A Girl With a Sword

Thanksgiving with the family

meh, I am still lacking motivation for schoolwork. I just drove for twelve hours. Twelve hours! It took ten to get to Pennsylvania, but the drive back was longer because my car was loaded with all of my worldly possessions and because I got very confused in Harrisburg. Grrr, Harrisburg. I actually at one point found myself in Harrisburg International Airport (I know what you're thinking, International?!) but then I got back on track and just found myself in lots of post-Thanksgiving traffic. I love the mountains of Virginia, though, and I'm glad I got to spend a nice afternoon there. Wish it could have been outside the car . . . I also finished a book on tape, The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant. It was about Florence during Savonarola and man, few things in history make me as angry as the Bonfire of the Vanities.

Thanksgiving Break was beautiful. I went to my cousins' house in Lancaster County, PA. It was a nice balance of random Covenant people and relatives.

and I love how all the houses up there have fireplaces! It just makes it so much more cozy and Thanksgiving-ish. The family Thanksgiving involved a lot of arguments in the morning over how to arrange the tables. My cousins and I maintained that since we had to sit at the "kids table" when we were little (and oh how traumatizing it was!), then we should make our little cousins sit at the kids table now, so they would know their place (and so we wouldn't have to sit with them). It worked out to a compromise, the kids sat with the grown-ups and we had the "big kids table", which kind of makes me question if we've gotten anywhere in the last ten years . . . There were also bets placed on which of our younger cousins would get spanked first. It might seem unsportsmanlike in a competition of this kind to urge your contestant on, but it sure makes it more exciting. I'm really not sure who won.

Later that night Sam, William, and I headed over to the Bleeckers' where we ate their Thanksgiving leftovers and made some cider, then decided to start watching Holiday Inn at midnight. It was good times.

magic words

Found this this morning:

THE SPELL AGAINST SPELLING
George Starbuck

(a poem to be inscribed in dark places and never to be spoken aloud)

My favorite student lately is the one who wrote about feeling clumbsy.
I mean if he wanted to say how it feels to be all thumbs he
Certainly picked the write language to right in in the first place.
I mean better to clutter a word up like the old Hearst place
Than to just walk off the job and not give a dam.

Another student gave me a diagragm.
"The Diagragm of the Plot in Henry the VIIIth."

Those, though, were instances of the sublime.
The wonder is in the wonders they can come up with every time.

Why do they all say heighth, but never weighth?
If chrystal can look like English to them, how come chryptic can't?
I guess cwm, chthonic, qanat, or quattrocento
Always gets looked up. But never momento.
Momento they know. Like wierd. Like differant.
It is a part of their deep deep-structure vocabulary:
Their stone axe, their dark bent-offering to the gods:
Their protoCro-Magnon pre-pre-sapient survival-against-cultural-odds.

You won't get me deputized in some Spelling Constabulary.
I'd sooner abandon the bag-toke-whiff system and go decimal.
I'm on their side. I better be, after my brush with "infinitessimal."

There it was, right where I put it, in my brand-new book.

And my friend Peter Davison read it, and he gave me this look,
And he held the look for a little while and said, "George..."

I needed my students at that moment. I, their Scourge.
I needed them. Needed their sympathy. Needed their care.
"Their their," I needed to hear them say, "their their."

You see, there are Spellers in this world, I mean mean ones too.
They shadow us around like a posse of Joe Btfsplks
Waiting for us to sit down at our study-desks and go shrdlu
So they can pop in at the windows saying "tsk tsk."

I know they're there. I know where the beggars are,
With their flash cards looking like prescriptions for the catarrh
And their mnemnmonics, blast 'em. They go too farrh.
I do not stoop to impugn, indict, or condemn;
But I know how to get back at the likes of thegm.

For a long time, I keep mumb.
I let 'em wait, while a preternatural calmn
Rises to me from the depths of my upwardly opened palmb.
Then I raise my eyes like some wizened-and-wisened gnolmbn,
Stranger to scissors, stranger to razor and coslmbn,
And I fix those birds with my gaze till my gaze strikes hoslgmbn,
And I say one word, and the word that I say is "Oslgmbnh."

"Om?" they inquire. "No, not exactly. Oslgmbnh.
Watch me carefully while I pronounce it because you've only got two more guesses
And you only get one more hint: there's an odd number of esses,
And you only get ten more seconds no nine more seconds no eight
And a wrong answer bumps you out of the losers' bracket
And disqualifies you for the National Spellathon Contestant jacket
And that's all the time extension you're going to gebt
So go pick up your consolation prizes from the usherebt
And don't be surprised if it's the bowdlerized regularized paperback abridgment of Pepys
Because around here, gentlemen, we play for kepys."

Then I drive off in my chauffeured Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham
Like something out of the last days of Fellini's Rougham
And leave them smiting their brows and exclaiming to each other "Ougham!
O-U-G-H-A-M Ougham!" and tearing their hair.

Intricate are the compoundments of despair.

Well, brevity must be the soul of something-or-other.

Not, certainly, of spelling, in the good old mother
Tongue of Shakespeare, Raleigh, Marvell, and Vaughan.
But something. One finds out as one goes aughan.

This kind of thing is so beautiful it almost makes me cry. I read somewhere, in something buried deep in my bibliography, that back when the world was free Edmund Spenser used different spellings to allude to different connotations of a word, or even to kind of link that word to a different word altogether. Our language does have this really handy rhyming thing going on, why not use it?

Borat on a quest for marriage

Yeah, so I went to go see Borat this weekend. I knew almost nothing about it beforehand, so when my friend suggested it, and my brain was too dead to argue for anything else, I said, sure, why not. I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes to check it out, just in case it might suck terribly, and found this. Check that out, how often do you see a movie get 100% from the Cream of the Crop (I don't know how long it'll be 100%, but it is now)? So I had hope going into the movie, you know. Confidence, shall we say. But after about five minutes I got bored with laughing at things I didn't find funny.

Anyway, my point here is not to talk about my own reaction to the film. I just want to point out how it is carrying on the knight-errant tradition. Think Sir Percival. Borat, despite his intensely active sexuality, is an innocent on a quest. Everything he sees surprises and fascinates him. Very early on he sees a woman on a screen (And can I just take the liberty of comparing this not only to Percival meeting Lady Yvette, but also to Britomart seeing Artegall in Merlin's mirror and falling in love with him (The Faerie Queene, book III, canto ii). And stop laughing, really, I think this all pertains.) and falls in love with her. He then undertakes a quest across the country, encountering many people and problems along the way. In the heroic tradition they all seem to symbolize something--the rodeo, the aristocratic Southerners, the prostitute, the bear, the gypsies, the shape-shifting Jews. What really captures the spirit of the old knight-errant stories for me is Borat's utter dejection when he finds out that his lady is not a virgin. Reminds me a lot of that part in Book I of The Faerie Queene where the Redcross Knight is deceived into thinking that Una is having sex with someone in the next room and he just ups and leaves, right then. Of course, the end of Borat doesn't fit so well, Hollywood tradition sets in and he has to deal with disillusionment and realize that he missed true happiness along the way. But really, even though I personally did not like the movie, I'm glad this knight-errant tradition is being carried on. Universal stories just make me happy.

