Accidentally PoMo
homework question: “How does this character think of himself?”
clueless student: “He thinks of himself as the main character of this play.”
From Ninth-Grade Essays
“The white servant were treated as badly as salves [spellcheck didn't help here], but the rich white masters gave a few rights and beehives [spellcheck's autocorrection for "benefits"?] to them, so that made the white servants on their side.”
“Racism was important back then too. Sometimes it was used more than you use your cell phone. I know I over exaggerated that, but it was used a lot.”
“The oppression was strong and thick in the air at that time.”
“The colonies’ one big bad wolf of a fear would be that unhappy white servants would join the black rebellion.”
“By 1619 millions of blacks is brought from Africa just to mines and sugar the plantation as a slave.”
“America most cruel form of history was slavery.” [One source had said "America's was the cruelest form of slavery in history" or something like that.]
Brainfreeze
At times all I can think of is how much life was wasted designing the cover of the book in front of me or pounding nails into the roof I’m under or choosing fonts for the program I’m using. I wonder why the people who did all those things didn’t just decide to die instead. At this basic level of decision-making I do not understand. Nor do I understand why I take the time to write this now, other than to satisfy my vanity.
Counterproductivity 101
I just discovered in a conversation with my boyfriend-turned-therapist that I mentally equate significance with ability to hurt me. No wonder I have issues.
Conversation-Enders
“I know now that death is not the loss of memory, but its apotheosis. An apotheosis of light. You no longer need to make an effort to remember. You see all the way back to childhood. You are reduced to eye and ear, as at the theater. This makes me wonder: does the audience at these secular stage amusements know that a play is an apprenticeship and that, in those amusing, moving, or disconcerting hours, they learn, passively, to die?”
“The sleeping quarters of screams stretch beyond echo’s reach. Formerly, one only heard screams when they awoke. And it happened that they slept a long time. Nowadays, they no longer sleep at all.”
“…eloquence. He compared it to a stone tearing the surface of a lake and to its misleading rings. The wound closes right up again. But the rings multiply and grow and bear witness–oh mockery–to the intensity of the pain.”
“You have to be mad to accept death, and wise to resign yourself to living.”
“Alas that we cannot brush against insanity without the risk of losing our reason for good.”
“Difficulty continues to live in us by marrying a difficulty of the opposite sex. It always engenders legitimate difficulties.”
-Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, “The Book of the Absent”
Like a pig in a butcher’s shop
As my friend and I walked past a fancy downtown hotel yesterday, a guy standing on the sidewalk asked us first if we were “um, like, out of high school” (yes) and then whether we were interested in earning a little extra money. At the time we laughed, along with passersby. Now I want to vomit.
*%$#^!
I don’t know what it does for my students, but the ban on swearing in class certainly makes my roommate and me start cussing like pirates as soon as we get home every day. This does not seem productive.
I miss the good old days
when I didn’t care about politics. I am so angry right now. Also, John, I am not your friend. Please refrain from calling me your friend. (I’m watching the debate.)
Meta of the Day
“Where is the book set?”
“In the book.”
-Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions
~
“The pages of the book are doors. Words go through them, driven by their impatience to regroup, to reach the end of the work, to be again transparent.”
-ibid.
~
1. I love the Upanishads.
2. Sometimes against my own will (whatever the hell that means), I can’t help wanting every work of art, in fact everything, to be all-encompassing, to be freed of particularity, to mean not something at some time but everything all the time, to be whole in a very un-post-modernist way.
I just realized that these two facts are not coincidental.
Catch-22
Do changes in beliefs precede or follow changes in behavior? And what does that mean for reform?
More on Sarah Palin, but without vitriol
Oh, I agree with this.
Retraction
It looks like the rape-kit thing was a myth. This is a relief, if a small one.
