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So, if you read my Twitters or Facebook, you know I’m really pissed off at a certain Business professor who keeps sending whole classes of students to the writing lab. Here’s the tweet I sent just after the first of a new class of students came in to get her paper stamped:
the asshole professor who sent 80 students to the writing lab last semester sent another class this semester, WHICH HE WAS TOLD NOT TO DO.
I’ve calmed down since then.
Here’s the backstory: Last semester, all was well in the writing lab until we got SWAMPED by a class of eighty students who had to bring in papers to get stamped. While a few of them came in early, most waited until the very last minute to bring in their papers, and there was a line out the door. It was terrible. After it was over, an email was sent to every professor at the university telling them not to send in entire classes. I thought it was over. But noooo. This time, though, I was proactive. As soon as that first student came in, I high-tailed it to the advisor’s office, and she couldn’t believe he’d done it again. She said she had just sent out an email reminding professors not to send whole classes. She asked me to email him volunteering to do a presentation. Here’s that email:
Hi Dr. ________,
I work in the Writing Center. One of your freshmen came in the other day to get a paper stamped, and she said the assignment required the entire class to come in. Regrettably, the Writing Center is unequipped to handle such a large number of students in such a short period of time. As I’m sure you can imagine, some of the students are ahead of the game, but the vast majority of them wait until the last minute. Last semester, we had lines going out the door. Some students had to wait over an hour to see a tutor because there are never more than two students working in the Writing Center at any given time. Each session takes around twenty minutes, and we are not allowed to give a quick proofread.
As an alternative, Ms. ______ suggested we come to you. If you give us a day and a time, someone who works in the Writing Center will be more than happy to give a quick presentation to your class outlining what the Writing Center can do for your students. Hopefully, the ones who need our help will come in on their own.
Nice enough, right? This letter better work. Otherwise, my head might explode.
I just convinced a friend to choose a Macbook over a Windows laptop. Part of the reason she was hesitant was the learning curve – Macs are different. I ordered a Macbook Pro at the same time, and I just put together this list for her as I’m waiting for FedEx to show up with both laptops. I figured it might be worth sharing with the world.
Programs (all free):
- The native apps for Mac are much better than native Windows apps – Mail and iCal are fantastic
- Adium is best for IM
- Appfresh will keep all your shizz updated automatically
- Soulseek is called SSX – it’s basically the same, but it looks entirely different
- Transmission is best for torrents
- No equivalent to MSPaint comes with your Mac – you’ll have to find an equivalent on the internet
- Download quicksilver and Growl, possibly the most popular mac programs – I’ll explain how those work, and you’ll love them
- Only the dev channel build of Chrome has extensions: download here if you want to use them
- use Boxee if you want to watch TV shows or Netflix on your TV. You might want to get an Apple remote, which used to come with Macbooks – it’s about $20 and well worth it.
Buttons:
- For most shortcuts, when you’d normally use control (like copy, paste, etc), use command – the button with ⌘ and the apple on it
- Use control for right-click. Right buttons on mice work like they do on PCs
- Hit f11 to make your windows scoot away
- Hit f10 to show the windows from the program you’re using
- Hit f9 to show all the windows open on the desktop
Random stuff:
- Clicking the red button that you’d think would shut down the program doesn’t. Hit command (apple/⌘ button)-q or right click (control-click) it in the dock or click and hold in the dock and choose quit.
- The Mac equivalent of .exe is .dmg
- The desktop isn’t for shortcuts – it’s for short-term storage. If you want a photo from the internet, drag it to the desktop. This also works for text – just highlight and drag (thanks, @picassolsus!)
- If you don’t want an icon on the dock, drag it away, and it’ll disappear in a puff of smoke! If you want one to stay, control-click it and choose “keep in dock”
- Technically, to delete programs, you can just drag them to the trash – most don’t come with an uninstall. That leaves files undeleted, though it generally doesn’t make a big difference. If you want to delete them once and for all, you need an extra program like AppZapper ($13), which kills the whole thing
- I haven’t run into any compatibility issues when switching between PC and Mac, but there might be some. there’s usually a mac equivalent to any windows program you can think of
So, dear reader, am I missing anything? It took me a really long time to convince her to get a Mac, so I want her to be really happy with it. I know that shouldn’t be hard simply because she bought a Mac.
 I have a complicated relationship with Walt Whitman, and for the past week, I’ve been on a quest to like him.
I’ve generally disliked Whitman since I read him for the first time in high school. Since I was supposed to like him, I bought (and read!) a volume of “Song of Myself” back in the day, only to discover that it made me hate him more. I’ve always preferred the general pessimism of Eliot and Yeats – ah, how I melodramatized multiple readings of “The Hollow Men” and “Second Coming!” He’s like the opposite of Yeats: “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.” I think I dismissed Whitman as too happy and energetic. I wanted to slap him. I didn’t really know anything about him, and I wasn’t interested enough to learn.
