Quoth the raven

 I take attendance by having the students answer a question (previously 2016, 2017).

Quoth the raven:

• nevermore
• caw caw caw
• IDK
• ??
• [checkmark]
• I don't know any ravens
• no clue
• !
• what is that
• no
• shishkabob
• type type
• moo
• French poetry is better
• no clue
• What does the fox say?
• I don't know
• Nevermore, lest I shuffle off this mortal coil and land in a bowl of soup

I think that the "?" and "IDK" votes swept this time, maybe the reference isn't popular enough amongst The Youths Nowadays.

This post's theme word is nuciform (adj), "like a nut." There are many bird techniques for obtaining food from nuciform prisons.

Humanity i love you because

I take attendance by having students answer a question. This week (and most of last) the questions have been expressions of dark emotions; this week in particular has been expressed as poetry references. The final highfalutin' poetry reference was today:

Humanity i love you because

... which on the surface seems sort of positive and upbeat (unlike the earlier ones).

Many students took it in a positive direction:

• there is so much potential
• sometimes good things happen?
• you're so funny and adorable
• Pokemon comes out today 😍
• I was loved first
• just cuz
• they gave me phones
• we are all part of it
• everyone who I like is one of you
• we are kind
• most people are nice-ish

... while others were, seemingly unintentionally, much truer to e. e. cummings' original tone:

• of the Anthropic Principle
• wait, no, i take that back
• all of Earth is Stockholm, and I have a syndrome.
• i have no choice.

Today's prizes go to the students who pushed back on the poetry theme, including "nope don't know this one", "don't get it", "what???", "poetry is not my forte", and the pretty amusing answers:

• Let me count the ways no that's not it

... which is pretty funny, and equalled for entertainment value by:

• tl;dr this week: 2 pretentious 5 me

... which is not a typo, that is actually written on the attendance sheet. Note that the author was not brave enough to attach a name, so it was just written down the margin. Still pretty funny, esp. the usage of '5'.

Gold stars to the Shakespeare reference, though. Gold stars!

This post's theme word is macher (n), "a person of influence, one who gets things done" or "a self-important overbearing person." Our professor began the semester as a good macher, and gradually transformed into an unbearable macher by the end.

And what rough beast

I take attendance by having students answer a question. This week's pop-quiz on dark poetry continues, as for afternoon labs I asked:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

... which I figured left itself open to some interesting answers, even if students didn't recognize the reference or felt overwhelmed by the current political situation falling apart.

Silly answers:

• the second one
• man bear pig
• Jabberwocky
• any beast
• the flamin' hot cheeto

CS-themed answers:

• computer scientists
• the ghost of the traveling salesman
• Lila

Yep:

• I still don't know
• literature is for NERDS
• ..??
• what book is this!
• idk lol

Today's clear winner goes to the most extremely specific and literal response to, namely: "pregnant Jewish woman who's jetlagged from the flight back." Take that, Yeats --- this student answered your rhetorical question!

This post's theme word is orgulous, "haughty". The usually-silly questions have been recast as a confused flurry of orgulous literary references.

What are the roots that clutch

I take attendance by having students answer a question. This week's emotionally-dark-poetry theme continues, as I explored my students' ongoing liberal arts education by asking:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?

A couple students answered, "hope."

Several other students answered in a more literal direction:

• a tree!
• BST?
• an AVL tree
• weeds...?
• Evil Trees (of Rowan and Rin)
• the roots of trash trees?
• some kind of moss probably

Most students expressed confusion and lack of understanding, for example "I just don't know", "I'm confused", "I give up.", "I'm a CS major for a reason...", and "Sorry, bad liberal arts student!"

From this I have learned two things. Firstly, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is not as widely recognizable as I assumed, and secondly and less-surprisingly, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land does not make for a good joke setup.

Ah, well.

This post's theme word is lobolly (n), "a thick gruel", or "mire; mudhole," or "an assistant to a ship's surgeon," or "a pine tree with long needles and strong wood (Pinus taeda)," or "an evergreen, loblolly-bay (Gordonia lasianthus)." The lobolly stuck in a lobolly full of lobolly used lobolly branches to climb up to refuge in his lobolly-house, perched on the side of the stony cliff.

What happens to a dream deferred?

I take attendance by having students answer a question. (The questions/answers from the rest of last week were too melancholy, dark, bitter, and depressing to bear repeating in this semipermanent venue.) Today I echoed Langston Hughes in asking:

What happens to a dream deferred?

