HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!

JULY

WHAT IS THE SUMMER SOLSTICE?

The summer solstice marks the peak of summer and takes place on the longest day of the year, that is to say when the Sun is at its highest in the sky. In Britain and other places north of the equator, to be precise the Northern Hemisphere, this takes place on June 21. After the summer solstice the days get shorter until the winter solstice when they start to get longer again.

June 21 is called the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and simultaneously the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. Around December 21 the solstices are reversed and winter begins in the Northern hemisphere.

The summer solstice has been celebrated since ancient times and is still celebrated around the world today. 
Many people gather at Stonehenge which is believed to have been used as an important religious site by early Britons 4,000 years ago.
Here you can read an interesting article about the meaning of the summer solstice. 

II PROVA SCRITTA ESAMI DI STATO

The end of the school year has finally come about and I have been sent to a Technical Institute for the school-leaving examination  as an external teacher  -  the students there have to take tests on specific subjects, including English.

As to my students  of  5^ C Liceo Linguistico, today they had to sit for their II Prova Scritta, a Foreign Language written exam, but they had the opportunity to  decide on the English, Spanish or French language.

As usual, the English test included a text analysis, a summary and a composition, but there was a choice between an article about sealing your love with a Master Lock in Paris, taken from The Wall Street Journal, Europe Edition, and a passage from The Great Gatsby by the American author Francis Scott Fitzgerald, a love story  set in the 1920s  -  a period of jazz and decadence.

Here you can download  both of them,  just in case you are curious!

MISS AUSTEN REGRETS

Miss Austen Regrets is a BBC-produced drama film  that depicts the last years of Jane Austen's life. Approaching her fortieth birthday, Jane Austen appears happily unmarried and displays all the assured wit and charm of her novels' young heroines. Yet when asked to help her young niece, Fanny Knight, find a husband, her confident composure is threatened. She finds herself looking back on her potential suitors and the choices she has made.

Born the daughter of an English Anglican minister in 1775, she died in 1817 at age forty-one, unmarried  and poor; she left us with six completed novels acclaimed by many to be literary perfection.

Traditional views on Jane Austen's love life vary, and little evidence still exists today to support much of a story. What we know survives from her personal letters and family recollections of a quiet 18th century life, spent  in privacy and decorum. Apart from the one known proposal by Harris Bigg-Wither, no other known love affairs were documented. Unfortunately, much of Jane Austen's personal correspondence, that could have supplied more private details, was destroyed after her death by her sister Cassandra. From what we know, the question surrounding Jane Austen's life is how an individual with little personal experience of romance and love could write with such understanding about the nature of the human heart.

In this speculative tale, director Jeremy Lovering and screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes look into the motives why the real Jane Austen never found her own Mr. Darcy.

Now let’s watch the trailer of this beautiful film, graced with an excellent   performance by Olivia Williams. 

60TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE QUEEN'S CORONATION

The Queen has joined 2,000 guests for a service at Westminster Abbey to mark 60 years since her Coronation.

Some of those who took part in the 1953 service were among the congregation. Inside the abbey, several generations of the  royal  family waited: the Queen's son, Prince Charles, now in his 60s, and next in line to the throne, and her grandson, Prince William, second in line, with his pregnant wife Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, who is due to give birth to yet another royal heir next month.

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron - the 12th to serve under Queen Elizabeth - gave the reading to all the guests gathered at the abbey.

Archbishop of Canterbury the Most Rev Justin Welby said the event honoured "60 years of commitment".

Several key items from the Coronation were placed in Westminster Abbey for the service.

They included the heavy, solid gold St Edward's Crown, displayed on the High Altar – it hasn’t been out of  the Tower of London since 1953. Beside it was the Ampulla, the gold, eagle-shaped bottle from which the holy oil was poured for the Queen's anointing. The Coronation Chair, one of the oldest pieces of English furniture still in use, was also on show.

Here you can watch a beautiful video of the 1953 Coronation ceremony!

JUNE

AN IRISHMAN'S PHILOSOPHY

In life, there are only two things to worry about:

Either you are well or you are sick.

If you are well,  there is nothing to worry about.

But if you are sick,
there are only two things to worry about:
Either you will get well or you will die.

If you get well, there is nothing to worry about.

But if you die,

there are only two things to worry about:
Either you will go to heaven or hell.

If you go to heaven, there is nothing to worry about.

But if you go to hell,
You'll be so busy shaking hands with friends
You won't have time to worry!

~ Author Unknown ~

GEORGE ORWELL

"Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship."

George Orwell

You can download an overview of George Orwell.

His literary masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four is considered the definitive dystopian novel, a chilling prophecy about the future, set in a world beyond our imagining.

SHE LOVED LIFE, LONDON, THIS MOMENT OF JUNE

Here  is the  beginning of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, together with a text analysis activity.

