Friday, September 12, 2014

Do Now: Yesterday, I asked you to research  ISIS or ISIL. What did you learn?
Quiz: Writing with Style - 10 minutes
Classwork: Popular Mechanics by Ray Bradbury

1. About the Author:
The basics:   American fantasy and horror author Ray Bradbury is best known for his novels Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles. Born August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, raised in California, self-educated,  died  on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91.
Philosophy of writing:  Raymond Carver enjoyed Minimalism. He also thought a short story should have a sense of "threat" or "menace." He said the following:
[There should be] a tension, a sense that something is imminent, that certain things are in relentless motion, or else, most often, there simply won't be a story. What creates tension in a piece of fiction is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it's also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things.
Personal Life:


2. Popular Mechanics

Reading Questions for “Popular Mechanics”

1.     What is the importance of the story’s title? Why do you think the author chose the title of a magazine for his short story?

2.     What is the importance of the narrator’s emphasis on the snow’s melting into dirty water in the first line of the story?

3.     Carver doesn’t use conventional punctuation when presenting dialogue—he skips quotation marks. What is the impact of this?

4.     What is the symbolic value of the flowerpot?

5.     Why does the woman take the picture of the baby off the bed and walk out of the room with it?

6.     When, and why, does the man decide that he wants the baby?

7.     The last sentence of Carver’s story is “In this manner, the issue was decided.” What do you think “the issue” refers to in the last sentence of the story? Why do you think Carver chose this curiously neutral term?

8.     The last sentence of the story is a passive sentence. (The issue “was decided” as opposed to someone deciding the issue.) Why is this significant?

9.     What themes do you see in this story?

Homework: Answer the above questions using evidence from the text to support your positions.