Summer!

Well, it starts all over again...

This time you will find activities for my classes scheduled either for Saint Paul Saturday or UTEC Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. You will find posted the stories, essays, and poetry used in class, including those below. You will find two short stories written by two authors who have a Minnesota connection. One of the stories is written by Mark Twain, one of the most famous authors in American history. He writes about the ant. Charles Dudley Warner, a lesser-known but equally talented humorous author writes about a bear. I've also included five poems written by Community students from the past.

You will always be responsible for reading the poems in the class. You will be given a book with the poems selected. If you miss a day, you can pick up the poems online. However, you will be responsible for the notes given in the class. There will be a "blue book" test given at the end of the summer for those wanting a B or higher grade. That test will be an open book or open blog variety. This group of stories will be used in class on Saturday the 14th of June in Saint Paul and the 18th, which is a Wednesday, at UTEC.

Happy Reading!





Mark Twain, Ants (from A Tramp Abroad)
It seems to me that in the matter of intellect the ant must be a strangely overrated bird. During the many summers, now, I have watched him, when I ought to have been in better business, and I have not yet come across a living ant that seemed to have any more sense than a dead one. I refer to the ordinary ant, of course; I have no experience of those wonderful Swiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies, hold slaves, and dispute about religion. Those particular ants may be all that the naturalist paints them, but I am persuaded that the average ant is a sham. I admit his industry, of course; he is the hardest working creature in the world,--when anybody is looking,--but his leather-headedness is the point I make against him. He goes out foraging, he makes a capture, and then what does he do? Go home? No,--he goes anywhere but home. He doesn't know where home is. His home may be only three feet away,--no matter, he can't find it. He makes his capture, as I have said; it is generally something which can be of no sort of use to himself or anybody else; it is usually seven times bigger than it ought to be; he hunts out the awkwardest place to take hold of it; he lifts it bodily up in the air by main force, and starts; not toward home, but in the opposite direction; not calmly and wisely, but with a frantic haste which is wasteful of his strength; he fetches up against a pebble, and instead of going around it, he climbs over it backwards dragging his booty after him, tumbles down on the other side, jumps up in a passion, kicks the dust off his clothes, moistens his hands, grabs his property viciously, yanks it this way then that, shoves it ahead of him a moment, turns tail and lugs it after him another moment, gets madder and madder, then presently hoists in into the air and goes tearing away in an entirely new direction; comes to a weed; it never occurs to him to go around it; no, he must climb it; and he does climb it, dragging his worthless property to the top--which is as bright a thing to do as it would be for me to carry a sack of flour from Heidelberg to Paris by way of Strasburg steeple, when he gets up there he finds that that is not the place; takes a cursor glance at the scenery and either climbs down again or tumbles down, and starts off once more--as usual, in a new direction. At the end of half an hour, he fetches up within six inches of the place he started from and lays his burden down; meantime he has been over all the ground for two yards around, and climbed all the weeds and pebbles he came across. Now he wipes the sweat from his brow, strokes his limbs, and then marches aimlessly off, in as violent a hurry as ever. He traverses a good deal of zig-zag country, and by and by stumbles on this same booty again. He does not remember to have ever seen it before; he looks around to see which is not the way home, grabs his bundle and starts; he goes through the same adventures he had before; finally stops to rest, and a friend comes along. Evidently the friend remarks that a last year's grasshopper leg is a very noble acquisition, and inquires where he got it. Evidently the proprietor does not remember exactly where he did get it, but thinks he got it "around here somewhere." Evidently the friend contracts to help him freight it home. Then, with a judgment peculiarly antic, (pun not intentional) they take hold of opposite ends of that grasshopper leg and begin to tug with all their might in opposite directions. Presently they take a rest and confer together. They decide that something is wrong, they can't make out what. Then they go at it again, just as before. Same result. Mutual recriminations follow. Evidently each accuses the other of being an obstructionist. They warm up, and dispute ends in a fight. They lock themselves together and chew each other's jaws for a while; then they roll and tumble on the ground till one loses a horn or a leg and has to haul off for repairs. They make up and go to work again in the same old insane way, but the crippled ant is at a disadvantage; tug as he may, the other one drags off the booty and him at the end of it. Instead of giving up, he hangs on, and gets his shins bruised against every obstruction that comes in the way. By and by, when that grasshopper leg has been dragged all over the same old ground once more, it is finally dumped at about the spot where it originally lay, the two perspiring ants inspect it thoughtfully and decide that dried grasshopper legs are a poor sort of property after all, and then each starts off in a different direction to see if he can't find an old nail or something else that is heavy enough to afford entertainment and at the same time valueless enough to make an ant want to own it.
There in the Black Forest, on the mountain side, I saw an ant go through with such a performance as this with a dead spider of fully ten times his own weight. The spider was not quite dead, but too far gone to resist. He had a round body the size of a pea. The little ant--observing that I was noticing--turned him on his back, sunk his fangs into his throat, lifted him into the air and started vigorously off with him, stumbling over little pebbles, stepping on the spider's legs and tripping himself up, dragging him backwards, shoving him bodily ahead, dragging him backwards, shoving him bodily ahead, dragging him up stones six inches high instead of going around them, climbing weeds twenty times his own height and jumping from their summits ,--and finally leaving him in the middle of the road to be confiscated by any other fool of an ant that wanted him. I measured the ground which this ass traversed, and arrived at the conclusion that what he had accomplished inside of twenty minutes would constitute some such job as this,--relatively speaking,--for a man; to-wit: to strap two eight-hundred pound horses together, carry then eighteen hundred feet, mainly over (not around) boulders averaging six feet high, and in the course of the journey climb up and jump from the top of one precipice like Niagara, and three steeples, each a hundred and twenty feet high; and then put the horses down, in an exposed place, without anybody to watch them, and go off to indulge in some other idiotic miracle for vanity's sake.
Science has recently discovered that the ant does not lay up anything for winter use. This will knock him out of literature, to some extent. He does not work, except when people are looking, and only then when the observer has a green, naturalistic look, and seems to be taking notes. This amounts to deception, and will injure him for the Sunday schools. He has not judgment enough to know what is good to eat from what isn't. This amounts to ignorance, and will impair the world's respect for him. He cannot stroll around a stump and find his way home again. This amounts to idiocy, and once the damaging fact is established, thoughtful people will cease to look up to him, the sentimental will cease to fondle him. His vaunted industry is but a vanity and of no effect, since he never gets home with anything he starts with. This disposes of the last remnant of his reputation and wholly destroys his main usefulness as a moral agent, since it will make the sluggard hesitate to go to him any more. It is strange beyond comprehension, that so manifest a humbug as the ant has been able to fool so many nations and keep it up so many ages without being found out.
- A Tramp Abroad 




