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Monday, December 1, 2014

1B: James Joyce (1882-1941)




Want to read a biographical sketch of James Joyce? Take a look at the Joyce biography page at The Brazen Head: A James Joyce Public House, the self-proclaimed best Joyce page on the web, and www.biography.com. The latter has a good written overview and video of Joyce's life. There is also the video, below, about Joyce that you might find of interest; however, if you are in the mood for watching a video, try the www.biography.com first; you might find it a little--a lot!-- more livelier.  I did.



From The New York Times, July 6, 1961, Ernest Hemingway's admiration of James Joyce is highlighted: "Hemingway was quick to see the merit in the work of James Joyce. . . . In a letter to Sherwood Anderson dated March 9, 1922, Hemingway wrote:

"'Joyce has written a most goddam wonderful book (Ulysses) * * *. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving, but you can find the whole Celtic crew of them in Michaud,' (then a moderately expensive Paris eating place).


"Nevertheless, on several occasions Hemingway contributed to the funds raised to aid Joyce, with whom he did a considerable amount of stout drinking in Paris. When Joyce's Ulysses was pirated in the United States, Hemingway was one of the organizers of the protest which bore the names of many of the most distinguished figures in world literature."





James Joyce: "A small, thin unathletic man with very bad eyes," the narrator
 of the above video says, so Hemingway stood between Joyce and a punch.



Joyce is known for four works of fiction, beginning with the collection of short stories Dubliners (Joyce attempted to publish in 1905; finally published in 1914), which contains 15 stories, including "Araby." Many of the stories have been staged in the theatre and made into films.  John Huston directed "The Dead" in 1987, based on the last story in the collection.  You can see a trailer of the film, or watch the complete film at Veoh. Here is an excerpt from The Dead's stage production from 2000.

News about Joyce's Dubliners, from "Joyce's Town"The New York Times: "In 1905, James Joyce wrote to the publisher Grant Richards: 'I do not think that any writer has yet presented Dublin to the world. It has been a capital of Europe for thousands of years, it is supposed to be the second city of the British Empire, and it is nearly three times as big as Venice.'

"But Joyce’s view of the city in Dubliners, his landmark collection of stories, had less grandeur than that pitch. The Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell recently wrote on Slate that Dublin in the book 'is a claustrophobic place, a place of entrapment and congenital disappointment, filled with frustrated people living thwarted lives. It is in every sense a small city.'

"On Tuesday, Penguin Classics is publishing a centennial edition of the book with a new foreword by Colum McCann, who writes that Dubliners, published nearly a decade after Joyce wrote the stories in it, 'was ripped up, burned, bowdlerized, rejected, resurrected, lost, dismissed, forgotten, thrown away, flogged, flayed and eventually celebrated.' A century later, it’s all celebration. In June, the fledgling Irish publisher Tramp Press will issue Dubliners 100, in which contemporary writers reimagine the collection’s 15 stories. Contributors include Patrick McCabe, Paul Murray, Eimear McBride and, perhaps bravest of all, Peter Murphy, who takes on 'The Dead,' considered by some the best story ever written." (Source: The New York Times, "Joyce's Town," by John Williams, May 23, 2014)


Joyce also wrote three novels: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939). You can read Joyce's Ulysses here. 

Ulysses tells the story of Leopold Bloom as he travels around Dublin one June 16, 1904, known as Bloomsday, and fans of the novel celebrate it with public readings of its more than 700 pages. Influenced by Homer's poem The Odyssey, Joyce also pays homage to numerous literary styles.  It was published to much acclaim for its sophisticated stylistic achievement and daring experimental features, including the so-called ""stream of consciousness," which takes the reader inside the mind of its characters. It has also attracted much controversy from the days of its publication when it was serialized in a literary magazine.  Frequently banned and considered obscene for its depiction of a character masturbating the U.S. Post Office burned copies of it during the 1920s upon its arrival in the U.S.

Finnegans Wake, a novel that Joyce worked on from 1922 until its publication in 1939, is far more experimental. Read it here.






Marilyn Monroe, unlike many dedicated readers, read to the end of Ulysses, we are to believe.


