from the comments
Daryl, I know I’ve told you about my father’s disciplinary method from his one-room schoolhouse days in Tennessee. Now and then, he would wrestle the big farm boys at recess. He always won, even against the ones twice his size. Don’t you wish you could do that? My father said he never had a minute’s trouble with any of his students in any way, assignments, etc. They knew what would happen otherwise…
A sentimental education
Daryl just got an email from an oft-absent student. It reads simply, “This time I got food poisoning.”
He has a ways to go, though, if he wants to beat the guy from last semester who came in on crutches and said he’d been out because he had a heart attack.
James Brown Teaches You to Dance
Flannery’s Squirrel Shrine
This squirrel looked like a character in a cartoon flattened by a steam roller. I begged her to take a picture and she did!
from the moderated comments
the human consciousness is a dimension… unto itself… ok think of a one dimensional dot, now a line or drawing of a human, now the shape of a human, now i human moving in space and time, and now a consciousness poking into our world through the intersecting points on the dimensional planes… through us. weird thought, I am sure someone has thought of it before.
Tilt the Cup and Push Against the Lever
Advice About Writing Advice, Please
I’m always trying to update a general advice sheet I hand out in my fiction workshops. If you have things you think I should add or take out or clarify, please let me know. Thanks.
P.S. I’m open to sarcasm too.
Day Maker
Thanks a lot, Neko No Chikan.
a RPG life
EpicWin is an app that turns your to do list into an RPG experience. From the EpicWin website:
EpicWin is an iPhone app that puts the adventure back into your life. It’s a streamlined to-do list, to note down all your everday tasks, but with a role-playing spin.
Rather than just mentally ticking off your chores, completing each one improves and develops your character in an onging quest to level-up, gain riches, and develop skills.
By getting points for your chores it’s easier to actually get things done. We all have good intentions but we need a bit of encouragement here and there. Doing the laundry is an epic feat of stamina so why not get stamina points for it?!
I don’t think this would actually help me to get things done. I don’t have much trouble with that. But, I think this is a pretty creative idea and would love to be able to do something similar for the courses I’m teaching. Turn in your homework? 10 experience points. Demonstrate your ability to explicate a poem? Unlock a badge. I don’t think that all high school students would get that into it, but I could see it catching on…
What Would the Number Be Today?
I have been reading Stephen Dunn’s poems for many years, and his book of “prose pairs,” Riffs & Reciprocities, is a favorite (perhaps because I am also fond of prose poems). One of the pairs of brief prose pieces is titled “Scruples / Saints” (it originally appeared in The Georgia Review). Here’s the start of it, and a link to the remainder of the “Scruples” half of the set, which is interesting on its own:
Since the early eighties more students in my Literature & Ethics class, a freshman seminar, say they would press a button that would kill a nondescript peasant in another land, for which they would receive one million dollars and the guarantee of never being caught. They respond anonymously and must give a reason. Four out of twenty-five would in 1982. Eleven out of twenty-five in 1995. Reasons: Because it would set me up for life. Or, It’s just a one-time thing. And once, Because it’s a doggie-dog world.
Dick and Jane’s Deepwater Horizon
Okay, I get that one should tailor a message to the audience, but this hit me as more than a little condescending:
President Obama’s speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.
Tuesday night’s speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.
Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence “added some difficulty for his target audience,” Payack said.
What does Payack mean by “over the heads of many in his audience”? This is the sentence he singled out as problematic:
“That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge — a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy.”
Makes my lips tired just reading that sentence. Ever seen someone bend down and talk loudly to someone in a wheelchair? Kind of seems like that’s what they think Obama should have done to the American people.
quote out of context
They asked their waiter to show them all 200 different combinations, and when he claimed that he would not do that, they called him a liar and left.
Y’all
It’s three weeks from today.
What Daryl Just Said
I’m going to the office supply store to order a stamp that says Better Luck Next Year.
Students Overheard at the University
You going over to the language building?
