10 Years After: 11.02.2003

Stinkfist

The Milton Marathon reading of Paradise Lost was today. I spent my three hours between 10:00am and 1:40. I stayed a bit over 3 hours so that we could walk out during a break between books vi and vii, rather than disturbing everyone. The reading was easy. Mostly it was students in the Milton class, a few other instructors, and students in other classes stopping by for extra-credit. Several of these later didn't even read! Very strange. The very worst part of the event was the old man at the end of the table who had an unbelievable stench. I mean this guy made me want to wretch as soon as I walked near him to sit down. For the first hour I sat next to him, but as soon as an opening was available across the room we jumped on it. It was suffocating. At first I thought it was some horrid cheese that he was eating. He had something that looked like butter that he was smearing on crackers. However, as soon as I sat next to him I realized I had to cross back behind him to sign in. As I passed near him he motioned that he wanted to tell me something. I leaned in near, but not too close. It certainly didn't seem like his food. No, this God awful smell was the man himself. I felt nauseous and thought my legs would buckle- only to hear him reiterate what Michael had pointed out was written on the board.

Also, I decided to go with a joke for my last analysis in Literary Criticism. It's not knee slapping funny, but it'll be easy to use up time and do a Marxist critcism with it. At least I suspect the criticism will be easy. I plan to iron out the details of that Monday.

I tried to post this to my Intro to LInguistics bulletin board, but I think it's on the fritz right now: McJob has been added to the latest version (11th Ed.) of the Mirriam-Webster dictionary. Of course, this has upset the company.

posted by Hiro # 11/08/2003 02:15:00 PM | 0 comments

11.07.2003

Your X-Rays Have Just Come Back From The Lab And We Think We Know What Your Problem Is

I stopped by and picked up and turned in an Intention to Graduate form. I'll squeek by in the Spring with just the bare mininum number of hours (128) and, unfortunately, not with enough time to pull my grade up to a 3.0. It'll be close, but not quite. What a shame. Still, I'd rather get to graduate school and involved there than to stay in undergrad and bring up my grade. I think I'll still be able to get into grad school, when it's all said and done.

Dialectology was okay. The Japanese ESL guy lead the class in a discussion of the first two chapters of the Appalachian Speech book. Mostly he showed snippets from the Heartland series and attempted to force a discussion. It was strange and, imho, not very well done. This is mostly due to his weak jokes and trying to get the undergrads (he's a grad student) in the class to discuss. He actually at one point said, "What do the undergrades, other than Chris, think about this. . .?" It felt being singled out.

I missed Intro to Linguistics this morning. I asked a student that's in both Intro to Ling and Dialectology what we did in there this morning. She said we went over the tests we took in there Monday. Oh, and we still haven't received our tests back in Dialectology.

posted by Hiro # 11/07/2003 01:47:00 PM | 0 comments

Nobody Hears

In dialectology the guy who taught ESL in Japan was talking nonsense again today. Several of us in the class were discussing the test and which of the two answers we chose. Everyone selected the history of English over the compare/contrast question dealing with levels of dialect. I mentioned how I had forgotten exactly what was meant by levels until halfway through answering the second question. I also commented on how slang remained a nebulous term that was never really agreed upon. That's when the ESL guy started into some soliloqy about nudity- that when it's in the form of a stone statue it's art but when it's in a movie it's pornography. This seemed veyr strange to me. Not all nudity in movies is pornographic, but it does seem to have some sort of cultural taboo. Due to how it went when I engaged him whether over hunters actually kept herds of deer healthy by hunting, I decided not to comment on his remarks. This is also the guy that was steadfast when we were talking about slang that "geek" and "nerd" were obviously distinct words, nothing approaching synonyms. (For him Geek had some conotation of social inadequecy that nerd didn't imply.)

CWL was cancelled today. Apparently the classroom was too hot for the instructor. It was hot, but nothing more than what it is like in any of the classes in the building. He said he spoke with the dean about having the heat reduced. The heater wasn't actually turned on but the steam running through it, combined with the unusual hot weather, made it very hot. Oh, well. We've spent, what?, two months on this project, I suppose another day or two won't matter much in the grand scheme of things. I just hope I receive an A in here.

posted by Hiro # 11/07/2003 01:36:00 PM | 0 comments

11.04.2003

Lost Weekend

Literary Criticism was interesting today. More talk about Marxist criticism. I will definitly use this rather than psychological analysis for the joke I am suppose to read and analyze next week.

Milton felt like a complete bust. First, the journal entry that I wrote up last time was returned and I received a 7 out of 10. His comment was that it was an interesting topic, the two-fold images that Milton uses in Paradise Lost, but that he took points off since it dealt more with earlier books than the ones we were reading for the week. This seems a bit strange since I had written well beyond the blasted word count he asked for and the parts from earlier books, mainly book II, support the thesis that Milton appears, so far, to use this sort of imagery throughout. In reality, I think the instructor has a set idea of what is an issue in Paradise Lost and most things outside of this box are uninteresting to him. I've noticed that while he has copious handouts about various critics and their statements about PL as either a whole or part, he seems unable to discuss these arguments in any sort of objective light. The best example is William Empson. While he hands out snippets of Empson's criticism of Pradise Lost, he seems wholey unable to discuss the view other than to offer C.S. Lewis as an opponent. I find this especially frustrating since I think that, as of yet (Book IX), Milton is failing to do that which he states at the start he wishes to do - justify God to man. One significant problem is Milton's combining a Christian omniscient/omnipotent god with one displaying characteristics of a Classical Greek deity. Essentially, ignorning God's omniscient for the majority of the story in order to relieve God from any implication of allowing bad things to befall or by his attitude in the face of perilous events. Furthermore, and I'm not sure that Empson discusses this, but Satan, despite Milton's comments as a narrator of sorts to the opposite, is drawn essentially as unable to choose the right thing even when he realizes what the right thing is. This seems a far cry from free will. Throughout the story free will doesn't seem to be what dictates people's actions, rather it seems their actions are thos based on their nature. Determinism seems to be at work even within the structure of the poem.