Here's a summary of Ulysses, with a particular focus on Molly Bloom, wife of the protagonist Leopold Bloom, and the book's legal and moralistic reception.  Roger Marsh explains  that "[T]he final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses is one of the most famous – some would say notorious – pieces of writing in 20th-century literature. It’s famous because, although very long, it’s written entirely without punctuation, as a so called ‘stream of consciousness’. It’s notorious because it was this chapter, principally, that got the book banned for 12 years following its first publication.

"In 1922, the arbiters of taste and decency in the English speaking world were not yet ready for explicit and intimate discussion of sex, especially from the mouth of a woman (even if they were put there by a male author). Nowadays, such explicit material is less remarkable and even the lack of punctuation seems less challenging in a world of text-speak. Even so, it’s hard to read, because Molly’s sleepy interior monologue drifts realistically from topic to topic, introducing thoughts and fragments of thoughts without warning, as they occur in real life. . . . 

"Molly, meanwhile, remains at home, mostly in bed. The highlight of her day, as [her husband Leopold] Bloom well knows, is the arrival at 4pm of her most recent lover, Blazes Boylan. Boylan is a concert impresario who has organised a concert tour for Molly, and he has arranged to come over to her house and ‘go through the programme’ with her. Bloom knows full well what this means, and so, it seems, does the whole of Dublin. More than one of Bloom’s associates, when he informs them of the impending tour, asks him knowingly ‘who’s getting it up?’

"Normal marital relations between Leopold and Molly have, we learn, been non-existent for some years, ever since the death of their young son Rudi, which tore them apart. Molly, however, is a passionate, sexual woman in her prime, and the list of her lovers, all known to her husband, is long. Thus when Bloom climbs the stairs and prepares for bed in the early hours of 17 June, he takes up his usual position, his head at the foot of the double bed, muttering vaguely about eggs.

"At this point begins the long interior monologue – 22,000 words – which closes the novel. Bloom’s day is done, but Molly – having spent the day in bed, one way or another, is not finding sleep easy. Her mind races, first taking up the half-heard comment about eggs, and then quickly moving on to reminiscences of the distant and recent past. She recalls her husband’s pathetic attempts at infidelity, and her own rather more successful ones – these in very graphic detail. She assumes that Bloom ‘came somewhere’ – he did, but not in the way she imagines – and speculates about his latest liaisons. Often her mind drifts back to Gibraltar, where she lived as a girl, and to her father and other characters of those days. From time to time the songs she is to perform on the concert tour come into her head. In particular, the popular ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ pre-occupies her – how to enunciate certain words, and the protracted note on the word ‘so-o-o-ong’, which seems to be echoed by passing trains: ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling…’. Unable to move much in bed for fear of waking her husband, she also wrestles with bodily discomforts (wind, the onset of her period) and eventually finds it necessary to slip out and use the chamber pot beside the bed.

"Finally, towards dawn, she begins to succumb to sleep. Romantically, her final thoughts are of the day that she agreed to marry Bloom (‘well as well him as another’) lying in the grass up on Howth Head above Dublin Bay, and she remembers how she got him to propose to her. There is an inevitability about her answer, for throughout the soliloquy Molly has punctuated her stream of consciousness with the word ‘yes’, thrown in almost as a marker for a new topic or a change of mood. As the chapter reaches its closing lines, the appearance of the word ‘yes’ increases in regularity, until the final line reads: ‘he could feel my breast all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.’ And here Joyce writes the chapter’s only full stop."



Joyce visiting with American expatriate Sylvia Beach,
 proprietor of the celebrated bookstore Shakespeare & Co.,
 in Paris, circa 1922. Beech was a champion of Joyce's Ulysses.

