Not public domain, if that's specifically what you're looking for, but my best curriculum for English is all old, out of print, and usually cheap from bookfinder.com or ebay: Educator Classic Library books: Children's classics from the late '60s with useful definitions and illustrations in the margins for challenging vocabulary, and the best appendices I've ever seen in a child's book, providing interesting information on the time, place, writer, or topic of the book. Word Wealth/ Word Wealth Jr., which I rattled on about in another thread so won't duplicate here. Scribner School Editions/ Scribner School Paperbacks: High school (mostly) classics with superior study guides. The best of this excellent series are The Wind in the Willows and James Boyd's Drums. Hard to find: I had to use university inter-library loan to get hold of a copy with the study guide for Wind in the Willows. But boy was it worth it.

+1000. I want to stand on street corners and hand out Dawn Huebner's book.

Last week Wee Girl and I arrived at her recital just in time for tuning, 45 minutes drive from our house, and discovered neither of us had put her cello in the car.

Yes to photos. Homeschooling really is about the education we wish we had received, isn't it?

Adopt me.

Us, junior & senior years: STEM + Classics: "Nature and Number": reading Euclid, Archimedes, and Theophrastus in Greek, while analyzing/critiquing the mathematics and science in the texts. (Someone else is doing that with Middle Girl, not me...) 1/2 credit of Driver's Ed combined with 1/2 credit of bicycle maintenance and repair, with some enthusiastic guidance from the local bike repair shop owner. Classics + English literature: Satire from Ancient Rome to 17th/18th century England

No, I think he was well known everywhere, at least when he was well known.

I think I saw that movie--doesn't she crawl out of the tv set, with her long hair in front of her face?

Into these dreams only it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles; especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him, and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated. And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear everything when I am sleeping), and instantly I awoke. It was broad noon, and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside—come to show me their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the transition from the damned crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and of infancy, that in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces. --from Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater [ETA: One might almost suspect De Quincey of having ambivalent feelings about fatherhood]

Nice contribution. I was permanently scarred by hearing Poe's "The Black Cat" read aloud by a counselor on an overnight camp at a tender age. Ever since then I've loved literature and kept a cat....

Book friends, I've started a separate thread for Literary Hallowe'en. Please contribute! With all the reading you ladies do, there's surely a lot of strange or eerie passages that have struck you.

I've been reading Symbolist and Decadent writings this year, and ran across this Paul Verlaine poem. Translation is by Lloyd Alexander; original below. Sentimental Conversation In a lonely, frozen park, Two phantoms wander by. Their mouths are slack, their eyes are dead, Their words are barely heard. In a lonely, frozen park, Two shadows whisper of the past. "Love, do you remember our old ecstasy?" "Why should I?" "Does your heart leap when you hear my name? In dreams do you still see my soul?" "No." "What gallant days, what bliss behond words, Lips joined to lips." "Perhaps." "How blue the sky, how bright our hope was then." "Hope, in defeat, has fled. The sky is black." Night alone hears them as they stroll Through the wild oats. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Colloque sentimental Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé Deux formes ont tout à l'heure passé. Leurs yeux sont morts et leurs lèvres sont molles, Et l'on entend à peine leurs paroles. Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé. - Te souvient-il de notre extase ancienne? - Pourquoi voulez-vous donc qu'il m'en souvienne? - Ton coeur bat-il toujours à mon seul nom? Toujours vois-tu mon âme en rêve? - Non. Ah ! les beaux jours de bonheur indicible Où nous joignions nos bouches ! - C'est possible. - Qu'il était bleu, le ciel, et grand, l'espoir ! - L'espoir a fui, vaincu, vers le ciel noir. Tels ils marchaient dans les avoines folles, Et la nuit seule entendit leurs paroles.

The Celestial Stag We know absolutely nothing about the appearance of the Celestial Stag (maybe because nobody has ever had a good look at one), but we do know that these tragic animals live underground in mines and desire nothing more than to reach the light of day. They have the power of speech and implore the miners to help them to the surface. At first, a Celestial Stag attempts to bribe the workmen with the promise of revealing hidden veins of silver and gold; when this gambit fails, the beast becomes troublesome and the miners are forced to overpower it and wall it up in one of the mine galleries. It is also rumored that miners outnumbered by the Stags have been tortured to death. Legend has it that if the Celestial Stag fids its way into the open air, it becomes a foul-smelling liquid that can breed death and pestilence. --from Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings

Please contribute the scariest, spookiest, creepiest, or weirdest excerpt from something you've encountered in your own reading. Multiple entries acceptable. Please precede violent, explicit, or otherwise disturbing material with appropriate cautions. Style points for excerpts from sources not generally regarded as spooky. (caution: mild violence) ---------------------- These Indians, and the ones we encountered before, told us a very strange thing which they reckoned had happened about fifteen or sixteen years earlier. They said that a man whom they called "Evil Thing" wandered that land. He had a small body and a beard, but they never were able to see his face. When he came to the house where they were, their hair stood on end and they trembled. Then there appeared at the entrance to the house a burning firebrand. Then he entered and took whomever he wanted and stabbed him three times in the side with a very sharp flint, as wide as a hand and two palms long. He would stick his hands in through the wounds and pull out their guts, and cut a piece of gut about a palm in length, which he would throw onto the embers. Then he would cut his victim three times in the arm, the second cut at the spot where people are bled. He would pull the arm out of its socket and shortly thereafter reset it. Finally he would place his hands on the wounds which they said suddenly healed. They told us that he often appeared among them when they were dancing, sometimes dressed as a woman and other times as a man. Whenever he wanted, he would take a buhio or a dwelling and lift it high. After a while he would let it drop with a great blow. They also told us that they offered him food many times but he never ate. They asked him where he came from and where he lived; he showed them an opening in the ground and said that his house was there below. We laughed a lot and made fun of these things that they told us. When they saw that we did not believe them, they brought many of the people who claimed he had taken them and showed us the marks of the stabbings in those places, just as they had said. --from Cabeza de Vaca, Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition

This week I finished my Spooky October Read, Thomas Tryon's The Other, your basic evil-twin, bad-seed, small-town-with-high-gruesome-death-rate psychological horror novel. It's not badly written for genre fiction. 10x10 category: Little Oval on the Spine. Currently reading The Stammering Century, Gilbert Seldes's 1928 overview of the minor social movements, religious and otherwise, of the American nineteenth century. Not far into it, but it seems promising. Also The Golden Pot and Other Tales by E.T.A. Hoffman (whose best-known short story is "The Nutcracker," not included in my collection). I've so far only read "The Sandman," a weird gothic exploration of the themes of vision, artificiality, and madness; it's part of Middle Girl's literature curriculum which we will be discussing soon. Also the occasional Hugh MacDiarmid poem.

Don't think I saw that thread. I had to read your post twice before I realized it had nothing to do with your avatar. :)

I have a question for WTM board members with relevant legal experience. How does a waiver protect the guy running this? You can waive your right to sue, but you can't waive the state's right to prosecute for assault, battery, or other relevant charges. I was under the impression that consent isn't a defense to assault (i.e. if I ask you to saw my arm off, and you do it, you still get arrested).

The standard English here would be "I think that we painters need help." There are two things going on here grammatically. One is that, as forty-two noted, that is a subordinator, marking the subordinate clause "we painters need help." More interestingly, you have here an example of a personal determinative. Our more familiar determinatives are words like the, a, this, that, all, both, and so on. We and you, however (but not other personal pronouns!), can be used as determinatives, as in "you guys" and "we painters." So painters is the subject of the subordinate clause, and we is its determinative.

This week I finished Updike's Rabbit, Run -- yes, a few decades late -- and my Apollinaire's Selected Writings. (10x10 category: Les Enfants de Baudelaire, or Symbolists, Surrealists, and Other Anti-Realists. Halfway through my spooky October book, The Other by Thomas Tryon. Not unreadable, but relies too much on "psychological horror" cliches. I'll finish but I'm not recommending it.

I contracted mild chicken pox in elementary school. Hardly any spots. I came down with shingles at age 20 (!!!); the doctor at the university health clinic was very excited as he didn't usually get to see cases on campus. It was mild, too, though even mild shingles is pretty painful. Never gotten the vaccine or been tested. I suppose I ought.

Dh says the Strugatsky brothers wrote the screenplay - based on Roadside Picnic - for the Tarkovsky movie STALKER, which was later made into a video game of the same name. I wonder how he knows this stuff. I wonder what he's actually doing at work.

I don't generally care for science fiction, but I've enjoyed the Strugatstky brothers' books that I have read. Did you know there's a popular Russian video game based on Roadside Picnic? With a little bit of Chernobyl thrown in.

Showing up late to this party, but Middle Girl took it today, sulky and resentful that she had to skip her Greek and history classes. We'll see how it went I guess.

Love the pictures, Negin. The grotto in the last one is amazing. Maus, congratulations on 52!

This week I needed a small and sturdy book I could take on a plane and fit into a 10x10 category, so I put all else aside and grabbed Mrs & Mrs Stevenson's The Dynamiter, a sort of strange comedy that they wrote quick because, as Mrs Stevenson explains, they were frankly out of money. So it's light, but enjoyable, featuring incompetent anarchist terrorists, Bertie Wooster-style impoverished gentlemen, a down-on-his-luck foreign prince-turned-tobacconist, perfidious Mormon bogeymen, a mad scientist, a wealthy cat lady conveniently eager to give away her mansion, a voodoo priestess, Cuban spies, exploding buildings, narrow escapes, poisonous swamps, a spontaneous deus-ex-machina tornado, and a happy ending. Whee! 10x10 category: Scots Wha' Hae. Almost done with John Updike's Rabbit, Run. Still working in the occasional Hugh MacDiarmid and Guillaume Apollinaire poem. I find I have to look up MacDiarmid's words a lot more than Apollinaire's, which is kind of sad. Back to Proust at some point, I swear. By the way, Boston, which I had never before visited, has some very nice used bookstores. I picked up a first edition set of Raby's Secular Latin Poetry, which being medieval is within my translation abilities, for $20 instead of the usual three-digit price. We got to visit the tomb of the Mather family, whose literary importance I only appreciated after reading Perry Miller's The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry earlier this year. A plain and unostentatious tomb under a sycamore, right in keeping with their theology and literary style. And Middle Girl got to run an authentic printing press, printing out her own copy of the Declaration of Independence. The guy doing the colonial printing press reenactment, it turns out, homeschooled his own daughter, and was eager to have another interested teen involved in the demonstration. So loads of literary and historical fun. Okay, off to read the thread now.