December 2007
34 posts
The joys of teaching spoiled rich kids
Student: Did you grade our finals?
Me: The essay portion, yes.
Student: Did you grade *my* final?
Me: Yes, the essay portion.
Student: What did I get?
Me: You got a "B."
Student: Way to screw me over.
“The best nuzzle of dogs, the love of whores, the hospitality of innkeepers: None...”
– Inscription on the back of “Young Man and Woman in an Inn,” by Frans Hals
What it means to be the chosen people
I felt growing within me, perhaps for the first time, a nauseating sensation of emptiness: so this is what it meant to be different: this was the price for being the salt of the earth. To carry on your crossbar a girl you desire and be so far from her as not to be able even to fall in love with her: carry her on your crossbar along Viale Gorizia to help her to belong to someone else, and vanish...
“If one’s own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to...”
– Rebecca West, from Black Lamb, Grey Falcon (which I will hopefully buy and read someday)
Ars Poetica?
I have always aspired to a more spacious form that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose and would let us understand each other without exposing the author or reader to sublime agonies. In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the...
To An Athlete Dying Young
The time you won your town the race We chaired you through the market-place; Man and boy stood cheering by, And home we brought you shoulder-high. To-day, the road all runners come, Shoulder-high we bring you home, And set you at your threshold down, Townsman of a stiller town. Smart lad, to slip betimes away From fields where glory does not stay, And early though the laurel grows It withers...
I've been told I have a weak handshake...
Gordon Gallup, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Albany, has a suggestion for women going on first dates: Bring a handgrip dynamometer. It’s a small, purse-size device they can use to measure their date’s grip strength. Why? Gallup’s new research suggests that handgrip strength in men is directly connected with reproductive fitness. [here thanks to MGM. Also, what exactly is an...
“…George Washington, who was certainly no Democrat, but who neatly avoided...”
– David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis
Happy Belated Birthday, Jacques
You may not have heard of Jacques Barzun for a long time, or perhaps not at all. Yet both the man and his influence in American intellectual life are very much alive as he begins his second century. Born in France on Nov. 30, 1907, taken to the U.S. when barely a teenager, he soon became linked with Columbia University as a student, then a teacher, and finally a dean. Over eight decades, Mr....
Cold War Poets
Nevertheless, interest in Eastern European poetry was increasingly subordinated to myths about its makers’ lives and characters. Their work came to be romanticized as the product of spiritual, moral, or intellectual nobility in the face of a unique and unimaginable horror that Western readers could only wonder at. The English critic Al Alvarez, who had been an early champion of these poets,...
My Goodness, My Guinness
DUBLIN, Ireland: Ireland’s police announced a manhunt Thursday for a beer bandit who drove into the Guinness brewery and left with 450 full kegs. The national police force, the Garda Siochana, said a lone man drove into the brewery — a Dublin landmark and top tourist attraction — on Wednesday and hitched his truck to a fully loaded trailer awaiting delivery to city pubs. Diageo PLC, the...
After reading this, I'm ashamed that I think...
When a novel’s first words are “Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed,” and the rest of it evinces no more feel for the English language and often a good deal less, and America’s most revered living writer touts “prose of amazing power and stylishness” on the back cover, and reviewers agree that whatever may be wrong with the book, there’s no faulting its finely crafted...
I briefly and timidly join the fray of the Kindle... →
Lego Mega Church →
Damnation is simple
You may have seen, you must have seen, some of those awful text books written not by educators but by educationalists—by people who talk about books instead of talking within books. You may have been told by them that the chief aim of a great writer, and indeed the main clue to his greatness, is “simplicity.” Traitors. not teachers. In reading exam papers written by misled students,...
Professor Types [Jung visits the university]
’Professor I’m-a-Fraud-and-Pray-To-Jesus-That-No-One-Will-Figure-It-Out Professor I’m-Above-This-Place-And-Should-Be-At-Harvard Professor Rebel-Without-A-Clue Professor Only-Teaches-His-G**d***-Dissertation Professor Promising-Young-Man Professor Couldabeena-contenda Professor Exploits-Grad-Students-as-Cheap-Labor-in-his-Consulting-Business Professor...
“Christians would be neglecting the distinctive service which they can and must...”
– Karl Barth, Church and State, 69.
We're normally not this tacky
LULEA, Sweden, Northern Sweden officials have given the go-ahead for developers to construct a 148-foot-tall restaurant and concert hall shaped like a giant moose. Officials said the planned venue, which will seat 350, will offer visitors the chance to take in a high-up view of the valleys from the building’s location atop Vithatten mountain, The Local reported Tuesday. Thorbjorn Holmlund,...
Psychology
As a branch of science, psychology has been defined in various ways, according to the particular method of approach adopted or field study proposed by the individual psychologist, but a comprehensive definition, which would include all varieties, so far as they can be rightly said to represent aspects of the original and historical meaning of the word, would run in some such way as this: the...
Flannery O'Connor To a Professor of English
28 March 61 The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be. If it were legitimate interpretation, the story would be little more than a trick and its interest would be simply for abnormal psychology. I am not interested in abnormal psychology. There is a change of tension from the first part of the...
“Poison Cup” by M. Ward
