Things on my corkboard: Fortune cardboards.
Posted: February 22, 2012 Filed under: Ephemera | Tags: academia, failure, grad school, meaning, questions, skepticism, words Leave a comment »Several (probably nigh on a half-dozen) years ago—when I was first applying to grad school, actually, a round of applications that were all rejected (edit: I think it was before this, but really I have no fucking idea—who remembers shit like that? Not me)—I’d purchased a few cases of Jones Soda for some party or other that we were having.
A bottle of Jones Soda has a fortune printed inside the cap, but since cans don’t have bottle-caps, Jones prints (or printed at the time—I think the packaging has changed?) the fortunes on the cardboard case the cans come in.
On this day, whenever it was, two of the fortunes jumped out at me as particularly significant (though I know, of course, that their significance is primarily a function of my decision to see them as significant—as relevant to my specific situation, &c, whatever).
They were: “You are headed in the right direction” and “Ask yourself why.”
I cut them out. They went, as a pair, onto my corkboard. They helped me get through the application process and the soul-crushing stack of (six) rejection letters that the process resulted in. They were, also, a factor in my decision to go through the application process again—successfully, this time.
At some point, I took the corkboard off the wall, took everything off of it, and bagged it up: the wall space in the room it was in had been … redistributed.
When I got (more-or-less) permanent office space on campus—in the fall of 2010, a full nine months before I started writing this post, and more months than I want to count before the actual posting (with some revision) of this post—the corkboard had a new home, and (almost) everything went back up on it. New things, too, as I acquire or unearth them (like a one-armed LEGO ninja that I found on the sidewalk, and a Return-of-the-Jedi-era stormtrooper action figure from my childhood).
One thing that didn’t make it was the “You are headed in the right direction” fortune: it disappeared somewhere, into the æther, into nonbeing, into the trash, who knows. I no longer know if I’m headed in the right direction—most days I’m not even sure what direction I’m headed in at all. I still have the other one, though, and it’s still on my corkboard. “Ask yourself why.” I try to, and I try to teach my students to do the same. Never stop asking, even when you get answers—the answers should just produce new questions. Ask yourself why.
It’s fucking exhausting, just like when a kid does it to you.
Day 197: Improve your signature.
Posted: July 30, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: first-world problems, technology, words, writing Leave a comment »Originally scheduled for Saturday, July 16.
I did this a long time ago, sort of. I improved my signature into illegibility.
My signature used to look like my name — I mean, one’s signature is supposed to look like one’s name, I get that, but what I mean is that my signed name looked no different than my name when I was just writing it down. That was unacceptable, and so I improved my signature into an illegible scribble. It’s a forceful and manly scribble, but it looks nothing like letters. Occasionally this causes people to look askance at me — but the paperwork all gets filed and the checks all get cashed, so I don’t guess it’s that big a problem.
My signature needed improving in the first place because I can no longer write in cursive. I learned how somewhere during grade school, and then promptly forgot when I was no longer required by my teachers to use it. (Aside: when I took the GRE, I had to copy out an I promise that I didn’t cheat and that I won’t talk to ANYBODY about what was on this test statement in cursive, and it took me twenty minutes, where it would have taken five if I’d been allowed to print it.)
Cursive is an outmoded technology. When you’re writing with a quill and ink, you want to lift the quill as seldom as possible, to avoid smudges and blots and boils and all that sort of thing. That’s not the case with a ball-point pen, though, so why bother? Nostalgic affectation, that’s why.
It’s probably hypocritical of me to dismiss cursive out of hand while also judging people with bad handwriting, but I do it anyway. Cursive might be an outmoded technology, but writing isn’t, or not yet — and people with terrible handwriting are inferior in important ways to those of us with clear, legible handwriting (and those people who write in cursive are either old, hipsters, or fops). For the record: my handwriting is not so good.
Of course, I do more typing than writing, so maybe handwriting is closer to being outmoded than I’m comfortable admitting. Also, just because cursive is outmoded isn’t a good enough reason to dismiss it: listening to music that’s been etched onto big wobbly pieces of plastic is also outmoded, but I still do it occasionally. I just don’t like cursive, and I’m trying to justify my dislike.
