Literary Joke of the Day

A Pathetic Fallacy is when a naturally lifeless object is treated as having human traits; a Phallic Patheticy is when a human object is naturally lifeless and not straight.

With Boldness and Italicization

I am no longer involved in extensive academic writing nor reading others' essays, however I was writing something this morning and was horrified at my lack of linguistic integrity.  I seem to have forgotten my freshman rhetoric course which emphasized the fact that words, if used correctly, speak for themselves.

Basically, I was writing something and felt like I needed to put a particular phrase in bold or italics.  WTF.  If your main emphasis in a paragraph, sentence, or 20 page essay is placed correctly and properly surrounded by appropriate language, the words will rise to the top.

Take for example my last sentence, "If your main emphasis in a paragraph, sentence, or 20 page essay is placed correctly and properly surrounded by appropriate language, the words will rise to the top."  This sentence ends in a major letdown.  I begin by highlighting the subject of the sentence, the "main emphasis".  I follow it by examples and secondary premises, leading to a crescendo after the final comma.  Then I end with a lack of precision in the word choice.  It would be more effective to end with a concise conclusion, reiterating the knowledge that the audience has already discerned.  Instead, I use a semi-metaphorical cliche that leads the reader's mind in another direction.  I could have used any number of conclusions, like "the meaning will become apparent."

However, my lack of experience in writing and continued inability to express myself concisely sometimes leads me to write like I speak.  I try to slip in commas and semi-colons, hyphens and periods when they are not needed.  I bold or italicize words and phrases that I want the audience to remember.  Of course, I refuse to fall into the horrid trap of using three exclamation points or all CAPS when making a point, but what I do is almost worse.

So how should I solve it?  First, I should use less words whenever possible.  Why expound on something without a rhetorical purpose?  Yes, sometimes it is necessary to repeat in a different form what you say in order to re-emphasize your point.  At the same time, a simple 7 word sentence in the midst of 4-line monsters can stand out perfectly.

Second, every word should be considered in all its purposes.  Does the word rise or fall phonetically?  Is it a stop, plosive, or fricative?  Do the following words complement the focus?

Third, consider all points of grammatical structure, punctuation in particular.  Is the main purpose of the sentence separated by a comma, led into by a run-on phrase, broken by hyphens, followed by a period, ended with a question mark?  How do I want the phrase to be read?

There are many other ways to emphasize a point or word, but the reality is that the audience will be ultimate receptor.  They will discern by means of their experience and faculty of logic.  How much grammatical hand-holding do they need?  Many times what I think is the "purpose" of the paper/essay/sentence will be entirely moot to the audience, but I can influence their decision.

Of Course Not and Other Conundrums

Fundamental to this view of the relation between text and culture, then, is a refusal to allow any rigid distinction between the inside and the outside of a work.  To study literature is to study culture, but, conversely, to understand literature, we have to understand a culture.  Literary study is of value in this account because it leads to a fuller cultural understanding but, equally, it is this understanding that informs the reading of the literary text.  There may appear to be a certain circularity to this explanation, but it is better to think of it as another version of the chiasmus that I quoted from Louis Montrose in the 'Why Greenblatt?' chapter.  Greenblatt's thinking here may be rendered as: culture produces literature and literature produces culture.  Thinking of literature in terms of culture allows the critic to see the ways in which culture may be seen as both inside and outside literature.

-From Stephen Greenblatt by Mark Robson...and of course there is no "circularity to the explanation", rather, it is the explanation that encircles the thing explained.  Conversely, it is Greenblatt's very understanding of culture that helps us to understand Robson's explanation of the understanding.

More Erudite Ramblings

I am thinking of changing the subtitle of my blog to match that of my friend, bjorniavelli, who is "Less Humble Than Others", with a slight change.  It would then read, "So Vastly and Supremely More Humble than You, You Just Wouldn't Believe It."

