Full resolution : http://i.imgur.com/5AzL2.jpg
Friday, April 29, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Consumer Comedy
They probably aren't really in stock either, but many "buyers" decided to review them anyways.
Highlight review:
I knew my day was going to improve when the truck pulled up at my home with this cable deep within. No ordinary truck, this one was Holy White, and the gold Delivery logo sparkled like a thousand suns reflected through shards of the purest ice formed with unadulterated water collected at the beginning of the universe. The driver, clad in a robe colored the softest of white, floated towards me on the cool fog of a hundred fire extinguishers. He smiled benevolently, like a father looking down upon his only child, and handed me a package wrapped in gold beaten thin to the point where you could see through it. I didn't have to sign, because the driver could see within my heart, and knew that I was pure. Upon opening the package, an angelic choir started to sing, and reached a crescendo as I laid this cable on my stereo system. Instantly, my antiquated equipment transformed into components made from the clearest diamond-semiconductor. The cable knew where to go, and hooked itself into the correct ports without help from me - all the while, the choir sang praises to the almighty digital god. With trepidation, I pushed "play," and was instantly enveloped in a sound that echoed the creation of all matter, a sound that vibrated every cell in my body to perfection. I was instantly taken to the next plane, where I saw the all-father. I knew with my entire soul, that all was good in the world.And more golden reviews for a $1600 HDMI cable
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
-JC
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Notes
On writing and towards a manifesto:
Writing may not need to “do anything,” but life is always leaking what is put into it. Forget physics and cosmology and everything an indeterminably chaotic and open universe has going for itself, life is an ultramarathoner who can’t afford to stop at the restroom. It must run through it. Run too and keep abreast or eat dust.
If you think you can ignore the elderly crossing the street while helping her you won’t be surprised to think twice of your own action. That is a call to action, as is everything you do. Action begets action, but first you must act for it all to become real. Think of Between the Acts, the plenitude of surprise and talk begat by the airplane—and the cows! Do not belittle or submerge the cow, but imagine you are more than cattle!
The canon is not only a body of works widely accepted as central and required reading, it is also the chorus of real people who would take insult the same way your tastes would be dismissed prejudicially on the basis of, let’s say, “otherliness.” The canonical works are fathers to your own work, and the determiners of the canon are step-fathers (if you insist the true fathers are the works themselves) to you. But the author is an inclusive germ and an asexual, so please always remember your mother: yourself, and feel free to call Mr. Bloom Harry.
It is not that the eight-hundred page epic novel is not readable in today’s times, as Cormac McCarthy upholds, but rather those that are written are not good enough to be read. Do not blame the times, live up to it; our past is more empty than our present. Do not lose faith.
If you are discouraged to write then encourage yourself, and regain heart from the view ripped from your chest—see the material that must be grafted if not back to yourself, then to another, thousands others. Nature is a fight against all but nature is what you got, so be economic and order yourself. Be not only a dynamite but also a forcefield.
________________________
Also, here is an introduction to a review I'm writing of Tabucchi's It's Getting Later All the Time. Is anyone interested in reading the work based on what I've reported so far?
“Life goes on,” as it is said, and likewise Antonio Tabucchi’s It’s Getting Later All the Time seems to just go on, but sweetly, in melancholy, and ultimately in cold professionalism. There are three primary images as motifs at play throughout the novel: the hole, the window, and the thread, each symbol expressing two archetypical meanings where each correlates most to either male or female genders. The emotive power and narrative arc, insofar as there is one, derives from the development of these three symbols, not so much the characters, which isn’t to say that there are no characters in the story or that it is absent of any narrative at all. The novel is simply constructed differently from the average novel. For one thing, it is epistolary. Secondly, there are eighteen different letters, each corresponding to a different narrator, and so it is not even a standard epistolary novel, though one could argue that it is identical to them in regards to the closing response “circular letter,” that a correspondence actually is still maintained. But only in that regards. Lastly, it potentially, depending on the reader’s will to see, or even form, patterns, lacks plot linearity, at least until the very last letter imposes itself simultaneously as both a response, or a return, and a termination. The mark of a master that is the ability to ingeniously make form serve content would not be missed in this work if only it were picked up and read through.
Love between two people is often described as rapturous, but it is also rupturing, essentially tearing away the lovers from the context of their old ways of life to install them into a world unto their own. This new world is one highly profused with the imagination and memory, as each lover fantasizes together the optimal way of exercising their joint potentials and turning their promised dreams into reality. Perhaps the most popular condition for a mature and lasting relationship is trust, which in essence is the capacity to honor promises, hopes, and expectations. It is, in other words, a perpetual transaction, a correspondence, and the epistolary correspondence is the most common and concise metaphor for this type of love. There is the purpose of writing the letter and the hope and expectation of it being pitched and returned. But life is not so structured nor facile; it is not a language game. Life, in fact, is a field of chance occurrences “wed to death” that may be cut short at any moment, and under such circumstances, despite the aid of science and statistics, one’s day as a life is always getting later all the time.
Interest will first catch halfway through the first paragraph when, after a casual expositional introducing first sentences, the “rugged and essential” island being written from turns out to be one the unnamed narrator “come[s] to think [it] dpesn’t exist, and [he] found it only because [he] imagined it” (3). The rest of the novel rifts across time, the world, and the human and nonhuman voices that people it, and emotions ranging from disengenuine appraisal to forlorn nostalgia to triumph then back around to bureaucratic indifference in response, tragically always, to dealings of dejected hearts, even in matrimony. It is a work of brilliant jazz.
____________________
and a cool cover of Chris Brown's Look At Me Now:
Writing may not need to “do anything,” but life is always leaking what is put into it. Forget physics and cosmology and everything an indeterminably chaotic and open universe has going for itself, life is an ultramarathoner who can’t afford to stop at the restroom. It must run through it. Run too and keep abreast or eat dust.
If you think you can ignore the elderly crossing the street while helping her you won’t be surprised to think twice of your own action. That is a call to action, as is everything you do. Action begets action, but first you must act for it all to become real. Think of Between the Acts, the plenitude of surprise and talk begat by the airplane—and the cows! Do not belittle or submerge the cow, but imagine you are more than cattle!
The canon is not only a body of works widely accepted as central and required reading, it is also the chorus of real people who would take insult the same way your tastes would be dismissed prejudicially on the basis of, let’s say, “otherliness.” The canonical works are fathers to your own work, and the determiners of the canon are step-fathers (if you insist the true fathers are the works themselves) to you. But the author is an inclusive germ and an asexual, so please always remember your mother: yourself, and feel free to call Mr. Bloom Harry.
It is not that the eight-hundred page epic novel is not readable in today’s times, as Cormac McCarthy upholds, but rather those that are written are not good enough to be read. Do not blame the times, live up to it; our past is more empty than our present. Do not lose faith.
If you are discouraged to write then encourage yourself, and regain heart from the view ripped from your chest—see the material that must be grafted if not back to yourself, then to another, thousands others. Nature is a fight against all but nature is what you got, so be economic and order yourself. Be not only a dynamite but also a forcefield.
________________________
Also, here is an introduction to a review I'm writing of Tabucchi's It's Getting Later All the Time. Is anyone interested in reading the work based on what I've reported so far?
“Life goes on,” as it is said, and likewise Antonio Tabucchi’s It’s Getting Later All the Time seems to just go on, but sweetly, in melancholy, and ultimately in cold professionalism. There are three primary images as motifs at play throughout the novel: the hole, the window, and the thread, each symbol expressing two archetypical meanings where each correlates most to either male or female genders. The emotive power and narrative arc, insofar as there is one, derives from the development of these three symbols, not so much the characters, which isn’t to say that there are no characters in the story or that it is absent of any narrative at all. The novel is simply constructed differently from the average novel. For one thing, it is epistolary. Secondly, there are eighteen different letters, each corresponding to a different narrator, and so it is not even a standard epistolary novel, though one could argue that it is identical to them in regards to the closing response “circular letter,” that a correspondence actually is still maintained. But only in that regards. Lastly, it potentially, depending on the reader’s will to see, or even form, patterns, lacks plot linearity, at least until the very last letter imposes itself simultaneously as both a response, or a return, and a termination. The mark of a master that is the ability to ingeniously make form serve content would not be missed in this work if only it were picked up and read through.
Love between two people is often described as rapturous, but it is also rupturing, essentially tearing away the lovers from the context of their old ways of life to install them into a world unto their own. This new world is one highly profused with the imagination and memory, as each lover fantasizes together the optimal way of exercising their joint potentials and turning their promised dreams into reality. Perhaps the most popular condition for a mature and lasting relationship is trust, which in essence is the capacity to honor promises, hopes, and expectations. It is, in other words, a perpetual transaction, a correspondence, and the epistolary correspondence is the most common and concise metaphor for this type of love. There is the purpose of writing the letter and the hope and expectation of it being pitched and returned. But life is not so structured nor facile; it is not a language game. Life, in fact, is a field of chance occurrences “wed to death” that may be cut short at any moment, and under such circumstances, despite the aid of science and statistics, one’s day as a life is always getting later all the time.
Interest will first catch halfway through the first paragraph when, after a casual expositional introducing first sentences, the “rugged and essential” island being written from turns out to be one the unnamed narrator “come[s] to think [it] dpesn’t exist, and [he] found it only because [he] imagined it” (3). The rest of the novel rifts across time, the world, and the human and nonhuman voices that people it, and emotions ranging from disengenuine appraisal to forlorn nostalgia to triumph then back around to bureaucratic indifference in response, tragically always, to dealings of dejected hearts, even in matrimony. It is a work of brilliant jazz.
____________________
and a cool cover of Chris Brown's Look At Me Now:
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Tequila Taco Night - Epic Meal Time
420 means a lot of things, but what does it mean to me? It means I'm hungry. I dunno about you guys, but this is how I felt about yesterday.
-Gabe
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Questions and galleries!
