They write it both ways there. But what does the apostrophe really add? How else would an English-speaker pronounce two consecutive I's at the end of a word?
So, Hawaii. I'll be the first to admit that I don't get as excited about visiting exotic locales as the rest of my family. Hawaii had good weather, no bugs, warm water, and scenic vistas, but nothing to excite me intellectually.
So I brought some books and worked on my tan. It's fading fast, but it's nice to be less than pasty white. I read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a great sprawling work of fantasy (though some of the denouement seems rushed) that reads like a cross between Harry Potter and Jane Austen.
With footnotes. I love footnotes in fiction.
I also read Rabbit, Run, the first popular novel written in the present tense (if you believe Prof. Dintenfass). Meh. And when I'd finished that I bought a dated collection of science fiction novellas from a used bookstore for $1.
Budrys' "Rogue Moon," Sherred's "E for Effort," and Jack Vance's "The Moon Moth" were very good for very different reasons. "The Martian Way," which I'd read before, would be great if not for Asimov's insistence on calling the villainously manipulative Earth politician "Hilder."
Ah, vacation.
That's Akaka falls. Naturally we also did a lot of tourist stuff on the big island. Saw some old volcanoes, explored an old lava tube, boogie-boarded, went scuba diving near where Captain Cook died… I'll spare you the list and the pictures. I know that kind of thing can be tedious.
But here's a group shot, for anyone who doesn't know what we all look like.
This particular family vacation was notable for two reasons. First, it could be the last time we do something like this as a family; next year I'll be probably be off at grad school or working at some tiny paper.
And second, Matt's longtime (three years?) girlfriend Amy came with us.
Here's us playing gummy bear poker in the hotel room. It was good to have Amy along; this was the first time I'd spent any significant amount of time with the girl who'll eventually be my sister-in-law.
We actually have a lot in common too. Like all intelligent people, she loves Burger King's chicken sandwiches. And you can tell that she's anal-retentive and I'm obsessive-compulsive just by looking at our gummy bear organization.
(Aside: Gummy bear poker is just one of the crazy things they do at Matt's college, Michigan Tech. A marked improvement over our money-based poker, which usually degenerates into a pissing contest rather than an eating contest. I'm not sure that they're more creative than us Lawrentians, but those crazy U.P. kids certainly have more initiative.)
I felt bad for Matt and Amy, spending a sexually-frustrated week together in paradise. But it's their own fault if they never figured out a way to sneak off. That's one skill that I'm sure every long-term couple develops.
My sympathy doesn't extend very far, of course. Sure must be rough at the top…
One of the fringe benefits of a tropical vacation is the drinks. Matt can't and doesn't drink, but Amy and I had girlie-drinks every day she was there. And there was no ridicule! It was awesome!
Equally awesome: I have a bunch of trivia questions now. With my grad school applications in the mail, I had the luxury of brainstorming. I even have what may be a decent super garruda.
If I can find the answer. God.
My family got along surprisingly well this time. I didn't go to Xmas mass, which probably irritated my parents. But otherwise I was on my best behavior, not taking anything too seriously.
I'm usually annoyed with someone or other a few days into any family vacation, but I only got frustrated once, when my exhausted father insisted on driving us home through the freezing rain instead of turning over the wheel to Matt.
I'm not planning on spending much time here at home. I'm going to the Cities tonight for New Year's (no clue what that'll be like) and I'm driving Ben and his girlfriend back to Lawrence tomorrow afternoon. I supposed I'd better get re-packed if I'm going to be out of here on time.
Read all of my old Calvin & Hobbes anthologies this week.
Let's face it, all through high school and into college I was a literature snob. Literature with a capital L. I read my share of airport novels, Crichton and Grisham and Clancy and this ungodly high-concept piece of crap called Spares — but I read more than my share of stuffy classics.
A lot of it was sentimental garbage. Well-written pap, but pap nonetheless. Why do critics shun the popular fiction of today only to praise yesterday's hacks?
