Seasonal Rotation of Catchphrases
Use:
Replaces "[o]ther than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Citation:
8/31/10 Telegraph article. A man, sent by wife to kill spider behind toilet, sprays much aerosol insecticide. When burned-out light bulb thwarts ability to confirm kill, he ignites cigarette lighter and thus explosion, resulting in burns, ambulance, and quite the Bank Holiday.
Original context:
Picture caption for photograph of large, unrepentant arachnid.
Phrase:
"It is not known whether the spider survived."
---------------------------------------
Use:
Replaces a variety of unpleasant phrases (most innocuously "up the wazoo") to suggest the painful insertion of onerous items and responsibilities.
Citation:
The Road to Wellville, T.C. Boyle (ch. 8, Changing the Flora)
Original context:
Dr. Kellogg somewhat vindictively prescribes a voluminous and mechanical colonic irrigation for an annoying spa patient.
Phrase:
"[T]aking the full gallonage".
8.31.2010
8.29.2010
Quote of the Day
"The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried this device to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication."
(Cakes and Ale, Maugham)
"The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried this device to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication."
(Cakes and Ale, Maugham)
8.28.2010
Mental Status Report
REGRET
I surely would never have been as brave as the T-P staff, but this LAT series on their Katrina reporting recarbonates my old journalism juices.
"We got within two miles of my house, at the edge of an ocean of water. I put on a life jacket, climbed into the kayak and shoved off down I-10, taking my usual freeway exit, steering the tiny boat past the rooftops of my neighbors' homes, hoping they all had made it out alive."
Also galvanizing is Jeff Antebi's photo-essay on Port-au-Prince after dark (Paris Review). He walked the vast areas of the city that even pre-earthquake lacked electricity, lit only by bonfires:
"Some of the fires are tiny, small enough that they’d require only a little bit of fuel to ignite. Others are massive, and engulf the middles of large intersections. I never see any Haitians tending to them—the fires seem almost like sentient creatures coming alive of their own free will, and staying awake as long as they care to.
What was a lively marketplace in daylight is utterly apocalyptic after dusk. Shoddy wood structures that held wares an hour ago are now makeshift whorehouses, white sheets thrown over planks. Teenagers-turned-street-pharmacists hold up buckets filled to the rim with long-expired prescription drugs."
Verified and freely-disseminated facts are objects of public utility and beauty. The private utility and lipgloss-on-pig manipulation of much legal fact-finding hardly feels a life's work, in comparison. Of course, now journalists apparently have no life's work. The rest of us must dash between the flicker of bonfires, as Rupert Murdoch, Sam Zell and their ilk extinguish the light with copious streams of piss.
-----------------------------
REASSURANCE
The Paris Review interviews Ashbery in 1983:
"This is the way that life appears to me, the way that experience happens. I can concentrate on the things in this room and our talking together, but what the context is is mysterious to me. And it’s not that I want to make it more mysterious in my poems—really, I just want to make it more photographic. I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too."
------------------------------
DISAPPOINTMENT
The Body purports to be the theme for the upcoming iteration of lectures and events at the Chicago Humanities Festival. Organizers every year manage to shoehorn an off-topic talk by an academic from the University of Chicago's Divinity School, the result of some dark pact with a provost at the Quadrangle Club. I thus was surprised by the pertinence of the listed Divinity School lecture on The Lingam Made Flesh.
The program description, however, devolves into the fey. "The lingam (or linga) is a cylindrical votary object that represents the Hindu god Shiva, and a dispute about its meaning has been going on for many centuries." When a phallus is tagged with the museum label of "cylindrical votary object," I lose hope that the speaker will be introduced as Professor Wendy Doniger: don of dongs.
REGRET
I surely would never have been as brave as the T-P staff, but this LAT series on their Katrina reporting recarbonates my old journalism juices.
"We got within two miles of my house, at the edge of an ocean of water. I put on a life jacket, climbed into the kayak and shoved off down I-10, taking my usual freeway exit, steering the tiny boat past the rooftops of my neighbors' homes, hoping they all had made it out alive."
Also galvanizing is Jeff Antebi's photo-essay on Port-au-Prince after dark (Paris Review). He walked the vast areas of the city that even pre-earthquake lacked electricity, lit only by bonfires:
"Some of the fires are tiny, small enough that they’d require only a little bit of fuel to ignite. Others are massive, and engulf the middles of large intersections. I never see any Haitians tending to them—the fires seem almost like sentient creatures coming alive of their own free will, and staying awake as long as they care to.
