, since he doesn't seem to have an office, just an answering service, and he always wants to meet you in Hamburg Heaven: that's because he's fat, he can eat ten hamburgers and two bowls of relish and a whole lemon meringue pie). He asked me how I'd like to cheer up a lonely old man, at the same time pick up a hundred a week. I told him look, darling, you've got the wrong Miss Golightly, I'm not a nurse that does tricks on the side. I wasn't impressed by the honorarium either; you can do as well as that on trips to the powder room: any gent with the slightest chic will give you fifty for the girl's john, and I always ask for cab fare too, that's another fifty. But then held me his client was Sally Tomato. He said dear old Sally had long admired me a la distance, so wouldn't it be a good deed if I went to visit him once a week. Well, I couldn't say no: it was too romantic." (From the title novel at pgs. 25-26) |
| Quote: | | "I (actor's agent O.J. Berman)'m the first one saw her. Out at Santa Anita. She's hanging around the track every day. I'm interested: professionally. I find out she's some jock's regular, she's living with the shrimp. I get the jock told Drop It if he don't want conversation with the vice boys: see, the kid's fifteen. But stylish: she's okay, she comes across. Even when she's wearing glasses this thick; even when she opens her mouth and you don't know if she's a hillbilly or an Okie or what. I still don't. My guess, nobody'll ever know where she came from. She such a goddamn liar, maybe she don't know herself any more. But it took us a year to smooth out that accent. How we did it finally, we gave her French lessons: after she could imitate French, it wasn't so long she could imitate English. We modeled her along the Margaret Sullavan type, but she could pitch some curves of her own, people were interested, big ones, and to top it all, Benny Polan, a respected guy, Benny wants to marry her. An agent could ask for more? Then wham! The Story of Dr. Wassell. You see that picture? Cecil B. De Mille. Gary Cooper. Jesus. I kill myself, it's all set: they're going to test her for the part of Dr. Wassell's nurse. One of his nurses, anyway. Then wham! The phone rings." He picked a telephone out of the air and held it to his ear. "She says, this is Holly, I say honey, you sound far away, she says I'm in New York, I say what the hell are you doing in New York when it's Sunday and you got the test tomorrow? She says I'm in New York cause I've never been to New York. I say get your ass on a plane and get back here, she says I don't want it. I say what's your angle, doll? She says you got to want it to be good and I don't want it, I say well, what the hell do you want, and she says when I find out you'll be the first to know. See what I mean: horseshit on a platter." (-- pgs. 32-33) |
| Quote: | | * Note: Based on personal experience, PokerPulse is pleased to recommend this excellent French language training organization - la crème de la crème. For more about our experience, write to legal@pokerpulse.com. |
Breakfast at Tiffany's
DVD
Breakfast at Tiffany's
CD Audio
Featuring Henry Mancini's lush movie score, including Moon River, sung at YouTube.com by Yank crooner Andy Williams in 1661
Better still:
Motions and Emotions
CD Audio
Featuring Oscar Peterson's jazz version of Mancini's Sally's Tomato
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2007 5:37 pm Post subject: |
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The Nabokov method - applying your superior skill in the mother tongue to English:
Natasha's Dance
A Cultural History of Russia
Hardcover
By Orlando Figes
| Quote: | Nabokov's switch from writing in Russian to writing in English is a complicated story intimately linked with his adoption of a new (American) identity. It must have been a painful switch, as Nabokov, who was famous for his showmanship, always liked to stress. It was, he said, 'like learning to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion.' Throughout his life Nabokov complained about the handicap of writing in English - perhaps too often to be totally believed (he once confessed in a letter to a friend that his 'best work was written in English') Even at the height of his literary prowess he argues, in his 1956 afterward to Lolita, that it had been his 'private tragedy' to
| Quote: | | abandon my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich and ifinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses - the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions - which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way. |
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| Quote: | | But even if such claims were a form of affectation, his achievement is undeniable. It is extraordinary that a writer who has been hailed as the supreme stylist of the modern English language should have written it as a foreigner. (emphasis added) As his wife Vera put it, not only had he 'switched from a very special and complex brand of Russian, all his own, which he had perfected over the years into something unique and peculiar to him,' but he had embraced 'an English which he then proceeded to wield and bend to his will until it, too, became under his pen something it had never been before in its melody and flexibility.' She came to the conclusion that what he had done was substitute for his passionate affair with the Russian language un marriage de raison which 'as it sometimes happens with a marriage de raison - became in turn a tender love affair (emphasis added) (footnotes omitted) (From Russia Abroad, pgs. 551-552) |
