Phosphorescence, by Tessa Hadley

 

SUMMARY, by Josep Guiteres

Graham Cooley is 38 years old, has a degree in physics, is married with children, is a competitive chess player and loves quantum mechanics and quarks.

One Friday, at the university, where he works as a physics professor, a course on food hygiene was held, and he saw a woman with shiny grey hair, a belligerent jaw, a turned-up nose, and a wide mouth. It was Claudia, a woman who he had met one summer at his parents’ house in West Wales, when Graham was 13 years old.

Graham told his wife Carol that in college he saw a woman he hadn’t seen in 25 years. At night, when Graham and his wife were in bed, he told Carol that when Claudia was on holiday at his parents’ house, she had made advances toward him. His wife ended the conversation saying, what would you think if a man did to your daughter what Claudia did to you?

Graham took Claudia’s address and went to her house. He introduced himself saying that he was Graham Cooley and that she and her family had been on holiday at the Cooley’s in West Wales. Claudia remembered, she looked at his face and told him that he was handsome and that she always had good taste in men.

She invited him into her house, they sat down, and he put his hand on Claudia’s knee and reminded her that, on the last night she was at his parents’ house, he took her and her two young daughters by boat. He told her that she had sat in front of him while he rowed; the water that night was full of phosphorescence, tiny sea creatures that glowed in the dark, and that she put her feet on top of his and rubbed them all the time. Once he said this, he kissed her, put his hands under her clothes and she didn’t stop him.

Graham got home very late, his wife was waiting for him, and, for a moment, he thought that Carol might suspect something, but he immediately thought, I am her husband, the physics professor who loves quantum mechanics and a puritan. Nothing happens here.

QUESTIONS

Describe Graham’s family

Talk about Graham.

What can you say about Claudia?

Do / did you play board games? What is your favourite? What kind of player are / were you? Do you have any anecdote?

When do children start dressing as adults?

Do you think our children know better about sex than us?

Do you think that in our time swearing has increased its intensity? Aren’t “shit” and “bloody” a little soft?

In your opinion, why did Claudia choose Graham, and not Tim or Alex?

At first Graham thought Claudia was old, but then, when he saw playing badminton, not so old, even young. How do you calibrate the age of a person? Is there a kind of touchstone?

How does Claudia approach Graham?

Why in a moment wasn’t Graham able to look at his mother?

Do you think our generation have overprotected children?

“He suffered like an adult, secretly.” Do adults suffer in secret? In which cases?

How did Graham / Claudia change over the time?

What do you think about telling your past to anybody (a new friend, a partner, your children)?

Graham’s wife thought that his experience with Claudia was horrible. Does Graham agree? Do you agree?

How was it possible that Claudia didn’t remember him and their story?

Did he have a “trauma” because of Claudia’s seduction?

In your opinion, did Graham cheat on his wife?

How do you think the story would go on?

What do you imagine it’s the relation between the title and the story?

 

VOCABULARY

daps, reslating, chalet, meadow, overspill, Dormobile van, making it all up, toddler, snap, suntan, soothed, scooping, shuttlecock, halter top, gritty, sandpapery, scorch, racing demon, humming, waxed, plug, rewire, flip-flops, hog, six-form college, foyer, pugnacious, brash, dregs, blare, droop, mews, stone-flagged, batik, tans, sag, tinged, GCSE moderation

