week 3 homeworks
The Revenge of Karl Marx - Christopher Hitchens
Quickhoney Marx’s “Das Kapital”: A Biography By Francis Wheen Grove The late Huw Wheldon of the BBC once described to me a series, made in the early days of radio, about celebrated exiles who had lived in London. At one stage, this had involved tracking down an ancient retiree who had toiled in the British Museum’s reading room during the Victorian epoch. Asked if he could remember a certain Karl Marx, the wheezing old pensioner at first came up empty. But when primed with different prompts about the once-diligent attendee (monopolizing the same seat number, always there between opening and closing time, heavily bearded, suffering from carbuncles, tending to lunch in the Museum Tavern, very much interested in works on political economy), he let the fount of memory be unsealed. Not all of these ironies are at capitalism’s expense, or at least not in a way that can bring any smirk, however wintry, to the grizzled features of the old leftist.
::First World War::
The bloodiest battle in human history was going to be fought from July 1916 to November 1916 near the River Somme in northern France. Here the Allied forces tried to break throughout the German lines and at the same time draw some of the German forces away from the Battle of Verdun . However with more than one million casualties in the Battle of Somme the losses would exceed those at Verdun. The first day, 1 July 1916, was the worst and the bloodiest.
week 2 homework
Christopher Hitchens on the Bourgeois Blues
Of course it makes sense that the critical eye cast on death in the book The American Way of Death should one day take on the business of birth. It just didn’t occur to the author. “I never had any intention of writing about childbirth, though one knew of course that the American Medical Association was rather hellish,” muses Jessica Mitford upon the publication of The American Way of Birth (Dutton). One advantage of Birth over Death is that it’s easier to write from experience. From this passage, even if that’s not the word I’m looking for, old loyalists will readily see that the Mitford style is undimmed. If many of those loyalists have the notion that Mitford still lives in England, it may be because so many Mitfords do. Iconoclast in every other respect, Mitford may be the only transplanted Brit to live in Oakland, California.
Memories of the Great War: Shell Shock
I was going to wait until I came to the end of my great-grandfather's story to write about this, but after talking to my Aunt I decided to do it now. To understand why I am doing this blog I have to talk about the unpleasant subject of shell shock or Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (as we call it today.) When I had started researching Jack, I asked my father what he could tell me about him. He couldn't tell me anything, but a few anecdotes. So, I asked my Aunt, who was twenty when he died if she could tell me anything. Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele, Jack was there. Stretcher Bearers In 1914, doctors began to see the first cases of shell shock. Philip Gibbs, writing about the war for The Daily Chronicle, mentions his experiences with shell shock in his autobiography, Adventures in Journalism. I saw a sergeant-major convulsed like someone suffering from epilepsy.
week 1 homework
Chrisopher Hitchens: From Abbottabad to Worse
Salman Rushdie’s upsettingly brilliant psycho-profile of Pakistan, in his 1983 novel, Shame, rightly laid emphasis on the crucial part played by sexual repression in the Islamic republic. And that was before the Talibanization of Afghanistan, and of much of Pakistan, too. Let me try to summarize and update the situation like this: Here is a society where rape is not a crime. If the most elemental of human instincts becomes warped in this bizarre manner, other morbid symptoms will disclose themselves as well. There’s absolutely no mystery to the “Why do they hate us?” Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike:Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,A timorous foe, and a suspicious friend …So well-bred Spaniels civilly delightIn mumbling of the game they dare not bite. I find, however, that I can’t quite share in the sense of jubilation. Well, what fucking sovereignty? SKETCHBOOK: HELL’S CAFETERIA “. . . This is well beyond humiliation.
Owen's Futility
I. Context & Subject Matter A recently deceased soldier is moved out into the sun in a desperate vain hope that the warmth of the sun will revive him. The futility of this act depicts the desperation of his comrades turning from grief to despairing rage. The two stanzas represent the different stages of grief: the first is denial of the death (the soldier is hopeful that the sun will stir life in his dead comrade), and the second stanza shows realisation, despair and anger (the soldier then questions the point of life and existence). In contrast to other Owen poems this poem deals with the death of an individual soldier - someone they knew. Owen brings his personal pain for losing one of his friends to a level of universal tragedy. Futility Move him into the sun - Gently its touch awoke him once, At home, whispering of fields unsown. Think how it wakes the seeds, - Woke, once, the clays of a cold star. Watch a Youtube presentations here: II. III. VI.
