Little Astronaut
A newborn rests her head
On the Earth of mother.
Everything else
Is outer space.
--J. Hope Stein
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Week 9
Class Ground Rules
Read all the assignments before class.
Keep yourself on mute unless called on.
Raise your hands electronically.
Focus your comments only on the question at hand rather than straying to other parts of the story.
Refrain from offering a review of the whole story or jumping to the end.
Try to support your comments by referring to details from the text.
Listen to and respond to others with respect.
READ (at least twice): Lorrie Moore, "Which is More than I Can Say About Some People," (published in The New Yorker, November 8, 1993 and included in Birds of America, 1998). PDF posted below.
A mother and her adult daughter on a driving tour of Ireland make their way to the Blarney Stone so the daughter can receive the gift of gab and overcome her fear of public speaking.
Think About:
What the mother seeks on the trip, and what she learns.
What the daughter seeks on the trip, and what she learns.
Click on the top right corner below to open the story
Lorrie Moore - Which is More Than I Can Say.pdfKissing the Blarney Stone
The Blarney Stone is a stone set into the tower of Blarney Castle in 1446. According to legend, kissing the stone endows the kisser with the “gift of gab”—great eloquence and skill in flattery. To touch the stone with one's lips, the participant must climb 127 steps up a steep spiral stairway, lie down and lean over backwards on the parapet's edge, grasping iron rails. This is traditionally achieved with the help of an assistant. In 2002, protective crossbars were installed below for safety.
Lorrie Moore Biography
Lorrie Moore Biography
Nicknamed "Lorrie" by her parents, she was born Marie Lorena Moore in 1957 in Glens Falls, New York, a small town in the Adirondacks. Her father was an insurance executive, her mother a former nurse turned housewife. Moore, the second of four children, remembers her parents as rather strict Protestants, politically minded, and culturally alert.
A quiet, skinny kid, Moore fretted, quite literally, about her insubstantiality. "I felt completely shy, and so completely thin that I was afraid to walk over grates. I thought I would fall through them. Both my younger brother and I were so painfully skinny, it still haunts us. Here we are, sort of big, middle-aged adults, and we still think we're these thin children who are going to fall down the slightest crevice and disappear." Read more...
Link to Week 9 class recording: brandeis.zoom.us/rec/play/jTL59_dQEWnt-SP-OqF6dSlvIR6RCYlG7_ew6ajY0WqAph7lxHdrrM0p6LmrPAww5-h9-5xm-Ex8q5YW.SC4jpa-PUQGa1QxY
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