Telemachus, friend, by O. Henry

BIOGRAPHY, by Begoña Devis
 
William Sydney Porter was born in North Carolina in 1862 and died in New York in 1910. He was a great writer known as O. Henry after a cat he lived with for a time. He is considered one of the masters of the short story. His admirable treatment of surprise narrative endings popularized in English the expression "an O. Henry ending".
He had an eventful life. His mother died when he was three, and he and his father moved to his paternal grandmother's house. As a child he was a good student, and a great reader. He graduated from his aunt's school, who continued teaching him until he was 15. He then began working in his uncle's pharmacy and finally graduated as a pharmacist.
In 1882 he went to Texas, hoping that a change of scenery would improve his persistent cough. There he worked there as a ranch hand, as a cook and as a nanny. When his health improved, he went to Austin, where he worked as a pharmacist and where he began writing short stories. He was popular in the social life in Austin for his storytelling and musical talent. At this time, his problems with alcohol abuse began. In 1887, he eloped with the young Athol Estes, daughter of a wealthy family. In 1888 they have a child, who died. In 1889, a new daughter, Margaret, was born.
In 1894, Porter founded a humorous weekly magazine called The Rolling Stone.  Then that magazine collapsed, and he moved to Houston, where he was a journalist at the Houston Post.
The most transcendental event occurred in 1895, when he was accused by the First National Bank of appropriating money that he had under his responsibility. On the eve of the trial he sailed for Honduras, where he lived for seven months, and where he wrote several stories, many of which appear in the book Cabbages and Kings, in which he coined the term «banana republic», phrase subsequently used to describe a small, unstable tropical nation in Latin America.
In 1897 he returned to Austin when he knew that his wife was dying, and after a few months he was arrested and convicted, spending three years in the Columbus (Ohio) prison. There he continued writing short stories to support his daughter. When he was released from prison, he changed his name to O. Henry and moved to New York, where he lived until his death.
In New York, the city the writer loved and the setting for many of his stories, O. Henry gained public recognition, but he had a deep problem with his alcoholism. Indeed, there is an anecdote that his most famous story, "The Gift of the Magi", was written under the pressure of a deadline, in just three hours and accompanied by a whole bottle of whiskey.
From December 1903 to January 1906, he wrote a story a week for the New York World, his most prolific period. He remarried in 1907 to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Lindsey Colem, who left him in 1909.
O. Henry died on June 5, 1910 of cirrhosis of the liver. His funeral was held in New York and he was buried in Asheville, North Carolina. His daughter, Margaret Worth Porter, died in 1927 and was buried next to her father.
In the United States, the O. Henry Award for short stories, one of the most important in the world, was created in his memory. Among other writers, it has been awarded to William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Saul Bellow and Woody Allen.
 

TELEMACHUS, FRIEND
 
The story begins when a hunter asks a man named Telemachus about his damaged ear, because it seems mutilated by a beast. Telemachus tells him that this ear is a mark of a really deep friendship between he and a man named Paisley, a friendship as strong as the one Damon and Pythias had.
He explained him that Telemachus and his friend spent seven years together, doing several jobs and living different experiences. Once they were in the town Los Piños and here they met a widow named Jessup, and both friends were attracted to her and each one wanted to marry her. But they didn’t want to lose their friendship and decided that if one of them reached her first, he would wait to the other to come before making advances, and would not do anything in secret. They decided to stay friends whoever won.
This situation ended up tiring the widow, who was most interested in Hinks and saw that he didn’t make any advance without being in the presence of his friend.
In spite of this, she still decided in the favour of Hicks and decided to marry him. At the wedding ceremony, Hicks asked the priest to wait until Paisley came. He finally came looking in his best, just in case the priest confuses them and marry Jessup to him instead Telemachus.
At night, after the wedding ceremony, Jessup waited in the room while Hicks sat outside. She asked him to come inside. He said her that he was waiting for his friend to come. After that Hicks felt as if somebody had shot his ear. In fact, it was a blow by Mrs. Hicks’s broom handle. This is the mark of his deep and truly friendship.

 

Audiobook

QUESTIONS

Describe the two friends.
What kind of friendship do they have?

Which is the first threat to this friendship?

What do you know about Damon and Phytias?

What is the meaning of this phrase: "anchovy to forget his vows"?

Describe Mrs Jessup.

What did Telemachus mean with "fidus Diogenes"?

What was the problem with Spring Valley / Big Spring Valley?

What is "to make a movement that leads up the widow to change her name to Hicks"?

Try to explain this image: "The smiles of a woman is the whirpool of Squills and Chalybeates into which the vortex of the good ship  Friendship is often drawn and dismembered"?

What is the "hot biscuit of Mrs Jessup"?

What are the "medicinal whirpools"?

What is a jew's harp?

What was the woman reaction to their idea of shared courtship?

Describe their different kind of courtshiping.

-Paisley

-Telemachus

Give some information about

-Rider Haggard

-Lew Dockstader

-Parkhurst

What does this mean: "when she can be referred as 'née Jones'"?