Has anyone seen Black Swan yet? What are your thoughts on it? I was going to attend the previous with a favored snap from the film but google searching it has only given me the jeebies...frightening good stuff.
________________________________
Again, another snippet of my life:
______________________________________
Also, is this not the dumbest reply you've ever read? Consequently I did not receive any response, to the loss of my wallet and reputation.
"Hi -----,
I actually chose to name my ad's subject "learning aid," and not just "tutor," to not restrict myself to just tutoring for school, since tutoring is usually known as something done "for school" only! With that said, yes I wouldn't mind being a personal tutor for your husband. In fact, I think acting as a conversation partner for language acquisition would be more enjoyable than exclusive school-related essay structuring. Judging by your last name, was I wrong in having already begun brushing up on my Spanish? Do you have any language skills or subjects in mind that I can begin preparing learning material for?
Also, what is your husband's availability? I work part-time at my local library in Fairfield so I'll cross-check his hours against mine. As to the upcoming two weeks, for which I already have my work schedule given by my supervisor, I am completely available Saturday (23rd), Sunday (24th), Monday (25th), and Thursday (28th). I work the mornings of Thursday and Friday, but I'd like some time to prepare so as to deliver an effective tutoring session.
As to the fee per hour, I'm sorry but I would only consider a long-term package type deal if I was local or even lived in Davis. But being from Fairfield, the gas is too much and I honestly need the money. I apologize.
Sincerely,
Arian"
Bastard, and right outside my employee entrance where I take my break . . .
The IRS has finally recognized how many families . . . kidnap children?!
My new office.
Thanks you, James.
________________________________
Again, another snippet of my life:
I need to work. She walks away downcast, playfully. The game fills me with joy. I know this, and what to do, and what should have been done. It shouldn’t have been said in the first place. I knew this, but most importantly: she knows this. Yet I fill lungs and bate my breath as I chase her the three bounds to the left that she’s achieved, right over left then left in place before sliding my right leg beside her so that I can lasso her with my arms and hold down on her shoulders. At that moment a group of teenagers let out late at the local school feign interest, “Awww.” The cooing member was the girl alone and ahead of the pack, who kept quiet and made me think of an ambush. But I have to admit, I then saw the best of her in there her eyelashes curled, her opal eyes fountaining resplendent over her cheeky mounds, before she turned it sidewards.
“Hmph.” arms crossed.
“Luuu!” in the highest mock pitch.
“Fine and I dressed up for this.” I knew it.
It usually just takes a few pecks to get her chiseling chimpy cheek back around, just like this time. It’s a wonderful breeze that’s caught up to us this time, like a lot of many other things are. I am thinking of a real modest proposal, the travel paying for itself with each recovered millimeter of smile joining mine in return. It does, it does, it does, I think outside Chin Hua under the awning. I have her back, my baby, that I throw into the air, really breathing now.
“Ok let’s go. You can go to your house to study and I’ll go to mine and lay in my bed and cry because baby isn’t with me because baby doesn’t want to be with baby because he’d rather stu-dy,” moving off the sidewalk. I took the plunge, too, my hand massaging her elbow entirely, behind her. She turns around. “Ok bye.”
“Where is you going?”
“You know where.”
I grab her keys. I open her driver’s door.
“I’ll go around—”
“Please.” I proffer her keys back and with my left arm sweep kindly into imaginary view the door. “I can’t leave my car here there are too many hoodlums coming out from school.”
“Luuuu! Just go home.”
“Okay, let’s go. I’ll follow you.” But before she can retake her natural ground I turn and head to my own door and get in. I buckle down then put the key in the ignition. I look over, and can’t see her face. She’s texting, I know it. I’m going to wait and good thing I just checked out the first volume Norton anthology of English literature. I’ve been studying the French Revolution and the Reformation and Marx, impressed with the Penguin Communist Manifesto’s 200 page introduction, and taking cognition pills to better take in books for potential review such as Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, the contents of which I’m finding to be already occidental, and of which I’m expecting a post-structural twist later in. But what I’m really studying is Marxism to better understand capitalism, to accurately diagnose our times, to have something to write about, anything important. She doesn’t look up once. I press on the honk, and still watching her, I see a wave of response move up her body and out from the top of her head like a bunny turning to prospect any threat to her comfort zone.
I point at what’s behind her, to the road. She doesn’t get it and even tilts her head, like bunnies are wont to. So I give her the thumbs up. She lifts up her phone to view and spins it along its X-axis to identify the proper object of her attentions now. I jut my bottom jaw out, lips pursed, and with eyebrows Stoogely raised with enlarged eyeballs. She just looks down. At these junctures, it’s best to give time.
So I continue down the contents and I see—Samuel Butler! As I’m turning to the appropriate page I notice something outside—she’s walking towards me! I unlock the door manually on her side since I’m not sure if any unlock button will actually unlock the whole car. And of course when she opens the door the alarm takes off and, used to the embarrassment, I calmly try each button on the controller, ‘lock,’ ‘unlock,’ ‘alarm,’ and finding them useless I remove the key from the ignition and then work ‘unlock’ how I know it will now, while taking care not to repeat aloud the page number (2155).
Supporting herself on her angled right leg, which is excruciating to think of, and using the car ceiling as a preventive to a balancing act, she removes everything from shotgun: two beanies, a dvd, her UCSC zip-up, all those tossed kindly to the back, and a clipboard with a single blank piece of paper to the ground, before sitting down. We don’t look at each other for about a long while as we hug.
______________________________________
Also, is this not the dumbest reply you've ever read? Consequently I did not receive any response, to the loss of my wallet and reputation.
"Hi -----,
I actually chose to name my ad's subject "learning aid," and not just "tutor," to not restrict myself to just tutoring for school, since tutoring is usually known as something done "for school" only! With that said, yes I wouldn't mind being a personal tutor for your husband. In fact, I think acting as a conversation partner for language acquisition would be more enjoyable than exclusive school-related essay structuring. Judging by your last name, was I wrong in having already begun brushing up on my Spanish? Do you have any language skills or subjects in mind that I can begin preparing learning material for?
Also, what is your husband's availability? I work part-time at my local library in Fairfield so I'll cross-check his hours against mine. As to the upcoming two weeks, for which I already have my work schedule given by my supervisor, I am completely available Saturday (23rd), Sunday (24th), Monday (25th), and Thursday (28th). I work the mornings of Thursday and Friday, but I'd like some time to prepare so as to deliver an effective tutoring session.
As to the fee per hour, I'm sorry but I would only consider a long-term package type deal if I was local or even lived in Davis. But being from Fairfield, the gas is too much and I honestly need the money. I apologize.
Sincerely,
Arian"
My new office.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Where is everybody?
Here is a snippet of my taunting life . . .
____________________________________________________
Also, does anyone know of any job openings? I need to make money in legitimate daylit ways.
I cannot open my mouth in objection even with the radio turned down for my response. I was not surprised at my ineffability, nor was I surprised by the way things turned out, or how things are discovered. Or how things are forced into place. We were on our way to a steakhouse in the city over so there was time enough to talk and reevaluate the family’s financial house, which is only possible from a distance. Before any reassessment, and this may be the cause for such a reassessment, there was also the silence not of the road, but of the travel. From an economic point of view there was good foundation, but from the managed’s perspective an iron hand was just shaking the beams to reinforce the contractor’s own good work. It was kind to have given me a shake, but it was pointless; he had already his own judgment, that it was sound.
But my house is a honeymoon suite of myself, sweeter becoming the closer my father gets. Lately he has been kinder to me, and I’ve appreciated the effort, but there was an underlying cause different from what I had hoped, and he had brought it up himself.
“Is it because you want more time to yourself?”
“Yeah. I’m afraid I won’t have time to write.” Kafka would have nodded at my own blunt force. But fathers are rarely Kafka’s.
“If I had known that was why you haven’t been doing anything . . .” In my mind anything I follow this with would have been negatively correct, because my mind was six feet beneath me scuttling for the sea. In the wake of his sentence I reconsidered the proposition, which was: apply for the job, “it was meant for [me],” “that’s a lot of money.” I didn’t even know his SUV had a calculator built-in it—“that’s $160 a day . . . $3200 a month—,” and my mom even joining: “Ooh that’s more than what you made Papa!” I couldn’t thank them enough.
____________________________________________________
Also, does anyone know of any job openings? I need to make money in legitimate daylit ways.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Ad posted
http://sacramento.craigslist.org/lss/2327982310.html
Does anyone know how to ad pictures in craigslist? I thought it'd be a good idea to have any picture, be it of just piled books, so that those filtering for photos only would still cull my ad.
Does anyone know how to ad pictures in craigslist? I thought it'd be a good idea to have any picture, be it of just piled books, so that those filtering for photos only would still cull my ad.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
25 writers on overlooked treasures
Hmm I just found out about the "Compose" mode of blogging so now my spaces will actually be spaces?
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/12/best-forgotten-reads.html
"What follows are lost treasures from 25 writers, as they looked back in 1999.