King, Queen, Knave
Hardcover
By Vladimir Nabokov
| Quote: | | Finally, the question of the title. Those three court cards, all hearts, I have retained, while discarding a small pair. The two new cards dealt me may justify the gamble, for I have always had an ivory thumb in this game. Tightly, narrowly, closely, through the smart of tobacco smoke, one edge is squeezed out. * Frog's heart - as they say in Russian Gulch. And Jingle Bells! I can only hope that my good old partners, replete with full houses and straights, will think I am bluffing. (From the introduction to the revised edition of Nabokov's second Russian novel first published in 1927, dated March 28, 1967, Montreux) |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 1:05 pm Post subject: |
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Learn from others' mistakes.
Errors and Expectations:
A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing
Paperback
By Mina P. Shaugnessy
| Quote: | | In more recent years, Shaughnessy’s work has been criticized for a variety of reasons: categorizing only the errors of finished products (rather than the errors of each draft) and focusing so completely on error, among others. In spite of such criticism, Errors and Expectations continues to be regarded as a groundbreaking work and is generally referred to as the definitive text in basic writing. -- Wikipedia |
About the book:
About Alice
Hardcover
By Calvin Trillin
| Quote: | Around the time Alice and I met, the coverage of American racism finally burst out of its regional boundaries; Northern universities were beginning to look into what they were doing to educate minority students who were, by conventional measurements, not qualified for admission. Alice got involved in a small program of that sort at Hofstra, and in 1967 whe moved to City College to teach in a program called SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge), which employed remedial courses and tutoring and counseling stipends as a way to integrate underprepared students. A friend of hers at Hofstra, Mina Shaughnessy, went to City with her, and for the next dozen years they were allies in the intense struggle over the role that a place like the City University of New York should play in what was sometimes known as remedial education.
From the start, some senior professors had been muttering about the decline of standards. As academic jobs began to dry up, some younger faculty members - people who had looked forward to a life of dropping graceful apercus about "The Waste Land" to enthralled students on ivy-covered campuses - were dispirited or even enraged at finding themselves instead in gritty urban universities, correcting seemingly endless errors in grammar and syntax. Alice and Mina, who were there because they wanted to be, had a completely different response. It was encapsulated in the title of a speech with which Mina, then a start in a field that hadn't been expected to produce any stars, electrified an annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, in 1975: "Diving In." Instead of throwing up her hands in despair at all the errors her students made, Mina had analyzed four thousand essays, found patterns of errors that could be addressed, and explained all this, in a tone of optimism and commitment and absolute confidence, in a book called Errors and Expectations. In later years, when Alice was producing programs for educational television, she'd occasionally take an unusual teaching job - at Phoenix House, the drug-treatment program, for a while, and for one semester at Sing Sing - and she always took it for granted that people who wanted to learn could be taught, no matter what their background. (-- pgs. 34-36) (More on the book at the Ultimate High-Stakes Gamble) |
The PokerPulse review:
| Quote: | This book is an embarrassingly eloquent shaming lecture for any purveyors of education who either fail or refuse to teach basic grammar whenever the need to do so makes itself as painfully obvious as it was when this book was written in 1977, although, frankly, we wonder if many English teachers in North America would understand it anymore. Long gone are the days of grammar lessons in which students were taught to underline the subject of each sentence (nouns) with a squiggly line, the predicate (verbs) with a straight line and either a direct object (follows a preposition, such as to, with, from, etc.) with a double line or an indirect object (when predicate is a passive verb) with both a straight and a squiggly line. As a result, this would probably be a challenging book for many English-speaking high school and university students. Advanced ESL students, however, will very likely understand the methodology of parsing sentences and phrases, although as the author indicates in the Introduction:
"Despite such advances, the territory I am calling basic writing (and that others might call remedial or developmental writing) is still very much of a frontier, unmapped, except for a scattering of impressionistic articles and a few blazed trails that individual teachers propose through their texts. And like the settlers of other frontiers, the teachers who by choice or assignment are heading to this pedagogical West are certain to be carrying many things they will not be needing, that will clog their journey as they get further on. So too they will discover the need of other things they do not have and will need to fabricate by mother wit out of whatever is at hand.
