Q: Should I really drink an energy drink at eleven o’clock, after I
have already had a good quart of coffee throughout the afternoon?
A: Nah, probably not. Well, maybe. Yeah, definitely should. Mmmm…tastes like smarties. Smmmarties. Ooh. Oh! OK! Whew! Zzzzzzip! Maybe I shouldn’t have had that smartie-tasting– Oooooh, do I have another one? (Hey, that was another question, not
an answer.) (Who says you can go around answering a question with a
question?) (Hey, that was another one!) (Shut up!)
Q: Does “prurient” mean what I think it means?
A: Yes. (Celebrate with more caffeine.)
Q: Can this thing spell-check in different languages?
A: It can. (More celebration.)
Q: Besotted? Am I really going to say besotted? I mean, really, right after I just said prurient?
A: Of course. Fuck off. It would behoove you to fuck off.
Q: Mmm…why [twitch] am no I not going to sleeping [twitch] now?
A: Awww, crap.
I am finishing a fat chunk of writing this evening, and while I am disproportionately excited to be Actually Doing some Actual Work, other things seem to be throwing themselves in my path. I got distracted for a ridiculous amount of time trying to decide whether to go ahead and change now to the Gradual-School-Approved font and margins, or to keep using what I have been using and change it later. This text message exchange sums it up nicely:
Vague: am reading grad school’s formatting requirements and they are very definition of madness.
SuomiChris: DISSERTATION MUST BE WRITTEN IN BLOOD. DISSERTATIONS NOT WRITTEN IN AN ORGANIC INK WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED. ALSO, DISSERTATION MUST BE BOUND IN CANDIDATE’S SKIN.
Vague: I am blogging that [....]
SuomiChris: Well, add this: DISSERTATION MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY CERTIFIED MEDICAL REPORT THAT CANDIDATE SUFFERED MENTAL BREAK DURING WRITING PROCESS.
So, is anybody out there a medical doctor?
A brief break from scholarly toils to tell you how miffed I am to read of Nabokov’s long-held disdain for William Faulkner. The title of this post quotes the last line of a letter from Vlad to Edmund (”Bunny”) Wilson [may I just mention that if I had a friend named Edmund I WOULD NOT RELENT from calling him Bunny] in response to Wilson’s entreaties to read Faulkner. Vlad later wrote to Bunny, “someday you will recall with astonishment and regret your soft spot for Faulkner (and Eliot, and H. James).”
I’m not surprised by any of this, though, as –in addition to Pushkin, of course– there were only ever about four writers Nabokov claimed to respect. One of them was Sirin.
The newspaper arrived today, so at least I have that going for me, which is nice.
Well, crap, y’all. The rest of this week and the beginning of next promise to be pretty action-packed for me. I have a huge stack of papers to grade as well as a huge stack of as-yet-unwritten pages of academic writing to complete. Can you believe I actually have to do some of that much-discussed dissertating? What a load of malarkey.
While I’m sure you’d all love to hear detail after sparkling detail of it all, I may be relatively absent for the next week. While I could pop by every now and then to “phone it in” (as the kids say) with creatively-titled seven-word posts (two of which words are both “fuck”), I think I’d better focus my over-caffeinated self on phoning it in to my adviser. Bo-ring!
This stinks, as I enjoy you and each of your lovely internet computer pixels with a pleasure that goes beyond words–a pleasure that sounds much like “Click, click. Giggle. Click. Clickety-click, giggle,” in fact.
In my absence, should any grammatical emergencies arise, feel free to leave your problem in the comments section and I will get back to you as soon as possible–provided, of course, that you do not close your request with a cocky “respond asap,” as did one of my students recently. Needless to say, I certainly did not respond “asap,” the tool.
Further to amuse you, may I suggest this album, especially good whether you like German pop or not.
I hate it when I walk into the bathroom near my office immediately after someone has stinkily pooped therein. It’s impossible to hold my breath no matter how quick a pisser I may be. I also dislike trying to breathe through my mouth in such a situation, being haunted by the thought that I can somehow taste the stench.
Things only get worse, though, when another person walks when I’m only half finished. They have no evidence to support the claim that it wasn’t I who polluted the place. This is especially bad when the other person is someone I know, such as a member of my department’s faculty. This is just an example.
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