I’m not sure I have a point. My signature used to be legible, and then I fixed it, and now it’s not.
Day 184: How memorable is your everyday conversation?
Posted: July 3, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: bad jokes, humor, language, translations, words Leave a comment »“Find out by writing down everything you say. Highlight your wittiest phrases.”
I don’t have to write down everything I say to know that my everyday conversation is so far from memorable that even I forget what I’ve said almost as soon as I’m done saying it.
Even my wittiest off-the-cuff moments are not that witty — and on those rare occasions when I stun my audience (myself included) with a flash of rhetorical, punning brilliance, merely writing down the one thing I said would not do the moment justice.
Context is important: no matter how funny the punchline, it’s not funny at all without the setup, and impromptu punchlines — bons mots — are the hardest to recreate, because nobody’s really paying enough attention to the setup to reconstruct it after the fact.
Most wit doesn’t keep. Some of it does, of course — none of mine, but that of wittier folks — but what wit does keep is kept in writing, and wit that is written down is embellished and refined in the writing. Something like that.
The small amount of conversational wittiness I do have is in my taciturnity — because brevity is the soul of wit — and so I’m going to spend the rest of this post recounting the parts of my conversations today when I could have said something, and didn’t:
Day 169: Speak only in clichés.
Posted: June 18, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: art, disappointment, meaning, memory, words, writing Leave a comment »“Never use seven words when four will do.”
I hate clichés. I hate them with the fire of a thousand suns. I hate them with an unquenchable hatred. When I find myself employing them, in speech or writing, I wash my mouth out with soap and put a dollar in my cliché jar. Then I take the rest of the day off, drink too much, and pass out on the bathroom floor.
There is a picture of George Orwell in this post because, in 1946, Orwell published an essay — “Politics and the English Language” — which contains a paragraph that captures quite nicely how I feel about clichés:
A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically “dead” (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a “rift,” for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.
I wasn’t entirely sure what that first one — ring the changes on — meant, so I looked it up, and it apparently has something to do with bells, but I don’t exactly understand what: the long and short of it is that ring the changes on is a stupid cliché, which is sort of my point about all of them.
The English language is capable of amazing and ridiculous images and metaphors, and settling for dried cans of beige paint when you can have the love-child of Jackson Pollock and Henri Matisse throwing liquid color at your face is just sad.
Of course, sometimes things get out of hand.
Day 148: Leave a note on someone’s car windshield.
Posted: May 28, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: beer, cars, family, strangers, words, WTF Leave a comment »Notes that get left on car windshields are always mean – passive-aggressive or aggressive-aggressive, or frighteningly violent – and I didn’t want to leave that kind of note. What to leave, though? Something “affirming,” but not too affirming.
“You’re doing a fine job. Keep it up.”
My friend Nathan and I say this to each other. If I remember correctly, it’s something his boss or a co-worker used to say to him – or maybe something he used to say? At any rate, it’s both affirming and sarcastic. The adjective changes: “adequate” is my favorite, I think, and occasionally one of us will use a “terrible” or a “pathetic” or something like that. We also only use it when the other is doing something really simple, like putting forks on the table or making coffee or just walking down the hall.
I made nine or ten of these. I put one on Carl – Carleton Livingstone Butterworth Goldsmith I, Duke of Somerset – who lives with my brother and his wife. I left a few on random windshields around Hampden, but windshields got boring pretty quickly.
I left one in a copy of Machine of Death in Atomic Books. I left one with (not as, because that’s not right) the tip for our waitress at 13.5% Wine Bar, where we drank beer instead of wine, because bottles were half off, and they had good bottles (I had a Brewdog Hardcore IPA and an Orkney Skullsplitter; my brother had a Petrus Aged Pale Ale and a St. Bernardus something-or-other). I left one on a bicycle – a nice vintage Peugeot – in front of a Rite-Aid (when I came back out of the Rite-Aid, the owner of that bicycle was preparing to ride off; the note was gone, so he’d obviously seen it, but it would have ruined the effect to have said anything).