Well, that's not fair. But so help me god, James Fenimore Cooper is a hack. Twain knew it, I know it, dogs know it…
I read his The Spy without prompting. I tried reading The Last of the Mohicans but couldn't stomach it. Plus it was an old book, and some pages fell out while we were learning about ghosts and demons in church. Don't read during confirmation class, kids.
And I read an unhealthy amount of Dickens, which I'm pretty sure had a hand in making me a romantic for a while. We've all heard that story before, though.
There was also Wuthering Heights, which I don't remember a word of. And D.H. Lawrence. I underlined stuff in D.H. Lawrence. Only connect.
On the plus side, I suspect that my (sentimental) notion that anything written better than the bible had to be divinely inspired contributed to my eventual disillusionment with religion.
I'd like to think I have good taste now. If I'm elected grad school student in April, I promise to use my English skills to defend what I think is good, instead of just what the diversity-mongers tell me is good.
But I had good taste before high school. I read some great fantasy and sci-fi books, all the stuff you'd expect a nerdy kid to be reading.
And before that I read Calvin & Hobbes, probably the greatest comic ever written. We need another Bill Watterson.
So really nervous: I sent out my personal statement to the Career Center and (an already overworked) Prof. Hoffmann for proofreading yesterday. It's really colloquial, maybe not the kind of letter I'm supposed to write to a grad school.
But it's honest, and it took me most of yesterday to write.
I did find the time to watch The Daily Show, which seems to be a little less annoying now that the election is over with. The dioxin jokes were a nice touch.
One point of order: Jon Stewart — last seen claiming that "terror" is not a noun — seems to be at the only news organization (unless you actually believe that trivial information or satirical commentary on major news stories constitutes "fake news") still calling a certain Eastern European country "the Ukraine" instead of "Ukraine."
It's a common mistake, but not as common as I once thought it was. Google News has about 3,740 hits for "the Ukraine" right now, and a lot of them seem to be attributive modifiers like "the Ukraine election debacle" and "the Ukraine runoff." There are about 53,960 articles using "Ukraine" but not "the Ukraine."
A quick Google search shows that even the unwashed masses drop the article 29 times out of 30.
I used to say "the Ukraine" too, probably because that's what they called it on Seinfeld that one time or in some long-forgotten Geography course. But I was wrong.
Once I learned this, I was eager to spread the word. I talked to the Politician, who had apparently always dropped the definite article. He's no stranger to Eastern Europe, that Politician.
Jonas was even less interested, declaiming to this English major that "the Ukraine" is no different than "the bench" or "the Spain," both proper in his eyes. I told him to use his trivia skills and look up the article I cited above, or some similar article; I can only assume he did just that, as he hasn't mentioned "the Ukraine" since.
Maybe in a few years, if popular programs like The Daily Show keep using "the Ukraine," a generation of Americans will opt to use the article and I'll be wrong again. Whatever. I consider myself a relatively descriptivist copy editor, and I'm willing to go with the consensus on this one.
Speaking of Google, the library idea is genius, though it could have interesting implications for Trivia. I've been working on trivia questions on and off since I got home.
I have three so far, out of a required thirty.
My goal is to make questions that are conceivably "knowable" but very difficult to answer with a simple Google search.
Other trivia masters have different strategies: the Grand Master seems to enjoy riddles, and it sounds like one of our expatriated masters is going to come back with thirty Garrudas.
OK, I've got to get back to app stuff. My 10-page writing sample still needs some work. Ugh.
So the test went well; I think my classes prepared me pretty well for the questions asked. Although we don't spend nearly as much time on minorities as the GRE. Got to check off all those points of diversity, I guess!
Good party in Ben and Freshman Matt's room last night, though I couldn't drink much because of the impending test.
An amazing amount of pure sweet drunk talk, everywhere. And numerous attempts at the legendary three-person piggyback. I think that Jonas, Our Bold Hero, and the Politician's little brother now hold the world distance record: seven feet.
