Category: Quotable

Caveat: End of Tomorrow

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Not My Poetry / Quotable / The Wonders of Work

Today was kind of the last official day for School of Tomorrow (language hagwon); as of next week, we become part of LinguaForum officially. We had a long staff meeting that wasn’t entirely pleasant, as we confronted the changes that we face – more classes to teach, completely changed curricula, etc.

Meanwhile, it was hard to get motivated to teach out of the “old” books for one last day – so I had the kids reading a simple little poem by Wallace Stevens, called “The Snow Man.”

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

 
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Caveat: Cake’s existence is have eat cake

Banalities & Journaling / Kids / Language & Linguistics / Quotable

My students have to keep writing journals, where they are supposed to make diary entries and/or respond to little pithy quotes with something reflective.  One of my lower-level students, but still quite intelligent and talented, when confronted with a request to reflect on the idea of "to have one's cake and eat it too," wrote "cake's existence is have eat cake."  This seemed truly profound to me.  But that might just be the cold medicine, acting up.

Caveat: Quotes

Quotable

"Oprah is transcendent;  she is a cultural treasure."  — David Letterman.

"when the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done."  — J. M. Keynes.

"Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company."  — Mark Twain.

"With only 300 bits, you could assign a unique barcode to each of the ten-to-the-ninetieth elementary particles in the universe." — Seth Lloyd.

Caveat: Unclear on the concept?

Banalities & Journaling / Kids / My Photos / Quotable / Teaching & Methodology

My students take these regular vocabulary quizzes, one component of which is to use the word in a sentence.  However, often times because of constraints on what can be covered in class, they’re left to their own devices in coming up with a good sentence to use for a given word.
The result can be some rather unusual sentences, either unintentionally funny or poetically incoherent.  In the first category:  “The dog appealed behind the tree.”  In the latter:  “this sheep is sink, soon.”
In other classroom humor, my most advanced class (an intimate five students)… we’re talking about some subject they’re not all finding terribly interesting – the US civil war, maybe? – and I look over and notice some rather insane 3-year-old-style scribbling/doodling on the broad face of the page of the book we have open.  Just a mishmash of swirly lines and boxes and dark blotches all across the text.  A brutal commentary on the quality of the text?  Sharing his level of interest in the class?
So, I call his and his classmates’ attention to the scribbling.  And without missing a beat, he says, “This is cubism, teacher.  I’m expressing myself.”
This brilliant display of adaptive language skill is a genuine delight, and I can’t stop myself from laughing for the remainder of the class.
No matter how boring it is, I’m going to try to post something every single day this month.  So prepare yourself, dear readers, for some truly banal content!
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Caveat: “There is great chaos under heaven, and the situation is excellent”

Banalities & Journaling / Databases, Smartphones & Computers / Quotable / The Wonders of Work

Location: Los Angeles

Soundtrack: my brother playing L7 and Echoboy on his turntable – good stuff

The quote above is from Mao Tse-tung. Many years ago (maybe 5? 6?) I had placed that quote on the home page (splash page) of my National Account Data Analysis intranet website that I built at ARAMARK (the application affectionately known as Reportomatic). At the time, it seemed very apropos to the IT/database situation there, but I’ve always assumed that the Reportomatic would eventually be upgraded or replaced. 

NadapageAt right is a screenshot of the page under discussion (click image to see larger).

Yet, yesterday morning I went to visit with old friends there: Joanne, Judy, Paul, Tom, Carol, and all the rest, and Joanne showed me that it was still there, exactly the same, all these years later. I was so pleased to have left such an ambiguous legacy!

Not surprising, perhaps, that things have changed so little there, but I still reflect that that company still seems so much more forward-looking and IT savvy than my more recent job, which was a sort of permanent IT disaster-in-progress.

Anyway, Paul and I went out to lunch in Burbank, and had some pretty good sushi at a place called Kabuki. Paul is the most brilliant database administrator I know, and I was surprised to learn he was still with ARAMARK at first, until I learned he’s a new father – this explains a great deal, as suddenly one’s need for stability and reliability in a job becomes more important than one’s frustration with the job’s nature, I suppose. I can sympathize if not quite relate. Anyway, he’s always great to talk with, and parenthood seems to agree with him.

My brother has the most amazing music collection – all kinds of ripped/burned CDs and tons of stuff on vinyl. He’s going through and playing stuff and it makes for a nice sound track.

Caveat: Voluptuosidad

Español Aleatorio (Random Spanish) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable / Retroblogging

Muchisamuchi al lado – dos jovenes se aman, se besan, pero notablemente románticos y cariñosos en extremo.  Me da una alegría destacada.

Leyendo a Nietzsche:  "el sendero de nuestro cielo pasa por la voluptuosidad de nuestro infierno." (our path to heaven goes through our own hell´s voluptosidad.") p 252.

Nietzsche as first evolutionary philosopher, o sea that is the geneological approach, drawing on his own genio and Lamarck – Darwin, he forges a new historicism that is not just (or only) dialectic but systematic, in that it views history as a dynamic system of evolving objects:  men, cultural constructs, ideologies, etc.

"Quisiera dar y distribuir hasta que los sabios de entre los hombres volvieran a sentirse alegres con su locura y los pobres felices con su riqueza." p 256

[The "retroblogging" project:  this is a "back-post" transcribed from paper on 2010-11-28.  I've decided to "fill-in" my blog all the way back.  It's a big project.  But there's no time limit, right?  The above was written one afternoon, after work.  Probably in a Starbucks.  I was reading Nietzsche, in Spanish.]

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