A Girl With a Sword

it's such a wonder that I think I'll sleep instead

I'm at Stanford, all checked into the institute and sitting in my dorm room. I got here and took a nap. It's been a long day, but it's still not dinner time. Dinner is the first meal my meal card (oh sweet mystery of life, at last I've found you!) will get me.

Let me tell you, California is magical, seriously, aside from the fact that my familiarity with California comes from the combined powers of Hollywood, The Decemberists, and Dave Eggers, California itself is a pretty magical looking place, soft, round little hills, with trees in just the right places, oleanders along the highway, bougainvillea (for those in the know, the drive down here from San Francisco reminded me of the drive between Gaeta and Sperlonga, except I couldn't see the sea). It really feels like I'm not even in America anymore. I found myself thinking, 'oh, this looks just like Southern France, in the old movies . . .' then I realized it probably was Southern France in the old movies. The weather is stunning, warm with a fresh breeze. I haven't seen much of my fellow instituters, besides invading another girls' room so I could use their ethernet cable to get my computer on the sweet sweet wireless. Most people don't seem to have arrived yet.

re-reading with the world

Aaaaaaah!! Too much has happened to me in the last two years! I can't remember anything from the last two Harry Potter books! Racing to finish them in the next week before I go to the LSA Institute. Life is a maze . . .

you can't clean words

All I've wanted to do for a week is clean and make things out of paper and rubber cement. It's that feeling I used to get in college during exam week that made me want to color or cross-stitch. (Remember the Disney coloring book? And how I photocopied all the pictures so we could keep using them? Good times.) I just want to see that I've accomplished something concrete. I've been working on my syntax paper for weeks, well really, I haven't stopped working on it since I started in January, but we've moved on to phase two. Since the beginning of June I've been making lists of my data, basically using my sound emission verbs:

e.g. baa, babble, bang, bark, bawl, bay, beat, beep, bellow, blare, blast, blat, bleat, boom, bray, bubble, burble, burr, buzz, cackle, call, carol, caw, chant, chatter, cheep, chime, chink, chir, chirp, chirrup, chitter, chug, . . .

in all possible types of sentences. I've used them with "agent oriented modifiers":

Grandpa bellowed to bring the cows in.
The cows bellowed to show they didn’t want to come in.
The horn bellowed to wake up the campers
The horn bellowed to make the pedestrians get out of the way.

I've used them in sentences with locative inversion:

The babies babbled in the nursery
The nursery babbled with babies.

The brooks babbled in the woods
The woods babbled with brooks

I've used them with directional phrases:

The train chugged into the station

And I've used them in my favorite, the causative alternation:

The music blared
He blared the music

And now I have to figure out which of these sentences sound "acceptable" (i.e. would a native English-speaker use them) and which of them are right out, and my brain is just feeling kind of addled. It might be the rubber cement . . . At any rate, that's what I'm doing and when I'm not doing it that's what I'm avoiding. I did my spring cleaning on Wednesday, on the last day of spring. I cleaned almost every surface corner and crevice in my entire house, changed the light bulbs that have been burned out since before I moved here, and put out traps for the cockroaches, because knowing they are in my house really disturbs me. Still haven't turned on the air, although I've started closing the curtains during the day. Now it's night and there's a beautiful breeze coming into my spotless living room. Here's a picture of my living room when it's not quite so spotless:

I also started reading the Dr. Wildeman recommended Doctor Dolittle's Delusion today. I'll probably have more thoughts about that later this week.

glasses

My contacts have been driving me crazy lately, I don't know why, but my eyes start tearing up and getting red after I've been wearing the contacts for only an hour or so. So I've been wearing my glasses a lot more lately, and look, this is cool, Laura Veirs and I have the same glasses:

almost the same.

everybody at the beach

Hope and I went to the beach yesterday (just to clarify, Hope doesn't live with me, but she lives in Augusta, which is just an hour away). It's been years and years since I spent a day at the beach. We got there just after noon. We went to Isle of Palms, which was great (it wasn't this deserted, I think this is a winter picture),

The day wasn't too hot and the tide was going out when we got there, so by late afternoon there was a long, warm tide pool and and sandbar before the real sea began. We played in the waves for a long time. I wanted to swim farther out, but Hope told me there were sharks in the waters around South Carolina, something we didn't have to worry about back in the Tyrrhenian. When she said that I turned around and looked out at the water. I saw a black fin, but I thought it was just my imagination, then I saw two fins, then a dolphin jumped out of the water. There was a whole group of dolphins (a pod?) and they seemed really close. They played there right in front of us for a few minutes, and I kept jumping up and down in the water to be able to see them, and then they swam out to sea. It was amazing to me because I was reading A Ring of Endless Light all day, which is all about dolphins, L'Engle dolphins, which are the best kind and have names like Ynid and Basil and Norberta.

