35 posts tagged “qotd”
In honor of World Teachers' Day today, tell us about a teacher who had a positive impact on your life.
John Abram Bubb, d. 1993, sculptor in stone, dearly remembered: the coolest art teacher who ever was.
Sister Patricia Binko, the Nun of Suzuki Strings. I play the violin because of her.
Bruce Weigl, poet, critic, essayist, memoirist, translator, and fucking cool guy. I had his English 213, Intro to Poetry Writing, pretty much by accident -- it fit my schedule that fall. I thought, "Oh, poetry. That should be easy" -- words which haunted me as I sat down to write my 4-hour master's-degree candidacy exam in 1997.
Carolyn Forche. My guru. I love Carolyn forever.
Peter Klappert. Peter is another poet under whose grad-school strictures I blossomed.
Chris Thaiss was the first instructor to teach me how to teach, way back in the TA days. Now, everybody I work with teaches me more about all that.
What television show stands the test of time?
Firefly does, more than, IMNSHO, any other Joss Whedon show (although Buffy's "Once More With Feeling" is admittedly brilliant). Firefly has a detailed 'verse with well-rounded characters (Simon, Simon, Simon -- you are so beautiful, and so selflessly dedicated, and so brilliant, and this sweet young thing follows you around with the very warmest of intentions, and you then stab her by saying something amazingly offensive) whose destinies you actually care about. Sure, there were only fourteen episodes -- so it never had time to jump the shark.
But I think I can now confidently award the Earliest Appearance of a Very Difficult Student medal to someone I teach English with. Yes, I can.
My officemate gave a quiz with this question:
True or false? The following is a good, arguable thesis statement: A healthy heart is the key to a healthy life.
This was a T/F quiz question about thesis statements, right? But one guy emailed my officemate and complained. He felt that "it doesn't matter how healthy your heart is" -- that one's Lord alone determines the length of one's life, not, say, fatty sclerosis, infarcts, what have you.
This is great news, my friends. Unless you're a cardiologist, in which case apparently you're in league with Satan.
Who is your favorite wizard of all time?
No contest. Technically, his was a knight-monastic order, but he was referred to as a "wizard" by Uncle Owen, so I say that counts. I was four when the movie came out; it was the first I'd ever seen in a theater; and Star Wars was, as Obi-Wan himself put it, my "first step into a larger world." (Propaganda, I tell you, those movies. Thinly-disguised Buddhist recruiting literature! Well -- it worked!)
Yeah, sorry, Gandalf. I love you too, and I love that moment in the movie version of RotK where Denethor is raving away, just completely mad as a hatter, and you bitchslap him with your big stick because nobody has time for that. And you had the sword and you got to go ridin' through the desert on a horse with no knees. But Obi-Wan had a lightsaber. Pwnt.
What is one of your favorite poems?
Submitted by marvel is my pen name.
Oh, please be joking! One? One?!
*sits down, composes self* This is hard to break down by category, even. Favorite haiku? There are numerous contenders, including this one by Oemaru that, several centuries later, has a double meaning to those of us who "aim to misbehave":
gives light
to its pursuer.
Favorite sonnet? See, that's huge too. You have everybody from Petrarch to Ted Berrigan to grapple with on that one. Favorite limerick? I have to cop to liking one of the crude ones:
A mathematician named Hall
has a hexahedronical ball.
The cube of its weight
times his pecker, plus eight,
is his phone number. Give him a call.
Favorite book-length poem? There are numerous there, too. C.D. Wright's Deepstep Come Shining, Carolyn Forché's The Blue Hour, works by Gwendolyn Brooks, Hart Crane's The Bridge, Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette, Anne Waldman's Iovis, Charles Olson's Maximus, obviously Pound's Cantos (with, one grants, severe misgivings), and always and eternally Allen Ginsberg's Howl for Carl Solomon:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
- who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
- who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
- who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
- who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull....
Whan that Aprille, with hir shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed euery vayne in swich licour
Of which Vertu engendred is the flour
Whan Zephirus eek, with his sweete breth
Inspired hath, in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram half his cours yronne....