What happened exactly in the paragraph "One night... but I didn't"? (page 171, lines 25-29)

Who marries Mrs Jessup at last?

Why did his friend come to the wedding?
What happened to Lem's ear and why?

VOCABULARY

intent, dipper, graft, entitlement, churn, surcease, habiliment, pry, anchovy, in hoc signo, dogwood, chip, accrue, japonica, hiatus, railroad tie, Squills and Chalybeates, opodeldoc, hoss, synonymously, gallivantery, dough, crock, cinctured, drought, pipeful, hike yourself down the gulch, disresume, Lem, nix cum rous, Hubbard squash, wear the willow, cinch, cuff, bowery, durn, 

The Coup of Grâce, by Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce at the Wikipedia
The Devil's Dictionary at the Wikipedia

Some entries of the Devil's Dictionary

The Coup de Grâce, review

The Coup de Grâce, study

Audio book

Biography

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce, was born on 24 June on 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio, United States, and died around 1914 in Chihuahua or Ojinaga, Mexico –this is a mystery!! They don’t have evidences, because his body was never found after his death. He married Mary Ellen Day (Molly) in 1871, and they had three children: Helen Bierce, Day Bierce and Leigh Bierce.

All instruction he received was from his father’s books, a farmer from Connecticut.  After graduating, he became known as a journalist in San Francisco, collaborating in various newspapers and becoming an editor. Years later, after returning from London, he went to live in Washington D.C.

When he was young, he enlisted to fight in the Civil War.

He was a writer of short stories, journalist and American editor. His satirical style of sharper works, with tragic humour and violent themes that always revolved around death, earned him the nickname of "Bitter Bierce". His literature exerted a strong influence on the Pacific Coast and several critics defined him as dry, functional and mechanical, and even compared him to great poets such as Edgar Alan Poe and also with Nathaniel Hawthorne and H.P. Lovecraft. Bierce wrote several books and stories and was a screenwriter for some movies. Among some books, the most notable are: The Damned Thing, The Devil’s Dictionary, Chickamauga and An Inhabitant of Carcosa.

His legacy and influences were many, among them there are three films made based on the short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.

Summary

This history talks about death. The entire scene takes place on a battlefield, where we can see the cruelty among the dead and those who barely survive. It talks about two friends, who, raised together since their early childhood, it is very difficult to separate from so much affection. One of them has no military aptitude or disposition, yet he enlists in the army to be close to his unconditional friend. However, the relationship was maintained with difficulties and in a different way, due to their military rank and the required distance.
The story speaks of a lot of blood, coldness, challenges, decisions and mismatches, and, as the final revelation demonstrates, says that, however arrogant an individual can demonstrate, the feeling and love came to the surface at the end. In our story, the captain, in a rush of courage, makes the strong decision of shortening the suffering of a dying man, and leaves us with doubt and reflection: Even with the supplication of the dying, was this the best shot? Could the help that arrived have saved him?

QUESTIONS

What do you know about the American Civil War?
In the story, they “wounded must wait until the end of the battle”. Do you think it’s a correct policy in a war? (In recent American films, the army always tries to rescue the wounded or the prisoners.)
Many of the enemy’s dead were counted several times. Why? (They say “History is always written by the winners.”)
Talk about the three characters (personality, relations with the others, rank in the army…)

Madwell

Caffal Halcrow

Creede Halcrow

What does this sentence mean “these two patriots would doubtless have endeavoured to deprive their country of one another’s services”?

Do you know the story of David, Bathsheba, and Uriah (2 Samuel, 11-12)? Is there any relation to our story?

Describe the situation in which sergeant Halcrow is after the battle. Why was he in so bad condition?

Who was Prometheus and why is he mentioned in our story?

What is exactly a coup de grâce? Describe the coup de grâce in our story.

How did the horse die? Why do you think he killed the horse first?

The story has an open ending. What do you think it’s going to happen afterwards?
What is your opinion about the euthanasia? Are you pro or con? Why?

VOCABULARY

succor, splinter, strecher-bearer, exposure, avail, score, glean, reap, quit, bearings, wretch, unheed, clump, daring, non-comissioned, comissioned, saturnine, repartee, defiled, besmirch, swine, chine, choke, utterance, cock (a gun) v., muzzle, trigger, report n.