blog-blog

Don't mind all the blogging, I'm just a verbal processor and right now blogging=talking. So in English we have these compounds, that we don't even think of as compounds. Say I am eating a pop-tart (this is a fun one because it's already a compound) and I tell you that it is a pop-tart pop-tart then you will say, 'oh yes, Linnea is not eating those cheap tasteless store-brand pop-tarts, only real pop-tarts are good enough for her.' Here the redundancy is used to reinforce the genuineness of what's being talked about. So I'm dealing with all of these redundant noun-noun compounds in Old English and I'm trying to figure out whether these are reinforcing genuineness (a terror-terror, as opposed to that kind of terror that you have when you dream that you failed an essay test because you ran out of time, but then you woke up and realized it wasn't true and realized that maybe you should get some help for your academic anxiety because when you have a dream about running out of time on a test and then are afraid to go back to sleep things have definitely gone too far) or are they intensifying (a treasure-treasure, which is just so much more . . . treasureful than a regular treasure) or are they showing plural, which would be weird, but some of them seem to point to that: strength-strength is used when describing "the strength of thirty men."

would you like a pot of tea?

I have a new friend. Realizing I am going to be spending an inordinate amount of time at the library . . . for probably the rest of my life, I went out today and bought a thermos, the big green Stanley kind. This thing is amazing, not only will it not break or spill, it holds a whole pot of tea and keeps it hot. I put the tea in there three hours ago and it's still almost hot enough to burn my tongue. I mean, really, where has this been all my academic life?? It's really big, though, I feel hard core carrying it around campus, it and my well used Beowulf book, with my sweater. So scholarly. Yay. Hmm, except the copy of Beowulf that I got from McKay yesterday was previously owned by someone who thought fit to tell the readers of Anglo-Saxon epic that "Chanse has a nice assssssssssssss". This just clarifies everything in Beowulf.

performative utterances

okay, quick blog before getting back into the slew of work. I went to Chattnooga this weekend, for a wedding and for seeing friends and watching movies and for going to Waffle House very late at night. I stopped in Atlanta on the way to see The Mountain Goats play at The Earl. It was very different from the last time I saw them. Let me just say that if you are going to a Mountain Goats concert you'd better be a pretty big fan. Some bands you can just go and see and feel like you're part of things, The Decemberists, but at The Mountain Goats concert you'd better at least know all the words to No Children. Plus Darnielle is crazy. I'd forgotten that. He plays his songs dancing and grinning like an idiot, even though all of them are horribly depressing which of course is why we love them. The crowd was great, shhh-ing anyone who made a noise during the songs that were quiet, and singing as loud as they could on the songs that weren't.

The weekend was a good calm-before-the-storm time. Lots of sleeping in and watching stuff and then it was great to see Tami and Keri and everyone else at the wedding. And such good food, oh man, possibly the best wedding cake I have ever had. After the wedding Earl, Lynnette, and I went back to Natalie and Chantel and we all crawled in bed and watched The Last Seduction. Which is also crazy. Yesterday Natalie and I had a good time being out, going to McKay, etc, joining Bradon and Catie on their date at Rembrants.

And now I have a paper to write, finally got my topic for Old English. Thankfully, it just needs to be a draft since there will be plenty of time to work on it later if it's good enough. I'm writing on compounds in which the first element means the same thing, or almost the same thing, as the second element. We have these in Modern English, words like "pathway" and "roadway", except in Old English they're more fun, things like death-death and horror-horror (and man-man, I like that one). It will involve lots of reading Beowulf. I am okay with the epics, though, so that's fine. It will also involve lots of tea, but hopefully not heavy drugs.

wireless tendency

Okay, first, I now have my beloved wireless router and so I have internet in my room.  Which means I will probably neither leave my room nor get any work done for . . . some time.  But I will learn amazing things from Wikipedia and Language Log and not-so-amazing but pleasant and happy things from McSweeney's and Pitchfork.  Okay, that was just an excuse to link to my favorite internet things.  And while I'm on the subject, check out Laura Veirs.  Oh oh, and RJD2's newest.  Have things changed.  I mean, . . . not sure how I feel about this, but it kind of sounds like Badly Drawn Boy (not BDB's new stuff, though, God save us all from a fate like that).

Second, has anyone else noticed that whenever signs tell you to vote "no" on something, it's almost always on "No. 1"?  Do they just put controversial things first?