André Aciman: "Count d'Orgel's Ball" by Raymond Radiguet
Margaret Atwood: "Doctor Glas" by Hjalmar Söderberg
Anthony Bailey: two by Marc Bloch - "Strange Defeat" and "Souvenirs de Guerre 1914-15"
John Banville: "By Love Possessed" by James Gould Cozzens
Jacques Barzun: "Practical Agitation" by John Jay Chapman
Alain de Botton: "The Unquiet Grave" by Cyril Connolly
Thomas Flanagan: "Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War" by Edmund Wilson
Carlos Fuentes: "Paradiso" by Jose Lezama Lima; "Grande Sertão, Veredas" by João Guimarães Rosa and "The Flowering of New England" by Van Wyck Brooks
Robert Giroux: "The Enormous Room" by E.E. Cummings
Nadine Gordimer: "Turbott Wolfe" by William Plomer
Juan Goytisolo: "Petersburg" by Andrei Bely
Thom Gunn: two by Arnold Bennett - "The Old Wives' Tale" and "Riceyman Steps"
Dave Hickey: "The Man Who Loved Children" by Christina Stead
Pico Iyer: "The Road to Xanadu" by John Livingston Lowes
Milan Kundera: "The Man Without Qualities" by Robert Musil
John Le Carré: "The Good Soldier" by Ford Madox Ford and "Rogue Male" by Geoffrey Household
Elmore Leonard: two by Richard Bissell - "High Water" and "A Stretch on the River"
John Luckas: two by Jean Dutourd - "The Horrors of Love" and "Best Butter"
Frederic Morton: "Lieutnant Gustl" [also published as "None but the Brave"] by Arthur Schnitzler
Paul Muldoon: "Irish Journal" by Heinrich Boll
Cynthia Ozick: seven by Rudyard Kipling - "The Wish House", "Dayspring Mishandled," "Mary Postgate," "The Gardener," "The Eye of Allah," "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and "Mrs. Bathurst"
Noel Perrin: "Far Rainbow" by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and "The Walls Came Tumbling Down" by Henriette Roosenburg
Gregory Rabassa: "Internal War" by Volodia Teitelboim, "My World Is Not of This Kingdom" by João de Melo and "The Return of the Caravels" by Antonio Lobo Antunes
Susan Sontag: "And Then" by Natsume Soseki, "Jennie Gerhardt" by Theodore Dreiser, "Fateless" by Imre Kertész
Marina Warner: "Anthologie des mythes, legendes, et conles populaires d'Amerique" ("Anthology of Myths, Legends, and Popular Tales of America") by Benjamin Peret
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Photo: Rare books from the Huntington Library's collection. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times"
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/12/best-forgotten-reads.html
"What follows are lost treasures from 25 writers, as they looked back in 1999.
André Aciman: "Count d'Orgel's Ball" by Raymond Radiguet
Margaret Atwood: "Doctor Glas" by Hjalmar Söderberg
Anthony Bailey: two by Marc Bloch - "Strange Defeat" and "Souvenirs de Guerre 1914-15"
John Banville: "By Love Possessed" by James Gould Cozzens
Jacques Barzun: "Practical Agitation" by John Jay Chapman
Alain de Botton: "The Unquiet Grave" by Cyril Connolly
Thomas Flanagan: "Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War" by Edmund Wilson
Carlos Fuentes: "Paradiso" by Jose Lezama Lima; "Grande Sertão, Veredas" by João Guimarães Rosa and "The Flowering of New England" by Van Wyck Brooks
Robert Giroux: "The Enormous Room" by E.E. Cummings
Nadine Gordimer: "Turbott Wolfe" by William Plomer
Juan Goytisolo: "Petersburg" by Andrei Bely
Thom Gunn: two by Arnold Bennett - "The Old Wives' Tale" and "Riceyman Steps"
Dave Hickey: "The Man Who Loved Children" by Christina Stead
Pico Iyer: "The Road to Xanadu" by John Livingston Lowes
Milan Kundera: "The Man Without Qualities" by Robert Musil
John Le Carré: "The Good Soldier" by Ford Madox Ford and "Rogue Male" by Geoffrey Household
Elmore Leonard: two by Richard Bissell - "High Water" and "A Stretch on the River"
John Luckas: two by Jean Dutourd - "The Horrors of Love" and "Best Butter"
Frederic Morton: "Lieutnant Gustl" [also published as "None but the Brave"] by Arthur Schnitzler
Paul Muldoon: "Irish Journal" by Heinrich Boll
Cynthia Ozick: seven by Rudyard Kipling - "The Wish House", "Dayspring Mishandled," "Mary Postgate," "The Gardener," "The Eye of Allah," "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and "Mrs. Bathurst"
Noel Perrin: "Far Rainbow" by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and "The Walls Came Tumbling Down" by Henriette Roosenburg
Gregory Rabassa: "Internal War" by Volodia Teitelboim, "My World Is Not of This Kingdom" by João de Melo and "The Return of the Caravels" by Antonio Lobo Antunes
Susan Sontag: "And Then" by Natsume Soseki, "Jennie Gerhardt" by Theodore Dreiser, "Fateless" by Imre Kertész
Marina Warner: "Anthologie des mythes, legendes, et conles populaires d'Amerique" ("Anthology of Myths, Legends, and Popular Tales of America") by Benjamin Peret
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Photo: Rare books from the Huntington Library's collection. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times"
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
craigstlist ad . . . help please!
So here is an ad I want to post up on craigslist.org offering my tutoring services in English. It's the first draft and I just completed it. Any suggestions?
ENGLISH TUTOR
To many English is like learning another language, and not just for foreign speakers. Many native English speakers, too, have a difficult time writing, and even reading, English, to the point that the national level of competence of basic English skills expected to be mastered by high school’s, or even college’s, end is often only eulogized in contemporary reports on its status. With many different style formats (MLA, APA, Chicago, AP, etc.) to navigate, each with its own unique grammar and punctuation rules, it is not unexpected that so many students are finding themselves surprisingly frustrated midway through English 1, having thought that they’ve mastered the language after thirteen years of K-12 schooling or preliminary English 350 and 250. And worse, some are even so discouraged to continue past the “drop date,” and it isn’t even entirely their fault!
Four out of five times I tutor I will be working with someone who is willing to make it on time everytime, fully awake and ready to go. Many students do ask for help from their peers and their teachers, but also many times the relationship between them gets in the way. The peer will be too relaxed, or condescending, or is just basically not qualified to guide the troubled student towards the right direction. And the teacher, well he/she is often preoccupied either with other students, her own work, or—let’s be realistic—her own life. There are also environmental concerns, such as distracting noises, absence of references tools, and uncomfortable workspaces. There is also the common plight of uninterestedness . . .
Hi, my name is Arian Cato and I want to help, whether it’s your son or daughter, sibling, friend, or you! I am a graduate of the San Francisco State University Bachelor’s English program as well as an experienced tutor with three semesters’ worth of in-building and private tutoring experience. I have worked with
English as a Second Language (e.g., a native Spanish speaker from Peru)
beginning learners in “English Fundamentals”
beginning students in “Basic Reading and Writing Skills”
students “majoring” in English taking courses such as
• English: Critical Thinking and Writing About Literature
• English: Critical Thinking and Composition: Language in Context
• English Literature 1 and 2
• American Literature 1 and 2
• Modern Fiction
a graduate student needing supervision with editing her Master’s Thesis
Of course I am more than eager to expand my horizons and grow intellectually beside you through discussion over whatever piece of literature you have in mind, whether for class or not. I am acquainted with the entire scope of Western literature across all ages and can even discourse over philosophy, criticism, or theory of any sort. I am also knowledgeable about MLA format and advanced grammar and punctuation rules. I am also ready to prepare anybody for the SAT, CBEST, or GRE English or Essay Writing components.
Just $15 per hour. Willing to meet at any house or public service facility, such as a library, within Solano County (Fairfield, Vacaville, Suisun, Vallejo, Cordelia), American Canyon, Napa, Dixon, Davis, or West Sacramento.
Please, if interested, contact me at (707)344-2230 or ariancato@sbcglobal.net
ENGLISH TUTOR
To many English is like learning another language, and not just for foreign speakers. Many native English speakers, too, have a difficult time writing, and even reading, English, to the point that the national level of competence of basic English skills expected to be mastered by high school’s, or even college’s, end is often only eulogized in contemporary reports on its status. With many different style formats (MLA, APA, Chicago, AP, etc.) to navigate, each with its own unique grammar and punctuation rules, it is not unexpected that so many students are finding themselves surprisingly frustrated midway through English 1, having thought that they’ve mastered the language after thirteen years of K-12 schooling or preliminary English 350 and 250. And worse, some are even so discouraged to continue past the “drop date,” and it isn’t even entirely their fault!
Four out of five times I tutor I will be working with someone who is willing to make it on time everytime, fully awake and ready to go. Many students do ask for help from their peers and their teachers, but also many times the relationship between them gets in the way. The peer will be too relaxed, or condescending, or is just basically not qualified to guide the troubled student towards the right direction. And the teacher, well he/she is often preoccupied either with other students, her own work, or—let’s be realistic—her own life. There are also environmental concerns, such as distracting noises, absence of references tools, and uncomfortable workspaces. There is also the common plight of uninterestedness . . .
Hi, my name is Arian Cato and I want to help, whether it’s your son or daughter, sibling, friend, or you! I am a graduate of the San Francisco State University Bachelor’s English program as well as an experienced tutor with three semesters’ worth of in-building and private tutoring experience. I have worked with
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beginning students in “Basic Reading and Writing Skills”
students “majoring” in English taking courses such as
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a graduate student needing supervision with editing her Master’s Thesis
Of course I am more than eager to expand my horizons and grow intellectually beside you through discussion over whatever piece of literature you have in mind, whether for class or not. I am acquainted with the entire scope of Western literature across all ages and can even discourse over philosophy, criticism, or theory of any sort. I am also knowledgeable about MLA format and advanced grammar and punctuation rules. I am also ready to prepare anybody for the SAT, CBEST, or GRE English or Essay Writing components.
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Please, if interested, contact me at (707)344-2230 or ariancato@sbcglobal.net
Jacques Barzun
Here is a great biographical sketch found in The New Yorker I just read of a man, beside D. F. W., it would be an honor for me to actually realize a path somewhat near approaching his own accomplished life.
"Age of Reason
In his hundred years, Jacques Barzun has learned a thing or two.
by Arthur Krystal October 22, 2007
The secret to Barzun’s erudition is a delight in learning.
For the past few years, Jacques Barzun has been dreaming more and more in French. Sometimes two people are speaking—one in English, the other in French—as though nothing could be more natural than the cadences of one language summoning the other. If awakened by the chatter, Barzun isn’t sure whether he has dreamed in French and incorporated a native English speaker, or vice versa. He finds these conversations oddly soothing, but he recognizes that they’re a sign of aging, the tic of a mind seeking a moment when all the world spoke French.
These days, Barzun doesn’t have much occasion to speak the language of Flaubert, whose grammar and syntax, by the way, he considers slovenly. He lives with his wife, Marguerite, in her home town of San Antonio, Texas, where he retired after spending more than seventy years in New York, most of them on the faculty of Columbia University. Barzun is usually out of bed by 6 A.M. He brews coffee, reads the San Antonio Express-News, exercises for forty minutes, and heads down the hall to his study. After lunch, he dips into the manuscripts and books that people send him, answers letters, and takes calls from family members and friends. In the afternoon, he likes to read in the sunroom, whose white brick walls and black-and-white tiled floor accommodate without protest a mélange of armchairs and end tables of no particular style. But then all the furnishings in the house—including the art: Piranesi fortifications, Daumier scenes of Parisian life, Expressionist studies by Cleve Gray, and bright watercolors of flowers and plants by Marguerite—have an aesthetic compatibility that seems to issue more from accident than from design. Cocktails are at six-thirty (Barzun favors Manhattans); a light dinner follows, then a session with the New York Times. Barzun doesn’t watch TV and is usually in bed by nine-thirty. Not long afterward, someone starts speaking in French.
Next month, Barzun, the eminent historian and cultural critic, will turn one hundred. His idea of celebrating his centenary is to put the finishing touches on his thirty-eighth book (not counting translations). Among his areas of expertise are French and German literature, music, education, ghost stories, detective fiction, language, and etymology. Barzun has examined Poe as proofreader, Abraham Lincoln as stylist, Diderot as satirist, and Liszt as reader; he has burnished the reputations of Thomas Beddoes, James Agate, and John Jay Chapman; and he has written so many reviews and essays that his official biographer is loath to put a number on them. There’s nothing hasty or haphazard about these evaluations. Barzun’s breadth of erudition has been a byword among friends and colleagues for six decades. Yet, in spite of his degrees and awards (he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom), Barzun regards himself in many respects as an “amateur” (the Latin root, amator, means “lover”), someone who takes genuine pleasure in what he learns about. More than any other historian of the past four generations, Barzun has stood for the seemingly contradictory ideas of scholarly rigor and unaffected enthusiasm.
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One of those enthusiasms produced what may be his most frequently quoted sentence: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” The line, extracted from his book “God’s Country and Mine,” is inscribed on a plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame and routinely trotted out by news anchors and NPR commentators. Sometimes, Barzun worries that after his books go out of print only those fourteen words will be remembered. Or so he said one evening not long ago, when I was visiting him in San Antonio. We had finished dinner and were sitting in the living room. When he saw me looking at a portrait of his mother by Albert Gleizes, Barzun remarked that it was the third Cubist portrait ever done. “Not the third Cubist picture,” he cautioned, “the third Cubist portrait.” He thinks the first may have been Picasso’s “Woman Seated in an Armchair,” and the second Gleizes’s “Portrait of Jacques Nayral.” Barzun’s taste and attitudes were formed at the beginning of the modernist movement—he played in Duchamp’s studio and attended the orchestral opening of Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps”—and he has yet to come around to the cultural aftermath.
Barzun’s declinist views about Western civilization are no secret. One reason that “From Dawn to Decadence,” an eight-hundred-page history of Western civilization from 1500 to the present, which he published at the age of ninety-two, was such an improbable best-seller (“the damnedest story you’ll ever read,” David Gates called it in Newsweek) was its contention that Western civilization is winding down, that “the forms of art as of life seem exhausted.” But, when Barzun insists that he sees “the end of the high creative energies at work since the Renaissance,” his tone is less that of someone appalled by what’s happening than of someone simply recording the ocean currents.
Barzun began to appreciate the transience of civilization almost as soon as he learned what the word meant. Born outside Paris in 1907, he was six years old when the First World War broke out. Early on, he had a sense that, in Paul Valéry’s harsh aperçu, “a civilization has the same fragility as a life.” The war shattered the world that he knew and, as he later wrote, “visibly destroyed that nursery of living culture.” This isn’t entirely a figure of speech. On Saturdays before the war, his parents’ living room had been a raucous salon where many of Europe’s leading avant-garde artists and writers gathered: Varèse played the piano, Ozenfant and Delaunay debated, Cocteau told lies, and Apollinaire declaimed. Brancusi often stopped by, as did Léger, Kandinsky, Jules Romains, Duchamp, and Pound.
In 1914, when the shells began to fall, the visits gradually ceased; soon came the names of the dead. His parents tried to conceal the losses, but the boy became depressed and, as he learned later, began hinting at suicide. At the age of ten, his parents bundled him off to the seashore at Dinard, where he immersed himself in Shakespeare and James Fenimore Cooper.
It’s tempting to relate Barzun’s skepticism about recent cultural developments (he’s inclined to regard the provocations of later artists, from John Cage to Damien Hirst, as leaves from a tree that was planted before the First World War) to the intensity of his childhood milieu and its abrupt disappearance. Barzun readily acknowledges that the accident of birth is “bound to have irreversible consequences,” but he rejects the idea that his character or sense of the world derives from any loss that he might have suffered as a child. In fact, when I broached the possibility that his precise way of formulating ideas and strict attention to empirical evidence are distinctive qualities of the civilization that he saw disintegrate before his eyes, his response was gently quizzical. “Why must you find trauma where there is none?” he asked. “I grew up a child of a bourgeois family, with emancipated parents who surrounded themselves with people who talked about ideas. My views were formed by my parents, by the lycée, and by my reading. How else should I be?”
With the war over, Barzun’s father, the poet and diplomat Henri Martin Barzun, offered his only son a choice of completing his studies in England or in America. Barzun, with visions of Chingachgook dancing in his head, didn’t hesitate, and in 1920 the family settled in New Rochelle. Barzun, with the aid of tutors, entered Columbia at fifteen. His student life presaged his professional one. He majored in history, reviewed theatre for the daily Spectator, edited the monthly literary magazine, became the president of the Philolexian Society, and, together with his friend Wendell Hertig Taylor, kept a running tally of every mystery book that came along. Their brief descriptions, scribbled on three-by-five-inch index cards, eventually coalesced into “A Catalogue of Crime,” one of the foremost reference works in the mystery/suspense genre. He also managed to graduate as valedictorian of his class, a feat he considers less impressive than having written the 1928 Varsity Show, “Zuleika, or the Sultan Insulted.”
Barzun joined the history faculty a year after graduating, at a moment when British and American universities, despite a general dislike of things Teutonic, were in thrall to the ideal of Wissenschaft, or scientific knowledge. Philosophers such as Wilhelm Dilthey had argued that history was a succession of conceptual forms and styles, capable of being classified and studied methodically. (Another German, of course, had maintained that class struggle was actually the transformative force behind historical events.) History was now thought too serious to be left to biographers and storytellers; and even Lord Acton urged his students to “study problems in preference to periods.” Barzun, though hardly a practitioner of the old popes-and-princes school of history (his first books examined ideas about race and freedom), disapproved of attempts to refashion history as a social science. History wasn’t “a piece of crockery dredged up from the Titanic,” he wrote; it was, “first, the shipwreck, then a piece of writing.” He demanded, therefore, that historical narrative include “the range and wildness of individuality, the pivotal force of trifles, the manifestations of greatness, the failures of unquestioned talent.” His models were Burkhardt, Gibbon, Macaulay, and Michelet, authors of imperfect mosaics characterized by a strong narrative line. As for philosopher-historians like Vico, Herder, and Spengler, Barzun held that they did not, despite creating prodigious works of learning, write histories at all: “It is not a paradox to say that in seeking a law of history those passionate minds were giving up their interest in history.”
In Columbia, Barzun found a genial host for his far-flung interests. In addition to the broadly conceived Contemporary Civilization course, Columbia offered a General Honors class—later, the Colloquium on Important Books—that let a select group of upperclassmen read the Western classics with instructors from two fields. When Barzun was assigned to the Colloquium, in 1934, his teaching partner was the English instructor Lionel Trilling. Among the most influential literary critics to emerge from the academy, Trilling admitted late in life that he had once stood “puzzled, abashed, and a little queasy” before the “high artistic culture of the modern age,” a discomfort no doubt torqued by sitting at a table next to a man whose mind had been formed at first hand by that culture. The Colloquium, as the word implies, was a conversation, and in 1934 it became not merely a conversation between instructors and undergraduates but also a dialogue between the two men that lasted until Trilling’s death, in 1975.
Dissimilar in many respects, the urbane, Americanized Frenchman, with his easy manner, and the shy, intense, Jewish writer-aspirant from Queens, who had only recently renounced his Marxist views, soon shared their thoughts, showed each other drafts of their work, and gradually began to carve out a new discipline in American education. They broadened the critical spectrum to include the biographical and social conditions attending the creation of any cultural artifact, and rerouted the notion of individuality or genius toward a busy intersection where various historical forces converged.
Barzun and Trilling, it could be said, also broadened each other. One day in the mid-nineteen-thirties, they began talking about novelists, and Barzun mentioned his admiration for Henry James. Trilling, who had read only a few of James’s stories, replied that he thought him not much more than a “social twitterer.” Barzun pressed upon him “The Pupil” and, as he recalls, “The Spoils of Poynton.” Trilling was duly persuaded, and marched off to convince Phillip Rahv and William Phillips, the editors of Partisan Review, that James was a writer to be taken seriously—and within five or six years he was.
At the Colloquium, books and ideas were thrown open to discussion; almost every approach was tolerated. “Cultural criticism” was Barzun and Trilling’s coinage for their lack of method, and it worked so well that, in the mid-fifties, Fred Friendly, an executive producer at CBS News, tried (and failed) to persuade the two men to offer a version of the Colloquium for television. “It was awe-inspiring,” the historian Fritz Stern, a 1946 alumnus of the Colloquium, recalled recently. “There I was, listening to two men very different, yet brilliantly attuned to each other, spinning and refining their thoughts in front of us. And when they spoke about Wordsworth, or Balzac, or Burke, it was as if they’d known him. I couldn’t imagine a better way to read the great masterpieces of modern European thought.”
