oxymoron67

We started with student evaluations. I normally do well on these though I have to admit that I don't think they show much of anything.

Anyway, from there, we watched the news broadcast. (I took their summaries and edited them together, adding some commercials made up by yours truly.) They were all laughing and uncomfortable watching themselves.

That's not unusual. We briefly discussed it: who did the best, what they found in their own performances that didn't work (several of them just didn't know what to do with their hands).

Then we discussed the next reading: The Gettysburg Address.

Oh.. a student who stopped attending three weeks ago popped up. He's promising to get all the work he owes me. I doubt it. And "always an hour late" guy was ON TIME. For the first time. Ever. Keep in mind that this is the tenth week of class.

Finally, we discussed -ed and -s endings. The rules for pronunciation of these morphological markers are EXTREMELY regular (to the point where I can't think of exceptions*) so it's a nice break from the heavy duty technical stuff like stress and rhythm.

Then we briefly discussed the final, which is in four weeks. Basically, it;s on everything since the midterm. We promised to have a more detailed review later.

By the time we were done with all of this, it was time to go.

All in all, a decent, fast-paced class.

*This doesn't mean that there AREN'T exceptions, of course.

The Fall of the House of Walworth: A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America by Geoffrey O'Brien

( I love reading about people more screwed up than me. )

The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Sicily and Jerusalem by Nancy Goldstone

I enjoy biographies and memoirs. If you look at what I read here, that should be obvious. In particular, I enjoy reading about the "second rank" of history: the people who were well-known in their lifetimes but whose fame/notoriety has since faded or the also-rans... the folks that could have been big, but weren't.

Joanna I is in the first category.

Her great-grandfather was Charles of Anjou, the younger brother of St Louis IX, King of France. Charles married the heiress of the county of Provence and bought the kingdom of Naples from the papacy.

Through her great-grandfather, Joanna was a descendant of the redoubtable Blanche of Castile and through her, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Both of those women were among the strongest people of their ages, and Joanna followed suit.

Joanna's grandfather, Robert the Wise, was actually the third son of Charles of Anjou. The first died young, leaving a small boy and the second went into the priesthood. Charles, scared that having a minor on the throne would lead to an invasion, put his grandson on the throne of Hungary, naming Robert his heir.

If I may compare royal families, the main problem with the Tudors is that they didn't have enough sons. Charles of Anjou had seven? eight? sons. Providing for all of them led to ugly family politics and constantly shifting alliances.

Before Joanna took the throne, the king of Hungary pressed his claim to the throne of Naples. This was solved by marrying his younger son, Andrew, to Joanna while they were both about twelve.

Several years (and after producing an heir) later,Andrew was strangled. Joanna was accused and was exiled to Provence for a short while. She appealed to the pope and was returned to her throne.

This is just the beginning of her story:of tremendous ups and downs, three more marriages, expansion and contraction of her domains and eventually her downfall. As the ruler of the strongest kingdom in Italy, Joanna wielded quite a bit of power. Yet, she was excommunicated before her death and, therefore, could not be interred in consecrated ground. She is buried in a dry well outside of a convent.

All of this happened in a much bigger European context, with the papacy in exile in Avignon, the Hundred Years' War, the Reconquista in Spain and the rise of Ottoman Turks.

It's an interesting read. Considering that anytime you discuss royalty, you're talking complex family and power relationships, it's as straightforward as it can be. The book is detailed enough, but not too bogged down in detail.

Originally posted by mountain_hiker at Colbert

( Rhythm! Grammar! Shakespeare! Videotaping! )

Originally posted by mountain_hiker at Obama

Midnight in Peking by Paul French

In 1937, China was a hot mess. There was a simmering Civil War between Chaing Kai-Shek and his Nationalists and Mao Zedong and his Communists. Japan had invaded Manchuria and set up a puppet kingdom, Manchukuo, there. They were also threatening a full-on invasion of China.

Beijing, so close to Manchuria, was abandoned as the capital, which was moved south.

The international community in Beijing lived in its own area, where there was kind of a desperate, forced decadence. They knew bad things were coming, so many partied like there was no tomorrow.

Pamela Werner, daughter of a retired British official who settled in Beijing, disappeared one night and was found the next day, murdered and her body mutilated.

This book relates how first Chinese and British officials tried to solve the crime, then, when they failed, how Pamela's father took up her case, through the Japanese invasion and occupation of the city.

With its twists and turns and its excursions into 1930's Peking's criminal underbelly and the British officials who wanted the whole thing hushes up, the book frequently reads like it would be a great Film Noir.

A fascinating read.

It was GREAT! I loved it!

I was kind of worried going in: no one (to my knowledge) has ever tried building a movie franchise quite this way before and so many things could go wrong.

Also, I was less than thrilled with Joss Whedon's previous two forays into the superhero genre. I thought Dr. Horrible fell apart in the last five or ten minutes, as if Whedon just ran out of story or stopped caring or something. His run on Astonishing X-Men was... okay. The stories dragged out a little too long for my taste. Most of them felt like four-issue long stories stretched out for six issues.

So, I was concerned.

But The Avengers ROCKED. The characterizations were spot on; the movie moved at a good pace. It all worked. I will be seeing it again, though some weeknight this week probably.

The Sisters who would be Queen by Leanda de Lisle
( The aftermath of Henry VIII )

Mistress of the Vatican by Eleanor Herman
( Renaissance era Italy! Popes! Intrigue! The Plague! )