Anthem for Doomed Youth

Well if I thought the past couple days were uneventful, today was the Dark Ages. So I will recount today but also give everyone a little look at all the excitement coming up this month. By the way, the title of this post is the title of a poem by Wilfred Owen, who we talked about today in class.

When I walked into Senior Sem today, Phil called me over and told me that an Indian woman at the grocery store he always goes to asked him to help her two kids (16 and 13) with their English proficiency. He couldn't do it so he asked me if I wanted to do. Of course I said yes. It would involve a couple nights a week and maybe a weekend or two. I would get paid. Sign me up! We'll see what happens but I hope something comes out of it.

In class today, we talked about a bunch of stuff. We discussed the War Poets which were some poets who served for Britain in WWI and wrote anti-war poetry because of it. The most famous of the War Poets was Wilfred Owen. The poetry he wrote holds nothing back and is quite grim and depressing. If you're interested, here's a link to some of his works. It really is worth it to just read one or two of the poems. I suggest Anthem for Doomed Youth because its short and is similar to the rest of his stuff. The most tragic part about the whole thing is that he ended up dying in WWI, just like all the people he wrote about.

We read those War Poet poems because they are featured in a piece of music called The War Requiem by Benjamin Britten. he wrote it for the re-opening of Coventry Cathedral after it was destroyed in WWII. We are visiting the cathedral in a week. Um, lots of connections there to stuff we are doing (British music, morality of war, program excursion, etc.). We are going to listen to that music next week in preparation for our visit. We spent the rest of the class time talking about "englishness" in music. We continued our journey through English music history by learning about the three great English composers of the late 19th and early 20th century, with Holst the biggest among them. Holst wrote The Planets which is very popular among high school marching bands. Park Center performed that music in 1999 I think, maybe 2001. I don't know. At any rate, I had heard it before and am going to hear it again soon. On Thursday we are going to a concert by the Royal College of Music and they are performing The Planets. You should be able to listen to some of the music at this link if you are so inclined. *Phew* That's a lot of connections and a lot of stuff to talk about and get ready for.

After class, I sat around in the computer lab applying for summer jobs and doing more travel research and just catching up on Facebook and emails. I could spend a lifetime doing travel research. Eventually, I will need to stop and do something else with myself but for now, I enjoy it and feel like I need to do it for all the reasons that I think I said before (lots of potential trips coming up). I ate dinner and read and watched tv and generally lazed around. Tough life, I know. That's about it for today.

To fulfill my promise at the beginning, here's a look at some of the uncoming stuff that I know about right now in my life:

March 6 ~ Orchestra Concert
March 7-9 ~ Home Stay near Oxford (more on that tomorrow)
March 12 ~ Theatre: Major Barbara
March 15 ~ Coventry Cathedral and Warwick Castle
March 21 ~ My mom arrives
March 23 ~ Easter
March 26 ~ Theatre: The Importance of Being Ernest
March 30 ~ My mom leaves

Busy, busy. Bye!