More selections from my e-mail account's out box. Most selections will be no more than a paragraph or two in length, but there will be exceptions.

From 05 November 2000:

"the world at the moment is a world indeed, replete with people and places. the people i know in the place that i now reside are unenthusiastic about another american invading their soil. i've avoided, thus far, more than one gang-beating by claiming canadian citizenship. we are the great evil, t____!

"i now have four theses to compose before the end of my german semester if i plan to receive credit from mannheim university. 160 pages. that is what they are requesting of me. 'twould be no sweat--were it but fiction they expected. i must produce these writings with the aid of secondary literatures i have yet to find, and within the time constraints of what i feel is an all-too-short period of two-and-a-half months. the doctors tell me everything will be fine, but that hasn't stopped them from drugging or physically restraining me."

From 11 January 2007:

"'Shyamalan, Dear Fellow,' I said, 'You are drunk.' Common knowledge to the both of us, of course. My vision was, itself, near-on-to-doubling, but such an admission would have robbed me of the sway my pronouncement held over him. The declaration of another's pissédness was, in our circle, something like an exemption from pissédness. The declarer, being of sound enough mind to call a friend on having turned up one or more past enough, is then yoked with the task of caring for all those whose current condition he considers to be less rigid (that is, 'upright') than his own.

"Shyamalan, I must say, was in a state of near-imbecility at this point. Before the Absenté really hit him (thujone or no, 55% alcohol by volume is still 55% alcohol by volume), he had been rattling on about how he was a storyteller and how his were stories what needed to be told the world through. He gets like this. Did then, does now, will continue to do so. But that is neither here nor there."

From 22 June 2006:

"A thorough scientific analysis of all my past e-mails has revealed that an average of 14% of each e-mail's content is worth reading. Further study indicates that at least 12.33% of that 14% (a negligible amount, even when one considers the length of some of my longer e-mails) provokes and promotes thoughtfulness in children under the age of seven. 72.28% of that thoughtfulness in children under the age of seven involves first-time exposure to matters vulgar, sensual or--far less often--trivial.

"I was seriously considering doing some work tonight. Thank you for giving me a reason to eschew (and spit out) that serious consideration. So on with this, tonight's diversionary tack (tit for that tack, and a thumb with it, too--with or without tact--bitten [but not at you {At you? Gesundheit!}] lipped and tweaked, coronated blue. And blue the winded, wound what it might--the jib's cut too tacky to sell it by flight. But sold it was, grounded, once the jib was sealed taut and lashed to the soldered mast's metal [not so taut, perhaps, as the lashed soldier's mettle--which, lasting past sirens, had landed him elsewhere {though not saintly, and thus wholly unlike Elmo. He followed an earlier light in theodicy, of course--which light led the ill lad, regrettably, off course in the odd sea}])."

From 7 August 2004:

I am at the library, and I am here because being here is the best place to be to avoid work. My avoidance has gotten to the "ridiculous" point. On the Spaceball 1 speed scale, "ridiculous" is still two notches below "ludicrous." It is almost to the point where I have no choice but to begin working on all that which I have--up to this point--avoided.

Yesterday, avoiding work led me to fill out some forms whose deadlines had already passed. No one seems all that worried about my having missed the deadlines; I am not all that worried, either, as I know I am only one in a large group of deadline missers (about half our department's graduate students. They can't kick us all out, right?). Avoiding work also led me to refine some lyrics for a song I have been working on for quite some time. Writing lyrics, for some people, is an important part of the song-writing process. For me, it is perfunctory, the reason being it is likely I won't retain a single lyric when the song actually comes into being. I don't really have a sense of how I want a song to sound when I am writing the lyrics (which comes, mostly, from not knowing anything about music other than that I know I like music), and once I begin recording the sounds it becomes apparent that there will be no way to apply my lyrics to it (either because I don't know how to do that, either, or because the two sound stupid together once they are paired).

From 9 November 2004:

I always feel rushed on campus computers, especially when I am writing e-mails. Part of this has to do with the over-the-shoulder-nosy-neighbor-factor--which is surely as familiar to you as it is to me. I was that nosy neighbor a little earlier in the day. I wanted to use a computer in the library, and none was available. Well, I walk past this one guy, and he's surfing for skinetration. I was appalled--though not because he was doing something I considered to be indecent. I was appalled because I needed a computer to do some class-related work, and here was this dude looking at still images of the sexual act. When I passed the first time, I only noticed what he was doing because he fumbled so to conceal it. I continued to pass by at random times, less because I wanted his computer and more just to make him feel bad about abusing school resources to do his thing.

It's not like looking at pornography is a bad thing. The bad thing about it is that all those pop-up windows gum up the works, freeze windows, cause reboots, et cetera. It makes it frustrating for the next person.

So, anyway, the man had been surfing freely, more or less, because he was sitting at the end of those motorized, moving book aisles (is there a special word for them?), and four or five were bunched up behind him, creating a kind of wall. I went to the other side of the aisles and opened up the space right behind him, with the intention of my action making him paranoid that someone was standing behind him, looking at him looking at porn. It seemed to work. He got up, left the computer. When I opened up the web browser, of course, ten new windows full of flesh popped up. Thank the Maker for Ctrl+W.

I don't know why I was so set on antagonizing the poor guy. He just wanted to get his daily eyeful of interracial anal action. Isn't that what everyone wants, after all?

What was my point, again? Ah, yes . . . feeling rushed at school. I never feel rushed at home. I feel downright lethargic, in fact. When I actually have all the time I need to write all the e-mails I want to write, I feel too lazy to do it.

