Worst paper-writing service ever.

Reading my undergraduate work is a short trip to hell. Actually, the same may be true for my graduate work. Come to think of it, I should avoid reading any of my work. Wow, things just got much simpler. You should be a life coach, Labs.

"Odor of pinks" and "Semiotic inability" are particularly good.

You should read the one about epistemology in MacBeth and Hamlet.

"robbed of his symbolic phallus" should be the new mouseover.

Glen Reynolds can say something that's not toolish?

All my papers were on things like Eastern Bloc labor theory and the role of wheat in South American settlement and immigration patterns. The topics didn't really lend themselves to florid prose.

Glen Reynolds can say something that's not toolish?

But on the subject of tools, you'll note.

"Robbed of its natural bounty of rich topsoil, the land lay empty and devastated, like Willy Loman."

robbed of his symbolic phallus

See, this has been happening to me for years now. But I only just realized it. I owe you, Labs.

"Odor of pinks." Holy shit, you're a genius. Seriously, this is a great idea. I have a ton of my stuff saved, and I was doing a lot of continental philosophy as an undergrad; it should be a gold mine.

I've got your number, Ari. Bill is in the mail.

Speaking of the symbolic phallus.

I believe all of my literary essays have long since been properly disposed of in the appropriate toxic waste dumps (about the best I got was "This reads like Faulkner—C+" in a Faulkner course.) However, I have something of the opposite reaction to blue books from upper level Math/Science courses. First some very hard or even incomprehensible question is asked, and then some stranger using my name jumps in and offers what apparently was an adequate answer. Very mysterious, and somewhat disturbing.

it should be a gold mine.

A friend of mine once that a bunch of us get together, get drunk, and read out the Personal Statements we wrote for our grad school applications.

My undergraduate papers are mostly on linguistics, so not so florid. Not that they aren't embarrassingly terrible in their own ways.

Talk about embarrassing, I published all my undergrad stuff in Ethics under the name "G.A. Cohen"

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Witt & I are getting together Sunday evening in Philadelphia. If there are any Philly commenters or lurkers, join us!

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Here we go, from a freshman-year Kant paper, the hidden thesis of which was that I was insufferable.

A clock is a mystical thing. The second hand moves in a regular fashion without any visible force acting upon it and the minute hand and the hour hand follow the second hand regularly. However, the mysticism of the clock evaporates as soon as we look inside, for there are complex, yet comprehensible, parts and principles at work directing the motion of the clock. In order to understand Kant, we must assume the role of apprentice. We are being shown the inner workings of a complex, yet comprehensible instrument, the human mind. The second analogy of experience sheds light on the workings of the mind and in order to understand it, we have to understand Kant's picture of the mind and the rules that govern its operation. To this end, we must examine the nature of the world as it is presented to us, how we perceive and comprehend the world and lastly, why we perceive and comprehend the world as we do. Finally, although we will introduce the terms which Kant uses to name his principles and faculties, we will do so only for the sake of reference and thus hopefully render our presentation concise and understandable.

How on earth do you have that so accessible, Ogged?

(The royal we? Seriously?)

Oh, Ogged.

A clock is a mystical thing. The second hand moves in a regular fashion without any visible force acting upon it

Is there a footnote here, "Unless it is one of those clocks with a glass case, you know, the ones you see on mantlepieces sometimes."

As for the rest of it, it seems you move from the collective to the authorial "we" and "our" between the beginning of the paragraph and the end.

Now I'll have to see if I can find any vintage stuff in the bowels of my laptop.

Oh, Ogged.

Don't fall in love with my freshman-year self, redfox; I've changed!

19: I find it incredibly easy, effortless really, to draw a straight line between that paper and your love of Camille Paglia. In fact, even if I try not to draw that line, it draws itself.

(The royal we? Seriously?)

I seem to have done that in all my papers that year. Let me go to the next year and see if anything has changed. Come on people, dig 'em up!

You lot are making me glad I did science & math. Most of the embarrassing stuff you do there leaves little trace for posterity.

it seems you move from the collective to the authorial "we" and "our" between the beginning of the paragraph and the end.

Though he could not have realized it at the time, Ogged's undergraduate education amounted to a 4-year apprenticeship in the lonely art of blogging.

ll

I just find this completely bizarre:

Republican Mike Huckabee responded to an offstage noise during his speech to the National Rifle Association by suggesting it was Barack Obama diving to the floor because someone had aimed a gun at him.

Hearing a loud noise and interrupting his speech, Huckabee said: "That was Barack Obama. He just tripped off a chair. He's getting ready to speak and somebody aimed a gun at him and he -- he dove for the floor."

I absolutely cannot imagine the running interior monologue that would allow THAT image to be what was immediately accessible when you're speaking on stage and hear a loud noise. Am I nuts? I mean, you hear a loud crash and you make a joke about the sky falling in, or whether you should pay the stagehands better, or heck, you even say something to God as if that were him. Right?

You don't come up with an elaborate, multi-step farce about somebody who isn't even present. On cognitive grounds alone it doesn't even seem plausible.

ll>

You can owe me.

I will sum up with a metaphor. Withdrawal can have many meanings. Descartes' withdrawal is that of a man who lies still, closes his eyes and contemplates whereas Montaigne withdraws in the sense that he steps back, but in the way one steps back with a camera in order to include more in the picture. Thus, Descartes finds in himself a mind while Montaigne finds a part of all that he has known.

On cognitive grounds alone it doesn't even seem plausible.

He was speaking to the NRA, which makes it more understandable.

28: It isn't plausible, and I really doubt he was thinking anything like it until he got started. It's just tribal signalling.

Withdrawal can have many meanings.

Awesome.

I've found some stuff from just before grad school, and the depressing thing is not so much the sustained smart-assery (though there is that) as the fact that I clearly haven't had a new idea in 15 years.

Maybe I should scan a college project and put it on Flickr.

Okay, here's the concluding paragraph to an undergrad seminar on postmodernism:

Rave culture is generally not one which a person can adopt for every-day life. Extasy can be a very harmful drug if used regularly, and the physical side effects of dancing for six straight hours can be severe. Those who do take on this lifestyle for long periods of time are rare and usually cannot keep it up for more than a few years. However, those who melt into this scene for a night or two every month can often take on the proper bourgeois characteristics required in this semi-modern society, while knowing that they can transform into the perfect post-modern individual by the exchange of a little bit of paper currency. This kind of flexibility between modes of existence is perhaps an even better example of post-modern life. For most of one's life, one is confined in the weary drudgery of anxiety, but if one picks up the right rave flyer, one can experience "jouissance."

