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Copywork
About This Passage
Selden compresses the Bellini family's devotion to opera into one sentence that works against its own grain. The verbs 'clustered' and 'straining' locate the family's love of art under unfriendly conditions: a radio in a subway newsstand, the broadcast fighting the station's noise. Copy carefully to notice how love of beauty is often revealed by the conditions it must survive.
the Bellini family liked Italian opera every Saturday during the winter when the Opera was broadcast they would sit clustered around the radio in the newsstand straining to hear the music above the di...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize Chapter 5 as a sequence of three adult encounters Chester has — with Mickey at the lunch counter, with Mr Smedley at the newsstand, and implicitly with Papa Bellini throughout. For each encounter, identify what the adult gives Chester and what the adult gives Mario. Then explain why Selden sequences these three in this order.
Discussion Questions
- Mickey's cricket-scaled soda (a tablespoon, a drop of syrup, a fingernail of ice cream) and his labeled paper cup are small acts of hospitality rendered with almost surgical precision. Why does Selden insist on such exact measurements rather than simply writing that Mickey made Chester a small soda? What is the relationship between numerical precision and ethical attention in this chapter?
- Mr Smedley refuses Mario's offer to give Chester music lessons, arguing that nature has already given the cricket everything a teacher could supply. Is this a sincere epistemological claim about where art originates, or is it a form of adult modesty dressed as philosophy? What in the chapter's portrait of Mr Smedley supports each reading?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
To predict or declare what is going to happen, often with a tone of authority or inspired conviction.
Item 2
Charming in a way that seems almost magical — holding the observer's attention with delight.
Item 3
A capacity or drive a creature is born with, without having to be taught or shown.
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Critical Thinking
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