I have a shitload of Thomas Carlyle and related stuff to read today, on which I must write a response paper by tomorrow night, and all I want to do is find a cool new Wolverine icon and read comic books.

Sigh.

I just went upstairs, knocked on the inside door, hauled one of them out, and made him stand in the stairwell with me, so he could hear how the acoustics are and how their voices carry.  I lectured him while we stood there, told him what time each of our neighbors had to get up for their jobs (downstairs, 5:30, across the hall, 6:30), and told him that I liked them all fine as neighbors but there's no keeping it down with twenty people in your house (I have no idea if the one I grabbed lived there or not, but I acted as if I'd met him before).

If they won't respond when I tell them to take it down a fucking notch, then I'll just parent them to death.  They ought to get sick of that really, really fast.  However, I think the neighbor across the way will probably call the cops within the next twenty minutes.  He's a big one for calling the cops.

The upstairs neighbors are having a fucking keg party.

Two of them just started hooting at the top of their lungs over something that the late-adolescent breed apparently finds amusing, and I was in full old-fart mode as I hauled ass up the back stairs and told them, loudly, through their open kitchen door, to take it down a fucking notch, thus forever destroying amicable relations.

Hardwood floors.  No carpets.  All doors and windows open.

Assholes.

I finally finished translating Soul and Body II.  It's clunky and ugly and probably error-ridden and very literal (except in places where I couldn't make the grammar come out and had to sort of squish the syntax around), but it's good enough to give my classicist committee member so he can point me in the right direction in the sea of Evagrius, Gregory of Nyssa, Plotinus, Plato, Augustine, et al (weeps).

So this is part of what I'll be working on for the next two and a half years of my life, for the curious.

Ok,  here's what I need to know, and I really need to know it, because my future depends on it.

How do people learn to read Old English with real facility?  I understand that at many places, two semesters is all you get, unlike other languages that you can actually major in.  I gave it my all when I was in the courses, but considering I was taking 14 semester hours for the first term course and 16 for the second, it was hardly something I could devote all my waking time to. My "all" looked a lot like dog-paddling.  (For perspective for non-academic readers, in my MA program, six semester hours was full time, and you needed permission to take more than 9 [some of this possibly because those of us with fellowships taught 2/2 composition].  As an undergrad, I always carried 15 or more.  Undergrad and grad courseloads are apples and oranges.  the first-year (and for me, needing language work and other work outside the department, the second year.  hell, and this the third year) courseloads are quite a chunk.  And frankly, I'm not sure I am at a point where "more time on my own" would do the trick, even if I had that time.  I need *a teacher.*  At least somebody to go to with grammar and syntax questions.  

I did have the directed reading, too, but we just never really got into the grammar all that much (though once or twice a bit more than we did in 2nd semester, which was a JOKE as a language course - not the prof's fault, long story), and there is still much I don't understand. It's not like Latin, where I could fix my deficiencies up to now if I did nothing one weekend but hit some paradigms hard and reviewed Future More Vivid and learned the stuff I was shaky on last semester about temporal clauses or whatever. I mean, at the end of the day, with a dictionary and my textbook, I can read Latin.  I read it slowly, and I make mistakes, but I can read it.  I'm in the middle of my third semester, and I damned well better be able to read something! and I can.  I know where to go for help.  I can pick up French and read it, after all these years.  But Old English still feels like a fog, most times.

I've technically had 3 semesters of Old English (one a 2-hour reading course), and it's just a different thing entirely.  It's taught totally differently, orthographic variations are WILD, you have to know which "type" of noun you're looking at to know what case you're looking at, because they aren't declined the same, yet the available hardcopy dictionary I got first semester  (Clark Hall) does not tell you in the word's entry what type of noun it is.  And verbs - oh god.  My advisor knows that "fremman" is a "short, weak, type 1 verb" instead of a "type 7a strong verb" but I don't know how to start knowing that. You have to know that to be able to read this language.  He had a radically different Old English education than I'm having.  I want it, damn it, but I don't know how to get it.  People keep telling me that OE is taught differently than most language courses for a reason, and that you learn it as you keep working on it, and that lots of medievalists have language-mastery-anxiety, and whatever sorts of things are designed to make me feel better.