But the NRA thing was so weird, because he was talking about how peaceful and good gun-owners are, and how they know right from wrong. Is he suggesting that shooting Obama is something a right-thinking person would do?

Holy crap, I'll need to dig up my old history papers when I get home. They go even younger, back to high school, but I remember having a lot of fun with the titles: "How Tokugawa Got His Groove Back", "Micks, Limeys, Frogs and Wogs: The Rise of Nationalism in Western Europe", that sort of thing.

Further to 29: Although the exam questions are sadly lost, my then-girlfriend decided to answer them while I procrastinated.

1. It is very important to withdraw in time. Otherwise you might make babies, which are certainly of great ethical significance. The fact that both Descartes and Montaigne managed to do this illustrates the effectiveness of there epistemology of the rhythm method. For Montaigne, this withdrawal is connected to his interior sense of inferiority. For Descartes, this withdrawal is evidence of his failure to accomplish inwardly.

2. Since they withdrew so frequently, neither Descartes nor Montaigne were able to conceive much. However, Descartes was able to reason that his skepticism was very influential in shaping his identity as an extremely annoying kind of guy. Montaigne, on the other hand, was skeptical of the reason his mother gave for his formation. They both answered the question "who am I?" succinctly.

3. Montaigne and Descartes both had big minds. Montaigne would have liked to tell Rousseau that he liked his hairdo, but that Montaigne's "friend" beat the pants off Descartes' "tutee." He also would have told Descartes to stop leaning out of windows and pretending to be deep.

30: When you're talking to the NRA, or another audience of gun nuts enthusiasts, every sound, splinter and squint is a reason to arm America's law-abiding citizens.

items that cannot be thrown away
the solution could be you can present them to some other people you like and those items will become their items of sentimental attachment, not your burden b/c it's always easy to give gifts
my undergrad projects were all history of illnesses
i remember the mute girl and the sharko-marie -tooth's muscular dystrophy cases, others were just regular pneumonias and nephritis perhaps so don't remember those, it's b/c our system is different from the US, we go directly to the medical school, not after the college
our philosophy classes were all dialectic materialism and conspects of Marx, Engels, Lenin or resolutions of the NNth KPSS or MRP conferences
so have pretty vague notion of Kant Descartes Montaigne, so keep them coming
i like the dissolves herself in the sea phrase

but if one picks up the right rave flyer, one can experience "jouissance."

I love it.

All of my papers from undergrad were handwritten, and are thus sadly lost to posterity.

vintage stuff in the bowels

Check the appendix.

My mom is convinced that someone will shoot BHO.

Papers written for professors are child's play. Go look at email from before 1994.

On cognitive grounds alone it doesn't even seem plausible.

It becomes more plausible (which is not to say less gun-nutty!) when you recall that Huckabee's son has a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

I like "the weary drudgery of anxiety."

30, 31, 35: But what I'm saying is, he didn't make a joke about the noise being a gunshot (heaven forbid). He made a joke about the noise being someone falling off a chair because of a gun. It's a two-step "joke."

I don't know. When I'm speaking in public and something unexpected happens, I have a whopping two tools in my repertoire: joke/pun about something really obvious, or canned timewaster while we figure out how to get the lights back on or whatever. This doesn't seem like either of those.

Never give a first-semester graduate student a paper to review, even as a pretend exercise:

I feel the author is aware of most of the argumentative problems, given the range of arguments presented. At best, the paper is just badly written and the argument poorly articulated. If this is true then the author needs to eliminate the superfluous parts of the case and focus upon the core argument - although there are a number of candidates in the paper. At worst, though, there are severe problems with the argument that the paper tries to make. If this is true, then I think it unlikely that these problems could be solved in a new draft while keeping it a recognisable revision of the first rather than a whole new article.

The first sentence of 34 gives me an image of ordinary settings -- the supermarket, the office, the bank -- in which all the participants have attempted to adopt rave culture for every-day life.

41: This is true for me as well.

And it turns out that my work in graduate school was so brilliant that it would blow your minds/topple the ivory towers of academe. I can't have that much blood on my hands. (Seriously, it's all just really boring. Much like my current work.)

45 reads like a parody of learned cluelessness.

Oooh, here's another embarassing one. It's in agrammatical, jargony French, so it would likely be fun to run through Babelfish.

L'imposition d'une règle volontaire, le noude à present, l'audacieuse tentative, est de "fixer le rêve" -- de l'écrire, de le mettre en ordre, de l'étudier. C'est bien l'imposition du conscient sur les traces affectives du rêve, pour en decouvrir les mechanismes, mais aussi de faire ré-présenter le contenu, pour faire ré-jouer ces esprits de nuits. L'écriture de rêve est l'essai de rendre "présent" le caché, d'imposer une ordre formelle sur des sensations fort importantes, qui sont organisées sous une logique étrangère, la logique de l'Absolu ou de l'inconscient. Cette déclaration volontariste ressemble beaucoup à l'énonciation du désir de "pénétrer le mystère" pour laquelle le /je/ tragique a été condamné dans notre passage. La tragédie de la vie de Nerval suivrait de près la tragédie de la pièce mise en scène dans le dixième chapitre, si l'on considèrait cette déclaration d'écrire comme parallèle au début de notre récit de rêve. On pourrait se demander combien il est possible d'imposer des règles conscientes à des ré-présentations affectives, comment il est possible de contenir une expérience dans une ordre. Ecrire la réduction du /je/, n'est-il pas condamner le /moi/ d'un point de vue extérieur? L'effacement formel du /je/ à travers ce texte, en plein tragédie autobiographique, n'est-il pas la défaite rendue consciente? Ce récit de rêve semble de déborder ses contraintes formelles, traînant de l'affect après lui pour le spectateur/lecteur, un affect trop dix-neuvième d'être cathartique.

I'm really starting to wonder how someone didn't just shoot me during my undergrad days.

The Habermasian solution to this, a rational inter-subjectivity, may be a step in the right direction. But I do not see how we have really gotten beyond the problem. How does agreement among many about the good lead us to the good? What is the starting place of this rationality, must not every rationality have some untestable, unquestionable ground? And what can we do with rationalities which spring from different grounds? It seems that we still leave the core of each individual untouched. We may be able to talk with people about the coherence of their beliefs but I do not see how we can address their beliefs at their roots. I have already gone on too long and at this time, I have no answer to this problem.