And my dislike bloomed over the years much like my unfounded hatred for Jane Austen did until I finally broke down and read Pride and Prejudice. That book changed my tune quickly, though I didn’t make it all the way through Sense and Sensibility.
I judge quickly, and said judgment is often based on a lack of knowledge.
So back to my quest. I had to read a chunk of Whitman for my Modern Poetry class, and I figured that this is a great time to learn to like a poet I really should like, so I told myself I’d read about him until I liked him more. After the first class, I went to the library and got Whitman by Geoffrey Dutton, the shortest book about the poet in the library’s collection. I have little time and a very short attention span. There’s a nice biography of Whitman that focuses on his prose, which I definitely prefer. The Preface to Leaves of Grass is brilliant:
The land and sea, the animals fishes and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests mountains and rivers, are not small themes…but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects…they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls. Men and women perceive the beauty well enough…probably as well as he. The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, all is an old varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty and of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people. They can never be assisted by poets to perceive…some may but they never can. The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to things nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else and is in the soul.
Okay, I’ll stop. This stuff is fantastic, and I prefer it to the poetry. In other words, I like to hear Whitman talk about what he’s doing rather than seeing it in practice, which seems kind of backward.
A few weeks ago, I ordered a book called Poets Thinking by Helen Vendler, which contains essays on the the thinking processes of Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, and Yeats. In the Whitman section, Vendler talks about Whitman’s use of reprise and what he called effusing, “a conscious refusal to remain a withdrawn spectator…requir[ing]…an annihilation of personal identity” (40). As I read “Song of Myself,” I saw that that’s exactly what Whitman is doing, and it’s brilliant. I think what most helped me to understand the value of Whitman was putting his poetry in its historical context and realizing how revolutionary he really was. I’d never thought of him as a Civil War poet, though I guess I knew he was in the area around that time, nor did I realize how much he changed poetry, all because I didn’t bother thinking about it.
I’ve never been a fan of American lit. When I was an undergrad, I focused almost entirely on British lit, Shakespeare especially. I only took the two required American lit classes, one of which must have covered Whitman, though I have no recollection of it. And we wonder why I didn’t too too well on the GRE lit test! (Okay, that’s not exactly the truth – I actually did okay because the vast majority of the stuff on that test is British, though I ran into trouble with questions about Jane Austin, etc. I’m just glad it’s been 5 years so I have to take it again. Or maybe that’s not a good thing.)
ANYWAY. Back to Whitman. This is what Vendler has to say, which makes me appreciate more what Whitman was trying to do:
The poet, by a voluntary mental yielding of his own identity into liquidity and even self-annihilation, must think his way into the independent and animate being of each thing he sees,…conferring on each object, from the inner being he experiences as he inhabits it mentally, a language appropriate to its newly invested independence, emotions, volition, or music” (47).
You can totally see exactly this idea in “Sparkles from the Wheel:”
The scene and all its belongings, how they seize and affect me,
The sad sharp-chinn’d old man with worn clothes and broad shoulder-band of leather,
Myself effusing and fluid, a phantom curiously floating, now here absorb’d and arrested,
The group, (an unminded point set in a vast surrounding,)
The attentive, quiet children, the loud, proud, restive base of the streets,
The low hoarse purr of the whirling stone, the light-press’d blade,
Diffusing, dropping, sideways-darting, in tiny showers of gold,
Sparkles from the wheel.
And (!) throughout “Song of Myself:”
The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready,
The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon,
The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged,
The armfuls are pack’d to the sagging mow.
I am there, I help, I came stretch’d atop of the load,
I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other,
I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy,
And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.
So now I can appreciate Whitman for his contribution. He’s very American in the most free and expansive sense, which I like. Lots of his poetry is also beautiful and brilliant, but I hadn’t put any energy into figuring that out. Take this for example:
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if eer there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, [take that, Yeats!]
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Sigh. Also, and finally!:
I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured.
I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.
Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.
It is not far, it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.
Ah! That almost brings tears to my eyes.
So. In the past week, I’ve decided that I not only don’t hate Whitman, but I like Whitman. I stand by my preference for his prose, but his poetry is fantastic, too. I also think I like a lot of the non-”Song of Myself” stuff more, like “Sparkles from the Wheel” and “Come Up from the Fields Father” because they are a bit less annoyingly celebratory than much of “Song of Myself.” It’s strange that Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s only book and that he chose to continually update it rather than publish more. He seems like he would have been a more prolific writer.
Or if you only see the feed, I’ve changed the my Wordpress theme again. The last one I had, the fancy one with the lifestream, loaded far too slowly and was generally unattractive. But this one’s better! Also, if you refresh the page, you’ll notice that there’s a nice rotation of images, all of which are on my flickr account.
Just a heads up.
In my Christmas-break boredom, I’ve spent a lot of time puttering around the internet – mostly, it appears, at sites that have “fuck” in the title. Of course I don’t mean p0rn sites. I first discovered my new favorite word, fuckyay (which, sadly, I haven’t been able to use in conversation yet), here, but the variation of it, fuckyeah, is EVERYWHERE, especially, for whatever reason, on Tumblr. The fuckyeah sites tend to be full of photos that are funny or fantastic or both, but some are just weird. Here are a few I found after only a couple minutes of searching:
It’s not only animals: there are lots of Fuck Yeah <insert celebrity here> sites too:
Basically, you can search for just about any famous person, living or dead, with “fuckyeah,” and you’ll find a Tumblr page to go along with it. Okay, that’s not exactly true – Cormac McCarthy doesn’t have his own page, nor do Don Delillo or Haruki Murakami, but Chuck Palahniuk does.
There are also lots of random sites:
I’ll stop now. It’s becoming ridiculous. They’re everywhere. I’m going to miss aimlessly surfing the internet for hours once school starts on Tuesday. Or maybe it’ll be my new form of procrastination.
I’m glad I don’t use ads because I’m pretty sure bad things would happen if I did.
Every year or so, I get to wondering where my flickr photos end up. I use a Creative Commons license, and anyone can use my photos as long as my name is attached, so I’ve found lots of photos in interesting places. I don’t use my flickr name (lindsayloveshermac) anywhere else, so it’s easy to search. Here are some of my favorites:
 This one is fantastic. This lovely photo appears on several websites, including one explaining how to tell your mom that you got your period. I’m glad my photos have been put to such important use. It also appears on a page called “Can I ask my boyf to buy me plugs?” The answer, if you’re wondering, is yes:
How can you be so opposed to a product that keeps your girlfriend’s sacred nether regions from looking like a viking battlefield?
Here’s another:
 I took this photo at Lakeside Mall in Metairie the Christmas after Katrina, hence the blue tarps on the roofs, etc. Several of my photos of this display appear on this blog post.
I’ve been meaning to try to make Shakespeare into a LOLcat, and it turns out he is one - kind of.
My photos also appear in some other random places, including local blogs.
 I just read Pinball, 1973, by my very favorite author, Haruki Murakami. It was the first book I read on my super-cool new Kindle. If you search the name on Google, followed by pdf, you’ll find a long list of files to download because it’s so expensive. For whatever reason, Murakami doesn’t want it published in the States. He doesn’t think it’s good enough.
Pinball, 1973 is Murakami’s second novel and a sequel to Hear the Wind Sing, which has also never been published here for the same reason. The copy I have was published in Japan for people learning to read English. Pinball, 1971, from what I understand, was published by the same people, and I have no idea why it’s so relatively rare.
Anyway, it’s fantastic. Almost difficult to grip, but fantastic. Like many of his other novels including Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Kafka on the Shore, it alternates perspectives between chapters. Unlike those two novels, though, there is very little connection beyond theme in Pinball. Which is fine.
This isn’t supposed to be a book review. It’s supposed to be a few things about Murakami.
I’m not exactly sure why I like him so much, though it might have something to do with how weird most of his novels are without falling into scifi or fantasy – or maybe it’s his fondness for cats, which have at least a small role in every novel of his I’ve read and at least a mention in every short story. He also likes wells. I have noticed that I like translations by Alfred Birnbaum best and Philip Gabriel least, though one of my favorites was translated by the latter. I’ve read all of his novels that have been translated into English except Dance Dance Dance, which is the sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, which comes rather loosely from Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973. A Wild Sheep Chase is quite possibly Murakami’s most popular novel – and my least favorite (this has happened before: Slaughterhouse Five is my least favorite Vonnegut novel, and I really like Vonnegut). That’s not exactly true: I really didn’t like After Dark either, but I’m not sure why. I like not having read Dance Dance Dance if only because there’s still something of his in English that I haven’t read. His new novel, 1Q84, won’t appear in English until September, 2011, and that seems forever away. There are short stories I haven’t read either, but I never like them as much as his novels. The longer his work is, the more I tend to like it. Case in point: my favorite three novels (I can’t choose one!) are Hard-Boiled Wonderland, Kafka on the Shore, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – three of his longest novels. From what I hear, 1Q84 is long too, so I’m particularly excited. Keep in mind that I generally hate long novels because I’m not good at finishing them.
Murakami has also written some nonfiction stuff including What I Talk about when I Talk about Running, which I read a couple of months ago and loved. It’s about running, and I run. Go figure. There’s also Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, which I haven’t read. He’s published a bunch of essays that have been translated, too.
I’ll stop now.