I have one left, which I’m going to deploy somewhere in NYC tomorrow. I’ll keep you posted.
Day 146: Famous last words: prepare yours ahead of time.
Posted: May 26, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: animals, disasters, paranormal activity, sadness, violence, words, zombies Leave a comment »I am going to be eaten by zombies.
It’s the year 2047, and I’m not as young as I used to be. Shit, I’ll be 65 for most of 2047 – the part I survive, that is – and 65 is fucking old during a zombie apocalypse.
Anyway. This zombies-walking-the-earth thing has been going on for a few years, and we’re surviving pretty well: we’ve got a fortress-commune going, out in a rural area, with good walls and hedges and ha-has and whatnot. We grow our own food, we raise some livestock, and we all get along pretty well, which is pretty good, considering that there are fifty-odd of us. We keep our heads down, and the zombies – and the roving motorcycle gangs – leave us alone.
That changes, though. A wandering pack – drove? horde? herd? what do you call a group of zombies? – a wandering whatever of zombies finds our commune. They can’t get in, but the incessant wailing attracts other zombies, and soon we’ve got a veritable army of the undead at our gates, and it just keeps getting bigger.
We discuss ways to kill them. Nuking them from orbit isn’t an option. Fire’s a possibility, except we’re likely to torch ourselves, too. Blow them up? Feed them poisoned livestock? Hope they go away? None of these sound like good plans.
We could lure them away. There’s a crater a few miles away – long story – and if we can get them into it, we can burn them before they can get back out. It’s a good idea, with one significant flaw: it’s a suicide mission.
I volunteer. I’m the oldest one in the commune, and I’m going to be a burden on everyone else sooner rather than later. This is a good way to go, a valiant and honorable way. Some people protest, but just for show: nobody else wants to do it, and nobody can think of a better plan.
We manage to get an old jeep running; it probably won’t run for long, and it doesn’t want to go much above 20 mph, but that’s enough. We kill a goat, strap it to the back, and slit its throat: to leave a trail for the zombies. They’ll follow me, down into the crater. I’ll have a flamethrower and a half-dozen grenades, and none of them will get out alive (not that they’re really alive to begin with).
As I’m leaving, someone says to me: “What if it doesn’t work? We’ve heard rumors that the zeds are developing intelligence.”
“Don’t worry,” I say, patting my flamethrower. “I’ll give them something to chew on.”
Day 124: Buy a parrot…
Posted: May 4, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: animals, children, Monty Python, speech, teaching, words Leave a comment »“…and train it to say some unpalatable truth that you cannot voice yourself in society.”
Aside from the fact that I don’t have the money to buy a parrot, the big problem with today’s task is that there are no unpalatable truths I’m unable to voice.
We’re all going to die. Most babies are ugly. Nobody gives a shit about anything. Mowing your lawn is a waste of time. Bad things will always happen to good people. None of you eat enough vegetables, but that’s okay, because there aren’t enough vegetables to go around. Politicians are liars and crooks, even the nice ones. I’m rocking out to this song. By the time you figure out what’s going on, it’s much too late. And, because it bears repeating: we’re all going to die.
Why would I bother training a parrot to say any of that? Much better to train my kids – and other people’s kids – to say such things.
If I was going to go to the trouble of training a parrot to say anything, I’d teach it John Cleese’s lines from the “Dead Parrot” sketch – except the parrot would refer to itself in the first person, where Cleese refers to it in the third:
I’m not pinin’! I’ve passed on! This parrot is no more! I have ceased to be! I’ve expired, and gone to meet my maker! I’m a stiff! Bereft of life! I rest in peace! If you hadn’t nailed me to the perch I’d be pushin’ up the daisies! My metabolic processes are now history! I’m off the twig! I’ve kicked the bucket, I’ve shuffled off my mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible! I am an ex-parrot!