45 reads like a parody of learned cluelessness.

There's three or four more pages along those lines before I wind up to the concluding paragraph in 45.

45 reads like a parody of learned cluelessness the graduate seminar.

I knew my papers were awful at the time and destroyed them as soon as possible. I have always been incapable of maintaining a serious, scholarly tone for much more than a paragraph. The only way I found around that was to write three paragraphs and go away for a while, then come back and delete all of the third, rewrite the second, and then write two more.

I also presented an utterly awful thing on Berg's Wozzeck in German during my year in Heidelberg. That one is lost to both time and distance, thank $deity.

Oh Jaysus. I just found something from my MA days in the old country, on Habermas:

Habermas's house (like the Lord's) has many rooms. It has often been noted that, in this house, the most promising doors lead to the least well-constructed areas.

Awesome. Here's Google Translator's version of the last bit of 49:

Write reduction / I /, is it not condemn / me / from an outside? The obliteration of formal / I / through this text, full-autobiographical tragedy, is it not the defeat made aware? This story dream seems to extend beyond its formal constraints, the affect of dragging after him for the viewer / reader, too affect nineteenth to be cathartic.

I have already gone on too long and at this time, I have no answer to this problem.

Also awesome. Nothing like ending on a note of honesty!

Habermas's house (like the Lord's) has many rooms.

Ahahaha. Way to play to the audience.

I have always been incapable of maintaining a serious, scholarly tone for much more than a paragraph. The only way I found around that was to write three paragraphs and go away for a while, then come back and delete all of the third, rewrite the second, and then write two more.

You, like Labs, possess a window into my soul and work habits. The above is how I write to this day. The problem with this method, of course, is that at least 1/3 of everything I produce remains a steaming pile of poo -- even after it's published.

I've been looking through my old papers to see if I have anything to contribute, but I still haven't found anything. A lot of them are awful, but not in a way that comes through clearly in the prose.

Habermas's house (like the Lord's) has many rooms.

Father Ted encounters the Frankfurt School!

I don't have any undergraduate papers, because most were handwritten. In a first-year grad school paper on Oliver Twist, I proved myself mistress of the obvious with gems like:

It is not surprising that Dickens has been charged with anti-Semitism in his depiction of the diabolical Jew who seduces young boys into a life of crime.

Wow. Reading the thread backwards, these excerpts from early papers are fucking great. Mine aren't computer archived, but I'm sure horrible. I looked back at some when I applied to grad school. Now even the grad school work, which was half decent, is in paper copy only.

And here is the thing of it; you folks were the good students.

So incredibly pleased with myself.

We are so accustomed, if we are not philosophers, to understand language as a means of self-expression that it is quite strange to suggest that perhaps language is in fact a way to hide things from ourselves. But Nietzsche, whose iconoclasm became so chic that it is now almost passé, suggests precisely that.

62: This is why I've begun to outsource my grading.

whose iconoclasm became so chic that it is now almost passé

This is your critique of the Unfoggetariat, no?

This is your critique of the Unfoggetariat, no?

Please see Gonerill's "no new ideas" comment.

Damn, y'all should get out more!

It was bad enough reviewing what nonsense came out of one's fingers the night before, when one was singing "I am kicking ass! I rule!" to one's pitiable beige Mac. I'd rather get my fingernails drawn out than revisit the papers of a decade-plus ago.

I found this one:

Even being less mediate on the mediacy scale does not bring one closer to the immediate: immediacy exists on a level above the scale of mediacy, and no matter how little mediated a mediate being is, it can never jump to the level of immediacy.

In my defense, I was writing on Heidegger, the process of which makes a lot of torturous sentences seem like they're actually saying something.

69 gets an "F." I'm really sorry. Please tell your parents not to call me. I'm not changing the grade.

See, my parents would laugh at me if I asked them to call a professor for me.

And I ended up getting an A- in that course.

69 makes perfect sense, Ari, you German hater.

71: I'm a notoriously tough grader.

72: You know why I hate the Germans. So just back off, anti-semite.

Watch it, Ari, or I'll pull out some selections from my senior thesis on German Jewish literature.

You know why I hate the Germans.

Because their women look like men? Could you be more sexist?

German Jews are the worst, Blume. Everyone knows that. And no, Ogged, I can be none more sexist. My sexism has maxed out at eleven.

34: JM wins.

BTW, she'll do anything for a copper-bottom kettle. Anything.

"German Jews are Germans" said my Russian Jewish friends.

"German Jews are Germans" said my Russian Jewish friends

"Yekkas," like my wife's family, freely admit it.

Everyone should read The Pity Of It All.

This is from freshman year of college. As I recall, I got a D on this one, and concluded, correctly, that if I praised Dickens, I would get As. I forgot to sign it "Bob McManus."

And here the crux of our argument comes to light: Dickens cannot escape what we have called his ideological baggage, he does not admire anger in the working classes--anger which could potentially move them to gain better lives for themselves--rather, he admires the more innocuous and benign resignation we see in Stephen. Dickens' attitude is made even more manifest in his critical portrayal of Slackbridge and his followers. Granted, many labor leaders and movements were not always pure in the moral sense and not always right in the practical sense, but they were the ultimate source of salvation for the workers. It seems that Dickens, perhaps deep down, would rather pity the working class than see the major social upheaval necessary
for their liberation.

You got a D for that? Where'd you go to college?

Contrast:

Here is the final long paragraph of my final undergrad paper, written at the end of a 24 or so hour stretch of constant writing:

They were not, however, so obsessed with death as to have no hope at all. Indeed although Puritan fatalism and belief in predestination did find some voice in the literature, this appeal mostly related to the material implications of these ideas: plague victims and the poor did not want to be isolated, dispersed, or shut-up. The fact that numerous descriptions of those who remained in the city emphasize the fear people had of walking near each other on the street implies that they still believed somewhat in the possibility of catching the infection through contagion. Furthermore, implicit in this moralizing about death is the potential for rebirth, purification, and the future escape from pestilence for the survivors. Most non-radical interpretations of plague saw the disease as a temporary affliction of God designed to improve society. Furthermore, aside from The Journal, each of these works appeared after the start of an epidemic, and most came once the plague was all but gone. These writings did not give advice for immediate use; instead they attempted to place a more vivid, terrifying image of plague in the minds of their readers so that they would take to heart the morals of the stories and act accordingly in the future. All, including a usually secular Defoe, held out the possibility that, if they acted with enough faith and devotion, God would be merciful and prevent the arrival of another mass mortality. In the case of 1722, the increase in specificity of the Journal reflected the presence for the first time of a specific, observable threat. Similarly, the literary moralizing advocated more secular actions: the separation of sick from healthy, the quarantine of England, and the good conduct of the government and people. Consequently, "God's mercy" in this last case took on a more material form: the preservation of England from the Marseilles plague.

Here's that same paragraph revised one year later for a grad student application writing sample, where it's no longer the final paragraph:

These writers were not, however, so obsessed with death as to show no hope at all. Implicit in the moralizing about death and repentance is the potential for rebirth, purification, and the future escape from pestilence for the survivors. Most of the literary plague writers saw the disease as a temporary affliction of God designed to purge and thereby improve society. Through these terrible images of God's wrath in the form of plague, they sought to show people the changes they needed to make in order to improve their world. They held out the possibility that, if everyone acted with enough faith and devotion, God would be merciful and prevent the arrival of another visitation. Moreover, Defoe's Journal also promoted the idea that proper social and political action - in addition to religious faith - could be instrumental in facing the threat of a new plague. Defoe's literary moralizing advocated more secular actions: the separation of sick and healthy, the quarantine of England, and the good conduct of the government and people. In a sense, "God's mercy" for this last case showed itself not only in the removal of the plague in 1665 but also in the preservation of England from the Marseilles plague.

I published an undergrad paper. Of course, I was an undergrad at age 34.

Nearly all my papers were handwritten as well, and I doubt are still in existence. I do have the stuff I did for the Poetry Writing class I took my freshman year, but no way am I posting any of that.

You got a D for that? Where'd you go to college?

Like I said, the key was praising the Great Author. They were teaching us more valuable lessons than thinking or writing.

(Actually, if I'm remembering correctly, this was a freshman comp class taught by a sociology prof--some experiment the school was running with senior faculty from various disciplines interacting more closely with freshman. Each freshman took two of these classes and my other one was great.)

I do have the stuff I did for the Poetry Writing class I took my freshman year, but no way am I posting any of that.

Oh come on!!

I published an undergrad paper.

And your ancestors were murderers and heretics. Show-off.

Post some poetry, Apo!

Funny story about guy I know talking to a big shot about teaching in the Core of a Certain Midwestern University with Ideas About Itself.

Guy: You teach in the Core?

Big Shot: Yes. But teaching is more than just showing up and lecturing. Anyone can do that. I endeavor to teach. Frankly, they don't pay well enough to have someone of my calibre doing that.

Guy: If you're doing it, they're paying you enough.

The conclusion to my senior essay, which was a not-close-enough reading of the made-for-TV-movie The Day After, with help from Frank Kermode, Walter Benjamin, and Garry Wills (on Lincoln!):

I dedicate this essay to apocalyptic readers of history, to those who will read the self-congratulatory monologues of Empire in their moments of danger. And who will interrupt.

Rousing! I got the "let's throw them all up in the air, and the ones that land on the ground get an A-."

I don't have any of my old papers, and none were any good. I filed the most dismissively insulting little bit of writing I can remember in a case earlier this week. I think commenting here has definitely improved my dismissiveness.

(Yes, it was more insulting than comparing the Attorney General's investigation of the destruction of those CIA tapes to OJ's hunt for the real killers).

The contrast in 82 is a great argument for the power of editing.

My first two papers in college were handed back to me as unacceptable; in one of them, I referenced The Tao of Pooh while explaining Emerson's Eastern mysticism.

Here's one of mine I found on the causes of the 1953 uprisings in E. Germany:

In 1948, under the auspices of the "German Economic Commission," the Soviets began to transform the East German economy from a crippled but vaguely market-oriented system into a command economy modeled after the Soviet Union (Allen 1989). The transformation included three main elements (Allen 1989): (1) the aforementioned separation from Western economies; (2) a focus on industrial goods; and (3) on the institution of a "Five Year Plan" similar to those undertaken previously by the Soviet Union. This had a predictably deleterious effect on the East German economy, and reconstruction efforts in East Germany lagged far behind that of West Germany by the early 1950s. Further, wages were below 50 percent of the pre-war levels (Allen 1989). By mid-1952, the economic situation in the German Democratic Republic was grim.

I like the word "grim".
And more!

Throughout 1952 and early 1953, the Secretary General of the SED, Walter Ulbricht, and by extension, the state as a whole remained largely ignorant of the potential political effects of the food shortages. In an attempt to punish what were seen as "capitalist elements" in East German society , the SED alienated an entire segment of the population it had not intended to, judging by the relatively genuine attempts to accommodate workers in the collective agreements negotiations (Baring 1972). Furthermore, this punishment in light of previous concessions constituted inconsistent reinforcement of a burgeoning social movement.

I feel like a wanker every time I write "social movement".

Now we're just killing time until Apo posts his poems. (I'll look for some of mine, Apo). This is from a paper in seventh or eighth grade. Shockingly topical! (And I resisted the urge to fix the one glaring grammatical mistake before posting.)

Soon after gaining control of SAVAK, the Shah came to depend upon it to allow him a freer hand in ruling Iran. SAVAK had so many informers throughout Iran, that, presently, Iranians stopped trusting each other. This "Policy of Distrust,"3 as it came to called, soon affected people so that they no longer voiced their political opinions, for fear of being prosecuted. People even lost confidence in themselves and their own beliefs. The Shah ruled over what could be called almost an introverted society, where people kept to themselves because there was no one else to trust. This lack of interest in government and reluctance to oppose the Shah, gave the king an opportunity to run rampant with his policies of both good and bad, of modernization. The Shah also depended on SAVAK to prosecute all civilian crimes. This required the Shah to give SAVAK the privilege of having the Powers of the Magistrate. With no one to answer to, SAVAK held its prisoners indefinitely. Trials were conducted unfairly and the sentence was, in most cases, much more harsh than what would have truly served justice. Another aspect of SAVAK's criminal prosecution was that it worked with the military. The strict and disciplined nature of the armed forces increased the incidence of torture and brutality that prisoners were forced to undergo.

34 is awesome. I kind of like 29, actually. There's a lot of bragging in this thread, ya know. Don't tell the SWPL guy.

At the end of high school, after college acceptances were in, I allowed a friend to write my compare and contrast of Slaughterhouse 5 and Catch-22 while I finished the liner notes to our band's cassette.

"Throughout history, man has struggled with two books, each of which have numbers in their names."