No, I flunked that already.
For India: a Dinner in Morocco
My friends Rick and Teel recently told me another amazing tale of a memorable meal, in the mode of an earlier one I have written about here. This one involves a meal at the home of Jacqueline Rosenblum, who taught at Mohammed V University in Rabat in the early ’60s. Rick was there as a Fulbright Lecturer in 1963-64, teaching American literature, and his wife, Teel, was teaching English. Their friend, Jacqueline was (is…?) a remarkable polyglot; she was teaching Latin, but was also fluent in Arabic, English, German, French, and other languages. I’m not quite sure of the details, but apparently control of the university was soon to change hands (in 1965), and with the change would come the exclusion of all Jewish faculty. Jacqueline arranged a dinner party and invited a number of faculty members to her small house, where she served a meal she prepared herself: a leafy salad, flat bread, couscous, a large platter of lamb’s eyes, and a bowl of snails, stacked in a spiral cone. As Rick and Teel sat in the murmur of a dozen different languages at the table, they looked at each other with trepidation. A woman sitting next to Rick asked him, in French, if he would be able to eat what had been set before them. Rick, whose French was not terribly strong at the time, answered with “Je sui pouissant.” He meant to indicate something along the lines of “I can take it,” but had apparently told the woman he was “potent.” Instantly the woman’s husband, seated across from them at the table, was up and rushing around to get at Rick, saying in Danish “Did you hear what that man said to my wife?” Fortunately Jacqueline swept in, making good use of her many languages to explain to all what he had meant to say.
What a microcosm of cultures and conflicts that dinner was! I asked Rick and Teel if they ate any of the lamb’s eyes. They said they liked the snails but passed on the eyes.
Who Needs History
AUSTIN – Republicans on the State Board of Education soundly rejected a Democratic-backed proposal Thursday that would have required Texas students to be taught the reasons behind the prohibition of a state religion in the Bill of Rights.
See the whole sad tale here.
Hey bitches
From here.
this unique 18-minute genre has its own requirements
From a Wired article on how to ace a TED Talk:
“I’m surprised to see that half the people here know my career in some detail and the other half don’t know who I am,” he says.
Science is fine, but not when it messes with our illusions.
If she had included solar power and African child warriors, it would have been so perfect a TED talk that there would have been no need for others.
Wolfram wraps his talk by saying that when it comes to trying to boil down the universe to a simple algorithm, “it’s almost embarrassing not to at least try.”
“Just because someone has an ego,” he says, citing a writer whose name I can’t read from my scribbled notes, “doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
Trailer for El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky. 1970)
The strangest movie I’d recommend?
Allen Klein presents an ABKCO Film.
the first legal male prostitute
I think for a male, if you want to be successful in this type of venture, you’re not a prostitute. You’re a surrogate lover. You encompass everything that’s required of you—not only emotionally, physically—but psychologically. Because women are wired differently. They’re much more sensitive creatures. You actually have to enjoy what you do. You can’t necessarily say, “Oh, it’s just a job.” You actually have to say it’s a passion. I think it’s the same situation as with anything that happens when you break apart a social institution. There has to be some kind of change in terminology to describe persons like myself. And it’s more of a civil rights thing now. Basically this is the first time in the economy of the United States that a male has actually stood up and said, “I want to do this for a living.” And be protected under law to do it. It’s just the same as when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front instead of the back. She was proclaiming her rights as a disadvantaged, African-American older woman. And I’m doing the same. I’m actually standing up now, and hopefully I can be supported by the male community and be understood as a person. This actually isn’t about selling my body. This is about changing social norms.
Congratulations.
(via marginal revolution)
quote out of context
He went on to say, “the extent to which you think writing is about something other than words then you will fail.”
Give it a ponder…
James Lipton — spokesman for teen culture?
Overheard
“And then things took a 360 for the worse.”
My new motto.
Brother Blue is gone.
I will try and write about his impact on me. Meantime, this from the Boston Globe.