Good Students, Good Colleges


The New York Times, November 29, 2014

For Accomplished Students, Reaching a Good College Isn’t as Hard as It Seems

by Kevin Carey
Earlier this year, Harvard announced that it had accepted 5.9 percent of the nearly 35,000 students who applied for admission to the class of 2018. The next day, Stanford announced an even more exacting 5.07 percent admission rate, the lowest in the university’s history.
Statistics like these have come to dominate the national narrative of elite college admissions, with each new batch of ever-more-minuscule success rates fueling a collective sense that getting into a good college has become a brutal, “Hunger Games"-style tournament that only the fittest survive.
That story is wrong. For well-qualified students, getting into a good college isn’t difficult. It probably isn’t that much harder than it was generations ago. The fact that everyone believes otherwise shows how reliance on a single set of data — in this case, institutional admission rates — can create a false sense of what’s really going on.
To start, it’s worth noting that the headline-inducing single-digit rates reported by Harvard and Stanford are unusual even for elite institutions. Washington University in St. Louis, ranked 14th nationally by U.S. News & World Report, admitted 17 percent of applicants this year. Notre Dame admitted 21 percent, Wellesley 28 percent, and the University of Michigan 32 percent. Still, those numbers are low and have been declining in each case.

Photo

CreditHisashi Okawa

They don’t, however, represent the true odds of a well-qualified student’s being admitted to a top school. That’s because anyone can apply to college, well qualified or otherwise. Selective colleges immediately toss the long shots and dreamers from the admissions pile in order to concentrate on students with a legitimate shot at getting in. But they don’t parse their admissions statistics that way, in part because it’s in their best interests to seem as selective as possible. Admission rates are among the most closely watched barometers of institutional prestige. The fact that Stanford’s rate beat Harvard’s for the last two years has been cited as prime evidence that Palo Alto may be eclipsing Cambridge in higher-education glory.
Institutional admission rates also don’t account for the number of applications submitted per student. Enabled by technology that makes it easier to copy and send electronic documents and driven by the competitive anxiety that plummeting admission rates produce, top students have beensending out more applications. In May, for example, a Long Island high school senior named Kwasi Enin was briefly famous for having applied to, and been accepted by, all eight Ivy League schools.
But while the best students are sending out more applications for the same number of slots at elite colleges, the slots themselves aren’t becoming more scarce and the number of students competing with one another isn’t growing. In essence, the growth in applications per student creates a vicious cycle, causing admission rates at the best schools to artificially decline, students to become more anxious, and the number of applications per student to grow even more.
Finally, the most important priority for most highly qualified students isn’t getting into a particular elite school. It’s getting into at least one, because elite schools are generally pretty similar in their eliteness, and you can attend only one at a time.
That’s why some students are applying to 20 or more schools: to increase their odds of making a single match. The most important elite college admissions statistic, then, is not the percentage of applications top schools accept. It’s the percentage of top students who are admitted to at least one top school. And that number isn’t 5 percent or 20 percent or even 50 percent. It’s 80 percent. It turns out that four out of five well-qualified students who apply to elite schools are accepted by at least one.
These numbers come courtesy of Parchment.com, a website that helps students submit college transcripts electronically and navigate the admissions world. Services like Parchment and the Common Application are among the reasons it has become easier for students to submit more applications and drive down institutional admission rates. This year, 800,000 students used Parchment to send more than 1.6 million transcripts.
Parchment began by identifying a subset of students with combined SAT scores (or an ACT equivalent) of at least 1300. Then it identified high-scoring students who had applied to at least one of the 113 schools identified by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges as the most selective. The average overall admission rate among those schools was about 32 percent. Yet 51 percent of the applications submitted by top Parchment students to the same colleges were accepted. Why? Because top schools receive a substantial number of applications from underqualified students who are almost always summarily rejected. Once the wheat and chaff are separated, the success rate for the wheat looks much better.
And the real odds of success were even higher than 51 percent. The top students in the Parchment database applied to 2.6 elite colleges, on average. Flip a coin twice and, according to probability theory, you’ll get heads at least once 75 percent of the time. Sure enough, 80 percent of top students were accepted to at least one elite school.
Since there has never been a time when 100 percent of well-qualified students were successful in the college admissions market, the truism that elite colleges are far more difficult to crack than in years gone by can’t be correct: 80 percent is too close, mathematically, to nearly everyone.
This doesn’t mean that aspiring students can drop out of the college admissions rat race entirely. There’s a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses aspect to sending out applications. The Parchment data suggest that students who apply to many schools are more likely to strike gold than those who apply to only one or two, which makes sense given the idiosyncrasy of the admissions process.
But this is mostly a matter of optimizing odds that are very good to begin with. So the next time you read about terrifyingly low college admission rates, don’t panic: If you work hard and get good grades and test scores, there is very likely a place in the best schools for you.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

College Degree: Good News, Bad News




Robert Reich: College gets you nowhere

[The former secretary of labor examines why a degree no longer guarantees a well-playing job]

This is the time of year when high school seniors apply to college, and when I get lots of mail about whether college is worth the cost.
The answer is unequivocally yes, but with one big qualification. I’ll come to the qualification in a moment but first the financial case for why it’s worth going to college.
Put simply, people with college degrees continue to earn far more than people without them. And that college “premium” keeps rising.
Last year, Americans with four-year college degrees earned on average 98 percent more per hour than people without college degrees.
In the early 1980s, graduates earned 64 percent more.
So even though college costs are rising, the financial return to a college degree compared to not having one is rising even faster.
But here’s the qualification, and it’s a big one.

Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including his latest best-seller, “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future;” “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; and his newest, an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His new movie "Inequality for All" is in Theaters. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org.

Saturday, November 22, 2014

John F. Kennedy: His Assassination, November 22, 1963



In a brief discussion with students in one of my classes last week, I learned that many could not place the date of John Kennedy's assassination. On the anniversary of his assassination here's a film that can serve as a review, or an introduction to it:





This biography of John F. Kennedy is taken from the official White House government website.  You can also find links to biographies of all 44 presidents at this page.  The History Channel has report on the day of the assassination. CBS presents photographs of the day.


On November 22, 1963, when he was hardly past his first thousand days in office, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by an assassin's bullets as his motorcade wound through Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was the youngest man elected President; he was the youngest to die.

Of Irish descent, [Kennedy] was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on May 29, 1917. Graduating from Harvard in 1940, he entered the Navy. In 1943, when his PT boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer, Kennedy, despite grave injuries, led the survivors through perilous waters to safety.
Back from the war, he became a Democratic Congressman from the Boston area, advancing in 1953 to the Senate. He married Jacqueline Bouvier on September 12, 1953. In 1955, while recuperating from a back operation, he wrote Profiles in Courage, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history.
In 1956 Kennedy almost gained the Democratic nomination for Vice President, and four years later was a first-ballot nominee for President. Millions watched his television debates with the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon. Winning by a narrow margin in the popular vote, Kennedy became the first Roman Catholic President.
His Inaugural Address offered the memorable injunction: "Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country." As President, he set out to redeem his campaign pledge to get America moving again. His economic programs launched the country on its longest sustained expansion since World War II; before his death, he laid plans for a massive assault on persisting pockets of privation and poverty.
Responding to ever more urgent demands, he took vigorous action in the cause of equal rights, calling for new civil rights legislation. His vision of America extended to the quality of the national culture and the central role of the arts in a vital society.
He wished America to resume its old mission as the first nation dedicated to the revolution of human rights. With the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps, he brought American idealism to the aid of developing nations. But the hard reality of the Communist challenge remained.
Shortly after his inauguration, Kennedy permitted a band of Cuban exiles, already armed and trained, to invade their homeland. The attempt to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro was a failure. Soon thereafter, the Soviet Union renewed its campaign against West Berlin. Kennedy replied by reinforcing the Berlin garrison and increasing the Nation's military strength, including new efforts in outer space. Confronted by this reaction, Moscow, after the erection of the Berlin Wall, relaxed its pressure in central Europe.
Instead, the Russians now sought to install nuclear missiles in Cuba. When this was discovered by air reconnaissance in October 1962, Kennedy imposed a quarantine on all offensive weapons bound for Cuba. While the world trembled on the brink of nuclear war, the Russians backed down and agreed to take the missiles away. The American response to the Cuban crisis evidently persuaded Moscow of the futility of nuclear blackmail.
Kennedy now contended that both sides had a vital interest in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and slowing the arms race--a contention which led to the test ban treaty of 1963. The months after the Cuban crisis showed significant progress toward his goal of "a world of law and free choice, banishing the world of war and coercion." His administration thus saw the beginning of new hope for both the equal rights of Americans and the peace of the world.
The Presidential biographies on WhiteHouse.gov are from “The Presidents of the United States of America,” by Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey. Copyright 2006 by the White House Historical Association.
This collage remembers the four major
political assassinations in the United States during the 1960s. 

