Monthly Archive for May, 2007

planning for pie and whiskey

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on May 31, 2007
in Academia, Food and Drink and Paedagogy
. 7 Comments

Once again, the school term is drawing to a close in spite of my panicked cries that I have not gotten enough done yet and surely no, it can not yet be time for finals and grading. Surely, no. But yes, assuredly, it is. I suddenly have to turn over assignments faster than I should, waiting till the last minute before grading and returning papers, only to have to collect the next batch in a couple of days’ time.

Whenever I hand back assignments to my students, I always offer some general commentary about what went well, over all, and what didn’t. This time I had to stoop to the embarrassing low of telling them that postmodern is an adjective, while postmodernism is a noun. “Know your parts of speech,” I intoned threateningly.? “Do not undermine your entire argument by convincing the reader that, rather than making claims about anything you actually know, you are merely repeating some words you heard one time.”

In other news, I have been living a rich fantasy life, thinking about how moving to a new city and buying new furniture will be oh-so-delightfully fun, and looking at sofas and beds online, when of course one important step remains before I can leave town: securing a goddamned job.? I have got a lot of irons in a lot of fires, a lot of fingers in a lot of metaphorical pies (mmm…pie), but no offers yet.? So, basically, browsing the CB2 Online Catalog is, how you say, premature. (But! This sofa is finally on sale!)

It feels good to be excited about the possibility of moving, though. Last time I faced a cross-country relocation, the excitement was nearly obliterated by all the relationship turmoil going on at the time (Would The Guy come with me? Would he move out here, eventually? Would we break up? How could I move to a place where no one knew me and no one would notice if I slipped in the shower and died, left to be devoured by the cat who, surely rejoicing that she had finally waited me out, would feast victoriously on my remains?) Although the move wound up ending a bad relationship and the cat hasn’t (yet) gotten her chance to dine on me, that phase of life was really no fun, in retrospect.

At any rate, Now Is The Time. I have really got to focus on keeping my shit together right now, or I could accidentally waste hours upon hours comparing apartment rates in all the cities where I’ve applied, and sorting out various possible salaries and income taxes and plotting and scheming to figure out how much disposable income I may or may not have left over, depending on myriad possible permutations. One always has to keep one’s whiskey budget in mind, you know.

the dark reign of chowderheads continues

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on May 24, 2007
in Paedagogy
. 5 Comments

I have another nemesis. She is not obnoxious during class discussions, as My Nemesis 1.0 so often was, but she is, as I was telling a friend the other day, the human embodiment of everything that stodgy, professorial, adult-type-people like to complain about.

In spite of the attendance policy which forbids cell-phone use in class, and in spite of my pointed reminders to refer to said policy, she has sat at her desk, blatantly text-messaging by the cold blue light of her phone screen, at least four times. In spite of the (university-wide) email policy requiring students to use their university email accounts for school communication, she insists on emailing me from her hotmail account [sidebar: who even has a hotmail account?!], which causes the email server thingy to reject the messages and put them in my spam folder. My spam folder, incidentally, is full of thousands upon thousands of?wondrously cryptic mails?with subject lines like “sarsaparilla and silane,” “plowmen find the best casino barker,” “cecropia or belgian,” “dear good mood too u,” “privet friend,” and “test the sweets of the life yourself,” but, as much as I love coincidental poetry, I do not want to have to sift through that crap every time she emails me frantically (from the university account, this time) to tell me she sent me her assignment, like, totally FOUR DAYS AGO, and why haven’t I written her back to tell her I got it yet?!

Her best quality, by far, is her utter unwilingness to do anything for herself. She emailed me all in a panic the night before her presentation to tell me that she and her partner had talked about the book for thirty whole minutes, and would you believe they didn’t know what to do. Then, of course, she didn’t respond to my helpful email where I gave them oodles of ideas for approaching the book, never told me what her topic would be (part of the assignment is getting the topic approved) and never showed up to class, leaving her partner high and dry. It really just burns my toast when people do that — the dumped-on partner is always all, “um, so, I don’t know where Betty Sue is, but, um, I guess I can do the presentation by myself…um….” And if I were in the partner’s place, you know I would have to cut a bitch.

