Classmates

Classmates, thanks for taking the time out of your days to read my blog. I know I didn't update this nearly as much as I should have, but I let personal issues and other things consume me over the last few weeks, which is no excuse, but again, thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed the blog, and I do recommend following this blog as well as my personal blog. I believe that over the next few months I will be updating this one, but most importantly, my personal blog will become very much alive and active.

Shameless Plugs:

Ebay Account: I am starting up my own Ebay page with a lot of cool nerdy items for you, a friend, or even your children! Please check this Ebay page often because I'm adding new stuff every week/two weeks.

Click Here To Support My Ebay Page

Podcast: I have my own podcast I do once every Sunday. It covers many "nerdy" topics and will be getting a couple new shows added to the weekly program covering topics from news, sports, and even movies! Feel free to listen anytime, and be on the look out for the iTunes release in the near future! For now, you can listen to this online or even on your phone with the "soundcloud" app.

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Other Blog: My personal blog will begin to get updates here in the next few weeks. I plan on doing at least one post a week and I would love your feedback!

Click Here To Support My Blog

Twitch: At least two to three times a week I live stream video games of all genre to everyone on twitch.tv. Here in the next month I will be doing drawings to win some cool prizes that you may enjoy, or that you may want for a friend/family member such as a little kid. Feel free to follow me on twitch, watch me live stream, and donate to enter into the monthly drawings!

Click Here To Support My Streaming

Last but certainly not least, follow me on Twitter @TCchrisross for all the latest updates on all the above mentioned sites.

Thanks again for the fun semester and I wish all of you the best of luck in your schooling adventures! Also, don't forget to read below this as I posted the final birthday blog of the semester! There was nobody famous from our past, but this guy was really interesting and I think you all should look into him more than what I provided. He was very interesting to read about!

Take Care Everyone <3

~Happy 84th Birthday Gary Snyder~

WE HAVE A LIVE ONE! Today we celebrate the 84th birthday of a poet named Gary Snyder. He was born today back in 1930 in San Francisco, and is most recognizable and noted for the Beats Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance. After college he seemed to dive heavily into Native-American and rural-Japanese ideas and cultures. He had even traveled back and forth from California and Japan studying Zen. As a result, he was given the dharma name "Chofu" which stands for "Listen to the Wind."

AWARDS:

• Pulitzer Prize for poetry, 1975
• Bollingen Prize for Poetry, 1997
• John Hay Award for Nature Writing, 1997
• Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, 2008

QUOTES:

• "Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there."
• "There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea." 

~Happy Birthday Charlotte Smith~

Hello to all of you whom have remained patient and finally get to read another happy birthday blog! I'm sorry for the lack of posts this semester, I'm sorry for the laziness, I did not intend for this semester to go this way, because believe it or not, I LOVE THIS BLOG! Life will get in the way of everything if you let it, and I seemed to have let it get in the way of getting a good grade on this blog lol. So lets put the past aside us for now, lets enjoy a quick summary of this young lady (265 year young lady) and lets learn about Charlotte Turner Smith.

Born on this very day back in 1749, Charlotte Turner Smith became a very important person to the world of literature. She was an English Romantic poet and a novelist as well. She basically revived the English sonnet, she helped to build the genre of Gothic fiction, and is noted for writing political novels of sensibility.
Her father was not that great of a man, but he was very wealthy. He had a spending problem and this caused her to marry at a young age. She married a man named Benjamin Smith and had an ugly marriage. The only thing that is odd about this, though was described as a violent marriage, she had TWELVE children with him! She called the marriage a "prostitution." Had it not been for this terrible marriage, she never would've became known for what she does best, writing.
Once she decided to leave her husband, she began writing as a means to support her family. She became a great writer, publishing three books of poetry, ten novels, children books, and a few other works over the course of her entire writing career. She died from illness on October 28th of 1806 and by the middle of the 19th century, so did her legacy. She was basically forgotten about until recently. Now her books have been republished and she is recognized for being a huge supporter and importance as a romantic writer.

QUOTES: 

• "If conquest does not bind posterity, so neither can compact bind it."
• "The cottage garden; most for use designed, Yet not of beauty destitute."
• "In following their line through, and those of Plantagenet and Tudor, there is but little to soothe the mind." 
• The child now shewed her a narrow and rugged descent, made by cutting the red clay and stone, of which the cliffs are here composed, into a sort of rude steps."

