--Well, my Christmas dinner has been spoiled anyhow. (Simon Dedalus)

[Post a response to one of the winter/holiday poems in the comment box below. You'll find more information about this at #3 below.]

I hope not to spoil your holiday feasts be they in celebration of the winter solstice (21 Dec this year), Christmas, St. Stephen's Day (26 Dec), Boxing Day (also 26 Dec), Kwanzaa, New Year's Eve and Day, or a retrospective celebration of recent holidays like Eid Al-Adha (27 Nov this year), Hanukkah (1 Dec - 8 Dec this year), or for the Swedes among us St. Lucia's Day.

Amidst all the merriment find time to do the following...

1. Respond to a second story from Dubliner by pumpkin time Friday, December 18.

2. Turn in your part-to-whole A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man essay Friday, December 18. Or turn in a letter requesting a week's extension and turn in your essay by Friday, December 25.

3. Write an informal, exploratory analysis of one of the winter poems (300+ words or so). See if you can explain the relationship between how it's written and what it might mean. (TPCAST+Theme, SOAPSTone+Theme, Say-Play-Imply might help to get you started.) Post in the comment box below.

You have paper copies of "Christ Climbed Down" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (a "Beat" or San Francisco Renaissance poet), an excerpt from Midwinter Day (a book length poem written on a solstice day) by Bernadette Mayer (a postmodern poet), two Fanny Howe poems (she's sometimes referred to as a "Language" poet), "Burning the Christmas Greens" by William Carlos Williams (a Modernist poet), and "The world is too much with us" a sonnet by William Wordsworth (a Romantic poet). (The Wordsworth poem doesn't mention Christmas or winter but it was alluded to in a Gloucester Daily Times my view critiquing our "getting and spending" during the holiday season.) You could also write about "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats (Irish modern, post-romantic poet) or "Journey of the Magi" by T.S. Eliot (American-British modernist poet, spent childhood summers on Eastern Point). Do this by Monday, January 4 (the tenth day of the nativity for Christians) at pumpkin time.

4. Read Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. It's 215 pages long and written in short sections. The diction is modern American with some substandard usage and slang. However, the simplicity of the diction and syntax is a bit deceptive because the book is surprisingly ornate in its design. The tone is a bit slippery too. Track motifs. What repeats? Take notes. Also think about the narration. What is the relationship between the author, the narrator, and Billy Pilgrim's perceptions of things. Finally I hope you lol at least once but avoid rofl-ing if there are presents, ornaments, or electronic devices nearby. If you find it helpful write comments and questions below as you read. (It's okay if SH5 comments are mixed with poem commentaries.)

Dubliners (a second story)

Choose a second story from Dubliners. Write a response below. Your response should attempt to link the story with some of the things we've talked about: Paralysis, simony, gnomon, for example, or any of the following quotations from Joyce's letters:

“I believe that composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step toward the spiritual liberation of my country.”

“My intention was to write of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.”

“I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.”

“…there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the [Catholic] mass and what I am trying to do…to give people a kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own… for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.”

“Do you [Joyce is writing to his brother Stanislaus] see that man who has just skipped out of the way of the tram? Consider, if he had been run over, how significant every act of his would at once become. I don't mean for the police inspector. I mean for anybody who knew him. And his thoughts, for anybody that could know them. It is my idea of the significance of trivial things that I want to give the two or three unfortunate wretches who may eventually read me.”

“I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness.”

You might also consider connections to Stephen Hero (Joyce's first version of the story that letter became A Portrait): " By an epiphany [Stephen Dedalus] meant ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself… He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany…Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany."

Or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- an artist is “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life…The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, paring his fingernails.”