That’s existential comedy gold, that is. Really makes you think about the human condition, from a parrot’s point of view. It’s absurd, but it makes sense: it hits you, hard, right in the gut, like a dead kitten. It’s a parrot, and it’s alive, right, but it’s so aware of it’s own death that it can return itself to the pet store, which is obviously a metaphor for … uh, something. Anyway, it’s brilliant.
Sam Beckett never wrote anything half that good.
Day 98: No swearing day.
Posted: April 7, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: disapproval, food, Harry Potter, sex, the Big Lebowski, words, WTF 1 Comment »The Stranger: Just one thing, Dude. Do you have to use so many cuss words?
The Dude: What the fuck are you talking about?
Yeah. What the fuck are you talking about, Book?
If you haven’t noticed, I tend to use “bad” words with some frequency on this blog, and I use them even more in my actual speech. And today, rather than curtail my usage of them, I’m going to defy the Book’s latent Victorian prudishness and curse like an Elizabethan.
Surely you’ve noticed that most of the “bad” words have to do with the bodily-ness of our bodies? Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cock, ass, bugger, &c — they have to do with excrement or sex. The “religious” curse words — damn and hell — are comparatively mild (so mild, in fact, that my three-year-old saying “dammit” when I ask him to help me pick up his trucks is funny, rather than shocking).
I think a big part of the reason that certain words are “offensive” or taboo is precisely that those words are so connected to our bodies, and we in the West have been embarrassed by and deeply distrustful of our bodies since Plato, at least, and the Church has done a lot to exacerbate that hatred of the body.
Well, fuck that shit.
Look: we all eat, and shitting necessarily follows eating; and a fair number of us have to fuck, if we want the species to continue. Shitting and fucking are the foundations of human society – why can’t we talk about them? Because some people are so fucking uptight that they want to pretend that they don’t shit or fuck. Well, some people might not fuck – and they’re missing out – but everybody shits. Everybody.
Alright, so jellyfish and corals and whatnots defecate by vomiting, but it still counts as shitting in my book. It’s just grosser to think about, that’s all. And they can reproduce asexually, sure, so they aren’t fucking, but my guess is that asexual reproduction is less fun than the alternative. The fact remains that lots of shitting and fucking happens every day, and we shouldn’t have a problem talking about it.
There are, I admit, contexts in which the words “shit” and “fuck” and “cunt” and the rest are inappropriate – but I would also argue that those contexts are far less numerous than most people want to think. Honestly, I find “like” and “y’know” much more offensive; if the undergrads I’m surrounded with on a daily basis replaced all their “likes” with “fuckin’s” I’d be a happy man.
Thus ends my rant, but I’d be remiss not to point out a few things in passing. Geoffrey Chaucer – the father of English letters – used the word “cunt” in the Canterbury Tales, back when it was spelled more like “quaint” – so, whenever you use the word “quaint,” think about cunts. Also, he wasn’t the first to use it in print, though he was close: there were “Gropecunt Lanes” in England as far back as 1230.
Lastly: your mother is a blast-ended skank:
Day 89: Primal scream day.
Posted: March 30, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: academia, cars, grading, traffic, violence, words, work Leave a comment »
Holy balls, I needed this today.
Yesterday morning I had one of my moments of despair — an hour or so of gnawing, crushing hopelessness, of absolute certainty that I will never be able to get done all the things I have to get done, and will therefore be politely asked to leave the PhD program that pays my bills and makes my life worth living.
I have one or two of these a semester. They’ve gotten easier, in some ways, because I know that they will come and pass; I can usually see them coming, even, and sort of brace myself. Of course, each time there’s more to lose, because I’ve invested another half a year each time.
It all got done: the paper proposal, the reading, the writing of the response to the reading, the grading, the writing of the response to the paper presented in class today by the dude who’s teaching the class (which went well, so that’s good). Didn’t sleep much, and by that I mean I went to bed at 5 a.m. and got up again at about 7:45. Listened to the final round of presentations my students did, handed back their papers – some of them freshly graded – and called that unit of the course over, finally, and good fucking riddance.
