archives for Monday 14 July 2008
Monday 14 July 2008 | 2 cookies in the jar
The last straw
During this time you may be much more irritable than usual and snappish with others, even though you cannot consciously recognize what you are angry about. Perhaps the most puzzling effect of this influence is that your irritability and anger seem completely irrational. They may not actually be irrational, but your anger […]
read ‘in which we consider ourselves warned’
Monday 14 July 2008 | I like a cookie
Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The […]
read ‘post-lyric, an inevitable crash’
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sagacity unfurled
I suppose that the inferiority of the teachers of [English] is largely due to the fact that they are recruited from the lower moiety of pedagogical aspirants. The more ambitious fellows tackle something that seems more recondite, and hence better worth knowing. [...] The stupider fellow turns to something that is easier and more obvious, which is to say, to the language that every "educated" man is presumed to know, and the books he is presumed to have read....But in English even the higher ranks of professors tend to be inferior to those of any other faculty. The papers printed in [the journals] seldom show any professional competence or contribute anything worth knowing to the subject. For the most part they consist wholly of dull pedantries—attempts to establish the dates of some forgotten poet, investigations of the stealings of one obscure author from another, elaborate statistical inquiries into weak endings, and so on and so on. [...] The men who actually know something always know the difference between something and nothing, but the professors of English seem to be largely unaware of it....they devote themselves ardently to irrelevant trivia about the writers of the past, many of them existing today only as flies embalmed in the amber of text-books.
—HL Mencken
• the unreliable narrator •
whatever it is, it's gotta be all our fault © 2008