Hope and I spent a lot of time reading and a lot of time floating in the tidepool. We discovered that if you lay still in the tidepool you could float, inches above the sand, and have your ears underwater so it was like being weightless in your own watery world. I also realized that one of my favorite things to do at the beach is to dive into the breakers, just as they're about to hit me, so that the water rushes past me really fast and it's like flying and being completely out of control, but it happens so fast it's alright.

We left the beach around seven thirty and we realized, especially when we got home, that if you want the sunscreen to actually go on your back, you should not ask Hope to put it there. Yeah, it looks like she was making little designs on my back with the sunscreen, maybe writing her name or drawing birds. It looks cool now, but it won't look so cool when I get skin cancer. I guess I'm kind of to blame, too, though, since my arms and my stomach also have strange designs on them. Maybe I need to start buying that colored sunscreen. So I have been drinking water today like it is . . . I don't know, water? and I feel better. Weird dreams last night. I think they were more from my book than from the sunburn, though. It's so hot today. I might have to think about turning on the air conditioning soon. I hate air conditioning.

the syllabus as art form

I just finished Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Here's my favorite passage from the book:

"I'm serious. Is there anything more glorious than a professor? Forget about molding the minds, the future of a nation--a dubious assertion; there's little you can do when they tend to emerge from the womb predestined for Grand Theft Auto Vice City. No. What I mean is, a professor is the only person on earth with the power to put a veritable frame around life--not the whole thing, God no--simply a fragment of it, a small wedge. He organizes the unorganizable. Nimbly partitions it into modern and postmodern, renaissance, baroque, primitivism, imperialism and so on. Splice that up with Research Papers, Vacation, Midterms. All that order--simply divine. The symmetry of a semester course. Consider the words themselves: the seminar, the tutorial, the advanced whatever workshop accessible only to seniors, to graduate fellows, to doctoral candidates, the practicum--what a marvelous word: practicum! You think me crazy. Consider a Kandinsky. Utterly muddled, put a frame around it, voila--looks rather quaint above the fireplace. And so it is with the curriculum. That celestial, sweet set of instructions, culminating in the scary wonder of the Final Exam. And what is the Final Exam? A test of one's deepest understanding of giant concepts. No wonder so many adults long to return to university, all those deadlines--ahh, that structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling! Even if it is arbitrary, without it, we're lost, wholly incapable of separating the Romantic from the Victorian in our sad, bewildering lives . . ."

The Table of Contents of the book is titled "Required Reading." The chapter titles are books, Wuthering Heights, Paradise Lost, Things Fall Apart. The book ends with a Final Exam. It's cute, but after awhile I started to wonder what the author was going for. It wasn't subtle, she was shining her flashlight of learning into all the readers' eyes and it felt just a little childish. Plus, she had long, obtuse metaphors and similes, usually allusions to things that were either completely obscure or that she had made up. The quirky writing style, though, reminded me a little of an episode of Gilmore Girls, once you get used to the way they talk it really starts to give you an adrenaline rush and it stops mattering that you're only getting a quarter of what they're saying.

rock on rock city

I was feeling dead on Wednesday--tired and apathetic, so I got in my car and drove over to Chattanooga. It's like magical things never fail to happen in Chattanooga, and there are lots of other people there to make my decisions for me. On Thursday evening we had a beautiful dinner at Ashley's, good salad and soup with rye bread, very familial. Afterwards we went out to half-price wine night at Mudpie.