The class met on Wednesday evenings, and, as the decades passed and more specialized approaches to literature emerged, Barzun and Trilling remained committed to the essential messiness of culture. Neither the self-isolating pieties of the New Critics, nor the technical proficiency of the Russian Formalists, nor the class-bound shibboleths of Marxist writers held sway in their classroom. As a result, they were condemned, as Barzun recalled, “for overlooking the autonomy of the work of art and its inherent indifference to meaning; for ignoring the dialectic of history,” not to mention “the ‘rigorous’ critical methods recently opened to those who could count metaphors, analyze themes, and trace myths.”
Basically, Barzun and Trilling cast themselves in the Arnoldian mold of relating culture to conduct. Matthew Arnold believed that judging books “as to the influence which they are calculated to have upon the general culture” would help realize man’s better nature and, thus, eventually improve society itself. Trilling and Barzun were less dreamy about the critic’s power, but, like Arnold, they saw no fissure between moral and aesthetic intelligence. They interpreted books liberally and wrote about them with a fluency and a precision befitting R. P. Blackmur’s definition of criticism as “the formal discourse of an amateur.”
For all that, Barzun was never a “New York intellectual.” He occasionally fraternized with the Partisan Review crowd, but he avoided the sectarian wars that seemed to fuel their lives and work; he appears only marginally in most accounts of the literary figures who rotated around the magazine. Yet, when a mid-century issue of Time came out with a lead article entitled “America and the Intellectual,” it wasn’t Edmund Wilson, or Lionel Trilling, or Sidney Hook, or Mark Van Doren whose likeness appeared on the cover (though all were mentioned inside); it was that of a man who hadn’t even been born here.
Around 1941, Barzun took on a larger classroom, becoming the moderator of the CBS radio program “Invitation to Learning,” which aired on Sunday mornings and featured four or five intellectual lights discussing books. From commenting on books, it was, apparently, a short step to selling them. In 1951, Barzun, Trilling, and W. H. Auden started up the Readers’ Subscription Book Club, writing monthly appreciations of books that they thought the public would benefit from reading. The club lasted for eleven years, partly on the strength of the recommended books, which ranged from Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows” to Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition,” and partly on the strength of the editors’ reputations.
Barzun’s public reputation had been made with the appearance of “Romanticism and the Modern Ego” (1943), which defied prevailing opinion by arguing that the difference between the ostensibly unruly Romantic movement and the ostensibly neoclassical Enlightenment was fundamentally social and political, not aesthetic. “The Romanticists’ point was in fact not an emotional point at all,” Barzun claimed, “but an intellectual point about the emotional life of man.” It was a bold statement to make at a time when Eliot’s condescensions to the early-nineteenth-century poets dominated literature departments, and perhaps it took a historian to recognize that Eliot’s distrust of personality and radicalism caused him to misjudge the Romantics’ debt to, among others, Rousseau and Kant. As Barzun laid it out, Romanticism was no aberrant aesthetic movement but reflected an intellectual sensibility perfectly suited to a hectic and idealistic age. In short, he helped make Romanticism respectable.
Although Barzun’s influence on literary studies is difficult to assess, there’s little doubt about his role in the revival of Hector Berlioz. Barzun had heard Berlioz’s “Rakoczy March” at a children’s concert in Paris when he was four or five, and, nearly forty years later, when putting the finishing touches on his biography of the composer, he noticed that the French and German scores of “Roméo et Juliette” contained a small discrepancy. (The placing of mutes on the strings at one point in the Love Scene was different.) He happened to mention this to Toscanini’s assistant, and a few days later he was having tea at Toscanini’s house in Riverdale, discussing music in general and Berlioz’s instrumentation and harmonics in particular.
Toscanini was one of a small number of musicians at mid-century who admired Berlioz. The rest of the music world, along with “conservatives, clerics, liberals and socialists,” Barzun wrote, “all joined in repudiating” the Romantic style. But, where others heard in Berlioz disorder and bombast, Barzun discerned exuberance, vividness, and dramatic flair. When he listened to Berlioz, Barzun heard “Gothic cathedrals, the festivals of the Revolution, the antique grandeur of classic tragedy, the comic force of Molière and Beaumarchais, and the special lyricism of his own Romantic period.” Barzun didn’t just like Berlioz’s music; he liked the mind that made the music, and his two-volume “Berlioz and the Romantic Century” (1950) not only spurred revisionist studies of Berlioz but also brought his music back into a general repertoire. “When I left school, I had to educate myself, and Jacques Barzun was part of my education,” the British conductor Sir Colin Davis told me. Davis had lobbied for Berlioz’s music in England and in 1969 he conducted a magnificent performance of “Les Troyens” in London that eventually led to his recording all Berlioz’s major works.
As much as he wrote about music and literature, Barzun was no unworldly aesthete, and his practical and political side was put to the test in 1958, when he assumed the inaugural post of provost and dean of faculties at Columbia. He remained provost for ten years and is generally credited with extricating the university from its financial and administrative woes. He also replaced the music played at graduation with the march from “Les Troyens.” Barzun returned to teaching the history of Western civilization just as it was coming under attack by various Continental theorists, whose repudiation of hierarchical structures and determinate meaning challenged everything that Barzun believed in. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Barzun became a symbol of the Old Guard, a mandarin scholar futilely defending the works of dead white males. Even as late as 1990, he had a walk-on in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,’s smart, hardboiled spoof of the canon wars, dressed in evening clothes and packing a .38 Beretta, holding forth on standards and errors of usage.
In truth, Barzun looked the part of someone who embodied tradition. He stood a straight-up six feet two inches and wore clothes that, if not expensive, looked expensive on him. His hair was silver, his forehead high and broad, and his nose long and straight, with a slight dip at the end. He looked ambassadorial, and possessed an air of authority that had less to do with giving orders than with the expectation that he would be listened to. Carolyn Heilbrun, one of the first female professors in Columbia’s English and Comparative Literature Department, remembers that she felt patronized by Trilling and other male faculty, but she wrote about Barzun almost reverently:
No picture of him I have seen, whether rendered by a photographer or by an artist, captures either his physical or his inner qualities. Obvious to the mere observer or the frightened student were his aristocratic way of carrying himself, suggesting arrogance, his impeccable clothes, his neat hair, his studious, exact, but never hesitant speech, his formidable intelligence. I have known history students tempted for the first time in their lives to plagiarize a paper because they could not imagine themselves writing anything that would not affront his critical eye, let alone satisfy him.
When I first encountered Jacques Barzun, in January of 1970, he was sixty-two and I was twenty-two. He was the University Professor of History at Columbia; I was a first-year graduate student in the English and Comparative Literature Department. He lived on upper Fifth Avenue; I lived in the Bronx, near Kingsbridge Avenue. He attended the opera; I hung out at revival movie theatres. He wore bespoke suits; I didn’t own a suit. He said “potato”; I said “pot.” Perhaps because we didn’t really know each other (to me, he was just a name following the introduction to my Bantam edition of “Germinal”; to him, I was just another student in a green Army jacket who smoked filterless Camels), Barzun and I hit it off.
After I began to read his books, I noticed that the historian and the critic had distinctive voices. When Barzun is compressing great batches of information, his prose races across spatial and chronological vistas, delivering facts, their causes and implications, in a strictly utilitarian, almost rat-a-tat manner. When he’s addressing an artist’s work, however, the prose becomes redolent, more capacious, its syntactical flourishes a tacit reflection of real appreciation. Very few historians could so confidently gauge a writer’s mind:
Shaw knows at any moment, on any subject, what he thinks, what you will think, what others have thought, what all this thinking entails. . . . Shaw is perhaps the most consciously conscious mind that has ever thought—certainly the most conscious since Rousseau; which may be why both of them often create the same impression of insincerity amounting to charlatanism.
Not everything that Barzun wrote struck me with equal force, and some years later, when I edited a compilation of his essays, I made so bold as to tinker with his style. The editorial process led to a spate of letters, highlighting our asynchronous temperaments. During one exchange, I suggested that the importance of what he was saying warranted heightened language. His reply came so fast that I thought he’d bounded across Central Park and put the letter in my mailbox himself. “You are a sky-high highbrow,” he wrote. “Me, I suspect highbrows (and low- and middle-) as I do all specialists, suspect them of making things too easy for themselves; and like women with a good figure who can afford to go braless, I go about brow-less.” Undeterred, I offered to rewrite the passages in question. My changes were acknowledged with fitting tribute. “To put it in a nice, friendly, unprejudiced way,” he responded, “your aim as shown in your rewritings of the ‘objectionable’ sentences strikes me as patronizing, smarmy, emetic!” My heart swells when I contemplate that exclamation point, as he seldom resorts to one.
Barzun doesn’t often emote on paper and is even less inclined to do so in person. When you talk to people who know him, the same adjectives pop up: “composed,” “distant,” “removed,” “reserved.” It’s not that friends find him cold or unhelpful; it’s just that Barzun exudes a formality that inhibits the exchange of intimate confidences. He doesn’t jabber. He won’t gossip about his friends or discuss his marriages (there have been three) or family (he has three children). After all, what does any of this have to do with his work? When I raised the prospect of talking to him about his life, he sighed and said, “It’s not a subject I’m interested in.” Still, I thought, he must confide in some people. So I asked Shirley Hazzard, whose husband, the French scholar Francis Steegmuller, was in the same class as Barzun at Columbia, if Barzun had ever revealed anything about his private life to her. Her reply was almost a reprimand: “If you know Jacques, you know that he doesn’t talk about those things.”