Since I am so well learned in the ways of becoming and maintaining the status of household Genus, I will enlighten you with some of my hard-earned and always humble wisdom:

To be, or to be believed to be, a Genus, you must adopt an objective viewpoint of the world...and a rather subjective viewpoint of yourself.  Take for example a young man, say in his mid-or-early-twenties, who works in a rather affluent suburb.  He often sees middle-aged women in Cadillac or Lexus SUVs in the drive-thru of his local Starbucks and thinks to himself, "Why are all these women so obnoxiously self-absorbed and stupid to be buying coffee from this company every day?  I mean, their coffee is so notoriously bad and their atmosphere is so blatantly anti-rational (I mean for crying out loud, they sell Sufjan Stevens, The Beatles, and A Charlie Brown Christmas all on the same counter!) and so unbelievably corporate, yet hypocritically "socially-concious", and faux-artsy, and--" then he interrupts his thoughts to pay for the coffee.

See, it is the innner conundrums of the Genus' mind that make him what he is.  He is not a hypocrite; a hypocrite is one who uses the same rules to mean different things in different situations.  He is a realist--he understands he can't expect everyone to live by the necessarily objective rules of life, rises above the despair of the nihilist, simultaneously denounces the Absurdist absenteeism, and becomes what can only be known by one who is also a Genus: that Other, which other than which cannot be thought not to exist (take that Anselm the blunderer!).

Bauerlein's Irony

Maybe he was serious.  Maybe he was up late downing pots of coffee because he felt obligated to squeak out some form of intellectual commentary on the state of higher education.  Maybe he knew what he was doing and knew it was flippin' hilarious.  Whatever the case, Mark Bauerlein of the Chronicle of Higher Education made me chuckle this morning.  In an article about the apparent lack of aesthetics in the ever-increasing vocational age and college students' inability to write palatable sentences, he writes this:

With college campuses becoming ever more preprofessional and vocational, it's getting harder for humanities teachers to get freshmen and sophomores to appreciate the aesthetic side of things.  That goes for both their interpretation of texts and for their creation of texts. They read everything for the kernal of fact and value, the information, the point, not for the expression (whether beautiful or vulgar or flat or conventional . . .).  And they write sentences that have no flair, no element of balance, rhythm, metaphor, or other aesthetic feature.

(emphasis mine).  I find this last sentence utterly hilarious in its own right, but the entire article is like this--short, pointless sentences with no imagery, flair, metaphor, or balance...

Dystopia in Kentucky

 A few miles west of Cincinnati, near the northern Kentucky town of Petersburg, there’s a gleaming new monument to Christianist ideology called the Creation Museum. It was built by an Australian Biblical literalist named Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis, at a cost of twenty-seven million dollars, raised mostly in small donations. It opened over Memorial Day weekend with a blast of media attention (Edward Rothstein wrote two pieces about it for the New York Times), and since then ten thousand people a week have been flocking to its exhibits. Last Sunday, on a visit to my in-laws in Lexington, I joined them.

More here.

Raw Feeling

Well, it's the end of spring and the "meteorologist's summer" (measured June-August), but it doesn't quite feel like it here in Chicago. I was outside three days straight for a little over 2.5 hours each time (both early morning and early evening) and each day the temperature was hovering between 49 and 53. Utterly awful. Yet today as I drove home from a meet, there were literally thousands of people along the shoreline on a beautiful 75 degree sunny day. I hate the fact that when I have to be outside it is just brutal, and so idyllic on the days I am inside. Oh well, I guess I can blame Murphy for that one.

While at the meet, I had an opportunity to brag on myself when a volunteer asked me if I was still in high school. I found myself describing my life in terms of my academic success instead of merely stating my age. I told her, "No, I actually am part-way through my masters", to which her surprised response was, "In what?" This job I have now is a significant change in my entire lifestyle. I find myself more and more realizing just how different it is to be an Age Group swim coach than a Teaching Assistant and student of English. I find that each of the two disparate sides of my existence often come into conflict--the academic me, loving literature for what it is and being able to debate it on a semi-intellectual level with those on the same wavelength as I am, and the newly-formed mostly-practical coaching side.

