December 2010
14 posts
So what happens when I take too many courses which all have essays due one after the other after the other is that I lose not only my mind but also my grasp on how to formulate ideas suitable for the rarefied world of academia and put those ideas into comprehensible sentences. My last paper until next term is due Thursday. Here is the introduction I wrote for it as an exercise in getting the...
November 2010
16 posts
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marginalgloss replied to your post: In one of my classes we read Intoxicated by My…
I don’t agree that every instance of disliking a set text can be attributed to ignorance; but yes, coming to a university seminar only to hear endless variants on ‘I just didn’t get it!’ from other students is infuriating. Better they remain silent.
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In one of my classes we read Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Illness and Death by Anatole Broyard, which I loved. Others disliked it, and one of them made the mistake of confessing that they disliked it so much that they stopped reading it, at which the professor, alarm in his eyes, took the opportunity to remind us why we are in university. The point at which you dislike a text is...
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When the teaching assistant handed back my paper today, she made a passive-aggressive remark about the fact that I wasn’t in class last week to pick it up. Looking at my grade, I found she’d marked me down for supposedly not citing sources properly. MLA style is something of my bitch, so I took this personally and (after double-checking the style guide) got all passive-aggressive back...
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I did National Novel Writing Month in 2002 and finished my 50,000-word novel that month. I was in high school and wrote a lot of it during classes by hand on paper which I typed up in the evenings (a mere mean feat; I wrote a lot of multi-chapter fan fiction in preceding years, so this was about the same, just faster). I later became so ashamed of the novel that I forgot what it was about, except...
“It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual...”
– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick 