All About Me Letter Essay Example for Free

All About Me Letter Essay My favorite sports are football and basketball. I play the recorder. I participated in football for three years and basket ball for one year. I played the recorder for one year in the fourth grade and earned all the belts for each skill level. On the other hand I don’t like to read what so ever, but I’m going to improve my reading this year. I don’t like to read because I fall asleep as soon as I begin to read books. The books that I like are adventurous and action-packed books because they interest me so I won’t fall asleep. These kinds of books stimulate my imagination and help me visualize the story. In order to keep me interested in reading I would like to have audio or graphics books. I did great academically last year as I made A’s and B’s. My academic goals this year are to make straight A’s and to receive scores above 900 on the CRCT. Considering that I do not like to read, it’s hard for me to brainstorm ideas and write an essay. Therefore, I do not think of myself as a good writer, as I prefer digital images to awaken my creativity. The few times that I must write, I like to write narratives about my family vacations in new places. Narratives allow me to express my emotions. Unfortunately, brainstorming ideas causes me to have headaches that turn me off from writing. I hope to learn how to overcome this obstacle and improve my writing skills. In conclusion, you can help me achieve my academic goals by suggesting some action-packed or adventurous book titles for me to enjoy reading. I learn best by following examples and listening to instructions. The activities you can help me with are reading and sentence-structure in writing assignments. I welcome the opportunity to learn from your expertise. Sincerely, Phillip Harrington Phillip Harrington

Three Cheers for Madness :: Nabokov Heller Montaigne Essays

Three Cheers for Madness Three of Psychology’s Least Wanted sit next to my desk and beckon me closer: A graying Humbert licks the corner of my eye and throws me a pitifully seductive glance; an anxiety-ridden Yossarian repeats over and over that the whole world is trying to kill him, and an almost robotic Montaigne sits as a kind of mediating force between the others, his head snapping back and forth from Humbert to Yossarian while his hands open and close books so quickly one might imagine his purpose is only to get a whiff of each cover’s staling odor. I need no special degree to deem them all nutcases. What I know of Humbert and Yossarian comes by way of Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Heller, respectively, as they are the creators, surveyors, and closest contacts of the deceivingly fictional characters. Brilliant in their ability to characterize—to sculpt flat words into the kind of real live, dynamic human beings one might well share a cab with—Nabokov and Heller steal a rousing glimpse into the minds of two intensely confusing personalities and succeed in making us forget that the characters are only the brainchildren of the writers, and not the writers themselves. Oddball Michel de Montaigne seems to look on from afar, speculating in an essay entitled â€Å"On Books† about his impatience for a number of acclaimed writers and their works, while confessing his â€Å"particular curiosity to know the mind and natural opinions of [writers].† Knowing well that Nabokov is not the sex offender he appears to have studied so intimately, and that Heller is not the soldier living amidst the confusion he so thoroughly seems to understand, Montaigne would understand that â€Å"from the display of their writings that they make on the world-stage, we may indeed judge their talents, but not their character or themselves† (167). But this is more than I can handle, as my conceptions of these characters as well as the writers who shaped them seem altogether disturbing. While writing out their prescriptions for shock therapy (the paranoid soldier’s frustratingly ambiguous remarks have earned him a bit more of it than the others), Humbert nudges forward his notebook of scattered words and doodles—a notebook containing his deepest thoughts about Dolores Haze (or ‘Lolita’), the twelve-year old girl with whom he has been completely infatuated his entire middle-aged life. I expect to run my eyes over vile passages—perverse diagrams, even—reflecting his disconcertingly base attraction to the pre-teen.

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky is a short story by Stephen Crane which was written in the late 1890s. The plot is simple, the story brief, and the characters complex. Crane articulately explores the slow disappearance of the American Frontier. The American West, in legend and in truth, played an essential role in chiseling the character of the American spirit and nationalism.The American West created the first truly free man. The European Frontier was nothing more than people recreating â€Å"Old World values and deferring to authority†. (Burns 37) The frontier in America had no law, no authority, and men lived by their wits.America thinks of it’s frontier as being within the country not at the edge. There is no line which separates the frontier from settled land. America’s frontier was transient and terrestrial. As Crane explores in â€Å"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky†, the American West could not stay â€Å"wild† forever. As the West became a place where adventurous individuals wanted to be, it became a place of less adventure – modernized by the East. While the short story can have many of the major characteristics of a traditional western, the plot, environment, and the narration are strikingly different.Crane, in â€Å"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky†employs the setting, character development, names and narration to represent a time of change in the â€Å"West†. The plot events center around the Yellow Sky's The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky† is a short story by Stephen Crane which was written in the late 1890s. The plot is simple, the story brief, and the characters complex. Crane articulately explores the slow disappearance of the American Frontier. The American West, in legend and in truth, played an essential role in chiseling the character of the American spirit and nationalism.The American West created the first truly free man. The European Frontier was nothing more than people recreating â€Å" Old World values and deferring to authority†. (Burns 37) The frontier in America had no law, no authority, and men lived by their wits. America thinks of it’s frontier as being within the country not at the edge. There is no line which separates the frontier from settled land. America’s frontier was transient and terrestrial. As Crane explores in â€Å"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky†, the American West could not stay â€Å"wild† forever.As the West became a place where adventurous individuals wanted to be, it became a place of less adventure – modernized by the East. While the short story can have many of the major characteristics of a traditional western, the plot, environment, and the narration are strikingly different. Crane, in â€Å"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky†employs the setting, character development, names and narration to represent a time of change in the â€Å"West†. The plot events center around the Yellow Sky's The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky† is a short story by Stephen Crane which was written in the late 1890s.The plot is simple, the story brief, and the characters complex. Crane articulately explores the slow disappearance of the American Frontier. The American West, in legend and in truth, played an essential role in chiseling the character of the American spirit and nationalism. The American West created the first truly free man. The European Frontier was nothing more than people recreating â€Å"Old World values and deferring to authority†. (Burns 37) The frontier in America had no law, no authority, and men lived by their wits.America thinks of it’s frontier as being within the country not at the edge. There is no line which separates the frontier from settled land. America’s frontier was transient and terrestrial. As Crane explores in â€Å"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky†, the American West could not stay â€Å"wild† forever. As the West became a p lace where adventurous individuals wanted to be, it became a place of less adventure – modernized by the East. While the short story can have many of the major characteristics of a traditional western, the plot, environment, and the narration are strikingly different.Crane, in â€Å"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky†employs the setting, character development, names and narration to represent a time of change in the â€Å"West†. The plot events center around the Yellow Sky's became a place of less adventure – modernized by the East. While the short story can have many of the major characteristics of a traditional western, the plot, environment, and the narration are strikingly different. Crane, in â€Å"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky†employs the setting, character development, names and narration to represent a time of change in the â€Å"West†. The plot events center around the Yellow Sky's town Marshal, Jack Potter.He is a quiet man in his early fifties who has been a lawman for several years. He travels to San Antonio, unbeknown to his fellow citizens to get married to woman his own age. In his absence the town drunk, Scratchy Wilson, show up in town looking for a fight and when the Marshall is no where to be found, he takes his boredom out on the town. The general impression of Wilson is that he is not necessary a threat but more of a pest, who is usually handled by Marshall Potter (Burns 36). The Marshall and his new wife travel home, by train, and when they arrive in Yellow Sky they are unexpectedly met by Wilson.Wilson immediately demands a duel and waits for Marshall Potter to draw his weapon. To Wilson's surprise, Potter has no weapon and insists that his â€Å"games† must cease. An often overlooked aspect of Crane's writing his unique uses of names and labels as applied in his stories. â€Å"The Brides Comes to Yellow Sky† is no home, by train, and when they arrive in Yellow Sky they are unexpectedly met by Wilson. Wilson immediately demands a duel and waits for Marshall Potter to draw his weapon. To Wilson's surprise, Potter has no weapon and insists that his â€Å"games† must cease.An often overlooked aspect of Crane's writing his unique uses of names and labels as applied in his stories. â€Å"The Brides Comes to Yellow Sky† is no exception. A close examination of the names in this short story reveal humor, symbolism, and commentary on the destruction of the American Frontier. While Crane utilizes characters names to perpetuate his representation of the easternization of the West, it is also typical of Crane's parody on the â€Å"western†. The Marshall is given the name of Jack Potter which comparatively different from the real life legendary Marshals of the West – Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill (Tietz 94).Crane's choses this name to make a statement about the kind of man Jack Potter is. He is not unique or charismatic as the Marshals of years past, whos e personality was just as wild and unforgiving as the Frontier once was. Jack Potter is a generic name, like his new bride who was never given a name. The name Potter evokes the idea of a Potter's Field, where the nameless and poor are buried. Yet, Crane, in writing this parody, describes Potter as â€Å"a man known, liked, and feared in his corner, a prominent person† (92).Marshal Jack Potter's foil, Scratchy Wilson, is also equipped with a name which parody's the western as well as comments on the migration of the eastern culture into the west. Scratchy is seen wearing red, with boots, red face â€Å"flamed in a rage begot of whisky† (94). Crane has designed the Scratchy character to appear as the devil. Satan, in old texts, are often referred to as Scratch (Tietz 90). However, Crane chooses not to call him Scratch but Scratchy. This simple name change shifts the evil outlaw to a kid-like character.