And yet Barzun is not all genteel restraint, something that Sir Colin Davis touched on when we spoke about Barzun’s appreciation of Berlioz: “Such an interesting figure, Berlioz—so intelligent and self-conscious, but also volatile and passionate. I rather think Jacques is like that—his internal life, I mean, not his personal life.” Barzun’s prose may not give off much heat, but over and over one finds paeans to pure feeling, to the sensuous response to experience. Like William James (his favorite philosopher), Barzun believes that feeling is at the root of all philosophy and art. “The greatest artists have never been men of taste,” Barzun wrote, with Berlioz in mind. “By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.” Because Barzun is so coolly analytical in his own work, one might infer that he would be drawn to poets of fine discrimination, to ingenious symbolists like Mallarmé and Valéry, and yet it’s the rude vitality of Molière and Hugo that engages him.
Obvious emotionalism is not the point; it’s the courage to be emotional that matters. Barzun has observed that “the vulgarity of mankind,” in the sense of the common man’s intense awareness of life—life with all its brief pleasures and bruising shocks—“is not only a source of art but the ultimate one.” It’s easy enough to understand why people don’t immediately see this side of Barzun, and pass over, without notice, sentiments such as “And when will art cease to be something so exclusively for nice people?” or “Reading history remakes the mind by feeding primitive pleasure in story.”
Barzun always seemed to know everything you had ever read or thought about reading one day, and he seemed just as comfortable talking about German architecture as about Venetian politics. “He was terrifying,” Steven Marcus, a former dean of Columbia College, recalled about the experience of being his student. “He would disgorge an absolutely enormous amount of information during his lectures, more than anyone could possibly remember, and what you felt was—you felt you couldn’t compete. I mean, you could imagine maybe one day writing something on the order of Trilling—maybe. But how could you ever know as much as Barzun did?” The charge against Barzun, accordingly, was that he spread himself too thin. As Marcus explained, “I think his natural reserve and the variegated subject matter have caused him to be taken less seriously by the intellectual crowd that runs literature departments and literary quarterlies.”
Barzun, though, never intended to write for that crowd. Instead, as he put it in a letter to me, he wanted “to write for a quite different, less homogeneous group: academics in other departments than English, people with a non-professional interest in the arts (doctors who play music, lawyers who read philosophy) and a certain number of men and women in business and philanthropy, in foundations and newspapers or publishing houses.” In writing for a general audience, Barzun was taking sides in an old debate about the relationship between the intellectual writer and the reading public. It was a question not of how much the reading public could bear but of who constituted that public. When Dr. Johnson wrote, “I rejoice to concur with the common reader,” he could count on that reader to actually read or hear about his rejoicing. He was speaking, after all, about a relatively small number of educated Brits who owned businesses or property and could afford to buy books. When Barzun began writing, the size and diversity of the reading public discouraged such assumptions.
Barzun wanted to do on the page what he did in the classroom: help the reader “carry in his head something more than the unexamined history of his own life,” not because knowledge is inherently good or makes one a better person but because it fosters an independence of mind. The more one learns about the course of civilization, he believed, the more one can appreciate its achievements. After a while, if you learn enough, you can argue that, say, Shaw’s mind more closely resembles Rousseau’s than Voltaire’s—and you may actually enjoy doing it. Consequently, there’s nothing Hegelian, Heideggerian, or hermeneutic about his work; no nihilistic or existential angst livens things up. Nor does he proffer any grand theory or unifying design that would explain the past in the categorical manner of Spengler’s organic cycle of regional growth and decay, or Braudel’s emphasis on broad socioeconomic “structures.” For Barzun, these systematic models of cause and effect run counter to the temper of history, which is intuitive, concrete, beholden to time and evidence:
History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils. Anything may become part of it; that is why it can be an image of the continuity of mankind. And it is also why some of its freight turns up again in the social sciences: they were constructed out of the contents of history in the same way as houses in medieval Rome were made out of stones taken from the Coliseum. But the special sciences based on sorted facts cannot be mistaken for rivers flowing in time and full of persons and events. They are systems fashioned with concepts, numbers, and abstract relations. For history, the reward of eluding method is to escape abstraction.
Barzun’s approach to history is, in a word, pragmatic. He is temperamentally in tune with William James’s self-assessment: “I am no lover of disorder, but fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it entirely.” Among the things that drew Barzun to James was James’s conviction that every request made in good faith incurs some moral obligation in the claimant. A few weeks shy of his hundredth birthday, Barzun is still pressed to read manuscripts, give talks, and attend affairs in his honor. He tries to accommodate everyone, but there is simply less of him to go around. He’s five inches shorter than he used to be, a decrease due to aging and spinal stenosis, which causes pain and numbness in the legs. He relies on a cane or a walker to get around, and, as one might expect, he is alert to the irony of aging: when time is short, old age takes up a lot of time. There are doctors’ visits, tests to be suffered, results to wait for, ailments and medications to be studied—all distractions from the work. “Old age is like learning a new profession,” he noted drily. “And not one of your own choosing.”
Before I left San Antonio, Barzun called my attention to what he slyly referred to as his “most notable accomplishment.” It was a book lying on a coffee table in the sunroom and titled “Introduction to Naval History: An Outline with Diagrams and Glossary.” I turned it over in my hands and looked inside: it was, as promised, a point-by-point synopsis of seafaring events, designed for the education of naval officers. It turns out that, during the Second World War, the U.S. Navy commissioned Barzun, an associate professor at the time, to write it. And why not? It was always risky to assume that any topic was beyond Barzun’s ken.
Shirley Hazzard learned this one evening, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, when she and Barzun found themselves standing in a storage room on East Seventy-ninth Street, up to their necks in books. They had been asked by the head librarian of the New York Society Library to help him weed out superfluous and out-of-date volumes. “There we were,” Hazzard told me, raising her arm, “books stacked this high, and I thought, We’re really in for it. We’ll never get through these. Then Jacques reached into a pile, glanced at the title—it didn’t matter which book it was—and said, ‘This one’s been superseded by another; this one is still valid; this one can stay until someone or somebody finishes his new study,’ and in a couple of hours we were done. It was a very impressive performance, because, you know, he wasn’t performing at all. It’s just Jacques.”
Sooner or later, all of Barzun’s acquaintances experience their own “just Jacques” moment. Two years ago, while working on a piece for this magazine, I called Barzun to find out whether Lord Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary during the First World War, had said that the lights were going out all over Europe before hostilities had actually begun. Barzun asked if I was referring to him in my article as “Lord Grey.” I said I was, since the attribution was always the same. Barzun cleared his throat. “Well, you know, he wasn’t a lord when he said it. He didn’t become Viscount of Fallodon until 1916.” For the first time in thirty-odd years of conversation, I exclaimed, “Why would you know that?” He replied, mildly, “It’s my business to know such things.” ♦
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/22/071022fa_fact_krystal#ixzz1JSxaMUmo"
Question: is this persuasive?
Comrades, I'm trying to private tutor. I will be posting an ad offering my services at the main and Vacaville Solano campuses. Any suggestions?
English Tutor
o Do you feel that your professor is marking you down unfairly for grammar and punctuation, or even ‘c.s.’ and ‘w.c.’?
o Is formatting your bibliography taking up more time than the actual essay itself?
o Does MLA still sound a bit too conspiratorial?
o Or what again was the significance of the storming of the Bastille and what did it betray? What was the cultural impact in America of the New York Armory Show? What was with fascination with the Greeks around turn-of-the-century Europe? And just what was Eliot trying to say?
Graduate from San Francisco State University with a Bachelor’s in English eager to tutor any English course! Passionate and experienced tutor who has worked with students coming from most, if not all, offered Solano courses over the course of three semesters.
Please contact Arian at (707) 344-2230 ariancato@sbcglobal.net
English Tutor
o Do you feel that your professor is marking you down unfairly for grammar and punctuation, or even ‘c.s.’ and ‘w.c.’?
o Is formatting your bibliography taking up more time than the actual essay itself?
o Does MLA still sound a bit too conspiratorial?
o Or what again was the significance of the storming of the Bastille and what did it betray? What was the cultural impact in America of the New York Armory Show? What was with fascination with the Greeks around turn-of-the-century Europe? And just what was Eliot trying to say?
Graduate from San Francisco State University with a Bachelor’s in English eager to tutor any English course! Passionate and experienced tutor who has worked with students coming from most, if not all, offered Solano courses over the course of three semesters.
Please contact Arian at (707) 344-2230 ariancato@sbcglobal.net
Some readings
“Pragmatism. [William] James says that we shall know a truth by relating its consequences to its avowed purpose. Something is true, not because it has been repeated often, not because someone in authority has said it, not because it copies the world outside in every detail, not because it has been deducted from an infallible generality; but because it leads as accurately as possible to the kind of result that we have in mind. Pragmatism, in other words, takes a stand in opposition to the genetic fallacy, which bade us lok at the antecedent of a thing, in institution, or an idea in order to discover its worth. 1941” Jacques Barzun, The Jacques Barzun Reader
The “genetic fallacy” is the fallacy of irrelevance of judging a claim based on a previous similar context that may, or may not be, one in which the same claim’s terms may actually have already been applied. “Genetic” comes from “genus,” a reference to taxonomy where, in the context of logic, the “species” that is the claim is presumed to possess the same characteristics of every other characterstic within the same “genus,” which is the taxonomic tier directly above, or encompassing, the “species,” by virtue of being descended from the same genus. Therefore, the genetic fallacy assumes that the species that is the claim to possess, or to yield the same consequences, as the genus by virtue of it being descended from the genus. In short, a genetic fallacy is committed when a claim is based on its origin. An example is, “To possess the title ‘couple’ is a real shame because it’s just another form of ownership,” or better yet, “Love is conditional when you call each other ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend.’” The cuteness is nauseating in its endlessness. Yet however numerous I’ve committed the genetic fallacy myself, a cousin fallacy is what I am most embarassed of: the etymological fallacy. I have always pondered too late afterwards the validity of “continental philosophy’s” claims, especially those of Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, who once proposed that the German language should be the master language because Germany was in the center of Europe and that it was more original than the other major Western languages because unlike the Romance languages it did not derive from a “mother language,” or so I’ve read in summary. To feel my embarrassment, just open the first page of Being and Time or Of Grammatology . . .
