november 21

JOURNAL TOPIC: ["Junk Food Junkie" by Larry Groce; "Whole Foods Parking Lot" by DJ Dave; "Alice's Restaurant Massacre" (abridged) by Arlo Guthrie]

Your friends invite you to a fancy restaurant in San Francisco for your birthday-- all expenses paid!  The waiter brings you a soda, calls you "sir" or "miss" and hands you a menu.  With horror you discover that each dish consists of insects and road kill in various states of decay/disembowelment.  How will you handle the situation? (Careful: if your friends eat here, they must be zombies/foreign agents who are trained to deal with this sort of thing.  They may turn on you if they consider you rude.  You can't just leave.  If you don't eat you'll have to talk your way out of it in a way that doesn't raise suspicion.)

AGENDA:
1. Journal
2. Literature circles & Henry V or Dickens
3. Return Hamlet & Plato essays [Update: still reading, will return Friday]

HW:
1. Write a sonnet about Plato's Allegory of the Cave and post it to your blog (title: ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE SONNET).  To receive full credit your sonnet must receive 10 positive reviews from your colleagues, each of whom must evaluate: a) whether your sonnet meets the definitional requirements and therefore deserves to be called a sonnet in the first place; and b) whether it's any good, as evidenced by the quality of narration, setting, use of figurative language, etc.
2. Begin reading the library book you selected (or Henry V, if you went that route; if anyone found a better script, please let me know and I'll post it).  In addition to your close/active reading notes, and whatever additional roles you decide on as a group, here is an additional incentive: if you answer the the Literature Analysis questions in a post to your blog by the end of Thanksgiving weekend (11:59 P.M. on Sunday, December 1) you can count this as a Literature Analysis.
3. Go to the member blogs page, find 15 people you don't know well, and comment to their blogs with: a) a compliment about their blog, b) a question you need help with for finals prep or Henry V / Dickens, and c) the URL of your blog so they can comment back.
4. Happy Thanksgiving in advance.  (Why wait to be thankful?)  Thank someone you love, thank someone you like, thank someone you can't stand, and thank someone you don't know.  And, since I don't say it often enough: thank you.