WORKS:

• Educational Works
• Rural Walks(1795)
• Rambles Father(1796) 
• Novels
• The Old Manor House(1793)
• Montalbert(1795) 
• Poetry
• Elegiac Sonnets(1784)
• The Emigrants(1793)

   

~Two For The Price of One~

Well today is day two of the birthday blog not having "celebrity" name authors or poets to write about. There was only a handful of names that I could choose from today, so I spent roughly a hour looking into each person and trying to find the most interesting one. While I also enjoyed learning about a man named Steven Saylor, who wrote about historical events (I'm a history nerd), I decided to choose an African writer who had some great quotes, and wrote about touching subjects throughout her career. Please enjoy and sorry for the short blog post. I can't wait to have a historical figure to talk about and dive into for all of you. Hopefully this week sometime I'll have a great poet or author from our distant past? 

Enter professor Ama Ata Aidoo, an author, poet, playwright, academic, and even former Minister of Education for the Ghana government. She was born today in 1940 in Saltpond, Ghana. You might wonder why I chose her if she wasn't born in America? Well have patience because I'm getting there! (JEESH) She worked here in America at Stanford University for creative writing and even taught African studies. 

Most of her work was fiction dealing with Western and African world views and the tension between the two. Most of her stories involve a women who goes against the norms of women roles at their time. She won an award in 1992 for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the best book in Africa. Even her poems gave her awards as her collection titled "Someone Talking to Sometime" won the Nelson Mandela Prize for Poetry in 1987. 

Some of Her Works:

• The Dilemma of a Ghost
• Anowa
• No Sweetness Here: A Collection of Short Stories
• African Love Stories
• Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint
• Diplomatic Pounds & Other Stories

QUOTES:

• "At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet."
• "For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. IT is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian."
• "People are worms, and even the God who created them is immensely bored with their antics."

~Happy 65th Birthday Diane Davidson~

WELCOME BACK EVERYONE! I'm so excited to be doing this blog once again for my American Literature class! Each week I will post one to three birthday blogs depending on my schedule. I hope everyone enjoys this blog and gives me feedback, rather positive or negative! Today is not a great day to do the birthday blog as I couldn't find a real historical person to talk about. I'll be sharing with all of you information about a woman named Diane Davidson. She is an American author that has published books as recent as 2013. Hopefully tomorrow we will have someone from the 17-early 1900's to talk about! 

Photo by Richard Haber
Photography

Today we are learning about Diane Mott Davidson. She is an American author, born on March 22, 1949 in Charlottesville, Virginia, who, very interestingly, writes mystery novels all based around the theme of food. Apparently she has recipes in each book, and each book title is a play on some type of food or drink. This is the main reason I picked to use her today. I've never heard of this technique and it sounded really interesting to me! She has around seventeen mystery novels in total and it took her three novels just to get her first one published at the age of forty-one. Her three most famous books are titled, "Fatally Flaky," "Crunch Time," and "The Whole Enchilada." Her first three novels were titled, "Catering to Nobody," "Dying for Chocolate," and "The Cereal Murders." I'm sorry, but these titles are really awesome and have me so intrigued by her! I honestly think I'm going to try and read some of her novels. If anyone else does, feel free to comment on this or shoot me a message and let me know what you think of them. As far as education, she attended Wellesley College and Stanford University. 

AWARDS:
Nominated For:

• 1990 Agatha Award - for Catering to Nobody in the category "Best First Novel" 
• 1991 Anthony Award

She won the 1993 Anthony Award for "Best Short-story" with her novel Cold Turkey.

More Awesome Novel Titles:

I really find her novel titles interesting, so I'm going to list the titles that I hadn't above. 

• The Last Suppers
• Killer Pancake
• The Main Corpse (doesn't sound yummy to me!)
• The Grilling Season
• Prime Cut
• Tough Cookie
• Sticks and Scones (haha)
• Chopping Spree
• Double Shot
• Dark Tort
• Sweet Revenge 

Quotes:

• "I told the caterer I'd work for nothing if he'd teach me about catering. I lasted one week full-time. It was exhausting."
• "I like cream cheese in just about anything."
• I'm always astonished to see how badly people can behave when they think no one is noticing." 
• The main thing I look for in a recipe is taste, which is different from caterers and restaurants, who first ask 'How does it look?'"