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

PCC THEATRE IN LONDON 
Spring Break: March 7-15, 2015


Join Professors Manny Perea and Brian Adler for an exciting week of theatre and sightseeing in London.
You’ll enjoy: 
Four plays
Round-trip flight on Virgin Atlantic
Round-trip airport transportation in London
7 nights at the 4-star Holiday Inn Bloomsbury
Daily Continental Breakfast
Day trip to the historic town of Bath
A tour of the National Theatre in London
Seven-day transportation pass for London tube/bus
And free time to explore London and its environs at your own pace 

Imagine... the British Museum, the British Library, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, the Tate Gallery, the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Covent Garden, Harrods, pubs, and fabulous food and shopping!

ALL THIS FOR $3,380!

Accommodations based on double occupancy. Single supplement: $850
Price excludes PCC course fees. Deposit due: December 5, 2014

INFORMATION MEETINGS

Thursday, November 13: 12 noon in C304 and 6 p.m. in C163

Please spread the word. Tell your family and friends! Any and all can come on this trip.

To learn more, please contact Professor Perea (626-585-7496; email: mxperea@pasadena.edu) or Professor Adler (626-585-7643; email: bradler@pasadena.edu)



Monday, October 27, 2014

English 1A

Post English 1A class comments here.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Dunk!




Brandon Todd is one of the shortest men in the world capable of dunking a basketball.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

1A: CONOVER (1958--) & COYOTES


Coyotes was published in 1987


ABOUT TED CONOVER
CONOVER'S website: www.tedconover.com

CONOVER talk (March 2010 Presentation) with links to text and video clips @ Zocalo Public Square
[Note: if Zocalo link does not take you there, try search at Zocalo home page.]



This interview was conducted in 2011. Conover published Coyotes in 1987.


CONOVER continues to write.  Here are two other recent articles of his:


Conover wrote "A Snitch’s Dilemma," about Alex White for The New York Times Magazine, June 29, 2012.  If there was ever a "secrets, lies and spies" story, this is it. Here's the first paragraph:

"Kathryn Johnston was doing pretty well until the night the police showed up. Ever since her sister died, Johnston, 92, had lived alone in a rough part of Atlanta called the Bluff. A niece checked in often. One of the gifts she left was a pistol, so that her aunt might protect herself."

If you like, read the rest of Conover's story about Alex "the Snitch" White, a member of the Black Mafia Family, and "Behind the Cover Story: Ted Conover on the Murky World of the Snitch" for Conover's point-of-view about his article.

Conover also has a report on a slaughterhouse in Harper's, May 2013. 


From Harper's May 2013 issue
The Way of All Flesh
Undercover in an industrial slaughterhouse
By Ted Conover

Here's the first two paragraphs:

The cattle arrive in perforated silver trailers called cattle pots that let in wind and weather and vent out their hot breath and flatus. It’s hard to see inside a cattle pot. The drivers are in a hurry to unload and leave, and are always speeding by. (When I ask Lefty how meat gets bruised, he says, “You ever see how those guys drive?”) The trucks have come from feedlots, some nearby, some in western Nebraska, a few in Iowa. The plant slaughters about 5,100 cattle each day, and a standard double-decker cattle pot holds only about forty, so there’s a constant stream of trucks pulling in to disgorge, even before the line starts up a little after six a.m.

First the cattle are weighed. Then they are guided into narrow outdoor pens angled diagonally toward the entrance to the kill floor. A veterinarian arrives before our shift and begins to inspect them; she looks for open wounds, problems walking, signs of disease. When their time comes, the cattle will be urged by workers toward the curving ramp that leads up into the building. The ramp has a roof and no sharp turns. It was designed by the livestock expert Temple Grandin, and the curves and penumbral light are believed to soothe the animals in their final moments. But the soothing goes only so far.

The story continues at Harper's, but it only offers limited access to its magazine online, including the above Conover article. You may be able to find the full-text through EbscoHost, a database available through the PCC Shatford Library.