The Swimmer, by John Cheever

John Cheever at the Wikipedia

The Swimmer at the Wikipedia

Analysis, summary, characters, themes... click here

More analysis: click here

Another study guide (clear and to the point): click here

The Swimmer audiobook (from minute 3.31 on)

The Swimmer (film) at the Wikipedia

The Swimmer (trailer)

Presentation, by Begoña Devis

Biography

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. His father was the owner of a shoe factory, which went bankrupt with the crash of 29, and the family fell into relative poverty. After this fact, the father left the family, and the young Cheever lived for a time in Boston with his brother. During that period he survived by publishing articles and stories in various media.
He was expelled from the academy for smoking, which ended his education and this was the core of his first short story, Expelled, which Malcom Cowley bought for the New Republican newspaper. From that moment, Cheever devoted himself entirely to writing short stories that progressively found space in several magazines and newspapers, and finally in the famous magazine The New Yorker, with which he maintained, until the end of these days, an intense relationship.
He was called the Chekhov of the suburbs, because many of his stories occurred in the middle class neighbourhoods that were born around New York during the recovery of the economy after the Second World War.
In 1957 he won The National Book Award for his first novel, and in 1971 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his compilation of stories. He wrote primarily about the decline of the American dream, alcoholism and homosexuality, and sometimes his characters had dubious moral.
A movie was made from his short story The Swimmer in 1957, played by Burt Lancaster. At the time it was unsuccessful, but now it is considered a cult film by cinephiles.
John Cheever died in New York in 1982 at the age of 70.

The Swimmer

The Swimmer is a short story by John Cheever about a relatively young and handsome man who decides to go back to his home, 8 miles from where he is at the moment, swimming. For this he plans a tour along the pools of his various friends and neighbours, a route that he will call “Lucinda River” in honour to his wife. This wild idea will take him on a personal journey with surreal overtones. As the journey progresses, the character’s disorientation, his temporary alterations and the doubtfulness of his feat are revealed. At first his neighbours are friendly and accommodating, but there comes a time when everything gets worse, being forced to cross a public swimming pool, later when a neighbour accuses him of being  an intruder and in the last pool he sees how an old lover looks at him with disdain, and she doesn’t even offer him a drink. When he finally gets home, we do not know if a day, a month or a year, later, he finds it closed and empty
In my opinion, it is a metaphorical journey, in which the protagonist wants to return home but cannot find the way to do so. Alcoholism is always present, and the sinking in it (and not in the pools) is what increasingly disorients him and prevents him from getting where he would like. A journey on a magnificent sunny day, in which an attractive young man is about to do something heroic, but instead he finishes as a defeated man who has lost his home, family and even his memories.

It is a dark and desperate story, but of great narrative force and with a dreamlike and surreal component that makes it especially attractive.

QUESTIONS

Characters:

Neddy Merrill

Mrs Graham

Enid Bunker

Grace Biswagner

Shirley Adams

Mr and Mrs Halloran

Helen and Eric Sachs

Places:

At Westerhazy’s

At Levys’s garden

At Lindleys’s

At Welchers’s

At the Recreation Center

At home

Can you point out the hints the narrator give us along the story about the decline and fall of the hero?
What social class do the characters belong to?
What do they drink?
What is the National Audubon Society?
Can you find parallels between this story and the Odyssey or a Pilgrimage?
What season is the story situated in?
What is a point of no return? And what is the point of no return in the story?
Greetings: he kisses women and shakes hands to men. What do you think of this kind of greetings, one for men and another for women?
Where do you prefer to swim: swimming pools, the sea, rivers, reservoirs?

 VOCABULARY

golf link, artesian well, cumulus cloud, dogleg, hurl, choppy, saddle, hoist, portage, bony, de Haviland trainer, spigot, cordite, put sb out to board, tool (v), bask, roughhouse, cerulean

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, by Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane at the Wikipedia: click here

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky at the Wikipedia: click here

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky: summary

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky: audiobook

Movie

Presentation, by Josep Guiteres

STEPHEN CRANE

Crane was one of America's leading realist writers who influenced most modern American naturalism.