I went with it.

Ooh, I can play the here's-an-embarrassing-story-about-how-stupid-I-am game. When I got back the first paper -- on the uses of historical fiction in pedagogy -- I handed in during my first year of graduate school, it had only the following comment on it: "See me." The commenter, G/ordon W/ood, was then fresh off collecting his Pulitzer Prize and also renowned as a, um, no-nonsense fellow. So I was pretty nervous when I went to meet with him. And with good reason! W/ood explained to me that if I didn't learn how to write and think before the end of the semester, I would be booted from the program. I never really did either of those things. But I made sure that my second paper that semester was graded by another faculty member.

That paper, unfortunately, is lost to the ages. It was on an early Mac laptop that died long before I mastered the art of backing-up. Sorry about that.

"Throughout history, man has struggled with two books, each of which have numbers in their names."

So great. What did the teacher think?

99: He was amused. He gave me a F for appearances' sake, but he also taped a really funny intro to our movie.

OK, here's a snatch from my VEVAK case:

Application of the core function test to this case is simple. The Ministry here is, like the Bolivian Air Force or the Turkish Army, an undifferentiated part of a foreign sovereign. Its acts are those of the Iranian government. Its core functions and even its support of Islamic terrorists in Lebanon, are clearly governmental in nature. Indeed, the Court of Appeals has already held in Cicippio I, that Iran's support of the very acts of terrorism at issue in this case was governmental rather than commercial in nature. 30 F.3d at 168. The core functions of an intelligence service are as categorically governmental as military services. Intelligence gathering is as old as government,* and as much a part of it as is a military. Certainly the Iranian tradition - the Ministry's predecessor SAVAK was formed in the 1950s - compels the conclusion that the Ministry is engaged in governmental functions. Under the governing law in this circuit, then, the Ministry was immune from punitive damages when Cicippio II was litigated.

* , e.g., Joshua 2:1-25; Homer's Iliad; Book X; R. Sheldon, Spies and Mailmen and the Royal Road to Persia, 14 American Intelligence Journal 37-40 (Autumn/Winter 1993). An analogue closer in time and perhaps in function is the intelligence and counter-espionage service John Thurloe operated for Oliver Cromwell beginning in 1653. See A. Fraser, Cromwell, the Lord Protector 518 (1973). Our own Central Intelligence Agency, restrained by American values from engaging in the full range of activities in which the Ministry is said to be involved, is a modern example. There is no question but that the CIA's core function is governmental. See 50 U.S.C. §403-3(d).

I learned just today that the decision in the case is published: 451 F. Supp. 2d 181 (D.D.C. 2006).

Post some poetry, Apo!

I'd have to climb into the attic and dig through boxes, which is a bigger task than I'm up to on a Friday night. I'll do you one better, though: poetry from my sophomore year in high school, reaching Olympian heights of wholly inauthentic Jim Morrison angst, as only tragically misunderstood, tortured, sensitive teenagers can do.

Entitled
I exhale slowly, watching smoke do tricks;
The nighttime New York air is coughing back
At me, its rotten breath alive with smells
Of switchblade scars and topless bars and men
Who need the sewer grates for heat. A girl
With sunken eyes and needlemarks shoots
Me a sexless wink and I smile back but think,
"I wonder if her mother knows (or cares)?"
Around the corner with his shaved head stands
The holy water Batman chanting Hare
Krishna mantras to the sidewalk cracks.
Another block and from an alley three
Lost wisemen hand me three unshaven stares;
The trashcan furnace lights up trembling palms
And sandpaper cheeks. A brick wall covered with
The work of spraycan poets, artists, and
Philosophers seals off a dirty one-room perch.
Inside it, standing by a sink, some thin,
Grey, strung-out actor runs a razor down
His wrist and blinks as blood drops to the drain.
"You have to open up yourself to reach
An audience," his coach had taught him once.
A neon sign burns back and forth and each
Weak flash pins my reflection to my face.
The window of the store is crossed with bars.
I taste the last stale breath the cigarette has
To offer, toss it in the scrap-strewn street,
And keep on walking, searching for a crude
Messiah for us all.

I had not, of course, ever been anywhere even close to New York then. But I could *feel* it, man.

God, I friggin' love it. "Three unshaven stares" isn't bad, actually.

I have junior high and high school poetry, but it's all in literary magazines stored at my mom's place. Too bad, because my earnestness would kill you all.

I got nothin.' There's probably something awful, but it's not on this computer and didn't infect my philosophy writing, so I'd have to find the old undergrad papers in English or theology.

You gues save the good posts for when I'm busy all day, don't you? (Amazingly, I include the Timing one as well, though I bet there was a lot of humorlessness about SWPL in it.)

Sadly it will be hours yet before I can go through my undergrad papers (of which I have all still on my computer, and some even handed back with comments!).

I think I've lost most of mine to drive failures -- and anyhow am not at my computer -- but anybody who wants to see some excruciatingly embarrassing newsgroup posts from me circa 91 or 92 should be able to find them under Tweety Fish in the déjà news (google groups?) archives.

God, I friggin' love it.

I was awfully impressed with it. I graduated high school thinking I would either be the Tobacco Road Rimbaud or a revolutionary. Turned out to be not much of a job market for either. When I realized the potential for achieving either option, my next career plan was to open a head shop. Go with what you know, as they say.

So angst-ridden. So earnest.

A girl
With sunken eyes and needlemarks shoots
Me a sexless wink and I smile back but think,
"I wonder if her mother knows (or cares)?"

That's great! Thanks, apo.

my next career plan was to open a head shop.

Well, you know the old saying: Do what you love, and the criminal indictments will follow.

80 is fascinating. On a quick scan.

Shit, since I have nothing computerized any more, I still remember this, the final line of a grad seminar presentation on Hume: "We rail against ourselves." Huh. Pretty dramatic there, woman. A course in the political science dept., not phil, which would not have stood for that sort of thing. The prof. told me in the hallway that I should hang on to that half-hour presentation, to use in a course I might ever teach sometime. wrongshore says this is bragging! Naw, just memories.

There is a cumulative affect to reading this much undergraduate writing. For the first 10 or so examples, it was painful and I though, "there is no way I am going to try to find something to post."

No I'm wondering if I can find anything suitably embarrassing but not too embarrassing.

Okay, one, I'm really sorry that I missed this thread, and two, I was reading through going "god, dire!" "ew, awful" until I reached Apo's poem, at which point I actually burst out laughing before the end of the first sentence.