All of that may be true, but it doesn't change the fact that I am within months of proposing a dissertation in Anglo Saxon (mostly) poetry, and I am really starting to freak out about my level of mastery.  How do people do this? How bad am I , really?  How deficient?   I suppose part of my problem may be that I have little sense of perspective - it's not as if there are other students here working on this language, not as if I've been in a class, ever, with anybody who had very much invested in really learning it.  I have no idea how other students are taught, how they learn, how they teach themselves, where they go when they can't figure a passage out.  By the time I get in to see my advisor, I have so many questions on the passage I'm translating that we can't get through even three of them in an hour, and we don't have the whole hour because we also have to talk about my damned exams, and I"m spending too much time trying to translate and not enough time reading other stuff on my lists.  I have to have other resources than my advisor and i have to be able to teach myself. But I really need somebody to explain things to me sometimes.  And I really need more time to spend with this language than I have. I will have some more time in the Fall when I'm finally done with coursework and exams, except - oh yeah, I have to actually be writing a dissertation, and it looks like I need some German too. So how do people do this?  Did I just get started too late in the game?  Lately that's what I think. and I can't figure out how to fix that now.

But really - I can't just be doomed. There has got to be something I can do. Or do people really work on this language one damned word at a time? I have spent an entire semester researching one word before - one word that lots of people much, much smarter than I am cannot exactly agree on.  I didn't understand half of what I read.  Sometimes I think that it's not that I'm buried wtih coursework/slow/too old/whatever, but that my brain is not built for this and I've picked the wrong thing to try to do.  Other days I begin to wonder if this language is simply not taught like it used to be because the people that can teach it like that are retiring and dying and they are not being replaced outside of a handful of universities, because, after all, who gives a shit about Anglo Saxon and all those other dead languages?   Nobody studies it!  The overwhelming majority of schools do not need faculty that can read and teach it.  My teacher knows what he's doing. But there is no demand for this work, and his schedule is such that he cannot be my private tutor on every little blip.  He has to teach Brit Lit and other courses that don't get canceled for lack of enrollment.  Our directed reading next semester, by popular demand, will be on Old English poetry in translation.  This is it. My formal education in Old English is over.  I have to do this myself now.

And some days I think I've doomed myself by choosing to attend a school where there isn't a community of people to work with (and by community, I mean that three students and a professor would be awesome by me).  There are only a few places in North America where you can go to truly get a decent OE education, I think, and I'm not at one of them, and therefore I'm doomed, because I'm not good enough (or whatever) to teach myself this language without some kind of support system.

Am I doomed?  What can I do better, or differently?  How do I get some perspective?

VICKREY, JOHN F.  BEOWULF AND THE ILLUSION OF HISTORY.  BETHLEHEM:  LEHIGH UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009.

( Read more... )

Why, yes, the citations are all wrong; it is 1 a.m.  Ask me if I care.

- a sloth named Dave
- Naruto (except 1-12)
- Inuyasha
- Death Note
- Chibi Vampire
- Green trees of munnies
- a puppy
- anything with Dr. Who or Torchwood
- can I have David Tennant?
- Naruto Shippuden for Nintendo DS
- Gaara plushie
- Gaara bookbag
- anything with Gaara
- Same as above but with Deathnote
- Zoo Tycoon
- Magic Night Rayearth Vol. 3

I don't know whether I should be alarmed that I don't even know what half of this stuff *is.*

Also, my mother was mortified that i let her watch Torchwood, but after the Great Saturday Night Live Debacle of 2006 -- when my young child came home and said, "Hey mom! Grammy let me watch Saturday Night Live and it was great!  Listen to this: 'I want to be a ho'!" -- I'm not at all sure my mother's judgment is superior to mine in these matters.

Ugh.

I used to have this article, something like "the top five grammar errors CEOs find most annoying" or something like that.  I can't remember where I got it - possibly a teaching or 'teaching comp' journal, but possibly not.  I want it because I want to talk about the "real world" side of the impact of grammar and mechanics on credibility and effective communication.  In other words, I want something to point to that backs up my claim that "other people care about this besides English teachers."  Many of these students are quite ambitious and are headed for the business school, and this article I think I remember just might help me get this point across.  Anybody know what I'm talking about, or have any recs for something similar?  IIRC, it was a study - a survey of a crapload of executives or something like that.  It wasn't just an interview with three or four CEOs. 

I would look in my pedagogy folder with all my old pedagogy source material on it, BUT CHOCOLATE MILK KILLED MY LAPTOP. 