Her latest query regards her standing grade-wise, and she has asked me to tell her what grade she “has” currently so she can determine what she “needs to do” to pass. First of all, she doesn’t “have” any grade at all, since we are only partway through the term and all the assignments haven’t been completed yet. Second of all, she has the same damned syllabus everyone else has — you know, the one with the list of assignments and how they are weighted. She could just make her own damned self a damned spreadsheet if she wants to know so much. Hello, lady, it is called ALGEBRA.

Compared to the rest of my students this term, she is like that one retard in the lunch room who is always touching himself inappropriately while screaming and smearing mashed potatoes on his face.

j’accuse et j’accuse et j’accuse

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on May 22, 2007
in Academia, Books and Grammar
. 5 Comments

Have you ever heard someone describe?a person?as “talking in run-on sentences?”? What do you think that means?

I ask because I’m not sure how one can “talk in run-on sentences,” except perhaps if the listener feels that the speaker?did not include?adequate pauses to convey the necessary punctuation.? But who can say, really, whether some chat-happy talker has used a comma or a semicolon?? I mean, that sounds suspiciously like hearing in run-on sentences, if you ask me.

Maybe I should back up a bit.? My real beef, I suppose, is with? people who throw the term run-on sentence out, all j’accuse!, when they don’t know what it means.? Long sentences, sentences with multiple clauses, sentences with one independent clause after another after another, sentences?that plod on and on and never stop?and drop noun after verb after noun after verb again are not necessarily run-on sentences.?

A run-on sentence is a sentence where two or more independent clauses have not been joined together by either a coordinating conjunction (like and, but, or or) or punctuation (semicolon or colon, or sometimes an em-dash).? A sentence can contain as many independent clauses as the writer wishes (just ask Marcel Proust or William Faulkner), so long as they have been joined by the appropriate conjunction or punctuation.?

Run-On Sentences:

I ate a burrito it was as big as my leg.

Marcel Proust is a silly gay French man he uses too may long sentences.

Not??Run-On Sentences:

I ate a burrito; it was as big as my leg.

I ate a burrito, and it was as big as my leg.

A sofa that had risen up from dreamland between a pair of new and thoroughly substantial armchairs, smaller chairs upholstered in pink silk, the cloth surface of a card-table raised to the dignity of a person since, like a person, it had a past, a memory, retaining in the chill and gloom of Quai Conti the tan of its roasting by the sun through the windows of Rue Montalivet (where it could tell the time of day as accurately as Mme. Verdurin herself) and through the glass doors at la Raspeli?re, where they had taken it and where it used to gaze out all day long over the flower-beds of the garden at the valley far below, until it was time for Cottard and the musician to sit down to their game; a posy of violets and pansies in pastel, the gift of a painter friend, now dead, the sole fragment that survived of a life that had vanished without leaving any trace, summarising a great talent and a long friendship, recalling his keen, gentle eyes, his shapely hand, plump and melancholy, while he was at work on it; the incoherent, charming disorder of the offerings of the faithful, which have followed the lady of the house on all her travels and have come in time to assume the fixity of a trait of character, of a line of destiny; a profusion of cut flowers, of chocolate-boxes which here as in the country systematised their growth in an identical mode of blossoming; the curious interpolation of those singular and superfluous objects which still appear to have been just taken from the box in which they were offered and remain for ever what they were at first, New Year?s Day presents; all those things, in short, which one could not have isolated from the rest, but which for Brichot, an old frequenter of the Verdurin parties, had that patina, that velvety bloom of things to which, giving them a sort of profundity, an astral body has been added; all these things scattered before him, sounded in his ear like so many resonant keys which awakened cherished likenesses in his heart, confused reminiscences which, here in this drawing-room of the present day that was littered with them, cut out, defined, as on a fine day a shaft of sunlight cuts a section in the atmosphere, the furniture and carpets, and pursuing it from a cushion to a flower-stand, from a footstool to a lingering scent, from the lighting arrangements to the colour scheme, carved, evoked, spiritualised, called to life a form which might be called the ideal aspect, immanent in each of their successive homes, of the Verdurin drawing-room.? –M. Proust

The next time you hear some giddy person waxing on and on and on, never giving you the chance to get a word in edgewise, feel free to call him a conversation-monopolizing jerkburger, because he probably is.? On the grammar front, however, give him the benefit of the doubt and assume you simply can’t hear his semicolons.? As for those silly gay French men and their ponderous descriptions of some lady’s drawing room, just be glad you did not decide to write a book about them.

success needs celebrated!

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on May 10, 2007
in Grammar
. 3 Comments

The old post about that mysterious English construction, “needs fixed,” has apparently done a little fixing of its own — it continues to attract googlers from all over, and, according to my dad, it may be working to call attention to this, the most pressing issue facing our Global Anglophone Community.

?He reports from the front lines:

I almost forgot to tell you: ?repair tags at?[Company] now say “This light needs TO BE repaired.” ?No, I can’t take credit for the change.? They probably noticed the international ridicule to which they were? subjected by your blog :)

Victory, my friends.? Victory.? Or coincidence; you never know.? Either way, it is now time to move on to the next thing.? I would suggest working to stamp out definately, but let’s face it; that would never happen.? What do you think?

on throwing the heat in your college writing

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on May 8, 2007
in Paedagogy
. 7 Comments

When the time has come for you to submit your first essay to a writing or literature course, you will want to practice the verbal equivalent of throwing the heat. Or, as Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh once said, you’ll want to announce your presence with authority.? First (and this strategy may sound counterintuitive, but hear me out) admit you know nothing. Don’t bother reading the assigned texts or listening during lectures: you will not need to know any of this information, because your own ignorance is the first and most important ingredient in this game. Here is an example of this strategy:

It would be right for me to being this paper by telling you that I don’t know anything about [This Literary Movement]. I kind of get what they are trying to say but at the same time I don’t get it or understand it. I also don’t know what these story’s are about, I think it seems like they are maybe using literary devices and language to get there point across.

Whew! Did you feel that heat? I clocked this pitch at a sizzling 97mph. Don’t stop there, though. Once you have begun you’ll have to keep them coming. Keep reminding the reader of how little you know. Little words like “might” and “seems” will work for this purpose, as well as, of course, the time-tested “I think.” Another example, smoking with heat:

When the author says “I will never be a writer,” it seems like he is saying that he lacks the self confidance to be a writer, because it seems like he doesn’t think he will be a writer, and I think it seems like he feels he cannot become one.

This guy is a real flamethrower — step back or you ’bouts to get burned! Examine how he not only stresses his own ignorance, but does so using repetitive, redundant, say-nothing filler sentences. He has one idea, but takes, like, eight clauses to get it out. That’s what we call free baseball!

To recap the highlights, we have seen the writer throw a screaming fireball in the form of ignorance, or, as fans of the game call it, “The Old I-Don’t-Knower.” No one can dispute that he is ignorant! But, just in case, he repeatedly undercuts and knowledge or expertise he may have incorrectly implied he had by stressing that things only seem like they might be a certain way, at least so he thinks. Scorching.

Make sure that the authority with which you announced your presence doesn’t wane — you’ll need to close with as much impact as you opened. Try something like this:

In conclusion, I do not know for sure what the author was saying with his writing, but it seems like he was saying something about how he might, or might not, do something. This is in some ways a part of the [Literary Movement] but in some ways it might be that it is also different. In short, to each his own, as the old saying goes.

There’s no need to bring in relief forces in this game! Our man has stayed strong the whole way. Admire the grip he has on the subject matter! In some ways it is one thing, he says; in other ways it might be different. No truer statement was ever made. It is out there, for sure. Kind of radical, in a kind of tubular sort of way, but mostly out there.

If this young man keeps throwing this kind of heat, who can say what future awaits him? Thus I say, make?him your model. You don’t need any knowledge to write a perfect-game paper. Just say what you think you might want to say, then say that maybe it could be that something else might be true, you think. Hey, you don’t really know! You’ve got a million-dollar arm and a five-cent head! And that’s fine, as long as you remember not to let fungus grow on your shower shoes.? You’ll never make it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes.