"...where all the angels meet with each other..."

One thing about teaching composition that is both amusing by spells and *headdesk*-worthy is the bloopers in student papers. Some are obvious goofs by an overly helpful spellcheck that can't read context -- "vestal lawn care" or the process analysis essay that defined the ridge of a roof as the place where "all the angels meet with each other." On the former, I actually wrote out the definition of "vestal," and on the latter, I wrote, "nice imagery, but I think you mean 'angles.'" Late night grading results in snarky comments sometimes. Lucky for one student I wasn't feeling snarky when I got to the paper that mentioned "mother-son bondage" (hot damn, I didn't know Jocasta was into that sort of thing).

And then there are the bloopers that can only be attributed to... pick a culprit; it's probably a combination of factors, the largest one being decreased attention to academic writing. And by academic writing, I actually mean writing that adheres to Standard English. But it's more than just making sure they iron out the glitches; their logic is... um, what do you call freshman logic?

One student took on the issue of interracial marriage, singing its praises. Lovely. I'm all for tolerance and breaking down historical barriers. But she had a hard time staying focused on the interracial aspect. One particular oversight was when she mentioned that if children were the result of such a union, they'd have the benefit of getting to know two different families! Granted, I do live in a state with a reputation for being "hick," but, really... I wrote something to the effect of, "Yes, but ideally most children would get to know two different families. I think you mean cultures."

And tonight, I wrote the following comments on a paper: "Well, there are male prostitutes, too" and "But it's not a crime if sado-masochism isn't involved?" My comments fit the context, by the way. But the logic was faulty.

... And the kicker? I read it through a couple times, inked it up a good deal, then played a hunch and fed a line to Google. First search, first hit. I'm getting entirely too good at this. The original source? An editorial piece.

Am I fighting a losing battle?

---

Here's Monday's post, early. My day's going to be crazy busy, but I'd hate to drop the ball and miss a day of November. What a great week this'll be, starting off with plagiarism, picking up with jury duty mid-week (it'd be neat to see the judicial process, but I've got to get out of it somehow...), and interwoven with a --pardon my French -- shitload of grading.

Veteran's day

As it turns out, today is Veteran's Day. It would be so easy to turn that into a politicking opportunity, wouldn't it? To promote my own views? My opinions are strong, a combination of personal conviction supported by evidence that I have selectively chosen. I could excoriate the Bush administration or praise its efforts; I could drag Iraq into this easily.

Or perhaps a non-statement is as much a statement as a soapbox spiel, and perhaps by refusing to take a clear stance I am as guilty of the political correctness and fear of saying anything that someone somewhere might take offense at as my students appear to be. What I intend is acknowledgment only, for the ambiguous thing that war is.

One of my favorite books is Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. The following is a passage from the story entitled "How to Tell a True War Story."

In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh." True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.

For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can't believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside.

It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.

...

How do you generalize?

War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can't help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the rocket's red glare. It's not pretty, exactly. It's astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference - a powerful, implacable beauty - and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.

Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel - the spiritual texture - of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, hate into love, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is absolute ambiguity.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is absolutely true.

I can't really write about war or the veteran's experience. I've never been there. And that's my non-statement of a statement for today.

The times, they are a-changin'

Once again, by complete accident, I've ended up at craft supply stores shortly after payday. Not the best timing on my part. My yarn stash is just shy of reaching the "when on earth do you expect to have the time to complete all those projects" stage. I have no self-control when confronted with a brightly colored clearance sign and funky textured yarns. Oh well. There are more expensive and less productive vices I could have; being a yarn sensualist isn't going to break the bank just yet.

Many of the people I saw at the store were middle-aged to older women, especially with my tendency to linger in the yarn aisles. There were, of course, exceptions. I kept passing a group of three Amish (or Mennonite; I didn't ask) women. They were probably around my age. Their hair-coverings were my first tip-off, and then I noticed their dresses--not stodgy, faded colors, but simple floral prints, full-length and I would guess by the length, homemade.

It was a bit brisk out today, not cold, just enough that a light jacket or sweater would be welcome. I was wearing a fleece poncho myself.

The Amish women? Hoodies. And flip-flops.

Wherein the Twit jumps on the meme bandwagon

I saw this shiny little thing floating around the blogosphere and had to try it out. (Yes, all the other kids were doing it, and yes, I'd jump off the bridge if they did, too, mom.)

According to this site, my blog's readability level is:

Get a Cash Advance

My first response was indignation. After all, I have, like, an advanced degree, and this silly little thing says I write at, like, a high school level, you know? And that's just not cool, I mean, my reputation is at stake here, and, like, it could completely ruin my life. You just don't get it.

And then I removed the stick of self-importance from the orifice where I had it lodged, and realized that what I aim for is readability. It's a blog, for goodness' sake. I can write gloriously convoluted sentences as the occasion requires (and by "occasion" here, I mean "grad school"). But I wouldn't write like that the rest of the time. I'm pretty sure I blog like I talk--the style can range anywhere between flippant and silly to somewhat stilted or stuffy sounding, and then it can make a 180 degree turn.

And if that averages out to high school level, that's fine. After all, I spend a considerable chunk of time each week dealing with students fresh out of high school.

(Day 9 of Nablopomo... can you tell I'm tired and a little short on material here? I got a blog post out of a meme.)

Covers

One night I was listening to music in the wee hours of the morning, a CD my friend had burned ahem, given to me. The music was Shinedown, with a few tracks by Lacuna Coil thrown in to use the extra space.

"Let me know which are your favorite tracks," my friend said when she gave it to me. It sounded like an odd request, but hey, she does keep company with me. Oddity is a given.

So I was listening late at night. Track five was a bit slow to start. Impatient, I fast forwarded a bit. "You have no riiiight to ask me how I feeeel..." Phil fucking Collins. The bitch.

She loves '80s music. I do not. It's a running joke between us--when we're out in my car, I threaten her with my "emo-screamo crap," and when I'm with her, she threatens me with Phil Collins. Or Genesis. Or something equally against the grain of my picky tastes.

With the exception of Metallica and The Cure, I really don't much care for '80s music. But I'll be darned, '80s pop makes for really good cover songs. A good cover song has to capture enough of the original, but add something new--otherwise, it just seems like a shadow of the original.
So, here are a few good ones.

Dead or Alive's "You Spin me Round (Like a Record)" as covered by industrial group Dope.
The Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" as covered by Marilyn Manson.
Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" as covered by Marilyn Manson (eh... Manson's video is nsfw).
Genesis's "Land of Confusion" as covered by Disturbed.
New Order's "Blue Monday" as covered by Orgy.

Actually, it isn't just '80s stuff.
Metallica's cover of Bob Seger's "Turn the Page" is in my humble opinion better than the original.
Ditto for Shinedown's cover of Lynard Skynard's "Simple Man" (Shinedown's vocalist is incredible; that's 90% of it right there).

And this last one is... Well, there's a trend in these songs for my preferring industrial renditions better than the originals. The last one reverses the trend, and it almost feels blasphemous to say, but...

I like Nine Inch Nails. A lot. And I like their song "Hurt," but Johnny Cash's rendition just blows them away. When I heard Cash's version, I think my heart broke a little bit. Heck, a lot. He strips it down and makes it bleed with regret. If you don't click any of the links, at least watch this:

So many books, so little time

It's said that booklovers never sleep alone. I can top that (yeah, that's what she said). I like multiple books, often at the same time, for a little bed(side) variety. Right now, I'm reading The Zombie Survival Guide, Tim O' Brien's The Things They Carried, several recent issues of National Geographic, and Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire. Which one I read depends on my mood, and there are nights when I'm just too tired or have a headache. Lately, Desert Solitaire's been my pick.

Whoever sold it to the used bookstore originally bought it at an information center in Moab, Utah. I'm jealous. If the land is half as beautiful as Abbey describes it, the scenery must be breath-taking. However, it's not just about the scenery. Not at all. Abbey writes in the introduction,

This is not primarily a book about the desert. In recording my impressions of the natural scene I have striven above all for accuracy, since I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact. But the desert is a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea. Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite. If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree which grows from a ledge of naked sandstone near the old entrance to Arches National Monument. What I have tried to do then is something a bit different. Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as a medium than as material. Not imitation but evocation has been the goal.