But to turn the page, an excerpt from something so charming I found in “the little book” I am ashamed to have gone on so long into life without:
“Some nouns that appear to be plural are usually construed as singular and given a singular verb.
Politics is an art, not a science.
The Republican Headquarters is on this side of the tracks.
But
The general’s quarters are across the river.
In these cases the writer must simply learn the idioms. The contents of a book is singular. The contents ofa jar may be either singular or plural, depending on what’s in the jar—jam or marbles.” William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style
And I can't get enough of the vindication . . .
One time biking through discomfort.
The saddest photo I've seen in my readings on the recent Japan disaster.
The “genetic fallacy” is the fallacy of irrelevance of judging a claim based on a previous similar context that may, or may not be, one in which the same claim’s terms may actually have already been applied. “Genetic” comes from “genus,” a reference to taxonomy where, in the context of logic, the “species” that is the claim is presumed to possess the same characteristics of every other characterstic within the same “genus,” which is the taxonomic tier directly above, or encompassing, the “species,” by virtue of being descended from the same genus. Therefore, the genetic fallacy assumes that the species that is the claim to possess, or to yield the same consequences, as the genus by virtue of it being descended from the genus. In short, a genetic fallacy is committed when a claim is based on its origin. An example is, “To possess the title ‘couple’ is a real shame because it’s just another form of ownership,” or better yet, “Love is conditional when you call each other ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend.’” The cuteness is nauseating in its endlessness. Yet however numerous I’ve committed the genetic fallacy myself, a cousin fallacy is what I am most embarassed of: the etymological fallacy. I have always pondered too late afterwards the validity of “continental philosophy’s” claims, especially those of Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, who once proposed that the German language should be the master language because Germany was in the center of Europe and that it was more original than the other major Western languages because unlike the Romance languages it did not derive from a “mother language,” or so I’ve read in summary. To feel my embarrassment, just open the first page of Being and Time or Of Grammatology . . .
But to turn the page, an excerpt from something so charming I found in “the little book” I am ashamed to have gone on so long into life without:
“Some nouns that appear to be plural are usually construed as singular and given a singular verb.
Politics is an art, not a science.
The Republican Headquarters is on this side of the tracks.
But
The general’s quarters are across the river.
In these cases the writer must simply learn the idioms. The contents of a book is singular. The contents ofa jar may be either singular or plural, depending on what’s in the jar—jam or marbles.” William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style
And I can't get enough of the vindication . . .
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Mortal Kombat Legacy
The high production Internet release of short film Mortal Kombat Rebirth had enormous positive reception by the public and is being further developed as a web series titled Mortal Kombat Legacy. First episode is released today, and new episodes will be released weekly and hosted on Youtube channel Machinima.
Oh yeah, Jax is Black Dynamite and Sonya is Seven of Nine.
-JC
Oh yeah, Jax is Black Dynamite and Sonya is Seven of Nine.
-JC
Monday, April 11, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Adventure Time!
Stats from two years ago before the Nook came out to take names. However, one does hope that truly portable literature survives in the form of durable paper, and not galvanic polymer.
You can do better jiggaboo.
Strength
Back when I was still attending SFSU I had actually started to write a novel titled Strength. Every now and then I'll contract novelistic tendencies, but recently there is too much of everything happening at once, seemingly anyways. When I think of writing now I think I have a social services impulse, that at heart I am a Realist. But then when I write I become a Naturalist. It is all dreary at times, but only at times of dedicated writing timed out from my usual life of ferrying between Fairfield and Dixon. I still preserve between my ribs the hope to write the greatest work of art, but for now I have to recognize my other duties and joys. But also, I can spring unto you the introduction and bits of the aforementioned Strength, however embarrassing, the only two things allowing myself to alloy our agora being (1) you guys deserve more from me, and (2) an amateur is, after all, a lover, and I'm just sharing some love homies.
The streets, they are there. The rain dropping, their hand across the peak of this cemented hill, sweeping under the skirts of the beach’s violent child, the wind twined with another. There is a lot of green, that is trees, beneath the splotches of aura covering everything. Around the corner there were even new trees planted in brick-marked holes, separating the berths from the encompassing white, white rocks. Priuses, lime and yellow shelled, skitter atop the city’s skin, as if dice, rolling down the chute of Lawton until the arrival of their numbers. This will take awhile, and so until then I look up. There isn’t a sky seen, but it is likely there.
I live in the grid of San Francisco right above the university. In the Fall I had singled myself out of those I had once belonged to, and ended myself here. To leave, you must travel North along 1 and then East, because my apartment is West of where I came from, and I’m assuming those leaving would be those from my childhood, associates from that entire business. From the school you must take the Cow Palace exit, it is a hole of an exit and a tunnel of a turn.
There is no violence in nature today, only a virulent warmth like the ends of brooms in the winter—harsh hours outside, though the innards of the planted homes only better by their walls, a respite between them only temporary for the momentary stays. A television mumbles its signs through the gutters in my roof, which after consideration becomes the bottom of my landlord’s room, and what I take to be the kitchen. Even though piping is normally configured to merge between two stories—the kitchen on the first floor in the same position as the next—a delicious aroma often permeates from my bathroom. Do I shower so good when I don’t every other day? I know why it was named the Sunset District now.
It is barren and safe when the evening couches herself between every curb, congealing herself on panes with ready regards to inclination. When the streets are most quiet you can hear her, hush hush. Before the succession of the sun’s reign a forlorn hope stomps through the yards, construction workings, even, pat their palms of the subterranean earth upon their workpants, most deciding to leave their food-wrappings in their capped ditches. An hour of rush inseminates the city, broiling a soup of mucus-ridden cars in the hoary streets, eggs atop birches taken into even higher structures. An ant is driven over while another is fried, another tormented along its path by the anticipation of its mother’s ways. Before leaving the home of the world, the sun waves goodbye across Ocean View and Embarcadero with a simultaneity the span of a breath, and as the door closes behind mother moon’s entrance a rush of wind threatens the windows one last time. It is standard protocol says the warfare books behind me, making dusty outlines in their shelves, to create subsidiary waypoints, whether in gesture or material, in case resistance should be called in another time. But until then, there is often silence, such is the way my landlord decrees.
A threat, it could’ve been, the incidents today I think could have been threats. No, not to me, but to us, a waylay point for soldiers of curfew to poison our sewers and threaten our dangers, their black-and-white striped cars derailing the 29 but allowing the Metro a passing, nobody objecting though all the red the subject of scrutiny. The Book of Nature is supposed to be inside each of us, our considerations outside of the law self-evidence for the authority of the origin for everything artificial. Across from the campus there walks its student body, two dozen at a time, interfusing and unweaving in their crossing as the stoplights across each of their paths’ count down from a prefigured average. The ants surviving between the rails and the daises between one person and another, their Converse’s and Vans always between synapses.
At the time of a fall, and when in the premises of an other, the effect of intervention is expected. For instance, when the recycled cup of coffee made its usual sound of splashing, upon contact with the floor, its contents splattering the condiments bar and the socks of chairs, I was in the course of calling for caution of the oncoming coffee spoors. Simultaneously, to my right, a gasp was ejected as the woman took notice of the event, this action common as well with the man on my left, we three being on the outermost of the café peering in over glasses and assorted papers. These gasps, mine included, were genuine, and if time had allowed any one of us an increase in reflexes, the cup would never have caused a scene, that is, the scene would not have been necessary. Therein lies the human content, between gasps and notification, or at least warning, but perhaps even as warning. If anybody had been able to call the spill over the calculation of physics required to provide enough of a window to act in catching the falling artifact, then time would have been subjugated to the assurance of man and his society, or his sense of equilibrium, and the spill would not have existed. But yet, it has occurred, and this analysis has assured it so, and we go about our sidewalks and cafés, philosophizing further what it all means, as if chance, that extracted dryad, were as present as the thought of a perfect day, without the spilled coffee, and needed to be excluded. It has occurred, indeed, and this is all I can say, under the gesture of notification, a spilled cup of coffee, and I am on my own perfect little way, not as the message maker, but as the messenger.
To conclude, we will need a return, for I had forgotten a part of the whole story. I had thrown the cup. A stretch was being performed, the ribcage like a stereo projecting my life story in beats and pops. It was in the air as long and silent as I had glided my cotton arm beneath the tables and then straight through the matrix of their interstice, the style of thrust being like a shotput but with a yawning jerk at the wrist. Only the NASA-black security camera knows who had thrown it, and this awareness being only provisional to the extent that somebody may not have been behind its control.
Nobody was there, I knew this. The project was not to harm anybody, only to encourage a scene, to spin one out like a wheelwright.
I had to write, “Therein lies the human content, between gasps and notification, or at least warning, but perhaps even as warning.” But what did I mean? I want to say, perhaps, it is not what the statement can mean or even what I had intended it to mean, but rather what does the act of writing it and then questioning it mean, given the contexts of its explicit, contained claims and the contexts of its previous ground, the paragraph.
And meaning? When a machine says, “I love you,” it will have meant it, but at the same time, not have meant it, for it is a machine, just a machine, and nothing with emotions. I tell you this so I can hear it myself since it will only be you, my opposite, who I can trust with an honest equation. It should not surprise you to hear that I do not trust myself with any sort of high concepts, such as love in general, but this is only because I do not trust myself as an aggregate, or as a collective, or better yet, as a sea anemone with all its surroundings as part of its body, which reality ultimately demands each of her constituents to be. It should not surprise you both that I think my computer mouse tells me, “Hold me,” and that sometimes I do. I say it anyways, aloud, “I do.” I do, I do, I do.
for whatever god was left in the machine, and that had wanted to be known.
