Junot Diaz writes “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”, a novel (fiction) that got lots of attention and popularity since 2007, when it is announced as one of the best books of that year according to the New York Times “ # 1 Fiction Book of the Year.”. Diaz views, in this novel, a different life phase of a young Dominican man; how different! In the way, if I am allowed to say, what we know about a typical Dominican man character, at least most of us believe so….The character of Oscar Wao that his whole life is going around the “ fuku” curse circle. There are too many ways to describe the novel and its character. Briefly, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” “…..is a book about love, about passion, about a character that would do anything [stupidly] to pursue love.” (Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert). 

Wednesday's (5/9) Homework: Reposting this from email here as a reminder

Reading questions: You will be put into groups and each group will present their thoughts on the following. 1) What do you think Orwell's elephant represents? 2) How does Orwell's essay contradict popular culture's view of weapons? 3) What does this say those who feel weapons are necessary in certain situations? What can be said about those situations? 4) Respond to Orwell's statement about masks. -- Other assignments: Come to class ready to write a body paragraph. Bring at least 2 database sources and at least 5 keywords you used to find those sources in the database. In class, we will work to incorporate the relevant segment of one of those sources into a body paragraph.

TIps for Conclusions

Here's a great site over at Harvard on writing conclusions. It's a little over a page, but there's much to learn from reading through it. In case you don't get through it (or don't want to), you might want to bookmark it just the same. Regardless of what you do with it, I'm going to go over a few of these points in class tomorrow and give some examples on how to each tactic might be approached.

Junot Diaz

I went to see Junot Diaz yesterday and let me tell you guys something, he is no ordinary author who bores you with their advance vocabulary. He knew how to grab the audience attention which surprised me because I thought he was just going to talk nonstop about writing or himself. But he proved me wrong.
Junot came on stage and spoke a bit and then read one his short stories called, Alma. Then he went to questions and answer discussion. Finally, he read a part from The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Who ever didn't go, you missed out. His words were inspiring.
 -Melissa R.
[he signed my book : ) ]

New Junot Diaz story up at the New Yorker

Diaz's new short story is called "Miss Lora." You can find it here (It's free. For now...).

Essay 4, Due 4/23

In a well-developed essay, choose a person you admire and compare them with Oscar Wao. This admired person can be real or fictitious. In other words, you may compare Wao to any superhero, villain, cartoon or movie character (this includes anime, graphic novels, role-playing and/or videos games, etc). Be sure to first identify and isolate specific points of comparison that you will use to illustrate how each is similar or different, and then use these points as the basis of your comparison.

Please use a minimum of 4 sources (less than four will receive a grade of No Credit) These sources must be integrated throughout your essay in MLA in-text citations and gathered in a correctly formatted MLA Works Cited page.

Due Date: Monday, April 23.

Should college be for everyone?

Some tough questions, here.

[Source: http://www.theysayiblog.com/]

The above link discusses a NYTimes article, here.