Biography

He was born in 1871 in Newark (New Jersey). He was the fourteenth and last child of a married couple belonging to the Methodist church. He married Cora Taylor, owner of the so-called Hotel de Dream, a combination of a hotel and a nightclub brothel.

 In 1890, he worked as a reporter of the slums in New York. In 1893, he wrote his first novel, Maggie, where he describes the life of a girl of the streets.

In1895, he wrote a classic of American literature, The Red Badge of Courage, where he describes realistically the psychological complexity of fear and courage on the battlefield in the context of the American Civil War. This novel was made into a film by John Huston.

In 1897, he was hired as a correspondent for the Greco-Turkish war, and in 1898, for the Spanish-American War.

He wrote The Open Boat and Other Tales which narrates his experience in a shipwreck for four days. In 1900, before his death from tuberculosis in Badenweiler (Germany), he wrote his possibly most popular book, Whilomville Stories.

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

Jack Potter, sheriff of Yellow Sky, married his girlfriend in San Antonio in the morning. They are happy but nervous about their new status as a couple and uncomfortable with their clothes that attract the attention of people, but they are so in love that don't even realize it.

Now they travel in a luxurious Pullman train from San Antonio passing through the plains of Texas to Yellow Sky. Potter worries that the inhabitants of Yellow Sky will be offended because he didn't inform them of his decision to marry, therefore he wishes to get home without attracting attention.

Meanwhile, in the "Weary Gentleman" saloon, a young man enters announcing that Scratchy Wilson, the last member of a gang of criminals, is drunk and prowling around town with two loaded pistols, and the barkeeper closes the doors and windows.

Wilson walks through the town playing with his guns, but, as nobody pays attention to him, he decides to go to Potter's house, but he finds him on the street.

Wilson challenges Potter, who tells him that he is unarmed because he’s just got married. When Wilson sees the bride, changes his mood, forgets the challenge, holsters his pistols, and he leaves in a huff.

 OPINION

In my opinion this short story defines the writer as realistic and modern: When people look at them in a strange way because of their appearance they don't even realize it; when Wilson is on the street giving war and the others are calm in their houses and in the bar; when everything seems to end in a great tragedy…

No way, don't worry, nothing happens here and in the end everything is settled easily.

QUESTIONS

Say something about these characters:
 
Jack Potter
The bride
Scratchy Wilson
The barkeeper
The drummer
 
Tell us something about San Antonio.
What is a Pullman?
Describe the train.
Talk about the train workers’ behaviour.
Describe the atmosphere inside the saloon.
How do the couple feel about Yellow Sky people?
How do the couple love each other?
 
Can you find any good descriptive images?
There are some actions that nowadays are clichés in a Western. Can you find some?

VOCABULARY

frame house, keening, leaden, heinous, parade, bliss, hangdog (glance), drummer, tear, pen, galoot, starboard

The Cop and the Anthem, by O. Henry

O. Henry at the Wikipedia: click here

The Cop and the Anthem at the wikipedia: click here

The Cop and the Anthem: review

Some academic activities (with solutions): click here

The Cop and the Anthem: audiobook

The Cop and the Anthem: short movie

Presentation

Biography

Oliver Henry, usually written O. Henry, was the pseudonym of William Sidney Porter. He started to use different pseudonyms when wanted to publish his stories while he was in prison. And as he liked O. Henry the best, he kept using it ever after, and we always speak of him as O. Henry.

He was born in 1862, so in the middle of the American Civil War or Secession War, between the slavers confederates secessionists and the yankees abolitionists unionists. His birthday was on the 11th of September, so we have to suppose that if he had known what were to happen, he would have written a story about it, because he liked the surprising ironies of life.

He was born in North Carolina, but he went to live in Texas where he graduated as a chemist (or pharmacist, as he was American, not British). He was then 19 years old.

When he was 25, he eloped with his girlfriend. They married and they had two children, a boy who died soon after his birth, and, later, a girl, Margaret.

When he was 29, he started to work in a bank, and only 3 years later he was accused of misappropriation. In order to avoid the trial and being found guilty, he run away to Honduras. There he started a friendship with a famous train robber. Also, there he coined the expression “banana republic” that appeared in his book Cabbages and Kings.