A Biography of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston in 1932, daughter of a German immigrant biology professor, an authority on bees, and his Austrian-American wife. At 8, bio-picSylvia suffered her first great loss: her father died suddenly after surgery for complications of undiagnosed diabetes, and she attained her first literary recognition: a poem published in The Boston Herald. She grew up in Wellesley, in an extremely close relationship with her widowed mother Aurelia. She sent out many poems and stories which were rejected before she began to see them published in national periodicals (Seventeen, The Christian Science Monitor) in 1950. Plath’s Education Plath was a star student and an ambitious apprentice writer. She attended Smith College on scholarship and won a guest editorship at Mademoiselle in New York City in the summer of 1953. Later that summer, having learned that she had not been admitted to the Harvard summer writing program for which she’d applied, Sylvia attempted suicide and was treated for depression at McLean Hospital. She returned to Smith the next spring, wrote her honors thesis on the double in Dostoevsky (â€Å"The Magic Mirror†), and graduated summa cum laude in 1955, with a Fulbright scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge. Plath’s Marriage to Ted Hughes The meeting between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is legendary, recreated in the biopic  Sylvia. Sylvia had read St. Botolph’s Review, was impressed by Hughes’ poems and went to the publication party determined to meet him. She recited his poems to him, it is said they danced, drank and kissed and she bit him on the cheek until he bled, and they were married within a few months, on Bloomsday 1956. When she completed her studies in 1957, Plath was offered a teaching position back at Smith and the couple returned to America. But after a year, she left academia and she and Ted devoted their life together to writing. Plath and Hughes in England In December 1959, Ted and pregnant Sylvia sailed back to England; Ted wanted his child to be born in his home country. They settled in London, Frieda was born in April 1960, and Sylvia’s first collection, The Colossus, was published in October. In 1961, she suffered a miscarriage and other health troubles, was given a â€Å"first look† contract by The New Yorker and began work on her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. When the couple moved to Court Green manor house in Devon, they let their London flat to a poet and his wife, David and Assia Wevill, fatefully: it was Ted’s affair with Assia that broke up their marriage. Plath’s Suicide Sylvia’s second child, Nicholas, was born in January 1962. It was during that year that she found her authentic poetic voice, writing the intense and crystalline poems later published in Ariel, even while managing the household and taking care of her two children essentially alone. In the fall she and Hughes separated, in December she moved back to London, to a flat where Yeats had once lived, and The Bell Jar was published under a pseudonym in January 1963. It was an extraordinarily cold winter and the children were sick. Sylvia left them in a separate aired-out room and gassed herself to death on February 11, 1963. The Plath Mystique After Death Sylvia Plath was only 30 years old when she committed suicide, and since her death, she has been elevated to the status of feminist icon and pioneer woman poet. Serious critics may quibble with the fan cult that has arisen around Plath, but her poetry is undeniably beautiful and powerful, and it is generally recognized as the most influential American work of the 20th century—in 1982, she became the first poet to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for her Collected Poems. Books and Recordings by Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar (unabridged audio CD of the novel read by Maggie Gyllenhaal, Caedmon/HarperAudio, 2006)Ariel, The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (with foreword by her daughter Frieda Hughes, HarperCollins, 2004; paperback, 2005)The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950 - 1962 (transcripts from the original manuscripts at Smith College, edited by Karen V. Kukil, Anchor Books, 2000)The Voice of the Poet: Sylvia Plath (audio cassette with book, Side A recorded with Ted Hughes in 1958, Side B recorded in 1962, just 3 months before her death, Random House Audio, 1999)Plath: Poems (selected by Diane Middlebrook, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 1998)The Journals of Sylvia Plath (abridged and edited by Ted Hughes, The Dial Press, 1982; paperback Anchor Books, 1998)Collected Poems (edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Ted Hughes, Harper Perennial, 1981)Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (short stories, prose and diary excerpts, Harper Row, 1979; paperback HarperCollins, 1980; Harper Perennial, 2000)Letters Home (correspondence, 1950 - 1963, edited by Aurelia Schober Plath, HarperCollins, 1978; paperback Harper Perennial, 1992)Crossing the Water: Transitional Poems (first American edition, Harper Row, 1971; paperback HarperCollins, 1980)The Bell Jar (loosely autobiographical novel, first American edition with drawings by Sylvia Plath, Harper Row, 1971; paperback HarperCollins, 2005)Ariel (poems, first American edition with an introduction by Robert Lowell, Harper Row, 1966; paperback HarperCollins, 1975, 1999)The Colossus and Other Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1962; paperback Random House 1968, 1998)