( Read more... )
Alfred, "King Alfred's Old English Version of Boethius"

And I pay Dell an extra fucking $15/month so that I can have tech support that is located in North America, speaks English clearly, and only keeps me on hold for 10 minutes instead of 40 before picking up my call.  What a fucking racket.  After one experience with "non-VIP" tech support, though, I shelled out the extra cash.

Really, Dell.  Really?

Well, they kiss your ass extra thoroughly when the "VIP tech team" has you on the phone though.  I haven't had my ass kissed like that in a long time. They are so polite that they almost refrained from laughing at me the time I called because my laptop wouldn't turn on, and the problem was a bum power outlet in my house.

This is what I get for waiting until tonight to write my Victorian lit response paper, I tell you.   Guess I'd better get started.

Chocolate milk all over laptop keyboard.  What do I do?  Pull each key off and swab it out as best I can?

ETA: on hold with tech support. My laptop model has all its little guts directly under a thin layer of plastic directly under the keyboard.  My daughter is dead meat and I'm laptopless for at least a few days, at best.

from inkmark: "Once you're our level of weird, you might as well put on the panda hat."

That should be a t-shirt or something.

Me, to blondie: Now quit thrashing around and get in bed and be still so I can tuck you in.

Blondie, flailing manically, wearing a black and pink argyle sweater dress and a felt panda hat (complete with ears and eyes and stuff) she bought at an anime con: Flail, flail, flail....

Me: Seriously, babe - do you want me to tuck you in or not?  Quit acting like a weirdo.

Blondie, now thrashing from side to side with her hands made into little paws near her face: I'm not a weirdo, I"m not a weirdo, I'm not a weirdo...

Me, laughing and pointing with both hands: *You* are a *weirdo*!

Blondie: Mom, you're like the poster grownup for weirdo.  Don't you want to wear the panda hat?

Check out the adorable little psychobilly band!  They're so cute!  And funny.  Gina, there are a few Danzig-worthy croons in some other songs, too :-)

Sawyer Family: Say Goodbye

Dear Latin Fairy,

If Psyche habebat solas voces famulas, then that's cool, even though it's weird, but what is "famulas" doing grammatically?  Accusative of Weird Stuff Psyche Has?  What is this construction called? How can "solas voces" and "famulas" all be in the accusative with, er, no other stuff in there?

Grammar is *hard.* (whinge)

Dear Latin Fairy,

Oh, what a day for a brain cramp.  Midterms for grad students are too cruel.

Iamque somno recreata placido resurgit animo.

I'm going with ablative of means on somno, so: She rises having been refreshed by sleep.  But where do I stick "placido animo"?   What is the que sticking together?  Can I do, With peaceful spirit [clunky ablative absolute trans], she rises having already been refreshed by sleep?

I should have gotten up at 5 instead of 7.  I didn't leave myself enough time to study for this test.

teh blondie comes in from playing yesterday and is upset because her friend's mother's boyfriend was yelling and "being mean," she says.  "He called [friend] stupid right to her face, but he's a jerk anyway, 'cause he was in jail yesterday for drinking and driving."  "Who told you that?"  "[friend's] mother."  "Oh."  "Yeah, she went to bail him out."  "And she just volunteered that information?"  "Yep."  "Oh.  Well, what did [friend] do when he yelled at her?"  "She's over there crying because he always says he wouldn't be stressing all the time if he didn't have to pay her bills and listen to her making so much noise playing with that video game."

Okay then. 

Dear friend's mom's boyfriend: You're a fucking scumbag and you should be ashamed of yourself for talking to a little girl like that, shit for brains.

Dear friend's mom: Find some fucking self respect, woman.  If not for your own sake, for the sake of your child.  He should be ashamed of himself for being an asshole.  But you?  You should be ashamed of yourself for letting your daughter grow up thinking this bullshit is ok. You should be ashamed of yourself for Bad Mothering. I don't give three shits whether you ever find a way to live without your worthless sack of shit boyfriend or not. But I cannot believe you don't want better for your eleven-year-old daughter than *this.*  The dude is a cliche, and so are you.

The little girl asked us if she could come with us for pizza the other day.  I didn't have enough money that day to be treating the neighborhood kids to pizza, but it stuck with me.  She's actually a very polite little girl, not the type to invite herself in or invite herself along normally, so it struck me as an odd thing for her to ask and it's been bugging me since the weekend and had me worried that maybe she was just plain hungry and I should have fed her.  But now I'm thinking she's always outside 'cause she doesn't want to go inside.  'Cause her mom's boyfriend is a douchebag.