Only the trunk was bright with arson, opened and safe from further disaster, the flames engulfing its felt bottom and rusty lock system. It was a trammeled-grass green, the side design’s reliefs espousing lights in shades familiar only to a painter, and multiplied by the dance of heated oxygen in the space behind them, assuming a natural compass packaged with the design. The 29 took it as easy as usual in its rest before the last school corner, the elderly giving only a nod to the fire, a tip of their brims. It was only a bright day, the only casualty being the dry neck of Crayne, the Vietnamese driver. Of interest, however, is the attention paid by those with strong cameras in their phones in their pockets in their hands now. It’s kind of like that, I wanted to alleviate my neighbor’s savagery, but either it was not there, or he was not there, and so I just faced that burning oxygen storm and held unto my pockets, my back straight in its dry shirt.
“Oh my god, that car is on fire.”
These authors died. Every intersection is a book, and when the stars hold the sky there are crosses in some of the bosses, windows clipped in their white rainbows by clipped curtains.
The streets, they are there. The rain dropping, their hand across the peak of this cemented hill, sweeping under the skirts of the beach’s violent child, the wind twined with another. There is a lot of green, that is trees, beneath the splotches of aura covering everything. Around the corner there were even new trees planted in brick-marked holes, separating the berths from the encompassing white, white rocks. Priuses, lime and yellow shelled, skitter atop the city’s skin, as if dice, rolling down the chute of Lawton until the arrival of their numbers. This will take awhile, and so until then I look up. There isn’t a sky seen, but it is likely there.
I live in the grid of San Francisco right above the university. In the Fall I had singled myself out of those I had once belonged to, and ended myself here. To leave, you must travel North along 1 and then East, because my apartment is West of where I came from, and I’m assuming those leaving would be those from my childhood, associates from that entire business. From the school you must take the Cow Palace exit, it is a hole of an exit and a tunnel of a turn.
There is no violence in nature today, only a virulent warmth like the ends of brooms in the winter—harsh hours outside, though the innards of the planted homes only better by their walls, a respite between them only temporary for the momentary stays. A television mumbles its signs through the gutters in my roof, which after consideration becomes the bottom of my landlord’s room, and what I take to be the kitchen. Even though piping is normally configured to merge between two stories—the kitchen on the first floor in the same position as the next—a delicious aroma often permeates from my bathroom. Do I shower so good when I don’t every other day? I know why it was named the Sunset District now.
It is barren and safe when the evening couches herself between every curb, congealing herself on panes with ready regards to inclination. When the streets are most quiet you can hear her, hush hush. Before the succession of the sun’s reign a forlorn hope stomps through the yards, construction workings, even, pat their palms of the subterranean earth upon their workpants, most deciding to leave their food-wrappings in their capped ditches. An hour of rush inseminates the city, broiling a soup of mucus-ridden cars in the hoary streets, eggs atop birches taken into even higher structures. An ant is driven over while another is fried, another tormented along its path by the anticipation of its mother’s ways. Before leaving the home of the world, the sun waves goodbye across Ocean View and Embarcadero with a simultaneity the span of a breath, and as the door closes behind mother moon’s entrance a rush of wind threatens the windows one last time. It is standard protocol says the warfare books behind me, making dusty outlines in their shelves, to create subsidiary waypoints, whether in gesture or material, in case resistance should be called in another time. But until then, there is often silence, such is the way my landlord decrees.
A threat, it could’ve been, the incidents today I think could have been threats. No, not to me, but to us, a waylay point for soldiers of curfew to poison our sewers and threaten our dangers, their black-and-white striped cars derailing the 29 but allowing the Metro a passing, nobody objecting though all the red the subject of scrutiny. The Book of Nature is supposed to be inside each of us, our considerations outside of the law self-evidence for the authority of the origin for everything artificial. Across from the campus there walks its student body, two dozen at a time, interfusing and unweaving in their crossing as the stoplights across each of their paths’ count down from a prefigured average. The ants surviving between the rails and the daises between one person and another, their Converse’s and Vans always between synapses.
At the time of a fall, and when in the premises of an other, the effect of intervention is expected. For instance, when the recycled cup of coffee made its usual sound of splashing, upon contact with the floor, its contents splattering the condiments bar and the socks of chairs, I was in the course of calling for caution of the oncoming coffee spoors. Simultaneously, to my right, a gasp was ejected as the woman took notice of the event, this action common as well with the man on my left, we three being on the outermost of the café peering in over glasses and assorted papers. These gasps, mine included, were genuine, and if time had allowed any one of us an increase in reflexes, the cup would never have caused a scene, that is, the scene would not have been necessary. Therein lies the human content, between gasps and notification, or at least warning, but perhaps even as warning. If anybody had been able to call the spill over the calculation of physics required to provide enough of a window to act in catching the falling artifact, then time would have been subjugated to the assurance of man and his society, or his sense of equilibrium, and the spill would not have existed. But yet, it has occurred, and this analysis has assured it so, and we go about our sidewalks and cafés, philosophizing further what it all means, as if chance, that extracted dryad, were as present as the thought of a perfect day, without the spilled coffee, and needed to be excluded. It has occurred, indeed, and this is all I can say, under the gesture of notification, a spilled cup of coffee, and I am on my own perfect little way, not as the message maker, but as the messenger.
To conclude, we will need a return, for I had forgotten a part of the whole story. I had thrown the cup. A stretch was being performed, the ribcage like a stereo projecting my life story in beats and pops. It was in the air as long and silent as I had glided my cotton arm beneath the tables and then straight through the matrix of their interstice, the style of thrust being like a shotput but with a yawning jerk at the wrist. Only the NASA-black security camera knows who had thrown it, and this awareness being only provisional to the extent that somebody may not have been behind its control.
Nobody was there, I knew this. The project was not to harm anybody, only to encourage a scene, to spin one out like a wheelwright.
I had to write, “Therein lies the human content, between gasps and notification, or at least warning, but perhaps even as warning.” But what did I mean? I want to say, perhaps, it is not what the statement can mean or even what I had intended it to mean, but rather what does the act of writing it and then questioning it mean, given the contexts of its explicit, contained claims and the contexts of its previous ground, the paragraph.
And meaning? When a machine says, “I love you,” it will have meant it, but at the same time, not have meant it, for it is a machine, just a machine, and nothing with emotions. I tell you this so I can hear it myself since it will only be you, my opposite, who I can trust with an honest equation. It should not surprise you to hear that I do not trust myself with any sort of high concepts, such as love in general, but this is only because I do not trust myself as an aggregate, or as a collective, or better yet, as a sea anemone with all its surroundings as part of its body, which reality ultimately demands each of her constituents to be. It should not surprise you both that I think my computer mouse tells me, “Hold me,” and that sometimes I do. I say it anyways, aloud, “I do.” I do, I do, I do.
for whatever god was left in the machine, and that had wanted to be known.
Only the trunk was bright with arson, opened and safe from further disaster, the flames engulfing its felt bottom and rusty lock system. It was a trammeled-grass green, the side design’s reliefs espousing lights in shades familiar only to a painter, and multiplied by the dance of heated oxygen in the space behind them, assuming a natural compass packaged with the design. The 29 took it as easy as usual in its rest before the last school corner, the elderly giving only a nod to the fire, a tip of their brims. It was only a bright day, the only casualty being the dry neck of Crayne, the Vietnamese driver. Of interest, however, is the attention paid by those with strong cameras in their phones in their pockets in their hands now. It’s kind of like that, I wanted to alleviate my neighbor’s savagery, but either it was not there, or he was not there, and so I just faced that burning oxygen storm and held unto my pockets, my back straight in its dry shirt.
“Oh my god, that car is on fire.”
These authors died. Every intersection is a book, and when the stars hold the sky there are crosses in some of the bosses, windows clipped in their white rainbows by clipped curtains.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Radioactive Bingo = unimaginable cuteness levels
note: Not really Bingo. Dachshund from Japan getting checked for radiation levels.
- JC
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
Sunday, April 3, 2011
CBEST vocabulary input
I will append the rest of the interesting words of hopeful fruit from the vocab section at the end of my CBEST review book at the end of my study session. But for now enjoy some of the ones I've written example sentences for last night.
Abet – to act as an accomplice; to aid. The BAU was abetted as usual by their technical analyst’s ability to conjure lists of any assortment of information and sift through it and synthesize pertinent data to yield to her team a shortlist of probably suspects, often times however right to the Unsub him/herself.
Abjure – to renounce under oath. To aver that cheating on one’s partner is to abjure one’s tacit fidelity is to seem controlling.
Abnegate – to give up, to deny to oneself. Toben abnegated quality blankets after infecting his whore-turned-wife with gangrene of the mouth.
Abrogate – annul; abolish by authoritative action. Using the new method Dector was able to abrogate all further pataphysics of the Latter-day Sophists.
Abscond – to leave quickly in secret. Absconding into witching hours of lovers is most prevalent amongst teenagers but after twenty-one, at the latest, trysts begin to decrease almost always at the terrifying and nonchalant request for moderation made by the female counterpart, sometimes behind closed doors.
Abstemious – done sparingly; consuming in moderation. Since working at the library my patron check-out record has become an expression completely opposite from abstemious.
Accede – to express approval; to agree to. Accede is something of the negative of concede, which is to agree disapprovingly.
Actuate – to motivate or influence to activity; to put into motion. The closing in of the CBEST actuated me into high-gear constipative cramtime.
-AC
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Broly crushing competition with a handicap
Mike Begum (a.k.a "Broly" or "Legs"). He was born with a condition called arthrogryposis which leaves him with limited use of his hands. He has adapted the use of his mouth to control his character movements. Even with this handicap he has beaten the best in Texas and now is a top-player in Super Smash Brothers Melee, Brawl, and Super Street Fighter 4.
- JC
image by: http://saiyakupo.deviantart.com/art/Metal-Broly-another-end-36515518
news source: http://shoryuken.com/content/interview-w-broly-legs-disabled-ssf4-chun-li-player-4088/
Friday, April 1, 2011
psa
nice to see this blog taking off. if you have a google account or a blogspot account and you want to contribute just let me know and i'll put u on. also if you have your own blog i'm sure there is a way to link it on the main page...just let me know and STAY ACTIVE
Cowboy Bebop X The Simpsons
just thought that picture was gnarly
and here are some nujabes samples courtesy of youtube
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