To their liberal-arts-education credit, many students were exactly on-point:

• it shrivels like a raisin in the sun
• shrivels up like a raisin in the sun?
• it shrivels up like a raisin
• or does it explode

The hopeful:

• deferred and rejected usually, but a second choice school hasn't killed anyone. probably.
• 2020
• fight or flight --> you go 100% to get it
• do something to make the dream come sooner
• Delayed but queued.
• It generates art, hope, and wonder for further than a dream achieved.
• It's still alive at the bottom of your heart.
• It will stick around and be fulfilled.
• It waits to be realized anew.
• It gets passed on.*
• It grows & inspires & drives everyone to action.

The not optimistic:

• it vanishes
• usually bad things, I'm really afraid to defer anything important; this meager existence is too short, man.
• gone, gone
• you don't want to know... :(
• gets a 9-5 office job, wants to travel but never does. gets a dog
• It dies a slow death.

The literal or extremely abstract:

• you dream it later
• Certainly science will never give us an answer.
• you wake up, then get to dream again later
• it becomes a ghost
• keep on sleeping keep on dreaming
• it gets caught in a dreamcatcher
• it goes to dream heaven
• It comes back night after night, tormenting you.
• It haunts the dreamer and drives a certain mania until the dream is reached.
• it will haunt you

The... rest of the answers:

• It goes into a black box.
• Tape storage.

Today's Prize for Uncategorizability goes to "the same thing that happens to all your dreams". Vague and yet descriptive enough that it lets the reader find whatever answer the reader seeks. A perfectly dithering response for a divided populace.


This post's theme word is today's Word of the Day, kakistocracy: "government by the least qualified or worst persons." We have recovered from our shock enough to teach and etymologize as usual, but the themes are indisputably colored by recent kakistocratic events.


*Depending on your interpretation of "passed on", could be good (the dream is passed to another dreamer) or bad (the dream is passed over and never dreamed again).

The art of good writing

The Inky Fool points to an article that exactly captures the quality that attracts me to literature. I can't and won't summarize it, so just go read it yourself: The art of good writing by Adam Haslett.

Seriously, go read it. Right now.

Every English essay I ever wrote -- and also the essays on opera, and Vietnamese culture, and maybe even one history paper -- was about how "the form and rhythm of sentences communicates as much meaning as their factual content, whether we’re conscious of it or not." And of course the aim of such studies is to become conscious of these various interwoven levels of meaning.

I wish I could write with this level of control. "That ability – to graft theme into syntax – is what makes great writing a pleasure to listen to." But I am no great writer. My field does not foster this careful wordcraft, this intricate interplay between meaning and message. More value is placed on naked ideas than on the words that clothe them; indeed, some value is placed on obscure, overly technical, abstruse, recondite, difficult writing.*

As both Forsyth and Haslett point out, we inhabitants of the internet live in a constant barrage of writing and reading. "This is the age of the word." I have yet to observe a tweet that is constructed with such verbal artistry; emails and blog posts seem to me to be written for brevity and "declarative masculine hardness." I worry. What I read influences how I write and speak and think, and Haslett describes my fear: "minimalist style becomes minimalist thought, and that is a problem."

I leave you with this quote. I love David Foster Wallace's writing, and Haslett's analysis highlights exactly why I find it so engrossing and effective.

Take the first sentence of David Foster Wallace’s story, “The Depressed Person”: “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.” By mixing heightened feeling and unrelenting repetition (“pain”, “pain”, “pain”) with a Latinate, clinically declarative voice (“component”, “contributing factor”), Wallace delivers his readers right where he wants them: inside the hellish disconnect between psychic pain and the modern means of describing it. The rhythm of the sentence is perfectly matched to its positive content. Indeed, from a writer’s point of view the two aren’t separate. If we could separate meaning from sound, we’d read plot summaries rather than novels.

Let's all read more novels.


This post's theme word is rhopalic, "having each successive word longer by one letter or syllable." I do not know about making awkward rhopalic sentences (rhetorical machination! oooooooooooh!).
This post written like H. P. Lovecraft.

*Sorry, I don't get to use "abstruse" and "recondite" often. I get excited when a chance arises. My other idea for this sentence involved the phrase "pissing contest" and was generally at the wrong level of diction.

Found poetry

The lack of capitalization and punctuation in internet communications (my previous comments) makes them read like poetry to me. Here is an unedited excerpt of a recent conversation I had with J. (It was actually more like a monologue that I witnessed.)

... in my world
where pi was modified
to terminate after 9 digits
it changed a lot of stuff
circles are kinda different
but it's okay
there's lots of meteor showers, though
and gravity doesn't work really well
maybe it wasn't a good idea
oh god, my hands are melting again

This post's theme word: tendentious, "expressing or intending to promote a particular cause or point of view, especially a controversial one." The view that pi terminates after 9 digits is not a tendentious one amongst mathematicians.