This book is intended to be a guide to that kind of teacher, and it is certain to have the shortcomings of other frontier maps, with doubtless a few rivers in the wrong place and some trails that end nowhere. Still, it is also certain to prepare the inexperienced teacher for some of the difficulties he is likely to encounter and even provide him with a better inventory of necessary supplies than he likely to draw up on his own." (footnote omitted) (-- p. 4)
All that's changed since publication in '77, in our view, is the prevalence of error-filled writing among North American students probably the result of so many missed grammar lessons. |
Most useful lessons:
1. Seek a pattern to your errors.
| Quote: | | ... I have reached the persuasion that underlies this book - namely, that BW (Basic Writing) students write the way they do, not because they are slow or non-verbal, indifferent to or incapable of academic escellence, but because they are beginners and must, like all beginners, learn by making mistakes. These they make aplenty and for such a variety of reasons that the inexperienced teacher is almost certain to see nothing but a chaos of error when he first encounters their papers. Yet a closer look will reveal very little that is random or "illogical" in what they have written. And the keys to their development as writers often lie hidden in the very features of their writing that English teachers have been trained to brush aside with a marginal code letter or a scribbled injunction to "Proofread!" (Introduction, p. 5) |
2. Get a dictionary and find out how it works.
Ask a librarian or someone equally enlightened and non-judgmental. Learning to use this important reference tool as a spelling guide is neither simple nor basic. To wit:
| Quote: | | Doubt is the most useful spelling aid - not, of course, the generalized debilitating doubt that convinces students they can't spell anything but rather an informed doubt that prods them to question the way they have spelled particular words or sounds. Experienced writers have been trained to doubt at the right places and then to turn to the dictionary; inexperienced writers not only doubt in unproductive ways but are intimidated by the dictionary. Like the other "simple" skills that many students acquire early in school, the skill of dictionary-using is not as simple as it seems. It requires, for one thing, a nimbleness with the alphabet and an awareness of spelling options that BW students often lack at the outset. (footnote omitted) Then there are the various codes (for pronunication and etymology, grammatical class, inflection, and levels of usage) that worry the reader until he learns how to read them. (emphasis added) Once understood, however, the dictionary can become a continuing source of insight into spelling, not only because it lists correct forms but because it presents words in ways that illuminate spelling rules and patterns, breaking them into syllables, indicating stress, and marking the pronunciation of vowels (a, e, i, o, u and y as in etymology). The dictionary remains, in short, the most useful single book the apprentice speller can own, and the habit of using it, the most important aid to spelling - nmore portable, lasting, and quiet than teachers. (From the chapter, Spelling, at p. 185) |
3. Memorize these four spelling rules:
| Quote: | 1. i before e
except after c
or when sounded like a
as in neighbor and weigh
This rule works only where the student's confusion is between ie and ei. For other spellings of the e sound, the rule is not useful (reach, extreme, etc.). Also, the rule does not apply to nouns that form their plurals by changing the y to i and adding - es (democracies).
2. Is there an unpronounced e at the end of the word?
Does the suffix begin with a vowel?
If YES to both questions, drop the e.
Another rule can be attached to this that covers the main exceptions, namely that when the "silent" e is preceded by c or g and the suffix begins with a, o, or u, the e remains. However, the student can usually discover the phenemic principle that underlies the rule simply by seeling lists of words that retain the diacritic e - manageable, peaceable, etc.