How I Killed a Bear
Charles Dudley Warner

American author Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900), a contemporary of Mark Twain (1835-1910), was not a hunter. He was not an outdoor writer. But he was, by George! a writer, and he knew how to tell a story well. And he did indeed kill a bear - with a Sharps - in 1878. Here's an excerpt from his account - a classic but not run-of-the-mill bear yarn:

THE ENCOUNTER was unpremeditated on both sides. I was not hunting for a bear, and I have no reason to suppose that a bear was looking for me. The fact is that we were both out blackberrying and met by chance - the usual way. There is among the Adirondack visitors always a great deal of conversation about bears - a general expression of the wish to see one in the woods and much speculation as to how a person would act if he or she chanced to meet one. But bears are scarce and timid, and appear only to a favored few.
It was a warm day in August, just the sort of day when an adventure of any kind seemed impossible. But the thought came to the housekeepers at our cottage - there were four of them - to send me to the clearing on the mountain back of the house to pick blackberries. It was rather a series of small clearings running up into the forest, much overgrown with bushes and briers and not unromantic. Cows pastured there, penetrating through the leafy passages from one opening to another and browsing among the bushes. I was kindly furnished with a six-quart pail and told not to be gone long.
Not from any predatory instinct, but to save appearances, I took a gun. It adds to the manly aspect of a person with a tin pail if he also carries a gun. It was possible I might start up a partridge; though how I was to hit him, if he started up instead of standing still, puzzled me. Many people use a shotgun for partridges. I prefer the rifle: it makes a clean job of death and does not prematurely stuff the bird with globules of lead.
The rifle was a Sharps, carrying a ball cartridge (ten to the pound), an excellent weapon belonging to a friend of mine who had intended, for a good many years back, to kill a deer with it. He could hit a tree with it - if the wind did not blow, and the atmosphere was just right, and the tree was not too far off - nearly every time. Of course, the tree must have some size.
Needless to say that I was at that time no sportsman. Years ago, I killed a robin under the most humiliating circumstances. The bird was in a low cherry tree. I loaded a big shotgun pretty full, crept up under the tree, rested the gun on the fence, with the muzzle no more than ten feet from the bird, shut both eyes, and pulled the trigger.
When I got up to see what had happened, the robin was scattered about under the tree in more than a thousand pieces, no one of which was big enough to enable a naturalist to decide from it to what species it belonged. This disgusted me with the life of the sportsman. I mention the incident to show that although I went blackberrying armed, there was not much inequality between me and the bear.
In this blackberry patch, bears had been seen. The summer before, our colored cook, accompanied by a little girl of the vicinity, was picking berries there one day when a bear came out of the woods and walked toward them. The girl took to her heels and escaped. Aunt Chloe was paralyzed with terror. Instead of attempting to run, she sat down on the ground where she was standing and began to weep and scream, giving herself up for lost.
The bear was bewildered by this conduct. He approached and looked at her; he walked around and surveyed her. Probably he had never seen a colored person before and did not know whether she would agree with him; at any rate, after watching her a few moments, he turned about and went into the forest. This is an authentic instance of the delicate consideration of a bear and is much more remarkable than the forbearance toward the African slave of the well known lion, because the bear had no thorn in his foot.
When I had climbed the hill, I set up my rifle against a tree and began picking berries, lured on from bush to bush by the black gleam of fruit (that always promises more in the distance than it realizes when you reach it), penetrating farther and farther, through leaf-shaded cowpaths flecked with sunlight, into clearing after clearing.
Occasionally, as I broke through a covert, I encountered a meek cow who stared at me stupidly for a second and then shambled off into the brush. I became accustomed to this dumb society and picked on in silence, attributing all the wood noises to the cattle, thinking nothing of any real bear.
In point of fact, however, I was thinking all the time of a nice romantic bear and - as I picked - was composing a story about a generous she-bear who had lost her cub and who seized a small girl in this very wood, carried her tenderly off to a cave, and brought her up on bear's milk and honey.
When the girl got big enough to run away, moved by her inherited instincts, she escaped and came into the valley of her father's house (this part of the story was to be worked out so that the child would know her father by some family resemblance and have some language in which to address him) and told him where the bear lived. The father took his gun, and guided by the unfeeling daughter, went into the woods and shot the bear, who never made any resistance and only, when dying, turned reproachful eyes upon her murderer. The moral of the tale was to be kindness to animals.