Secondly, and most frustrating, the paper I worked and reworked so hard on was returned. I received an 82. He docked points for lack of internal citation and for, and his notes are unclear, either making a distinction that isn't made in"Lycidas" or not making a distinction in my paper when the poem does. I knew I would loose some points for the citation. Finishing it at 5am I was too tired to go back in and re-add them after the computer fried my disk. However, if I had known he would have let people off so easy for not doing their presentations the day of, I would have just gone to bed normally on Saturday, skipped the presentation and instead worked on my paper Sunday, and then turned it in Tuesday, doing a presentation for the class.

He didn't even regard the presentations in his rubric for grading. In fact, it was discovered that he wrote good poster on some students papers that used handouts rather than posters. Very strange to ask students to give up a Sunday afternoon, do a presentation before a disinterested audience, and then to not factor that into their grade- even if as nothing more than a pass/fail grade. I think I should have been compensated for my out of class participation.

I'm not sure about the comment on the distinction between the Catholic church and corrupt Anglican church. I'll have to reread my paper and try to figure it out.

Regardless of the lackluster grade on the paper (as far as I can tell the highest grade was a 94), I think I can still pull an A. I have some friends that said they would certainly go and read some at the Miltothon so that I can receive the extra-credit. This'll bring my paper grade up, in effect, to a high 80. I think he said it was 7 points extra-credit. I'll also receive the extra-credit in my Literary Criticism. Although there I think it comes up to 15 (7 for going myself and 8 more for brining a friend). Yeah, basically I need to be a point-whore in class to ensure an A.

All this has me slightly worried about the next paper. I'll try to finish it a week early and ask him to read over it. The class is beginning to remind me of my poetry class and the instructor's odd subjective grading of analysises of poems. I ende up with a B+ in that class and I don't want a repeat of it in Milton.

posted by Hiro # 11/04/2003 03:25:00 PM | 0 comments

11.03.2003

The Best Dishwasher I Ever Had

Friday night I went to a show, a stop in Kid Koala's Short Attention Span Theater, in Asheville with Rich and Greg. At the end of September, when I learned that Rich was moving back to the area from Minnesota, I had stumbled onto the fact that the show was stopping at the Orange Peel (a place I previously overlooked in my exploits in Asheville). While Kid Koala was impressive, I enjoyed Lederhosen Lucil best of all. She took the stage after DJ Jester (The Filipino Fist), who did a lot of 80s smashup/mixes. Rich picked up a few of DJ Jester's CDs for Cary since she was stuck in Minnesota waiting for the final paperwork on selling their house. DJ P-Love was at the show cutting it up and the animated shorts by Monkmus were great and way too few. I had really expected there to be a lot more of the animated shorts. Still, I couldn't complain as it was a great night. Asheville is always interesting anyways due to its bohemian culture. However, it seemed as if the whole city was dressed up Friday night for Halloween.

This morning was my second Introduction to Linguistics test. After dinner at Charlie Peppers (Yummmy Buffalo burger!) last night I studied relative clause information from the chapter on Syntax at Borders. After waking up this morning I refreshed over a few items and made it to campus early. The test didn't seem as long as the first one and was still broken into parts. The first part consisted of 5 questions of which I had to choose 3 to answer. The second section was made up of 3 questions of which I had to select 2. I thought all was going well and at a nice pace. However, with only two people done with the test the professor wrote a message on the board: 7 minutes left. What?! I was on the first of the two questions I needed to answer in the second section. I had planned to answer a lengthy question as the second one. However, due to time constraints I took the easy way out. I finished with 3 minutes and felt great about the answers I had given.

On the way out we had to pick up a take home portion of the test. It is weighted as 20% of the total exam score and is comprised of 2 questions, each broken into multiple parts, and which span 3 pages. We need to only answer one of the two questions. I had a chance to look over this during the break between Intro to Ling and Dialectology. The first question deals with the construction of tag questions. The second questions, which is a two pager, deals with question formation in French. I am definately going to answer the first of the two.

In Dialectology we discussed a 1984 article by Allan Bell, Language style as audience design." In this article Bell argues that the audience is a more important factor than monitoring, setting, or topic. We discussed how it's impractical to always seperate audience from setting. At the end of the intructor mentioned a slightly (read:very slightly) modified 1991 article by Allan Bell, "Back in Style: reworking audience design." In this later article Bell discusses a linguistic experiment with a male and female Maori and a male and female Pakeha (European descended New Zealander) where each subject interviews the other three and this is monitored for convergence, divergence, or maintainance. The instructor asked if anyone wanted to borrow the book containing the later article and, due to my intrest in Maori language and the fact that the experiment concerned Maori/English doblets, I thought it would be an interesting read.

This brings us to the last class of the day, Computers, Writing, & Literature. When I was down in the department office asking for the key to the computer lab I was told that the instructor wouldn't be here today but that he left a message that we should know what to work on. As I expressed to the receptionist/secretary, in fact I didn't know what we were to be working on, but that we could find the next project to work on. My understanding was that today we were going to upload the departments to the JEST Web page and then create a splash page for our issue of the electronic journal. With the instructor absent I know we won't upload any files (only he knows the password required) and neither will any progress be made on the splash page. Oh well, maybe I'll have a chance to write up the survey for my Dialectogy project and then split early for work.

posted by Hiro # 11/03/2003 01:28:00 PM | 0 comments

10 Years After

11.08.2003