To continue with this gimmick... this is to illustrate the contrast of how my mind has been poisoned since the summer. I did this almost unconsciously when I got my scattergories back today, looking at the list on the outside of the box on the T......
LIST 4:
1.) HEROES
Judith Butler. heroine is a drug not a woman. we don't need a linguistic category to perform a social one into being.
2.) GIFTS/PRESENTS
Mauss himself! Though he has really only given us an obligation to give back...
3.) TERMS OF ENDEARMENT
anti-oedipal?
4.) KINDS OF DANCES
"how can we know the dancer from the dance?"
5.) THINGS THAT ARE BLACK
"black" is contextual, an empty signifier - like all discourse
6.) VEHICLES
ideology
7.) THINGS FOUND IN AN ARENA
lions, tigers, bears, and objectified women subjected to an imagined male gaze.
8.) THINGS PEOPLE GOSSIP ABOUT
firstly: things about which people gossip. secondly: who are these people? thirdly, is "gossip" a valid speech genre?
9.) COLORS
i don't know... I'm more of a humanities person. something about electrons and waves, no? how does it resonate with YOU, reader?
10.) THINGS IN A SOUVENIR SHOP
commodity fetishes
11. ITEMS IN YOUR PURSE/WALLET
my 2 cents: again, why these gendered / categories... what damn DIFFERAANCE does it make!?!
12. WORLD RECORDS
what field of knowledge legitimates these kinds of hierarchies of value, really?
Funny how most of my blog
starts are at the beginning of a long year
abroad and then they disappear...
Well NEW IDEAR
Now that i'm in Bahston
....and it's not poetry (thank god)
Well, I might throw in a poem every now and then when I'm feeling existential BUT most of the time I'm going to play scattergories instead.
Here is a summary of my summer in the official game's list 14:
1.) WORN ABOVE THE WAIST
my nerdy camelback nozzle. yes i did drink out of it sometimes.
2.) THINGS THAT ARE BRIGHT
the top of the state house! but not the students who, I learned, once tried scraping gold off the top of it to pay for college. it's not a very discreet place...
3.) THINGS THAT HAVE NUMBERS
ages on student ID cards... whoooops.
4.) FOUND IN A GYM/HEALTH CLUB
not me.
5.) CHAIN STORES
family dollar. .....oh yeahhh. nothing makes me feel entitled like all of the cleaning supplies i could ever want.
6.) WAYS TO SAY HI AND BYE
"Well.... now I'm bloated and disoriented. I'll go home"
(a customer leaving the restaurant said this to me while I was hosting. It was actually a nice change from the routine greeting)
7.) THINGS IN THE BACKYARD
the prudential! literally behind my window where I lived this summer!
8.) THINGS I USE TO DECORATE MY HOUSE
a mouse. ...is it still a decoration if you don't choose it?
9.) ITEMS IN AN OFFICE
in my office? bananagrams and scattergories and google images mug shots for ESL kids to describe and candy to pacify them... a sort of starbursts communion.
10.) THINGS IN PAIRS OR SETS
If Infinite Jest came in sets, I wouldn't need weights to lift for when I am not at the gym. I only made it about half way in the end, but there is always next summer!
11.) ARTISTS
this guy on Newbury who I will always remember singing the possibly drug-induced but very original acoustic lyrics,
"your head is replaced by a cabbage/ is / something that could never happen"
I always wonder where quality control happens in the giving out of permits to street musicians.
I also got into the following artists, some thanks to one of my dearest friends, who emptied and refilled my ipod in june: Mountain Man, Nick Drake, Morphine, Frank Turner, Jackson C Frank, Laura Marling, and many others.
12.) THINGS IN LAS VEGAS
also not me. i did get out to vermont and cape cod though!
Today, I am thinking about Anglo-Saxon English. I spent much of my afternoon at an outdoor cafe by this statue that the townspeople call "La Fountaine Moussue" (the mossy fountain) but which my British assistant friends and I know is really a leafy rendering of some sort of Mushroom. "Meet me at the mushroom" may have an unfortunate resonance for some, but not for us.
Sipping my miniature coffee and nibbling my miniature cookie, feeling a bit like Gulliver chez les Lilliputians, I am preparing for the GRE literature exam, trying to keep my flashcards away from le mistral.
Right now, I am reading in the Norton Anthology about "Kenning."
"Kenning" is the term for when, in Anglo-Saxon English, "a compound of two words takes the place of another." The Norton gives a few examples that tickle me pink, such as when "SEA" is termed "WHALE-ROAD" or "BODY" is called "LIFE-HOUSE." ("I'll tell ya - my Lifehouse sure is cold in this Whaleroad!")
I picture a barbaric Anglo-Saxon rudely forcing out the syllables. But then I think…. Well, actually, modern English is not a far leap from this kind of literalism.
In Britain, a stove is called a "cooker" - thing that cooks. The thing that elevates you to the next level of the apartment is an elevator. That which lies outside the norm is an outlier.Why can't we call our bodies "life houses"?
And so many words are like that, but with hidden roots… In old English, "Gar" mean "Spear" and "Leek" means "vegetable." "Garlick" therefore is "A vegetable that looks like a spear."
In English, drop a hyphen into anything, or squish two words together and you have a perfect compound.
Maybe we could also make it contextual and whimsical. For instance, this week. if we apply kenning to Modern American English, "affirmative action" might be rendered "Woman-binder."
English is just that beautiful and whimsical.
And I hope that each of my days here continues to be.