3. Does the word end in a consonant + y?
Change the y to i and add the suffix.
Exception: Keep the y when suffix is -ing, possessive 's, or a proper name.
4. Rule for doubling final consonant (given above).
... While it is true that a student's pronunciation will often cause him to misspell, it is also true that the way he pronounces a word - whether, for example, he stresses a syllable or not (as in sick/classic) or whether he uses a short vowel or a long vowel (as in bit/bite) - will often give him a clue to its spelling. (Ibid., p. 178) |
The view from the cheap seats:
Much of the book, in our view, can be boiled down to two basic cautions:
1. Parallelism.
| Quote: | Think balance. What you do the subject, you must also do to the predicate and the indirect/direct object (Who is screwing whom?). Grammar is the slave of logic, which after all is the point of communication.
Many a girl has lost her chemise at the racetrack
BUT
everyone is glad when the turf accountant settles in her favor next race.
Another example of parallelism is the maxim, Commas, like shoes, come in twos.
The girl, who was wearing strange dark glasses over her eyes to conceal their depths, slammed her cards down hard on the table before calling the bet. |
Need more examples? Write to legal@pokerpulse.com. We're happy to take questions, too.
2. Forget nouns (person, place, thing) and adjectives (mere modifiers) - focus on VERBS (action words).
| Quote: | Most of us can learn the names of things in just about any language fairly quickly. The advanced communicator is distinguished by the wide and colorful assortment of VERBS at his disposal, which s/he has learned to conjungate in three time frames - YESTERDAY, TODAY and TOMORROW.
Yesterday, I clicked 'AGREE!' to the prompt asking if I wanted to learn the rules of poker at PartyPoker - Getting Started.
PartyPoker is pleased to offer services in a variety of languages AND THE LIST IS GROWING!
Ceština,
Dansk,
Deutsch,
Español,
Français,
Norsk,
Polski,
Português,
Русский,
Suomi, and
Svenska
Today, after visiting PokerPulse Gambler's Guide to Safe Bets Online, I open / am opening a PartyPoker account.
More on REGISTRATION and how to take advantage of BONUS offers here.
Tomorrow, I play / will play / am going to play online at PartyPoker's Beginner Tables and maybe at Paradise Poker, too!
PartyPoker - $25 BONUS!
Paradise Poker - €100 BONUS!
 |
| Quote: | The quickest way to amass a well-rounded working list of verbs is to study poetry! Because it's shorter than fiction, it's more accessible, and the poet's skill in condensing images by selecting and applying the most evocative verbs is the stuff of legend. For a considered list of quick picks, visit
PokerPulse Gambler's Guide to Poetry.
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BONUS Tip! Ignore the seductive mysteries of the semi-colon.
| Quote: | Periods work to separate clauses just as well if not better, although semi-colons do help separate long, complicated lists in writing - usually lists that involving naming an item and describing it between commas.
four tables, which must be round and covered in green baise;
four sets of unmarked cards, which prevents cheating;
four large, black ash trays, preferably with beer or pub advertisements, simply to give the room an air of the Wild West poker saloon; |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 9:06 am Post subject: |
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From the Will to Win:
Lexus
Magazine Subscription
Words, Words, Words
The Manhattan-based organization Girls Write Now show the power - and pleasures - of the pen
By Grace Bastidas
Q4 2008
| Quote: | The teenage girls I know write in pink spiral notebooks. Like other New York City students, they commute to class on the subway every day, but instead of staring off blankly, closing out the world with the help of their iPods, they watch the bustle of strangers rushing to work and the confusion of tourists unforlding maps that never seem to fold back up in the right way. They observe because observation is a writer's training.
They are the wordsmiths of Girls Write Now (www.girlswritenow.org), a volunteer organization that pairs creative teenage girls, from 13-20 years old, with professional women writers, like me, who serve as mentors and writing coaches. The girls are recruited from public high schools throughout the city; the mentors are magazine editiros, newspaper reporters, and even waitresses waiting to turn their prose into bestsellers.