The thread ain't over, people. You haven't missed a thing! Post!

I still remember this, the final line of a grad seminar presentation on Hume: "We rail against ourselves."

I love it!

I almost wish I had saved my undergrad essay on the Enlightenment. It had a feminist theme, and I was inordinately proud of the subtitle: Creatures of Passion in an Age of Reason. I can't remember the title, though.

It's really too bad I don't have any poetry from my younger days to hand, because it all rhymed and you'd really enjoy it. I can't tell when this one is from, but I think it was college.

Old man sits still
With restive, watery eyes
Bending round the world
Like the river round the stone:
Each image bridges the eye and man
But always the traveler's fear
Of yesterday receding, small,
While tomorrow stands large, out of reach.

God, I actually burned most of my undergrad papers. No, really, I did: my friends and I had a bonfire on top of the student center at the end of finals. We were disaffected. I remember at some point thinking that perhaps a bonfire on top of a tarpaper roof wasn't a great idea.

I know I kept my undergrad thesis, though. I'll go look. If it's in a box in the garage, however, you'll all just have to imagine.

Actually, that's not bad, ogged, and only borderline embarrassing. Showoff!

Showoff!

Easy grader!

I've got some horrible stuff, but I'm still looking for it.

Yep, sorry, never unpacked that shit yet. Maybe after we move. Which we'll do SOON. Really.

I bet some of my MA stuff is pretty godawful, too. In fact, I *distinctly* remember an absolutely *appalling* exam question answer about feminist something or other, about which the reader's comment was, "this response is uninformed by feminist criticism. Then again, so is the question."

My mother threw out my undergrad thesis in a bout of spring cleaning. No respect for scholarship!

I'm impressed by the bravery of posting old poetry. There is NO WAY I would do that.

I never wrote poetry. I have no soul.

Aha! Some horrible stuff: found! College again, I think.

I'm a little lost, trying to find the grapefruit.
There's an old lady,
she keeps looking at me.

I can't find it,
maybe I look like her son,
maybe he died in the war.
What war?
Where's the grapefruit?

That kid looks like he's about to fall
out of the cart.
"Ma'am"
There are the oranges.

Maybe not her son, her husband.
If I belch, she'll hate me.
She smiled at me a little,
the bitch is going to make me cry.

Where's the goddam grapefruit?
I can't handle this pressure, forget it,
I hope you fall, brat.
I've got twelve things.

Good lord, this is one of the all-time classic Unfogged threads. I was trying to rank the contributions but there are just too many good ones. (I was thinking 34 won the thread until I hit 102).

Unfortunately, my undergrad magnum opus, "Freedom and Slavery in Aristotle and Hegel", is lost to posterity due to too many changes in memory storage formats. As is my superb essay on Kant's Critique of Judgement. You'll just have to imagine the brilliant defenses of Hillary Clinton's candidacy contained therein.

Somebody should start a web site devoted to immortalizing the most pompous undergrad papers.

maybe he died in the war.
What war?
Where's the grapefruit?

You, sir, are a fucking genius.

the bitch is going to make me cry.

More prolepsis!

115: Mutual friends of ours were in that course, MC.

Apo's poem was from high school? Good lord, my high school era stuff, not written for classes, because they didn't ask for much, was such crap. I wrote something on ee cummings I did like and labor over, whether it was crap or not.

My dad always made fun of the worst excesses of my writing as a kid (I was six, and he criticized a description I wrote of someone's hair by drawing it and taping it to my bedroom door), and while it had the sad (tiny violin) effect of making sure I never write fiction, it did mean that all the whimsy went out of my prose early.

Never did poetry unless it was assigned.

O, except for a series of intro philo papers where I was wayyy too infatuated with imagery.

I was selected as the poet laureate of my 11th grade AP English class. I wrote an ironic and self-assured poem about love, heavily influenced by Dylan lyrics and Somerset Maughm, when I had never even kissed a girl.

all the whimsy went out of my prose early

My sophomore year English teacher wrote, on one of the first papers I gave him, "Are you writing to impress, or to communicate?" That helped. But not enough! Haha!

The fabulousness of this thread, by the way, is one reason you should go to Get Mortified if it's in your town. This stuff (and they do a lot from old diaries) is comedy gold.

sophomore year English teacher

That would be high school.

Mutual friends of ours were in that course, MC.

Gimme a hint! Am I married to one of them?

Where's the goddam grapefruit?
I can't handle this pressure, forget it,
I hope you fall, brat.
I've got twelve things.

I love it. I absolutely love it.

I wish I had more of my undergrad poetry---I particularly remember one in which I analogised a crush to, I kid you not, a dwarf walking under a lamp-post---but that fucking former roommate stole all my journals.

Oh god, I just found a bunch of poems from grad school. Some are clearly awful, some I'm still kind of fond of. Both kinds are hard to post.

Gonerill's right; those three lines are just . . . wow, Ogged.

I had the foresight to preëmpt this humiliating exercise by not finishing many of my papers and destroying most of the rest. There was a hastily written on Derrida and Searle which, if I had it, I would be unlikely to share because I'm still embarrassed about it. I'll look for the one I know I still have, but I only saved it because next to probably my most brilliant aperçu of the semester, the professor had written, "Nice idea. Yours?"

I actually burst out laughing before the end of the first sentence

I had the same reaction when I pulled it out. Hadn't looked at it in years, but instantly went from "no way am I posting shitty poetry" to "oh Jesus, I have to post this."

I had the same reaction when I pulled it out.

At the Mineshaft!

Oh, and how many of the women here (or men, too, for that matter) went through a period of adolescent angst, the meaning and expression of which was basically organized around the work of Sylvia Plath? Like, you know, you read The Bell Jar and think it might be rather "special" to be locked away in an asylum because you're so misunderstood. (Not saying there aren't NON-adolescent-angst ways of reading/appreciating Plath, of course, but there's [or there was, at any rate] definitely a teen cult of Plath amongst the geeky girls).

Now you see. I have hung on (stubbornly) to my journals from early years. They're filled with things that, in this postmodern age, would be greeted with embarassed silence. Earnestness is deprecated, and so is halting speech. So is whimsy, of course.

Reproduce early poetic ventures here? I wrote some of them in the cemetery (it was great, it was by a lake, and I had a '69 Mustang to drive there). Everybody says to cut that shit out.

You know, maybe I am a genius.

Love makes blind
The way bees bee
Knowing one's kind
Without needing to see.

