Robert Pinsky, former US Poet Laureate, argues that it's a good thing that poetry is challenging :
Difficulty, after all, is one of life's essential pleasures: music, athletics, dance thrill us partly because they engage great difficulties. Epics and tragedies, no less than action movies and mysteries, portray an individual's struggle with some great difficulty. In his difficult and entertaining work Ulysses, James Joyce recounts the challenges engaged by the persistent, thwarted hero Leopold and the ambitious, narcissistic hero Stephen. Golf and video games, for certain demographic categories, provide inexhaustible, readily available sources of difficulty.
This link (PDF, give it a moment to load) contains the sample responses to the Lear prompt from the College Board. I suspect that you will be unimpressed. Lots of OJ, personal examples, and terrible transitions.
Yikes.
In the next three weeks, these will be the key pieces of information for review/work on the AP test:
- 30. C
- 31. B
- 32. C
- 33. C
- 34. D
- 35. D
- 36. E
- 37. D
- 38. D
- 39. A
- 40.C
- 41. D
- 42. A
- 43. E
- 44. C
- 45. D
- 46. C
- 47. C
- 48. E
- 49. D
- 50. B
- 51. A
- 52. D
- 53. E
- 54. D
- 55. A
- 56. D
- 57. E
- 58. C
- 59. B
Not really news to me, but it's reassuring to read confirmation of what you already believe: needing eight hours of sleep is a myth:
And it's become an increasingly common sentiment that too much work and stress and missing out on our eight hours is the modern plague. But the good news, says Prof Jim Horne, director of Loughborough University's Sleep Research Centre, is that we don't need eight hours at all. "It's nonsense. It's like saying everybody should have size eight shoes, or be five foot eight inches. "There is a normal distribution – the average sleep length is seven, seven and a quarter hours."
The test for Antony and Cleopatra is tomorrow. Enjoy questions like these:
- Does Shakespeare intend for the audience to feel sympathy for Cleopatra at the end of the play?
- Based on Aristotle's definition of a tragedy, is Antony a tragic figure?
- What thematic/symbolic purpose does Enobarbus serve?
- Is Cleopatra a sexist representation of womyn or a strong feminist character?