John Moore/Getty Images
A flag marks the spot where the remains of a person believed
 to have been an immigrant were found in Falfurrias, Texas, in May 2013.
Published in The New York Times, September 22, 2013

NEWS from the BORDER
"Bodies on the Border" by Marc Silver, The New York Times, August 17, 2013:
This summer, as discussions have advanced around a comprehensive immigration reform bill, I traveled to Arizona to film some people who have a unique perspective on border security. I followed Dr. Bruce Anderson, a forensic anthropologist with the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, who has worked to identify the remains of some 2,200 people found dead in the Arizona desert since 1990 — undocumented migrants who attempted to cross illicitly from Central America and Mexico into the United States. And I followed Robin Reineke, a University of Arizona doctoral student in anthropology who founded the Missing Migrant Project, a nongovernmental organization that helps families look for their missing relatives.

To read this article and watch a selection from Silver's film click here. or click on this link
http://nyti.ms/16xBGuNThis issued is covered further in "Bodies Pile Up in Texas as Immigrants Adopt New Routes Over Border", The New York Times, September 22, 2013.

"At the Border, on the Night Watch" by Marc Lacey, The New York Times, October 12, 2011

DOUGLAS, Ariz. — The lanky young man with two bales of marijuana slung over his back who was apprehended by Border Patrol agents in a rugged area about a mile from the border here one recent night represented both the significant strides the country has made in controlling its southern border and the challenges that remain.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

The Heartache of an Immigrant Family


LOS ANGELES — WHEN we talk about immigration to America, we tell a hopeful story about courage and sacrifice. But that story obscures the fact that, especially for the poor, immigration is often a traumatizing event, one that tears families apart.

Consider the experience of one family, originally from Honduras. In 1989, Lourdes Pineda was the single mother of a 5-year-old boy and a 7-year-old girl. She sold tortillas, plantains and used clothes door to door, but barely earned enough to feed her children, and feared not being able to send them to school past the sixth grade. So she made the painful decision to leave them behind in Honduras, and found work in the United States as a nanny, taking care of other people’s children.

To read the rest of this article, go to The Heartache of an Immigrant Family

LANGUAGE USAGE
from The New York Times, April 4, 2013
No More 'Illegal Immigrants'
by Lawrence Downes

The Associated Press has changed its stylebook entry on the term “illegal immigrant.”  It now reads, in part:

“Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant.”

The new usage should quickly become apparent to readers of the thousands of newspapers and news web sites that follow, or try to follow, the AP’s rules.

Read the rest of this New York Times article here.
Also, the "L.A. Times updates guidelines for covering immigration".


10 miles east of Douglas, Ariz. by Aldo Zúñiga, May 2012 (The New York Times)
More New York Times readers photographs of the border can be found here.

*****

PLEASE NOTE FILM:  Janeen Gonzalez of 1A recommended a documentary, American Harvest, that touches on the same themes Ted Conover presents in Coyotes.  To learn more about American Harvest, you can go to its website or watch an 18 minute video  from it.  (Thanks, Janeen!)

PLEASE NOTE FILM #2: Yadira Easley, 1A student and a great fan of documentaries, told me about this one, Life and Death on the Border, that is a perfect film complement to Coyotes.   (Thanks, Yadira!)

PLEASE NOTE MORE FILMS about the immigrant experience. These were recommended by English 1A students Jose Quiroz, Cindy Huerta,  Christine Ching,  and Mathieu Mathet. (Am I forgetting anyone?) The films: Under the Same Moon, Crossing Over, Sin Nombre, and Cavite.) A big thank you to Jose, Cindy, Christine and Mathieu!


WETBACK: THE UNDOCUMENTED DOCUMENTARY (2 preview clips)






DISCUSSION QUESTIONS for COYOTES

You may print these out, if you like

1. Discuss the section “A Note on Translation”. Why would Conover use the terms “illegal alien” and “undocumented” when he says that he tries “to avoid both labels.” Why would the term “illegal aliens” appear in the subtitle? What term do you prefer to use—“illegal aliens,” “undocumented worker,” etc., to describe the subjects of the book. Explain.

2. See page xviii and the first full paragraph and the following sentence: “What La Migra does not know—what it perhaps cannot afford to know—is the more human side of the men and women it arrests, the drama of their lives.” What is Conover’s point here? In which ways does Conover's book best address the "human side." Why?