The Kessel Run: Now Made in Even Fewer Parsecs! (From 30 January 2008)

What's that, Lucas? You actually did know what a parsec was, but you were making the point that a skilled pilot could make the Kessel Run by covering less distance than whatever the standard distance was? Then why did you say "less than"? Why not "fewer than"?

* * *

A large swath^1 of the following paragraph will be contained in the second sentence.

Manohla Dargis's criticism is pretty useless. Back when the Internet was little more than a rumor to me, I knew her as the critic in the critics' grades paradigm on the page opposite the previous week's box office takes in Entertainment Weekly who only ever liked obvious awards fodder and made sure to score everything lower than everybody else. (How's that for an awkward sentence?)

The New York Times has spent a considerable amount of money on the reviews of the likes of both Manohla Dargis and Elvis Mitchell. It makes one wonder how A. O. Scott manages to sleep through his nights.

I'm not saying that A. O. Scott's reviews should be borne as Good Movie Criticism's standard, mind you. I'm just saying that when you compare his reviews to those of Mitchell and Dargis . . .

* * *

If you want to see what passes for pompous in post-modern German pop reportage (yeah, you'd damned well better pronounce it in Froschzungisch^2), go here.

There's a Brecht reference in the title,^3 as well as an occurrence of the word "Entselbstung" (a term one only ever encounters in Hesse, Hesse criticism or Buddhist texts translated into German) in the first paragraph.

I told students to seek out and forward to me articles for translation in mid-October. One chose the above without bothering to skim at it, because he assumed it would be written in a manner similar to the manner in which AP writers write about celebrities in USA Today's "Lifestyles" section. What he didn't know to account for was Germany's AmiPop-obsessed^4 Feuilleton^5 culture.

The article isn't particularly difficult, but I'm sure you can imagine that it would not be the easiest read for someone who had only been reading German for a month-and-a-half.

* * *

But I like to use the word "latrocinious," which returns only four Google hits, so I'll do my best to refrain from being persnickety about this.^6

My assumption was that this word had something to do with one of America's two poisonous spiders,^7 considering the entity responsible for presenting "Walking" to the world. (If this video had been made after James Brown's death, it would have had even more offensive potential. You added it after his death, though, so you get points for that.)

My trip to my library's PE 1625^8 section tells me, however, that it is more likely that the word has something to do with theft. If I had paid more attention in Latin--and if I hadn't taken a year's worth of it in six weeks--there would have been no need to make the trip.

Whatever the case, it sounds more like an adjective for people who frequent theater washrooms:

"You'd better piss before we go to the movie. I hear it's three hours long."
"I'll just wait until after I'm there. I'm latrocinious, you know."

_______________
^1 Here I am making fun of Dargis's misuse of "swath" in her There Will Be Blood review.
^2 My German neologism for frog-tongue-ish.
^3 Mutter Blamage und ihre Schinder ("Mother Disgrace and Her Oppressors") is a play on a Brecht play's title (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder ["Mother Courage and Her Children"]).
^4 Ami is a term of disparagement Germans often use when speaking critically of Americans.
^5 A Feuilleton--in the German sense (though it is an appropriation, as one might guess from the word, itself, of something originally French)--is a kind of snotty, academic newspaper insert that examines some area of culture, the arts or politics. There is no real American equivalent.
^6 This a quote from the writing of the friend to whom I am responding.
^7 Latrodectus mactans, otherwise known as the Black Widow.
^8 If you were to walk to this section (which section employs the Library of Congress's book filing system), you would encounter the Oxford English Dictionary.

Am I the only one of us who likes to dig around in his e-mail annals?

That's a big 10-4!

I reminisce some times... but I don't really feel compelled to share that with you blokes.

But, Thursty, if you want to share a small piece of your mind with us, go right ahead.

Please correct my spelling of reminisce. I know I fucked it up.

No need to correct your spelling of reminisce.

You spell it the way I spell it, and I spell it the way dictionaries spell it.

So, by the transitive property, I'm right?

Good. Good.

From 17 November 2008

The other day, I was writing "smoke" on the board. I guess I was in a German state of mind, because it came out "smock." (I had yet to write the "e.") I rubbed out the "c" with my hand, wrote a "k" over it. This left it "smokk." (You can see where this is going, perhaps.) I was about to rub out the unnecessary "k" when I forgot I was standing in front of my perpetual sticks-in-the-mud freshmen and decided to put a third "k" up there for a laugh. I had done something similar with my graduate students last year, and it had been received unanimously positively. It was not received unanimously positively this time. One student took umbrage. This student is the same one, I realized later on, who asked for Yom Kippur off. If no mention of this is made in the evaluation, I will be a lucky man. I have done dumber things in the past, but not many that were all that much dumber. Maybe I need to go the Michael Richards/Mel Gibson route, seek out some minority activists and finally admit to my deep-seated, hurtful racism.

* * *

Here's something I wrote in a Joyce forum:

Folks are desperate to impose "connections/correspondence" of Portrait and Dubliners to classic work because of the rather obvious, intended connection of Ulysses to The Odyssey. This desperation is born out of any number of desires on the part of the theoretician, but its end result is usually little more than a mild amusement.

It could be that years of associating with CompLit types has soured me to most anything said types would have to say about any work's correspondence to any other work.

At some point, I became a bitter fuck. I am within a spur-kick or more's space from being made to wonder why I ever hopped on this dead horse I've come to know as Academia in the first place. I suppose I supposed, as did Dedalus, that modality is ineluctable. Anything ridden is a thing ridden somewhere, right? Inert, inertia. Ridden, riddance.

*sigh*

I am the joke I used to tell!