I once read somewhere that a mentor is someone whose hindsight can become your foresight, but the mentor/mentee relationship is mutually beneficial. My 16-year-old mentee, Thea, writes descriptive personal essays in between Regents exams, soccer matches, and an internship at a local hospital, inspiring me to create new work despite my own hectic schedule. Thea and the other girls are all college bound (Girls Write Now has a 100 percent college acceptance rate).
A native of the Philippines, Thea has lived here for only a year, yet her command of the English language is flawless, much like her fashion sense - her Nike sneakers always match the color of her T-shirt. ... (-- p. 64) |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2009 7:42 am Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
The Broadview Book of Common Errors
A Guide to Righting Wrongs
Paperback
By Frostback scholar Don LePan
A classic - especially the chapter on common ESL errors!
| Quote: | One of the ways in which this book differs from many other guides to grammar and usage is in its approach to change in language, and in the degree to which it attempts to resist the assumption that where the English language is concerned, change implies debasement. ...
If Strunk and White are out of date on the particulars, this remains a good example of the wisdom of their advice to writers that one danger of "adopting new coinages too quickly is that they will bedevil one by insinuating themselves wher they do not belong" (75-76). What was a fuzzy and confusing coinage in the 1950s has found a clearly defined place int he language of today. And even conservative arbiters such as Strunk and White recognize that language must change, and that this is not in itself a bad. In the end guides such as this one should continually strive for a balance between the value of continuity in language and in usage, and the value of language as a living thing; without change there can be no life.
***
In one area in particular this guide is not only unresistant to change but embraces change: the move towards bias-free language. ... An increased emphasis on the ways in which language can help or hinder social change of this sort is thus an important part of this book; a discussion of bias-free language forms one of the longer chapters in the book, and provides a much more thoroughgoing treatment of these issues than did the early editions of this book - or than do most other concise guides to usage. (-- pgs. 10-11) |
On tricky distinctions:
| Quote: | 210. adverse/averse: Adverse means unfavourable; averse means reluctant or unwilling.
214. alternately/alternatively: Alternately means happening in turn, first one and then the other; alternatively means instead of. ...
221. assure/ensure/insure: To assure someone of something is to tell them with confidence or certainty; to insure (or ensure) that something will happen is to make sure that it does; to insure something is to purchase insurance on it so as to protect yourself in case of loss. ...
237. compliment/complement: To compliment someone is to praise him, and a compliment is the praise; to complement something is to add to it to make it better or complete, and a complement is the number of amount needed to make it complete. ...
238. comprise/compose: The whole comprises or includes the various the various parts; the parts compose the whole. ...
241. continual/continuous: If something is continuous it never stops; something continual is frequently repeated but not unceasing. The same distinction holds for the adverbs continually and continuously. ...
243. council/counsel; councillor/counsellor: A council is an assembled group of officials, and a councillor is a member of that group. Counsel is advice, or in the special case of a lawyer, the person offering advice. In other situations the person offering counsel in a counsellor. ...
272. flammable/inflammable: The two words share the same meaning; flammable may have originated because of the possibility for confusion over the word inflammable, which looks like a negative but isn't. Non-flammable should be used to difficult or impossible to burn. ...
335. they/their/there/they're: Four words that are confused perhaps more frequently than any others. They is a pronoun used to replace any plural noun (e.g., books, people, numbers). There can be used to mean in (or at) that place, or can be used as an introductory word before various forms of the very to be (there is, there had been, etc.). Their is a possessive adjective meaning belonging to them. Beware in particular of substituting they for there. ... (From Word Meanings: Are Cars Ever Stationery?, pgs. 76-) |
Just for ESL students:
| Quote: | In order to use articles properly in English it is important to understand the distinction English makes between nouns naming things that are countable (houses, books, trees, etc.) and nouns naming things that it does seem possible to count: sugar, grass, furniture, etc. In such cases counting must in English be done indirectly: a grain of sugar, two grains of sugar, three blades of grass, four pieces of furniture, and so on.