I guess I might have exceeded the “few things” I wanted to talk about, especially considering that I didn’t mention what I’d originally planned to say, which is that I like how Murakami handles sex. I dislike explicit sex in books – it’s annoying. With Murakami, you know it’s going on, but you don’t get many details. The most explicit scene I remember is in Kafka on the Shore, and I don’t remember it being bad. I need to reread that novel.
 I spent a week reading White Noise for my modern fiction class. This book was why I signed up for the class in the first place, and I was terribly excited. It’s totally different than how I remembered it.
I read White Noise the summer after my freshman year of high school. Before summer break, I asked a teacher who I idolized what books I should read over the summer, which I would be spending in the no man’s land of Minden, LA. She gave me three suggestions: Hard Times, A Handmaid’s Tale, and White Noise. I read and adored all three, but White Noise was, by far, my favorite. It also changed my life by filling my head with crazy (and reasonable) ideas.
Here’s one that occurs very early in the book. Throughout my childhood, just before I’d fall asleep, I’d jerk awake because I felt like I was falling. It was terrible. It happened almost every night. One of my very first memories was lying in my Strawberry Shortcake-themed bed at my dad’s house, trying to sleep, and being jarred awake. I couldn’t have been older than three or four. Of course, I kept it a secret, as so many kids keep secret anything they think is wrong with them. For a long time, I was convinced that I had a disease. And here’s what White Noise has to do with my problem: it explained what it was and how it happened. I’ve never bothered actually looking it up, but, according to the novel, it’s called a myoclonic jerk, and it’s a “more or less normal muscular contraction.” That’s all I’ve ever found out about it, but it’s enough for me. It hasn’t happened often since I was a kid, but every time it does, that phrase goes through my head. I’d forgotten where it came from.
Life-changing bit number two: I idolized Heinrich. I wanted to be just like him: brilliant and brooding. And I think I might have pulled it off for a while, though that’s another post.
And number three: I don’t remember, but my airplane phobia must have been exacerbated by the terrible near-crash description. This is only part of it:
The plane had lost power in all three engines, dropped from thirty-four thousand feet to twelve thousand feet. Something like four miles. When the steep glide began, people rose, fell, collided, swam in their seats. Then the serious screaming and moaning began. Almost immediately a voice from the flight deck was heard on the intercom: “We’re falling out of the sky! We’re going down! We’re a silver gleaming death machine!” This outburst struck the passengers as an all but total breakdown of authority, competence, and command presence and it brought on a round of fresh and desperate wailing.
Here’s a story: When I was little, having divorced parents, I used to fly alone a lot. A lot. I was generally okay with it until, when I was eight or nine, my dad put me on a plane from New Orleans or Baton Rouge to Shreveport. It was terrible. It was a little puddle-jumper from an airline that doesn’t exist anymore, and we were flying behind a 757. It flew through a thunderhead, and, for whatever reason, the pilot of my plane decided that it would be a good idea for us to go through it too. Once we got into it, though, we started falling. Like two hundred feet at a time, which took seconds. After each fall, we would climb back up and fall again. I, of course, was alone, and I was surrounded by adults who were screaming and crying and holding hands and praying. How could I not be traumatized? For years after that, I gripped the armrests and said rosaries through whole flights, convinced that I was about to die. When I turned eighteen, I got a car, and I SWORE I’d never fly again. And I didn’t for six years, when I was faced with a free trip to Disney World. It was a phobia: I would have nightmares not about planes crashing, but about being forced to board them. I can deal with planes now, I think, only thanks to a combination of NLP and a book called Flying without Fear.
ANYWAY, I’m sure you can see how the description in White Noise might affect my fourteen-year-old psyche (after reading Cat’s Cradle, I wanted to be a Bokononist!). I remember sitting in an airport sometime around then, watching several people exit a plane with IVs and casts and the like. I think I assumed that something terrible had happened on the plane, but now, of course, I realize that planes probably don’t carry IV or cast-making supplies.
And, finally, there’s the athiest nun at the end. I won’t explain the circumstances for the benefit of those of you who STILL NEED TO READ THIS NOVEL. This includes you, Charlotte. I know that, being fourteen, I took that part way too seriously. In fact, I didn’t think White Noise was a funny novel at all. I’m especially amused that I only remembered the first half of it – I guess I was just too young to understand what in the hell was going on.
When I was little, I had a little, blue book of jokes at my dad’s house. I have no idea what happened to it, and I’d forgotten about it until this lovely comic was posted on Nedroid Comics:
For years, I thought there was nothing funnier in the world than the elephant on a fence joke, though this one rivaled it:
Why do firemen wear red suspenders?
To hold their pants up!
Ah, the memories. I have no idea what the name of this book is, but it was my favorite for a long time. Ooh! Here’s another one:
Why did the kid throw the clock out of the window?
To make time fly!
Ha! Complicated jokes are overrated.
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