And from what I've read so far, he succeeds. Even throws in a bit of metaphysics. My own spirituality has been in what could, in the grandest of understatements, be referred to as a state of flux. In trying to sort that mess out, I'm not finding satisfactory answers in trite organized religions' tracts. Instead, I'm drawn to personal testimonies-- no, "testimonies" seems too didactic. Accounts. Questionings. Musings. Perhaps what I mean is personal spiritual experiences. (Even here I struggle with how to define spirituality, and even my final answer seems inadequate. And I'm quibbling with semantics, not the actual substance. A little more tussling, and I may have the exact word that I want, but no answer to the underlying question. I prefer words.)

Off track there. Sorry. That was supposed to lead into another great quote from Abbey. From a descriptive passage, he leads in to a description of a huge rock near the arches:

it looks like a head from Easter Island, a stone god or a petrified ogre. Like a god, like an ogre? The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

His words were what got me at first. There's poetry in his writing, and when I re-read the passage the first time, it was because I loved the way they sounded. Then I got into the ideas. We've still got a fair trace of romanticism in our culture, and the idea of going out into nature to find ourselves or some objective truth, removed from the sullying effects of "civilization," still resonates. What he proposes, at least in this passage, seems impossible. We're so caught up in ourselves and in the world we've created, we can't help but impose our all-too-human and all-too-fallible structures on our surroundings. If it's our humanity that makes us push for some metaphysical truth, and giving up that humanity is what it takes to find it... The idea is terrifying.

Urgh. My head hurts now. Mr. Abbey can sleep on my desk tonight.

Nerds 'r' us

". . . And he killed the vampire by chopping its head off with an axe. Just a regular axe. Everybody knows you're supposed to use a stake to the heart. Didn't he read Dracula?" My co-worker was adamant on this point. We had a lull in students coming into the writing lab, which gave us a chance to catch up. She was talking about watching a horror movie with a friend and being unable to shut off her writing tutor's analysis. "There are rules. Certain ways to kill zombies, certain ways to kill vampires."

My other co-worker was at the computer opposite me. "How do you kill a zombie?" he asked.

"Three easy steps to killing a zombie. I wish I were still in English 101 so I could write a process analysis essay. Chop off its head. That's how you kill zombies, not vampires. It's like... sprinkling salt on a bear to kill it like you would a slug. It just doesn't work."

"That's not the same thing, though," my other co-worker said. "You can't kill something that's already dead."

"Undead," I corrected. "And there's a book about how to fight off zombies, actually. The Zombie Survival Handbook. I bought it recently from the bookstore."

"They published a book about how to survive a zombie attack?"

"And you bought it?"

"Yeah." I'm on Amazon.com by now to prove my point. "Borders had a sale. Oh, it's The Zombie Survival Guide."

"So, how do they say to do it?" they ask.

"I haven't gotten there yet," I say. "I just started reading it the other night; it's my current bedside reading."

"You're strange," my co-worker tells me, and then to further emphasize her point, "You chop off a zombie's head. And there are rules about vampires. They can't go out in the sun, and you kill them with a stake in the heart. It's in Dracula."

"But," I said, ready to enter the fray, "Dracula's not the authority on vampires. It's just our cultural reference point for vampire mythology."

"Bram Stoker did his research, though. He based it off of traditional vampire lore."

Somewhere in the midst of this, the supervisor for the learning center has come out of her office. Someone asks her how to kill a zombie. "Cut off its head," she says without missing a beat, showing no surprise at the nature of our conversation.

The conversation then drifts to the subject of how vampires and zombies became so popular. Paranormal studies, we decide, and an ongoing cultural fascination with the paranormal in general. Two of the shows that I watch with any regularity are supernatural in nature: Ghost Whisperer and Moonlight. Our supervisor hasn't heard of Moonlight.

It's a new show, I explain. "It's got vampires. The main character, a vampire, is a private investigator, and the show has a noir-ish feel. They update the vampire mythos, though. They can go out in the sun, but it weakens them--" I don't even get to the part where I explain how even the "rules" regarding stakes in hearts have been updated.

"That's just not right," my co-worker says. "I'm going to write an essay on the rules of vampires. I'll cite--"

"Buffy," my other co-worker suggests.

"Yes. I'll cite Buffy the Vampire Slayer, like I would cite [the city newspaper] as a reference."

As I leave, she's planning her essay.

Oh, the joys of working in a writing center. There are some conversations you can't have anyplace else. I'd call us geeks, but that term tends to have computer-y connotations. Nerds? Yep. I think it fits.

. . . And a search on Google turns up a late nineteenth century vampire killing kit. I want one.