Distinguishing between count and non-count nouns is inevitably a challenge for those whose first language is not English. A dictionary such as The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary can be very helpful; unlike most dictionaries it indicates whether or not each noun is a count noun. (From Those Whose Native Language Is Not English, pgs. 260-261) |
The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
Hardcover
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2009 9:59 am Post subject: |
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Popular music can be an effective ESL tool, too:
Follow the lyrics to Poker Face and sing along with Lady Gaga!
The Fame
Audio CD
Featuring Lady Gaga's hit, Poker Face
| Quote: | Poker Face
Mum mum mum mah
Mum mum mum mah
I wanna hold em' like they do in Texas Plays
Fold em' let em' hit me raise it baby stay with me (I love it)
Luck and intuition play the cards with Spades to start
And after he's been hooked I'll play the one that's on his heart
Oh, oh, oh, oh, ohhhh, ohh-oh-e-ohh-oh-oh
I'll get him hot, show him what I've got
Oh, oh, oh, oh, ohhhh, ohh-oh-e-ohh-oh-oh,
I'll get him hot, show him what I've got
Can't read my,
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(she's got me like nobody)
Can't read my
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(she's got me like nobody)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)
I wanna roll with him a hard pair we will be
A little gambling is fun when you're with me I love it)
Russian Roulette is not the same without a gun
And baby when it's love if its not rough it isn't fun, fun
Oh, oh, oh, oh, ohhhh, ohh-oh-e-ohh-oh-oh
I'll get him hot, show him what I've got
Oh, oh, oh, oh, ohhhh, ohh-oh-e-ohh-oh-oh,
I'll get him hot, show him what I've got
Can't read my,
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(she's got me like nobody)
Can't read my
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(she's got me like nobody)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)
I won't tell you that I love you
Kiss or hug you
Cause I'm bluffin' with my muffin
I'm not lying I'm just stunnin' with my love-glue-gunning
Just like a chick in the casino
Take your bank before I pay you out
I promise this, promise this
Check this hand cause I'm marvelous
Can't read my,
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(she's got me like nobody)
Can't read my
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(she's got me like nobody)
Can't read my,
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(she's got me like nobody)
Can't read my
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(she's got me like nobody)
Can't read my,
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(she's got me like nobody)
Can't read my
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(she's got me like nobody)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah) |
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editor
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Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 2:12 pm Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
The King's English
A Guide to Modern Usage
Hardcover
A joy!
By Kingsley Amis
| Quote: | This book is intended partly as a work of definition and reference, in which some modern linguistic problems are discussed and perhaps settled, and partly as a collection of more or less discursive essays on linguistic problems. In no sense is it complete or exhaustive. Even the great predecessor of the present volume, the Modern English Usage of H.W. Fowler, never set out to be that. What Fowler's aim was takes some defining. To settle scores as well as problems, to shake things up, to make people think about what they said and wrote, to be provocative without being unjust, these were certainly among his aims. In my less educated way they are among mine. ...
All talk of deference may be beside the point. Despite his sometimes derisive and even caustic tone, one easily guesses that Fowler had no real hope that his recommendations would be followed by more than a small fraction of his readership. No writer on the subject can nourish such a hope. The most that can be offered is some guidance for those who may want it and the thought that, without Fowler and his heirs and allies, the language might be in an even worse state than it is. A lost cause may still deserve support, and that support is never wasted. (Opening paragraphs of the Preface, p. vii) |
| Quote: | | My interest in words as parts of language preceded their appeal to me as units of literature of any sort, and I was learning how to spell some individual words before I knew what they meant. Ever since, I have retained what I like to think of as a special feeling for language in spoken as well as written form. This has gone hand in hand with one of the less immediately appealing sides of my character, the didactic or put-'em-right side. I would guess that for every acquaintance of mine who looks on me as some sort of authority on correct usage or pronunciation there is at least one who sees me as an officious neurotic who sets right venial blunderers uninvited. Any vocal stickler for accuracy perpetually runs that sort of risk. (From Apologia Pro Vita Sua Academica, p. ix) |
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