What was a lively marketplace in daylight is utterly apocalyptic after dusk. Shoddy wood structures that held wares an hour ago are now makeshift whorehouses, white sheets thrown over planks. Teenagers-turned-street-pharmacists hold up buckets filled to the rim with long-expired prescription drugs."
Verified and freely-disseminated facts are objects of public utility and beauty. The private utility and lipgloss-on-pig manipulation of much legal fact-finding hardly feels a life's work, in comparison. Of course, now journalists apparently have no life's work. The rest of us must dash between the flicker of bonfires, as Rupert Murdoch, Sam Zell and their ilk extinguish the light with copious streams of piss.
-----------------------------
REASSURANCE
The Paris Review interviews Ashbery in 1983:
"This is the way that life appears to me, the way that experience happens. I can concentrate on the things in this room and our talking together, but what the context is is mysterious to me. And it’s not that I want to make it more mysterious in my poems—really, I just want to make it more photographic. I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too."
------------------------------
DISAPPOINTMENT
The Body purports to be the theme for the upcoming iteration of lectures and events at the Chicago Humanities Festival. Organizers every year manage to shoehorn an off-topic talk by an academic from the University of Chicago's Divinity School, the result of some dark pact with a provost at the Quadrangle Club. I thus was surprised by the pertinence of the listed Divinity School lecture on The Lingam Made Flesh.
The program description, however, devolves into the fey. "The lingam (or linga) is a cylindrical votary object that represents the Hindu god Shiva, and a dispute about its meaning has been going on for many centuries." When a phallus is tagged with the museum label of "cylindrical votary object," I lose hope that the speaker will be introduced as Professor Wendy Doniger: don of dongs.
8.23.2010
Changes
Signs have aligned in the last week. The backyard fountain, tired of aerating fledgling corpses and mosquito eggs, died. A neighbor's pumpkins once again have thrown vegetal arms of invitation over the fence. Do I accept the characteristic swelling with the melon-flowers, or save the ersatz trellis from collapse? Autumn clouds steam in, imbued with November grey yet still pneumatically inflated with Summer. A jocular woman with curves squeezes into a man's suit, and age then shrinks her to fit.
Windows open, the insects are now more muted than with the windows shut. Cicadas no longer scream their slasher-movie soundtrack. The hum of life is sinking, down to the height of the grass. Even the basement cricket - who has been using a wet-bar sink for amplification - takes no more requests for his toilet-paper-and-comb waltz.
-----------------------
Two aging galoots on bicycles this morning, sporting dingy wife-beaters and silver hair. One screams: "How the fuck did YOU get paid?? Jimmy didn't get paid! Frankie didn't get paid!" Perhaps coincidentally, the paid one was wearing a helmet.
Signs have aligned in the last week. The backyard fountain, tired of aerating fledgling corpses and mosquito eggs, died. A neighbor's pumpkins once again have thrown vegetal arms of invitation over the fence. Do I accept the characteristic swelling with the melon-flowers, or save the ersatz trellis from collapse? Autumn clouds steam in, imbued with November grey yet still pneumatically inflated with Summer. A jocular woman with curves squeezes into a man's suit, and age then shrinks her to fit.
Windows open, the insects are now more muted than with the windows shut. Cicadas no longer scream their slasher-movie soundtrack. The hum of life is sinking, down to the height of the grass. Even the basement cricket - who has been using a wet-bar sink for amplification - takes no more requests for his toilet-paper-and-comb waltz.
-----------------------
Two aging galoots on bicycles this morning, sporting dingy wife-beaters and silver hair. One screams: "How the fuck did YOU get paid?? Jimmy didn't get paid! Frankie didn't get paid!" Perhaps coincidentally, the paid one was wearing a helmet.
8.16.2010
ALARM-CLOCK, LAST CHANCE, LA LA LA
Warmest recorded year, Russian wildfires and wheat failure, Pakistan's unprecedented flooding with cholera chaser. Each new shudder of the Earth prompts a millisecond of recognition that we are mid-cataclysm, before we sag and return to standard programming.
The work of Amy Clampitt is just as resistant to disaggregation as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, yet lines from both have been swimming through my head.
[T]he seethe of entity
undoes what's done,
the sieve unselves,
the drift within
proceeds from dark
to dark, from rift to
rift, from mooring
to castoff
off uncharted
continental shelves
(Continental Drift, Clampitt)
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
(God's Grandeur, Hopkins).