I was in the midst of this tale when I happened to look some rods away to the other side of the clearing, and there was a bear! He was standing on his hind legs and doing just what I was doing - picking blackberries. With one paw, he bent down the bush while with the other, he clawed the berries into his mouth - green ones and all.
To say that I was astonished is beside the mark. I suddenly discovered that I didn't want to see a bear after all. At about the same moment, the bear saw me, stopped eating berries, and regarded me with a glad surprise. It is all very well to imagine what you would do under such circumstances. Probably, you wouldn't do it. I didn't.
The bear dropped down on his forefeet and came slowly toward me. Climbing a tree was of no use, with so good a climber in the rear. If I started to run, I had no doubt, the bear would give chase, and although a bear can not run downhill as fast as he can run uphill, yet I felt that he could get over this rough, brush-tangled ground faster than I could.
The bear was approaching. It suddenly occurred to me how I could divert his mind until I could fall back upon my military base. My pail was nearly full of excellent berries - much better than the bear could pick himself. I put the pail on the ground and slowly backed away from it, keeping my eye - as beast tamers do - on the bear. The ruse worked.
The bear came up to the berries and stopped. Not accustomed to eat out of a pail, he tipped it over and nosed about in the fruit, "gorming" (if there is such a word) it down, mixed with leaves and dirt, like a pig. The bear is a worse feeder than the pig. Whenever he disturbs a maple-sugar camp in the spring, he always upsets the buckets of syrup and tramples around in the sticky sweets, wasting more than he eats. The bear's manners are thoroughly disagreeable.
As soon as my enemy's head was down, I started and ran. Somewhat breathless and shaky, I reached for my faithful rifle. It was not a moment too soon. I heard the bear crashing through the brush after me. Enraged at my duplicity, he was now coming on with blood in his eye. I felt that the time of one of us was probably short.
The rapidity of thought at such moments of peril is well known. I thought an octavo volume, had it illustrated and published, sold fifty thousand copies, and went to Europe on the proceeds while that bear was loping across the clearing.
As I was cocking the gun, I made a hasty and unsatisfactory review of my whole life. I noted that even in such a compulsory review, it is almost impossible to think of any good thing you have done. The sins come out uncommonly strong. I recollected a newspaper subscription I had delayed paying years and years ago, until both editor and newspaper were dead, and which now could never be paid to all eternity.
The bear was coming on.
I tried to remember what I had read about encounters with bears. I couldn't recall an instance in which a man had run away from a bear in the woods and got off. I tried to think what is the best way to kill a bear with a gun when you are not near enough to club him with the stock. My first thought was to fire at his head, to plant the ball between his eyes; but this is a dangerous experiment. The bear's brain is very small; and unless you hit that, the bear does not mind a bullet in his head; that is, not at the time. remembered that instant death of the bear would follow a bullet planted just back of his foreleg and sent into his heart. This spot is also difficult to reach unless the bear stands off, side toward you, like a target. I finally decided to fire at him generally.
The bear was coming on.
The contest seemed to me very different from anything at Creedmoor. I had carefully read the reports of the shooting there, but it was not easy to apply the experience I had thus acquired. I hesitated whether I had better fire lying on my stomach, or lying on my back and resting the gun on my toes. But in neither position, I reflected, could I see the bear until he was upon me. The range was too short, and the bear wouldn't wait for me to examine the thermometer and note the direction of the wind. Trial of the Creedmoor method, therefore, had to be abandoned - and I bitterly regretted that I had not read more accounts of offhand shooting.
For the bear was coming on.
I tried to fix my last thoughts on my family. As my family is small, this was not difficult. Dread of displeasing my wife or hurting her feelings was uppermost in my mind. What would be her anxiety as hour after hour passed on, and I did not return! What would the rest of the household think as the afternoon passed on, and no blackberries came! What would be my wife's mortification when the news was brought that her husband had been eaten by a bear! I can not imagine anything more ignominious than to have a husband eaten by a bear. And this was not my only anxiety. The mind at such times is not under control. With the gravest fears, the most whimsical ideas will occur. I looked beyond the mourning friends and thought what kind of an epitaph they would be compelled to put upon the stone. Something like this:

HERE LIES THE REMAINS
OF
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
EATEN BY A BEAR AUGUST 20, 1877
It is a very unheroic and even disagreeable epitaph. That eaten by a bear is intolerable. It is grotesque. And then I thought what an inadequate language the English is for compact expression. It would not answer to put upon the stone simply eaten, for that is indefinite and requires explanation; it might mean eaten by a cannibal. This difficulty could not occur in the German, where essen signifies the act of feeding by a man, and fressen by a beast. How simple the thing would be in German!
HIER LICHT
HOCHWOHLGEBOREN
HERR CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
GEFRESSEN
AUGUST 20, 1877
That explains itself. The well born one was eaten by a beast and presumably by a bear - an animal that has had a bad reputation since the days of Elisha.
The bear was coming on; he had, in fact, come on. I judged that he could see the whites of my eyes. All my subsequent reflections were confused. I raised the gun, covered the bear's breast with the sight and let drive. Then I turned and ran like a deer. I did not hear the bear pursuing. I looked back. The bear had stopped. He was lying down.
I then remembered that the best thing to do after having fired your gun is to reload it. I slipped in a charge, keeping my eyes on the bear. He never stirred.
I walked back suspiciously. There was a quiver in his hind legs but no other motion. Still, he might be shamming; bears often sham. To make sure, I approached and put a ball into his head. He didn't mind it now: he minded nothing. Death had come to him with a merciful suddenness. He was calm in death. In order that he might remain so, I blew his brains out and started for home.
I had killed a bear!