3. After Conover says “What La Migra . . . “ (as quoted #2, above), he makes a distinction between a story and a policy book. Though he claims he is only writing the former, explain the difference between the terms. Based on what you’ve read so far, do you agree with Conover that his book is mainly a story? Or not? Why? What impact do you think his book could have on American immigration policy?

4. Conover could have opened his book in many different ways. He could have told his reader about how he prepared for this writing assignment, or his trip to Mexico from the United States, or where he grew up, among other approaches. Why do you think he selected Alonso to open Coyotes? How would you describe the relationship between Alonso and Conover?

5. Point out at least three different examples of Conover’s and the workers’ reaction to police officers (and other uniformed personnel.) Explain how these different reactions may or may not be the central conflict that Conover faces as a reporter. Note his experience with Alonso crossing the border, with Carlos and the others at the airports, and additional examples that you identify.

6. By the end of “The Gringo and the Mexicano” chapter—and subsequent chapters—do you trust Conover as a reporter? You must point to specific examples to support your position.

7. By befriending the Mexican workers as a reporter and telling their story, has Conover intruded on their lives strictly for his own benefit? Discuss your position with specific examples from the book.

8. Why does Conover describe the workers on page 42 as “professionals”? Do you agree with his assessment? Why or Why not?

9. Point out examples where Conover is naïve. Does this quality help or harm him as he works as a reporter? Explain.

10. In the “Welcome to L.A.” chapter Conover describes the relationships between different racial groups. Point out at least three stereotypes—and the notion of “team”—that he faces and describes in the chapter. Does he succeed in upending these stereotypes through his reporting? Explain.

11. Conover published this book in 1987. Does the “Welcome to L.A.” chapter present a different society, especially with regard to race and the “team,”  than what you know about race issues today in Los Angeles County? Discuss.

12. Discuss at least three things that surprised you about Coyotes and the story Conover has told.

13. Define the notion of work in your own words. Illustrate your definition with several examples from Coyotes.

We don't have time review in-class "Making the Border Less Enticing to Cross," which appeared in the Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2012.  But read it if you have a chance.  On the same page, see links to other articles regarding immigration.


Questions posted by English 1A, Fall 2012:


Anna Dawahara, Michelle Burton, Rick Thurnell, Christine Ching:

1.) Compare the ways women are treated in Ahuacatlan and the ways Conover treats women. (p. 158, 165)

2.) What are the Mexican's expectations for America? (p. 138-139)


William Cheng, Rebeka Carrasco, Jose Quirzo:

1. On page 86, Carlos says to Conover "Welcome to LA! Welcome to the Hispanic team!" After hearing this statement which side do you believe Ted is on? Neutral or Biased side.

2. Throughout the book both the coyotes and the Mexican police are predators and prey on the weak. What are some of the things they did and how? Did it change your perspective of the undocumented workers? What other struggles not mentioned in the book do you believe the workers may have had to gone through just to get these low paying jobs in the US?


Jodi Shou, Alex Garcia, Cindy Huerta,Valerie Arellano:

1. How does Conover seem to earn the trust of groups, such as the orchard pickers, so easily? What makes it so easy for him to integrate into another person's lifestyle? Offer at least five examples from the book.  (Pg. 36, etc.)

2. In the "The Gringo and the Mexican" chapter, Conover is denied a construction job while Alonso, his undocumented friend, is offered it. How does Conover take it and what does his reaction show? Does this seem like an accurate response for the opposition to immigration policies? (Pg. 28-29)

Jon, Jactel, Tarik and 1 more student:

1. Conover is repeatedly met with suspicion, and mistrust again and again from Mexicans and coyotes (16, 56). However, he consistently seems to win them over. What is it about Conover that makes him seem trustworthy? What does it say about the Mexican workers that they are willing to trust Conover?

2. Why was Conover never directly accused of being a smuggler or a coyote, but his Mexican companions are met with constant suspicion? Taruk, Jaquetelle, Jon, and we had one more, but we did not write our names down. on English 1A: CONOVER & COYOTES

from McCabe:

1. Humorous moments appear in Conover's Coyotes.  Identify five humorous moments in the book, and explain how humor helps Conover's desire to show the "human side of the men and women [the INS] arrests, the drama of their lives" (xviii).



Conover with some of the men who crossed
at Sonoita, AZ, north of Nogales, Mexico