Warmest recorded year, Russian wildfires and wheat failure, Pakistan's unprecedented flooding with cholera chaser. Each new shudder of the Earth prompts a millisecond of recognition that we are mid-cataclysm, before we sag and return to standard programming.
The work of Amy Clampitt is just as resistant to disaggregation as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, yet lines from both have been swimming through my head.
[T]he seethe of entity
undoes what's done,
the sieve unselves,
the drift within
proceeds from dark
to dark, from rift to
rift, from mooring
to castoff
off uncharted
continental shelves
(Continental Drift, Clampitt)
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
(God's Grandeur, Hopkins).
8.05.2010
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"Language functions like money. It is only an intermediary. But like money it takes on some of the life of the things it represents. It begins in the world of experience and returns to the world of experience - and it does so via metaphor, which is a function of the right hemisphere, and is rooted in the body. To use a metaphor, language is the money of thought." (The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist)
"Language functions like money. It is only an intermediary. But like money it takes on some of the life of the things it represents. It begins in the world of experience and returns to the world of experience - and it does so via metaphor, which is a function of the right hemisphere, and is rooted in the body. To use a metaphor, language is the money of thought." (The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist)
7.29.2010
YET ANOTHER LITERACY RANT
School Library Journal habitually fails both as journalism and industry publication. But despite the buffer of low expectation, this article made my head explode.
SLJ wholesale adopted the press release on a recent Canadian Council of Learning report, without challenge or other viewpoint. And it is a doozey of a report. CCL notes the vast reading fluency gap between male and female students, and that the boys already prefer comics. Its conclusion - entirely unsupported - is: librarians must provide MORE comic books for boys. But let us follow la rue de weasels.
"The [CCL] report says comics serve as an effective gateway to reading prose-based works and contribute to visual literacy, as well as the ability to understand and respond to a visual image. Comics also can help develop many of the same literacy skills as books, such as how to follow a sequence of events; connect narratives to the reader's own experiences, predict what will happen next, and interpret symbols.
Even before children are ready to read text, comic books can give them practice in understanding material printed on a page, tracking left to right and top to bottom, and inferring what happens between individual panels in a story, the report says, adding that thanks to their strong visual element, they're a [sic] used as teaching aids for second-language learners and students with learning difficulties."
([Sic] reflects where School Library Journal mistranscribed its wholesale adoption - here without quotation marks - of the CCL press release.)
This is no gateway, but peering through a path barred. "Visual literacy" is not reading. You aren't literate because you "interpret symbols," unless said symbols are written language. Comics are neither the same path or an intersecting road: they are a parallel track to nowhere. Watch what happens as kids age. I've worked for years with boys who are reluctant readers. An exclusive diet of comics virtually always indicates not preference but crutch; comics lead not to text but (absent active intervention) more comics.
Want data to support that anecdotal? One spandrel of the dreaded Renaissance Learning's Accelerated Reader ("AR") Program is copious data on what kids in fact have read. For the 2008-09 year, the AR database compiled the books read by 4.6 million kids. Third grade is when kids should move to chapter books, with sufficient fluency to read for content rather than decode. Among boys in third grade, Wimpy Kid series books were the first, second and third most popular reads. This is true again in fourth grade, with Captain Underpants (a comic with even fewer and more easily ignored words) books as an additional four of the top ten. Fifth grade: Wimpy Kid takes slots 1, 2 and 3. Sixth grade: Wimpy Kid in slots 1, 2 and 3. Among sixth-grade girls, in contrast, the three most-often read books were those in the Twilight series. Seventh grade boys rank Wimpy Kid at slots 2, 3 and 7. Eighth-grade boys: Wimpy Kid remains the fifth most-read. Most districts do not continue AR in high-school, so the data for grades 9-12 is relatively scant.
Does this data suggest that boys are springboarding from comics to text (of any kind)? Nope. Boys are clinging (sometimes hysterically) to comics like floats. They want to give the appearance of swimming, without expending effort. Many of these kids fear that they would sink in a book, which then becomes a self-fulfilling fact as they go longer without developing fluency.
SLJ appears these days the PR-arm of purveyors of comics to boys. Another article today heralds an elementary school librarian in San Diego selling the same message, indeed at Comic-Con. She would dilute even the most mundane aspects of reading, suggesting that "media specialists make access to comic books easier by letting students place their names on a sign-up sheet rather than go through the lengthier check-out process."