I'm not going to chronicle the whole weekend because that gets old fast, but I feel so much better now. There was lots of movie watching and eating at Lupi's and late night (early morning) excursions to Waffle House. It was Riverbend weekend so the city was crazy, but as I told Natalie, it was nice to be there bitching about the Riverbend crowds again.  It feels like home. Last night Natalie and I went out to Rembrandt's, which is kind of becoming a tradition for my visits. We sat in the front and I ate fruit and spent a lot of time staring over toward the lights of the Aquarium. We listened to the music mitigated by the distance. Riverbend always sounds better from far away.

I got books on tape for the trip and I got halfway through A Swiftly Tilting Planet (sidenote: I really like the new covers for the Times Quartet), which I haven't read in about ten years so I'm finishing it tonight. Right now, as we speak.

getting the joke

I just found this article on Wikipedia about nonsense jokes, those kinds of jokes that don't have real punchline, just something ridiculous that doesn't have anything to do with the joke, like "None! Elephants don't eat ice cream!" or in this case "No soap. Radio!" We used to tell each other these jokes when I was little and just about fall down laughing, even if we all knew where the joke was going. The first one I heard was this:

“So you’re driving along and you’re canoe springs a leak, how many pancakes will fit into a dog house?”
“None! Elephants don’t eat ice cream!”

Then there were other ones, more along the lines of the “no soap, radio” ones, like this:

“So there was a big penguin and a little penguin and they decided to have a race to an iceberg. They dive off the cliff and start swimming and first the big penguin is ahead, then the little penguin and then the big penguin really picked up speed, but just a the last minute the little penguin got ahead, jumped up on the iceberg and shouted ‘Radio!’”

These remind me vaguely of this rhyme we used to chant when I was little in Scotland, although there’s probably an American version of it too:

“Early in the morning in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys got up to fight,
Back to back they faced each other,
With their swords they shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard the noise,
Got up and killed those two dead boys.”

That’s just theatre of the absurd. This is why I love Ionesco (although don’t watch the version of Rhinoceros with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel. I know it sounds like a good idea, but it’s really not.), he manages to pull off this kind of nonsense humor in a way that points out the inherent ridiculousness of life. It all comes around to meta-jokes and destroying the fourth wall and self-reference. It’s kind of a flip-flopping of what you thought was real and what you thought was a joke that plays on the whole nature of joking.

Along other lines, I tried looking these jokes up on Google and I found several forums where the people carry on about these jokes for awhile then conclude "Well, we've finally lost it, not that we were ever sane to begin with." There seems to be some kind of trend, maybe it's been around for a long time, to treat insanity like some kind of in-group (covert) prestige. This is similar to the in-group prestige of "geekiness" or, to get even more general, "randomness." But why? What’s so cool about being crazy and chaotic? I think what bothers me about these people is that they are trying to imitate the humor that comes from turning reality on it’s head without knowing why they’re doing it. It’s kind of the “false understanding” that the “No Soap Radio” article talks about. They don’t get the joke, but they’re still laughing. Or maybe it's a joke that you don't have to understand to get it. Maybe it's more instinctively rooted in whatever part of ourselves produces humor in the first place.

summer day

Today was a long, hot Carolina day. All afternoon it looked like rain, so I decided not to walk to campus. Yesterday Hope and I got drenched on our way back from the coffee shop and all the stuff that was in my backpack is now drying on the floor of my apartment. So I tidied the house in between looking up stuff on wikipedia. I do have stuff I'm working on right now, but my brain is so dead. I get this horrible PMS ennui and I just don't know what to do about it, plus, due to the nature of the illness, I have a hard time caring. But I went to see a movie tonight. I love the local indie theater because I just hang the schedule up and go see what looks good, which is almost everything, but usually I don't know anything about the movie (if I'm lucky I know what time it starts . . .) and I love being able to go to a random movie and loving it. Tonight the film was Fauteuils d'orchestre.

It was a beautiful ensemble drama about a theater in Paris and the bar across the street from it. It was mainly about one girl who worked at the bar, played by Cecile De France. At first I was afraid she was going to be one of those "magic girls" like Natalie Portman in Garden State, but she really stayed on the ground and held things together. It wasn't a fantastic movie, but it was quietly good. I had a hard time, though, with the subtitles. There seemed to be a lot of slang or something that made me realize that sometimes subtitles are just inefficient. Damn it, why didn't I learn French?