Obviously I am well-suited to either pursuit--I grew up with kids, know how to see things outside their respective parameters, and have a constant energy that I can learn to use in motivating young children; and I read an immense amount from before I can remember, always interested in the opposite sides of arguments, beginning and ending debates, and reading some more.

I guess my dilemna is common and at this point I guess I could say I am lucky to have my life before me, but still I fear I must raise the question as to how compatible these two lifestyles are. I fully intend to return to school ASAP, yet I wish to continue full-time coaching. Should I fully dedicate myself to one or the other in neglect of the other? Or should I continue my current plan of doing both in the best way I can?

This is definitely my most personal post yet, and I will certainly follow it up with some irregular poetry (or is it the timing that is irregular? or the exposure?).

And the Fastest Way Between Two Points is...

Chapter 1, dimension two, is very elementary. Secondary school students should be able to appreciate it, but we think that, even if you know already what meridians and parallels are, you will enjoy the spectacle of the Earth rolling like a ball !
...
Mathematician Heinz Hopf explains his "fibration". Using complex numbers he constructs pretty patterns of circles in space.

My friend the Teddy Bear pointed me to this site on his Facebook account (god I hate that site!)

Property Relations in Mickey Mouse Cartoons

Property relations in Mickey Mouse cartoons: here we see for the first time that it is possible to have one's own arm, even one's own body, stolen.

The route taken by a file in an office is more like that taken by Mickey Mouse than by a marathon runner.

In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilisation.

Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.

These films disavow experience more radically than ever before. In such a world, it is not worthwhile to have experiences.

Similarity to fairy tales. Not since fairy tales have the most important and most vital events been evoked more unsymbolically and more unatomospherically. There is an immeasurable gulf between them and Maeterlick or Mary Wigman. All Mickey Mouse films are founded on the motif of leaving home in order to learn what fear is.

So the explanation for the huge popularity of these films is not mechanization, their form; nor is it a misunderstanding. It is simply the fact that the public recognizes its own life in them.

-from Walter Benjamin's "Mickey Mouse", 1931

A Perfect Circle with 3 Points

In my one semester of grad school, I began researching a paper on a Southern New Critic of the Vanderbilt era. I was writing about the origins of the Southern Ballad and the responsibility of the ballad collectors, especially in the heyday of ballad collecting in the 1920s, to maintain the tradition of cultural authorship. I investigated theories of authorship and attribution as well as copyright law for this paper. When I went to look up information on this guy (whose relation to the ballad and authorship comes in the form of his novel, The Big Ballad Jamboree), I merely typed in his name, Donald Davidson, and checked out the books that sounded interesting. Unfortunately I ended up with a slew of books by and about a more contemporary linguistic theorist. I read through them a bit and found them extremely interesting as related to the paper I had in mind. Then of course I realized my naivete. However, there were a few things I retained from that brief reading of the linguist Donald Davidson that remain intriguing.

Davidson described the formation of language as "triangulation." When two individuals communicate, they form a certain understanding of one another and the others' starting point to the conversation. They each contribute to the other and create a direct link of communication in a very intimate way. Imagine a person's relationship to his or her best friend; they speak together and understand each other in a way that almost makes for its own language, one that others either don't understand or don't find of interest. What forces their communication to adapt, to change, is the interruption of a third party. Neither of the original two can connect with the newcomer on an individual basis without disrupting their own relative distance in the newly formed communication triangle.Another way of thinking about this, and this is the approach I was planning on taking with my paper, is to imagine an insular culture where everyone within the culture can communicate and interact with everyone else on the common basis of being involved with the culture. Yet when someone new arrives in the area, it disrupts the active connection between the participants in the culture and forces them to adapt in their communicative efforts. This, Davidson argued, forms the basis for all linguistic development.

On a similar note, three members of the former Ante-Occidents once raised their legs together, resting one leg on top of another, and began to spin in a circle, thus forming a perfect circle with three points.