Like the transcontinental railroad, this parallel track is simultaneously being laid from the college end.
On Amazon, Wuthering Heights, Poe's stories and Frankenstein are marketed as "Kaplan SAT Score-Raising Classics." Likewise, The Scarlet Letter, Great Expectations, and War of the Worlds. We no longer learn to read fluently to enjoy complex writing and thought, which fluency reflects on tests. Rather, we avoid such writing entirely, and substitute test-prep flash-cards.
Why any SAT vocabulary testing at all? I fear a Wimpy SAT in my lifetime, with "literacy" entirely redefined. An acquaintance recently was instructed by her flight attendant to "turn off your books." We may already have done.
School Library Journal habitually fails both as journalism and industry publication. But despite the buffer of low expectation, this article made my head explode.
SLJ wholesale adopted the press release on a recent Canadian Council of Learning report, without challenge or other viewpoint. And it is a doozey of a report. CCL notes the vast reading fluency gap between male and female students, and that the boys already prefer comics. Its conclusion - entirely unsupported - is: librarians must provide MORE comic books for boys. But let us follow la rue de weasels.
"The [CCL] report says comics serve as an effective gateway to reading prose-based works and contribute to visual literacy, as well as the ability to understand and respond to a visual image. Comics also can help develop many of the same literacy skills as books, such as how to follow a sequence of events; connect narratives to the reader's own experiences, predict what will happen next, and interpret symbols.
Even before children are ready to read text, comic books can give them practice in understanding material printed on a page, tracking left to right and top to bottom, and inferring what happens between individual panels in a story, the report says, adding that thanks to their strong visual element, they're a [sic] used as teaching aids for second-language learners and students with learning difficulties."
([Sic] reflects where School Library Journal mistranscribed its wholesale adoption - here without quotation marks - of the CCL press release.)
This is no gateway, but peering through a path barred. "Visual literacy" is not reading. You aren't literate because you "interpret symbols," unless said symbols are written language. Comics are neither the same path or an intersecting road: they are a parallel track to nowhere. Watch what happens as kids age. I've worked for years with boys who are reluctant readers. An exclusive diet of comics virtually always indicates not preference but crutch; comics lead not to text but (absent active intervention) more comics.
Want data to support that anecdotal? One spandrel of the dreaded Renaissance Learning's Accelerated Reader ("AR") Program is copious data on what kids in fact have read. For the 2008-09 year, the AR database compiled the books read by 4.6 million kids. Third grade is when kids should move to chapter books, with sufficient fluency to read for content rather than decode. Among boys in third grade, Wimpy Kid series books were the first, second and third most popular reads. This is true again in fourth grade, with Captain Underpants (a comic with even fewer and more easily ignored words) books as an additional four of the top ten. Fifth grade: Wimpy Kid takes slots 1, 2 and 3. Sixth grade: Wimpy Kid in slots 1, 2 and 3. Among sixth-grade girls, in contrast, the three most-often read books were those in the Twilight series. Seventh grade boys rank Wimpy Kid at slots 2, 3 and 7. Eighth-grade boys: Wimpy Kid remains the fifth most-read. Most districts do not continue AR in high-school, so the data for grades 9-12 is relatively scant.
Does this data suggest that boys are springboarding from comics to text (of any kind)? Nope. Boys are clinging (sometimes hysterically) to comics like floats. They want to give the appearance of swimming, without expending effort. Many of these kids fear that they would sink in a book, which then becomes a self-fulfilling fact as they go longer without developing fluency.
SLJ appears these days the PR-arm of purveyors of comics to boys. Another article today heralds an elementary school librarian in San Diego selling the same message, indeed at Comic-Con. She would dilute even the most mundane aspects of reading, suggesting that "media specialists make access to comic books easier by letting students place their names on a sign-up sheet rather than go through the lengthier check-out process."
Like the transcontinental railroad, this parallel track is simultaneously being laid from the college end.
On Amazon, Wuthering Heights, Poe's stories and Frankenstein are marketed as "Kaplan SAT Score-Raising Classics." Likewise, The Scarlet Letter, Great Expectations, and War of the Worlds. We no longer learn to read fluently to enjoy complex writing and thought, which fluency reflects on tests. Rather, we avoid such writing entirely, and substitute test-prep flash-cards.
Why any SAT vocabulary testing at all? I fear a Wimpy SAT in my lifetime, with "literacy" entirely redefined. An acquaintance recently was instructed by her flight attendant to "turn off your books." We may already have done.
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