124 is just completely magical. Where is the goddamn grapefruit.

Okay, here's a segment from my final paper (on "La Belle Dame Sans Merci) for an undergrad seminar on semiotics that goes along nicely with the original post:

The active passions of this segment are horror and disappointment. The spectres of the dream produce the horror by their warning: 'you will look like us if you do not escape conjunction' they imply. The failure of the love-programs, the suddenness of the shift into the dream-state, disorient and disillusion the knight, who is left in a sorrowing, purposeless state of disjunction. The knight's expectations have been reversed (the definition of disappointment), and he is nostalgic for the program of conjunction which he had thought to have realized. Although a form of conjunction had arrived, by her reciprocation of gifts and by their physical unity, his new cognitive state, characterized by a perceived program of domination, destroys his hopes of the continuance of conjunction. The disappointment of his programs is part of the cause of his listlessness, to which we return in Segment V, where the program-evaluation begun in Segment I continues.

Two copies of each Reed thesis are kept in the library. At least a couple of acquaintances have stolen theirs because they hated them so much. Similarly, each of my few journal-keeping periods ended with excision and disposal of the offending material.

On preview, 144 is.. gross!

I thank you all for making me go through my old notebooks, because tears of laughter are streaming down my cheeks. Holy crap, stuff I'd completely forgotten.

The way bees bee

Is there a typo here? Or was young ogged just too subtle for me?

I wrote some of them in the cemetery (it was great, it was by a lake, and I had a '69 Mustang to drive there). Everybody says to cut that shit out.

Are you kidding me? That sounds perfect.

thea, sigh
Ogged writes poetry! and never answers to my e-mails with translations, i know it's very poor attempts, just translations, not original poetry etc
still a comment or two on just grammar or anything would have been soo much appreciated :(
otoh, Thank you, Witt.
yeah, a great thread, may be the best i liked so far
hope to read Apo's and BphD's and all other's excerpts

144 is clearly about masturbation.

I haven't got any old papers I can lay my hands on from before law school, and those are really dry. I do refer to a line of Establishment Cause cases as a 'flurry of jurisprudence' in one, for which Professor Bell should have smacked me, but that's the entertainment high point.

Oh geez, I've hung onto some journals from my early 20s that I blush with shame to think of. Every time I take a plane trip I think, "I should have burned those journals! If I die in a plane crash, someone's going to go through my stuff and read that crap, and that's not how I want to be remembered."

I'm embarrassed by the first excerpt in 82 - especially the multiple "futhermore"s - but that paper got an A, and having graded papers since then, I don't think that was the wrong grade. But I guess I would say that.

I do remember taking a long time to revise it for my grad school application, something I did only because I could not read the paper in the original without cringing at various places, and I didn't want to send the admissions committees something that weak.

Or was young ogged just too subtle for me?

Like the ways bears bear, or birds bird, of course.

In a rare example of truth in advertising, the publisher of The Knitting Sutra has packaged it as a combination of two genres: spirituality/crafts. If the essence of the book can indeed be distilled into two easy-to-classify phrases, then these two are they.

The Knitting Sutra is at once a paean to an act, an autobiography, and a would-be spiritual journey. It works best of all in the first category, not badly in the second, and almost succeeds in the third. Its reach is physically limited: just over a hundred and fifty pages in between small covers, and that includes a fair amount of white space. But its ambitions are high, and the reader's pleasant surprised is that it is not a fifty-page book stretched to three times its destined length.

Lydon is a magazine writer, and in some sense it shows. Her book is short, and its sections overlap slightly, looping in on themselves and among each other like slightly drunken porpoises. Yet her writing is rarely repetitious to the point of irritation. The links between the stories are there, not hidden, although Lydon's strength is that she makes one feel successful when one uncovers (creates?) such a link. She has the famed "journalist's eye for detail," and it serves her well, especialy when combined with her sense of humor. At one point she describes an injury: "...close to the rotator cuff -- a complex arrangement of muscles normally of little interest to anyone but major league pitchers...."

At times she reaches too far for jokes, but sprinked among failures such as "Master knitter or demon knitter? You be the judge" are far better phrases, such as her sly, offhand observation that "[w]e kntters have a secret passion: to clothe ourselves and our families and friends (and occasionally perfect strangers) in marvelous colors and textures and warmth." Lydon's is a deeply real voice, marred by occasional jarring lapses into the second person, and some clunkers a good fine-tooth editing job could have unearthed. (At point point she refers to "precious knowledge, hard-won and painstakingly accumulated," and the reader yearns to tell her that more words are not necessarily better.)

That was my last year of college; the assignment was to write a book review. The reader yearns to tell the student to heed her own advice.

142, 149: maybe the bees are a Plath reference.

That was my last year of college

Are you kidding? That's better than most of the reviews I read in the NYTimes. Showoff!

like slightly drunken porpoises

Wonderful.

I have a poem here with a line of ancient Greek in it. None! None more pretentious!

This thread is great. When I get home, I'll post some truly awful poetry.

Hm, this one was apparently supposed to be in the style of one of Plutarch's essays:

Dear Friend,

I was distressed to receive your message of last night. As usual I feel my advice is inadequate, but it is the best I have to offer.

There is little any of us can do about what others say. This stops no one from trying, of course, but I mention it because it is nevertheless true. In your situation, living as you do on an island, I am not sure but that the situation is even more pronounced. There is so little to do on an island but talk about other people.

My gloomy remarks to the contrary, I do think it is wise for you to act while considering how those actions may be interpreted. I know I sound as if I am preaching out of both sides of my mouth, but you know I have always been athletic.

There's a Mineshaft joke in there somewhere....

Lordy, I must have been sooo mad at exbeforelast when I wrote this one. Even your potential future children hate you!

I had spent a day or more
Thinking and alone
With a chill in all my parts
So though her hands were cold
I thought I had never felt so much.

Now here we are
The three of us
She and I
And a choiceless boy
Who cries at his mother's touch.

Witt was clearly smarter than the rest of us.

Okay, I love 144.

Witt was clearly smarter than the rest of us only able to reach the box of essays from senior year.

When I move again I'll find some of the older stuff. Much, much worse than drunken porpoises.

(Who are you bizarre people who have electronic copies of things from college?)

And a choiceless boy
Who cries at his mother's touch.

Jesus Christ, Ogged, that's so brutal! Not to mention petulant.

Hell hath no fury like an Iranian scorned.