Oh, and Jubb seems to have disfigured my face with a well-aimed bag of peanut brittle. There's no way not to forgive someone for something so unlikely.
That said, I punched him in the face a few times afterwards; Jubb, at least, seems to believe in retributive justice.
Well, I want to be out of town by three, so it's back to packing.
Like the other two buildings in Lawrence's student resources triad — the Diversity Center and the Recreation Center — the Career Center is stocked with everything a student could ever ask for but never will. I went there today to ask a few questions about the GRE test tomorrow.
The lady there couldn't make any promises but expressed guarded hopes that I'll be able to take the subject test in English Literature tomorrow as a standby. This is my last chance to take it, so it'll be disastrous if I can't.
I did a practice test tonight and did well enough that my only worry now is getting to take the test, not the test itself. They expect you to get a lot of questions wrong, thank god.
I'm finally done with homework. Not work, mind you — I still have to write a little bit of autobiography for my grad school applications and study for the GRE English test on Saturday. Which I'm assuming I'll be able to take.
My essay for satire took forever for two reasons. First, the computer carrels in the library are just the right size where you can put the keyboard in your lap and lean back comfortably against the wall. And second, George McKay, whose critical framework I was applying to the satires we read, writes in an academic jargon that has to be translated:
Fictively, she is caught in diasynchronic space-time.
I picture Goldgar throwing my essay back at me and shouting "Gibberish! All gibberish!"
But despite McKay's overly academic style and poorly chosen examples, 'Time back way back': 'motivation' and speculative fiction was actually interesting, even profound. He redefines the term "speculative fiction" — popular among writers like Margaret Atwood, who don't want their satires to be dismissed as mere science fiction — as any literature which forces an overt comparison with the real world. At the other end of the spectrum are works which McKay classifies as "fantasy" but which could really be just about anything overly escapist or emotive. I'm thinking thrillers, romances, most classic novels…
This system is actually pretty good, because if we reconsider literature in terms of speculative fiction versus fantasy, some talented writers working in genres critics usually dismiss seem worthy of reevaluation, even inclusion in the canon. I'm not claiming that works of fantasy are inherently inferior to speculative fiction, just that it's a better mindset for critics than the usual labeling-and-dismissal.
Writing the essay, I thought of three excellent (and, as it happens, relatively satiric) works that have been confined to genre hell: H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (sci-fi), Terry Pratchett's Small Gods (comedic fantasy), and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (cyberpunk).
And speaking of useful terms, I noticed that Noel Murray's Onion A.V. Club review describes Jonathan Lethem as a "neo-fantasist," the first instance I can find of that concept in English.
Germans have two useful literary classifications that we seem to lack. Prof. Ternes has been talking about them this term, filtering information he got from some weird German book.
First there's the phantastisch, works by authors like Kafka and Poe, in which an otherworldly element is placed in otherwise ordinary circumstances to shock or creep out the reader.
Then there's the neo-phantastisch, as seen in Patrick Süskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and Günter Grass's The Tin Drum. In these works the fantastic elements aren't there to shock or frighten, they're just, for whatever reason, there.
So now I'm translating neo-phantastisch to neo-fantasist in my essays. I mentioned Grass in my satire essay, so I translated the word this morning.
And there you have it, a longish tribute to book-geekdom. I expect the slight twinge of guilt I get while writing something of such limited interest will disappear by the time I'm in grad school, so consider yourself forewarned.
Deep breaths. I finally got a look at the U.S. News and World Report guide to grad schools tonight at our campus library. It was impossible to find in Brainerd.
After considering the location, quality, and relative cost of living of the various top campuses, I've decided to apply to four. In no particular order: Brown, Duke, the University of Chicago, and Cornell.
I've heard from a number of professors that it's not worth it to go to a mediocre grad school for English if you want a good teaching job, so I didn't choose a safety school.
It's good to have the ball rolling. Once I've got my schoolwork and tests and these applications out of the way, I can start considering which school, if accepted (hope!), I'd prefer to attend.