But is it one of my favorites simply because it's stuck in my head, or was on my reading list for my MFA exam? Does it become favorite-er if I know the person, or they're a FOAF? No -- I'm sorry. I cannot even begin to answer this question.
What's the most obsessive-compulsive thing you do in a normal day?
Submitted by Nikki.
Since I have OCD, I'm a little annoyed at this question, thank you very damn much, Nikki, but... okay, other people's typos, spelling errors, grammar disasters, and punctuation problems make me twitch. Example: I went to a newly-opened art exhibit at the [Local] Museum of Art, and was loving the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Frank Zappa, Lenny Bruce, Country Joe & the Fish, and other posters on display. However, the fact that the wall and brochure text said 60's every time it should have said '60s ground my teeth.
Also, whoever typeset (and approved!) the brochure was clearly psychedelically influenced themselves, because there's a deeply hilarious error — admittedly funnier if you know the context. One lithograph represented therein, next to the Alton Kelley/Stanley Mouse "Skull and Roses" poster (which became the cover of the album Warner wouldn't let the Grateful Dead call Skullfuck), was done by an artist called Robert Fried. Amusingly, the wall text is correct, but the brochure claims this artwork was actually done by Robert Field. Robert Field is my husband's boss! When informed that he was apparently a poster-art lithographer back in the day, he replied, "It pays to advertise!"
What's one thing you regret not doing?
Submitted by Mr. Nice.
Reporting my rapist, Mr. Not Nice, to everybody in the universe at the time -- including the police. Now any physical evidence is 17 years gone, and all I have to prove it is a whopping case of PTSD with some bodily side effects.
I just want to officially thank the following actual human beings:
Dr. Judith Halden-Sullivan
Dr. Yufeng Zhang
Keith McDonald
Rose Flosser
Those people, for the permanent record of the universe, officially rock my world at this time. I mean, lots of people do, including Cari, who seems to make it her mission in life to keep my spirits up. But those four people really helped me today. Thank you.
I'm also loving this new blog theme, which I don't think LiveJournal has nicked yet. It reminds me of the local wildlife. I dreamed of deer last night and have no idea what that means.
Who's the hardest person to shop for on your holiday list?
Hubby. Absolutely. One, I can and do buy him books, but his actual time for pleasure reading is limited by the fact that he's a ginormous workaholic. P.G. Wodehouse, he'll make time for, but you'll note that Mr. Wodehouse is deceased and therefore not producing any new books. Two, Doug loves music -- but has a massive CD collection, and has to be firmly told to stop buying himself new releases after a certain point. So if I want to buy him, I dunno, a Smashing Pumpkins CD for some reason (he has extremely eclectic tastes; maybe some Voxer recommended an album they thought was extra-great, hint, hint), I have to go to the CD racks and look under S to make sure he doesn't already have it.
Anyway, I'm mostly posting to say: Hi! I'm not dead! I'm just buried under 15 bazillion research papers from the class I'm substituting for -- the most terrifying of which was written by a guy who wants to be a cardiac surgeon someday. After reading some of his sentences, I want to vow never to eat a French fry again in my life, if you follow me.
Grading is really, really brainwracking in a way that I think not everybody understands. My boss from one of the schools and I had this conversation recently:
Boss (female) is wearing dark red nail polish -- you'd call it burgundy. I remark on it. Boss says she'd call it "burgundy," too, except its official name is "Dark Wine."
Preparing to exit, I say, "Yeah, well I'm going to go home, have some dark wine, and grade papers."
Boss says, with look of desperation, "I tried two whisky-and-sodas, and it was like [drinking] nothing."
What's your favorite music for a Sunday morning?
Submitted by Nick.
Duh -- Velvet Underground, "Sunday Morning," from The Velvet Underground and Nico, a/k/a "The Banana Album," whose banana peel, in the original printing, really peeled back. It's just so delicate and spooky and magical, that simultaneous sense of dawning and doom, which really was the mix that made the Warhol era so erotic.
No, La Loca is not old enough to have been there herself, thank you. She is giving you her impressions from visual, film, musical, and other types of art of the period. Kthx.