What’s Inside

An unreal sense of hollowness
Where do I stand?
what’s right; what’s wrong
A lack of confidence

What is self assurance?
The meaning I don’t understand
insides rotten
outsides glowing
Self-destruction but no scars
No ends met; nothing controlled

Inner feelings- strings tied in knots
weaving but no latch
Inside the unknown

-Melissa Bolle



abuse

A feeling of confusion still dances in my mind.
They stole my heart and soul.
They didn’t car.
Touching.
Feeling.
Kissing.
“not there.” The arrested child whispers.
“it’s just a game” the foaming monster laughs,
with an enraged fury,
that’s hidden inside the laughter of a few friends.

Growing with a confused wondering,
He’s not sure what he’s become.
Both sexes confuse and attract him,
Both have abused him.
The bitter rage built up inside him,
Creates a foaming monster from a sweet young child.
Why does this happen?
The mean cycle of the
Uncaring,
Hating,
Soul snatching,
Abuse

-r.f.r.



Life

The drink of choice, Mountain Dew
Late, late nights, sleep is few
Twinkies, Ho-Ho’s, Hostess Cupcakes
Burgers, pizza, fries, and milkshakes

Building, tweaking, configuring, and fixing
Backing up, IRQ’s, databases
Playing games, PCI, audio mixing
RJ-45, RG-58, BNC, AVI, or DIX

This is the life of a computer nerd.



stuff

shrink wrap
bubble wrap
saran wrap
plastic wrap

paper bags
plastic bags
cloth bags
leather bags

ceramic
wood
metal
glass

all this is just stuff


What If

I am black and you are white, to set the record straight
But I often wonder if you could make it
Behind a twist of fate.

Suppose you woke up this morning
And things were turned around,
And I was Mr. Charlie and you were “Blackie” on the ground?
Would I make your kids pick cotton while my kids went to school,
Or would I make myself smarter while you became the fool>

What if you wanted something from the corner store,
Would you ever get insulted if I said
“Use the other door”?

What if I said that I was one and you were two?
Would you ask for civil rights or just what would you do?

What if I hung your dad and then went and raped your mother?
Could you still look me in the eyes and say that I’m your brother?

So you see its not so easy when you have to wear my shoe,
But I just thought that I would ask to see what you would do.

You had three hundred years on me
Before I took a lap,
But I’ve got to keep on trying until I close the gap.

So please don’t let me shake you up or
Cause your mind to roam,
It’s only ink on paper-
Just a black man with a poem.

Santay Allen



I am the Daughter of Darkness

I am the Daughter of Darkness
The Sister of Night
The Shame of Day
An Outcast of Light.

Day burns me
And hurts my eyes.
Night shelters me
And lets me hide
From vicious attack
Dawn will expose me
My only friend is black

So I lurk amongst the shadows
Beyond all sight
For day doesn’t want
A Child of Night


-Ivy Thompson