Final Notes:

One final thing about Diane Davidson that I would like to share is that in her series, the first twelve books had recipeis interewoven into the text. Basically, after a dish was described, the recipe would follow within the next page or two. I think that's awesome! Additionally, her twelfth novel titled Double Shot, she changed this concept and just put the recipes to all the dishes in the end of the novel. That kind of makes me sad. It was such a cool concept, and I'm not sure how much I like that she went against it. Never the less, Diane Mott Davidson has proven to be interesting to me and hopefully to you as well. Though she's not very popular or well known, at least I'd never heard of her, she has proven that you don't have to be from the 1700's or 1800's to be an interesting writer to talk about. Again, if anyone reads her work please let me know! I'm going to try out one of her books in the very near future. 

Thanks again for taking the time to stick around and read the blog! Comments are very much appreciated and welcomed. See you all tomorrow with a new birthday boy or girl!!!! 

-TCCR-

UPDATE

It's almost time for college classes to start again, which means, ITS ALMOST TIME FOR ME TO GRADUATE! Yes, three more classes this semester and I'm all done....for a while. This blog will begin to get updated at the very least once a week once classes start rolling. I'm really excited to continue this again and I hope all of you enjoy! Until that time comes, I do have my own personal blog that I've been trying to get started over at this link: HEY! CLICK ME! You should check it out and let me know what you think! Also, as you will see when you click on the link, I'm working on a podcast with a friend. It's been a fun time messing around with and I'm really enjoying it. It's something just to do in our spare time for fun, nothing we are trying to make money off of by any means. Maybe take a listen to that as well? Hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas, a Happy New Year, and check out my personal blog.

UNTIL NEXT TIME:

                                       READ ON!

~Happy 183rd Birthday Emily Dickinson~

 The End Has Come! Our class is about to be wrapped up and tomorrow is the final day of our blogs. I wish I posted more on this during the semester, but maybe, just maybe I'll continue updating this weekly or bi-weekly. Hope everyone enjoyed reading this as it has been pretty fun for me to do! 

How fitting is it that this possible final blog ends on a poet that we actually talked about in class? Today we celebrate the 183rd birthday of Emily Dickinson! (hit me with a picture please!)

Credit: www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org

Emily Dickinson was born on this very day back in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. A very famous poet in our generation, but was semi private in her time. Out of nearly eighteen hundred poems, only a handful were published in her lifetime. It wasn't until 58 years ago that her complete and basically unaltered collection of work was published in 1955. Though it didn't receive the greatest reviews at first, this woman is now considered one of the most important poets in American history!

She died on May 15th, 1886 at the age of just 55 to "Bright's disease" which was a form of kidney disease that now we would call acute or chronic nephritis. For two and a half years she was dealing with this before her death. Her funeral was rather interesting as she was laid in a white coffin with vanilla scented heliotrope, which is a highly fragrant plant, and blue field violets placed about it. Higginson read "No Coward Soul Is Mine", which was a favorite poem of Dickinson written by Emily Bronte. Lastly, she had previously asked to not be driven to the cemetery, but instead carried through a field of buttercups. Her burial is at West Cemetery.

I made this post rather short because I'm sure all of you read her introduction in our book, and I didn't want to take up too much of your time, because I'm sure you have finals to study for, or a blog to post/comment on as well. My final thoughts on her are that Emily was a great poet. She wrote so many wonderful poems and the fact that they were super short, yet super meaningful, made me so interested that I have probably re-read more than a dozen of them over and over again. I encourage anyone who would like to learn more about her to head over to her website. CLICK THIS LINK!
Here's a short one minute video on her website:

Thanks to all of you who have been reading this. Thanks to you who are just now reading this blog for the first time. Will this be the last post on this blog? Tomorrow is the due date. Will I continue to update and provide birthdays every week? Or will this blog become full of dust and rot in the back corner of a dark abandoned house? Tune in next time(?) as we find out these answers and more!