This Sunday morning, after doing basically nothing else yesterday, I finished the book. National Novel Writing Month, a winner is me. They don't start official validation until the 25th, where you get your certificate and winner's icon and all those downloadable goodies, but I've done it -- and now I'm sad because, although the story arc is concluded and the various plots are resolved or left deliberately open, I've just spent a lot of intense time with these characters and I miss them! Where will I escape to now, if not their little world? Nevertheless, I do feel as though I've cleared something out of my head by doing this, and can move on to some other projects (work and otherwise) that I need to tackle. I mean, doing this every year guarantees you an output of 50,000+ words that you can then rearrange, cut up, mine, and rewrite if need be, but you can't do any of that stuff if it's not on the page in the first place. I keep telling my students what Anne Lamott says: that you have to give yourself permission to write crap first drafts. You certainly can't do NaNo any other way -- you're padding things out to make the word count! You don't just have a spooky castle; you have a spooky, bleak, rain-dripping castle whose Gothic architecture puts you in mind of the house of Usher, blah blah blah. But you can't bring out the editorial pencil until next month.
Some years I've gone plotless, doing extended freewrites in a sense, very silly indeed but fun picaresque fantasies. This year, I actually set myself up with a situation, a plot, a problem, and characters who would have to deal with the problem with limited resources. It went much faster this year. I don't have enough of a sample size to infer a statistical correlation, she said academically, but it's interesting.
The "Psychic Radio" also was depressingly perfect during the last part. My iTunes turned to the Grateful Dead's American Beauty during the part where I needed to kill off somebody's father. The first song on the album is "Box of Rain," written for Phil Lesh's dying father. It wasn't until the album hit "Brokedown Palace" that I actually wept, of course:
Goin' home, goin' home
By the water's side I'm gonna lay my bones
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
to rock my soul
So today was definitely a recovery day, as if I'd been on an extended psychedelic trip. Back to reality! (If you want a copy of the silly thing in .doc or .pdf -- and if you use the solecism "PDF format," I will reach through my computer and strangle you; what do you think the F in PDF stands for? -- comment with an email address. It helps if you like birds, and the requirement is that you are not the guy who raped me when I was 16. Fortunately, the majority of the world's population is free of the affliction of being that guy.)
What's your method for calculating a tip?
Ah, Grasshopper, I use the time-honored method of English teachers everywhere: I use a calculator. Actually, I once frequented a piercer who collected statues of elephants -- but only with their trunks down, not up in the "lucky elephant" position. So a lot of cool factors came together: the Smithsonian Folklife Festival that year had Mali as one of its featured cultures, and in the vending booth, I found a small, relatively inexpensive elephant statue of the kind he liked. The next time I visited him, I gave him this elephant for general continued good service. So occasionally, I do tip in Pachydermata.
I got shot at school on Thursday. A lot of my colleagues got shot, actually. It was really cheap: $10 per dose per faculty or staff member. They had a nurse from Nearby Large Hospital come right to the school and do them, and she was experienced and quick. All that was good, except all weekend, I've been smeared all over the floor with the low-grade flu reaction I should have known I'd get from the vaccine. Oh, believe you me, I've got asthma, and the mini-flu is infinitely preferable to the maxi-flu later in the season. But my concentration is shot once again, and I don't have a clue which highly specialized bodhisattva is supposed to give me the strength to do the other 50% of this smegging alleged novel.
What is your favorite scent?
Submitted by Erinen.
Freshly sharpened #2 pencils. No joke. There's just something clean and lovely to me about the way they smell. I also like the smell of a brand-new pink eraser. I always have. Leather is both sexy and nostalgic to me (my grandfather, even in retirement, had his own shoe repair shop going in his garage); sandalwood makes me feel spiritual; lavender is infinitely relaxing.
I do not smell victory yet, but I reek of the sweat of a good, honest first day's NaNoWriMo effort. (Comment with your username on the site if you want a Writing Buddy, for whatever that's worth.) I am incredibly spacey just now. If I can keep up a similar pace -- 2,609 words today -- over the next few, it will make up for the inevitable Thanksgiving disruption and fall-behind. I got through the Prologue and now I'm into Part One and there you go, off to the races. My brain? Is it in the dryer?