But when he knew his wife coudn't come to Honduras (as they had planned) because she was dying of tuberculosis, he went back to the USA. He had spent six months in Honduras. Back in the USA, he was found guilty of misappropriation and got a penalty of 5 years in prison, but he went out after 3 years because of his good behaviour.

Then he moved to New York, the setting of most of his stories.

He died when he was only 48 years old of cirrhosis: as you can imagine, he was a heavy drinker.

While he lived in New York, he was a very prolific author because he wrote a story every week for different magazines. He was a popular author; his stories are witty, funny and with a surprising ending, but he wasn’t very praised by critics, because they thought he wasn’t deep enough.

His most known short stories are The Gift of the Magi (where a very poor marriage try to buy presents each other in secret), The Ransom of Great Chief (where two bandits kidnap a boy, and the things doesn’t go as easily as they thought), The Last Leaf (where and old artist helps, in a very special way, to spirit another young artist who doesn’t want to fight for her own life), Hearts and Hands (where a prisoner and his guard travel by train and there they find an old acquaintance), etc. 

The Cop and the Anthem

It was published in December 1904, and it’s a typical Henrian story. It has irony, witty sentences and an unexpected ending. Furthermore, it was adapted for the cinema (as a part of a longer movie) with Charles Laughton and Marilyn Monroe as stars.

It’s about a lazy homeless who feels winter is coming, and knows he’s going to be cold, and, as he lives in the streets, he has to look for warm accommodation. According to his opinion, the best he can get is some months in prison: there he will be fed and will have bed and blankets and a cell with a roof on it and walls around. But the question is how can be he put into prison? So he tries different ways, that is, different minor crimes, and waits for an officer to arrest him. But all of his attempts are a failure, so at the end he decides..., but I’m not going to be a spoiler telling you the end!

I like this kind of stories because they’re pure entertainment, and they are sincere and not pretentious. You read them, and you feel immediately satisfied and happy. But, on the other hand, they don’t make you meditate, they don’t give you new ideas and they don’t stimulate your intellectual or moral curiosity. All in all, however, they’re enjoyable.

QUESTIONS

In the story The Last Leaf, there is a personification: Pneumonia is treated like a person who walks around, touches people and kills them. What personification do we have in our story? Explain its elements.
Our protagonist, what cannot he do to get warm in winter that other (richer) people do?
What was Blackwell’s Island, or, simply, the Island?
What’s the Boreas in our story? What about the bluecoats?
How did Soapy protect himself from the cold the previous night?
Why doesn’t he like to go to a charity institution?
 
Explain the different ways to get arrested, and so an accommodation on the Island:

The expensive restaurant way
The breaking of a shop-window glass way
The regular restaurant way
The annoying a young woman way
The disorderly behaviour way
The umbrella way

 
What are the choosiest products of the grape, the silkworm and the protoplasm in the expensive restaurant?
What does it mean that “the minutest coin and himself were strangers”?
How does Soapy feel after hearing the church music?
At last, how did he get a place on the Island?

VOCABULARY

honk, hegira, parley, minion, loaf, telltale, woo, demeanour, cant, sud, larceny

The Blush, by Elizabeth Taylor

 

 

 

 

 Elizabeth Taylor at the Wikipedia: here.

Article in a magazine: here

A review on The Blush: here

 

 

 

Vocabulary:

intimations, bib, filch, dainty, mope, glower, answer back, ginger-beer, quandary, oafish, overalls, poorly (be), sort out, heartburn, fastidious, come over funny, cosset, toll (take its), expecting (be), stubborn, corduroy, sea (be at), rough (do the), flighty

A contest: 

Sumarize the story in just one sentence.

Themes to talk about:

Mrs Allen
Mrs Allen's dreams about children
Mrs Lacey personality
Mrs Lacey appearence
Mrs Lacey's behaviour with her children
Mrs Allen's gardener
Horse and Jockey
Chequers
Mr Allen
Maureen, Vera, Ron
Mr Lacey
Mrs Lacey arrives unusually late
Mrs Allen walks the dog
Mrs Lacey feels unwell
Mr Lacey pays a visit to Mrs Allen
Mrs Lacey's real life
Surprise at the end
The title