Anyway. A long two days, at the end of which I was tired and drained, and in need of some primal screaming (I had, in fact, been looking forward to it since Monday morning, when I flipped ahead a bit to see what the week had in store).
I like a primal scream now and then; I do them almost exclusively in my car, and usually when I’m stuck in traffic. They’re usually of the “AAAAAAUUUUGH” variety, though there’s also an occasional “FUUUUUCK” that is mostly the “uh” sound.
I expected traffic, today, since I was driving home at rush hour; I needed it, really, to give me the energy to let out a few primal screams, because I was content to just zone out and smoke my pipe on the way home. There was no traffic, though – amazing! stupendous! wonderful! – so I had to make a conscious effort: take a deep breath, brace myself with both arms against the steering wheel, and scream.
It felt great. I’m going to start doing it more often.
Day 86: Go to the wrong side of the tracks.
Posted: March 27, 2011 Filed under: The Book | Tags: adventure, dictionary, language, meaning, travel, wikipedia, words Leave a comment »
I’m tempted to pull the sort of thing with this phrase that I pulled with “hobby” a few weeks ago – or, rather, I was tempted to do so, until a bit of poking around in the vast soup of knowledge and nonsense that is the internet convinced me reconstructing the history of this idiom was going to require looking in actual books in a library somewhere, and I’m just not up for it tonight.
Not up for looking in books, that is: I’m just going to make this shit up as I go along.
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the “tracks” are train tracks. The definite article in the idiom implies that there is only one set of tracks passing through the town – although there we’re assuming that the “wrong side” exists only where the tracks pass through some sort of community, and that the sides are neutral with respect to one another in those places that the track runs through the open countryside. I think it’s a reasonable assumption to make, but we need to be clear about it.
So. Train tracks. One set in town. I think we’ll have to assume that, especially if the town had a station, there must have been a few small spurs of track associated with the station, because practicality seems to necessitate such things. For the sake of the idiom, though, we won’t consider these separate tracks, but part of the tracks.
So. There’s one major set of train tracks running through town. How do you tell which side is the wrong side?
This is, I think, the crux of the matter. We all know that the “wrong side” is the “poor side” – the question is, as it seems to me, whether the less-than-nice side of the tracks was wrong or poor first. That is, is there something inherently undesirable about the wrong side of the tracks which means that the poor people have to live there because the bougies won’t, or is the poor side of the tracks “wrong” precisely because that’s where the poor people live?
One explanation – which I find highly dubious – is that the wrong side is wrong because it’s the side that all or most of the train exhaust ends up on, due to “prevailing winds.” It seems like, for this to be the case, the train tracks would have to run perpendicular to the prevailing winds. Right? Maybe not.
Furthermore, the immediate vicinity of the tracks on both sides are subject to air pollution and noise and hobos and stray railroad spike impalements and who knows what else – so why is it that one side is right and the other wrong, and not that both sides get “righter” the further from the tracks one gets?
This is all more or less pointless, as most places don’t just have one set of tracks anymore. Which particular set of tracks here in Sherman is the set that has a wrong and a right side? Wait, shit – if each set of tracks has a right and a wrong side, how does that work where they overlap? Can one area be really wrong, or both wrong and right and therefore neutral, or the right side of a lesser track and the wrong side of a major track and therefore wrong, but not as wrong as it could be?
Sorry, I got myself sidetracked. Wrong-tracked. Whatever.
We live only a few blocks from a set of tracks. It’s a relatively minor spur, but in the absence of an official pronouncement on the rightness or wrongness of sides of various sets of tracks, I’m going to say it’s the one. The one. And so: our house is on one side, and the Montessori pre-school Jack goes to is on the other side, and the tracks are roughly the halfway point. Either we live on the wrong side, or he goes to school on the wrong side, but either way, we visit both sides of the tracks five days a week – seven, actually, as the park, our church, and my parents are all also on the other side of the tracks from us.
So, dear Book, fuck you. I win this round.