The novel starts with one of Clarissa's monologues; nothing really happens  in this passage, but much is revealed about the central  character's thoughts and feelings.  In fact, it introduces the reader to the stream-of-consciousness technique,  characterized by a flow of thoughts and images, which may not always appear to have a coherent structure or cohesion. 

It is a style of writing evolved by authors at the beginning of the 20^th  century to express in words the flow of a character's thoughts and feelings. The technique aims to give readers the impression of being inside the mind of the character - an internal view that illuminates plot and motivation in the novel. Thoughts spoken aloud are not always the same as those "on the floor of the mind", as Virginia Woolf put it.

"Stream of consciousness" has its origins in the late 19^th  century with the birth of psychology. An American psychologist, William James (brother of novelist Henry), first used the phrase in his Principles of Psychology of 1890 to describe the flow of conscious experience in the brain.

The term was first used in a literary sense by May Sinclair in her 1918 review of a novel by Dorothy Richardson. Other authors well known for this style include Katherine Mansfield, William Faulkner and, most remarkably, James Joyce.

MRS DALLOWAY

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, was a bestseller both in Britain and the United States despite its rejection of  typical novelistic style. 

The action of Mrs. Dalloway takes place during a single day in June 1923 in London, England. This unusual organizational strategy creates a special problem for the novelist, that is to say how to create  characters deep enough to be realistic while treating only one day in their lives. Virginia Woolf solved this problem with what she called a “tunneling” technique, referring to the way her characters remember their pasts. In experiencing these characters’ recollections, readers derive for themselves a sense of background and history to characters that, otherwise, a narrator would have had to provide.

In a sense, Mrs. Dalloway is a novel without a plot. Instead of creating major situations between characters to push the story forward, Virginia Woolf moved her narrative by following the passing hours of a day. The book is composed of movements from one character to another, or of movements from the internal thoughts of one character to the internal thoughts of another.

Mrs. Dalloway depicts people walking about a city. The book  makes the city, its parks, and its streets as interesting as the characters who inhabit them.

Clarissa Dalloway’s party, which is the culminating event of the book, ties the narrative together by gathering the group of friends Clarissa thinks about throughout her day. It also concludes the secondary story of the book, the story of Septimus Warren Smith, by having Dr. Bradshaw arrive at the party and reveal that one of his patients committed suicide that day.

The book’s major themes are sanity and insanity, isolation and community, or the possibilities and limits of communicativeness, as evidenced by Clarissa’s permanent sense of being alone and by her social skills, which bring people together at her parties.

A GAELIC PRAYER

Deep peace of running waves to you.
Deep peace of flowing air to you.
Deep peace of the smiling stars to you.
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.
Deep peace of the watching shepherds to you.
Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of the Victorian  literary critic  Leslie Stephen.  She lived and was educated  in a highly intellectual atmosphere at home, as her father was friendly with many of the  main literary figures of the period,  among them Henry James.  Her mother died when she was 13  and the loss influenced  her profoundly. It was soon after  her mother’s death  that she had  the first  of a series of nervous breakdowns  which  affected her all her life. When her father died in 1904, she moved to a new area of London,  Bloomsbury,  where she founded a close circle of intellectuals, who became known as the “Bloomsbury  Group”.  Among them there was Leonard Woolf, who later became her husband,  and the novelist E.M. Forster, besides painters and art critics. 

The Bloomsberries shared the desire to challenge the strict Victorian social norms, and demonstrated a sexual freedom that was ahead of their time. They were rather elitist and exclusive. They were highly criticized for their snobbishness and selfishness. The group was also reproached with its pacifism during the First World War.

https://lithub.com/virginia-woolf-a-bloomsbury-reading-list/

A ROOM WITH A VIEW

A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the repressed culture of Edwardian era England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century. 

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked A Room with a View 79th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

A Room with a View is also a 1985 British drama film directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant. The film is a close adaptation of E. M. Forster's novel and even uses his chapter titles to divide the film into sections. It stars Maggie Smith as "Charlotte Bartlett", Helena Bonham Carter as "Lucy Honeychurch", Judi Dench as "Eleanor Lavish",  Julian Sands as "George Emerson," Daniel Day-Lewis as "Cecil Vyse" and Simon Callow as "The Reverend Mr. Beebe".

HAPPY MAY DAY!

May Day on May 1 is an ancient Northern Hemisphere spring festival and usually a public holiday; it is also a traditional spring holiday in many cultures.

The earliest May Day celebrations appeared in pre-Christian times, with the festival of Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, and the Walpurgis Night celebrations of the Germanic countries. It is also associated with the Gaelic Beltane. Many pagan celebrations were abandoned or Christianized during the process of conversion in Europe.

A more secular version of May Day continues to be observed in Europe and America. In this form, May Day may be best known for its tradition of dancing "the maypole dance" and crowning of the May Queen.

Fading in popularity since the late 20th century is the giving of "May baskets", small baskets of sweets and/or flowers, usually left anonymously on neighbours' doorsteps.

Here  you can read an interesting article about May Day as  "a cornucopia of holidays" ...