The real problem with these law school papers is that they're horribly stilted and florid, but I don't really write all that differently these days:

It is well established, then, that if LaShonda were an employee, she would have been protected by Title VII. She was verbally harassed in the most graphic of terms over a five month period, and suffered unwelcome sexual touching over the same period, unwelcome touching severe enough that it culminated in criminal proceedings. She notified her immediate superiors promptly, and the highest official to have ready access soon thereafter. She continued to complain as long as the abuse continued: up until the very day the police were forced to take action to protect her. Throughout this process, the school took no action more effective than directing a verbal reprimand to her harasser. There can be no doubt that if she were receiving a salary from the Monroe County Board of Education she would have a right to recover for all the damage she has suffered due to their neglect; as she is merely a child entrusted to their care, her rights are still unsettled.

Bombastic, much? And someone please take the commas away from me before I hurt myself.

124 is just so great. I keep going back and reading it and I keep laughing.

She was verbally harassed in the most graphic of terms over a five month period, and suffered unwelcome sexual touching over the same period, unwelcome touching severe enough that it culminated in criminal proceedings.

In Volokh's version of this paper, the next sentence involves LaShonda becoming involuntarily sexually aroused.

169 sounds like one of those unfogged sexism threads!

"Ma'am"
There are the oranges.

Does the phrase "Something, something, oranges, something" mean anything to anyone around here?

There's a Mineshaft joke in there somewhere....

This thread could supply mouseover text for decades.

173: Not unless the oranges in question should have been made out of yellow wool.

135: I think he may have been. Also Jen (you know who I mean?) who gave a tremendous presentation on Lacan or somebody. I believe also Alan, and his friend with the three-letter name, and J.L. Long time.

How many of us wrote bad triolets in high school? Did anyone else use one at the top of the college applications essay?

You dare me to declare what's me
In one typewritten page.
What I am now, what I could be
You dare me to declare what's me
To snare essentiality
And fit it in a cage.
You dare me to declare what's me
In one typewritten page.

I think her name was J.L.Y. Long Time.

I would have admitted you, unimaginative.

In Volokh's version of this paper, the next sentence involves LaShonda becoming involuntarily sexually aroused.

Ew. I thought I had successfully blocked from my memory Volokh's theory of the actively passive, or is it passively active, victim-as-agent/agent-as-victim. But it's all coming back to me...So: thanks, Gonerill!

A preview of my awful poetry-prose from college and high school. I thought I was so deep and my random associations were so meaningful. This is junior year of college.

"i looked away from everything, saw through the walls into other rooms, other spaces. people's lives. caught emotion
in the v between my third and fourth fingers when i waved my hand through the air. a web of silence, the paralysis
of the concrete unmoving, the wood, bending, changing with time. there is heat seeping from the palm of my hand,
blood withstanding every possible underlying notion of what art is, of what feeling was.
no one asks for the color blue, no one ever understands the transparency of a corner. the light shows how flickering is
nothing but a careful examination of the difference between day and night. and seeing is the dewy meadows of ireland,
the faces in the rocks, the patterns the carpet makes on the bottoms of my feet."

I mean, seeing is the dewy meadows of Ireland? The fuck?

177: Holy shit.

no one asks for the color blue, no one ever understands the transparency of a corner

Dude.

On second thoughts, I'm sure the color blue gets asked for all the time, in paint supply stores and so on.

seeing is the dewy meadows of ireland

Very few Irish women are named Meadow.

I scribble my feelings with the black crayon of my SOUL.

I know, right?

Also Jen (you know who I mean?)

Yes! She always had three drinks on the go: a bottle of Rolling Rock; a mug of coffee; and a glass of ice water. She was great. And she had that cool Israeli girlfriend who was so beautiful. I also remember Alan.

Do you remember that guy whose name was always shortened to two initials, who came from some kind of grand old Southern family in decline like something out of a Faulkner novel, and he was the lefty firebrand disgrace of the family? He lives in NYC now, and makes heaps o' money.

188: You talkin' about T.L.?

Sadly, I have to go, but I'm really looking forward to checking back in on this thread.

I keep forgetting that everyone on this blog except me was in college together, dated at one time, or both.

191: Feels that way sometimes, doesn't it.

191: I keep being surprised that so many people here knew each other socially, pre-blog. It's so contrary to every other online community I've been involved with that I keep blocking it out.

In other news, I have discovered that the essays are actually from a freshman comp class I took in my last semester of college, due to a screwup. I also found a list of my classmates, and googled the most interesting one to find out that she is -- ta da! -- a blogger. What a shock.

Relatedly, Facebook's relentless efforts to close triads in friendship networks have resulted in some odd things popping up in the "You might want to be friends with ..." suggestions box. Yes I know this person because they are two or three degrees of separation away from me and connected to several people I know, who are also tied to each other. No, neither they nor I want to have anything to do with one another.

189: Yes. Actually, I don't know for certain that he still lives in New York (I haven't seen him in about 5 years), but I do recall that when my son was an infant, he was here making the big bucks.

191, 192: I'm sorry. That should have been off-blog. My past acquaintance with MC was a surprise.

(Apologies if this is a repeat post. The last was just swallowed.)

Very few Irish women are named Meadow.

Amongst Irish men of a certain generation, however, the name Emmett Patrick Meadow enjoyed a striking, if short-lived, popularity.

(In my family tree, the name Emmett, in combination with either Daniel or Patrick, first appears circa 1890, and reaches its peak with several baptisms performed in 1920).

I knew one or two Emmetts growing up. I always thought it was owing to Robert Emmett.

I really can't wait to contribute to this one. I dug out a bunch of this kind of thing in the whole division of property/moving UNG's sorry ass out process. There's a poem I wrote 15 years ago all about adjusting to divorce. Eeeire... I'll dig it out late and post.

I started to say that I knew an Emmett, but then remembered Queer as Folk was only a television show.

179: well then I could name several colleges where you were not employed in the admissions department in 1979.

Taken from the middle of an essay on photography. This paragraph seemed appropriate for the Mineshaft.

Thus, these mad photographs "prick" one, like a ghost pricking the back of one's neck. A small detail in the photograph, which one always misses in real-time, but which is caught by the lens, turns one's attention. The detail, or punctum according to Barthes, provokes us. Often, it provokes pity, and this is the political aspect of photography. Barthes' writes, "I collected in a last thought the images which had "pricked" me. In each of them, inescapably, I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die, as Nietzsche did when, as Podach tells us, on January 3, 1889, he threw himself in tears on the neck of a beaten horse: gone mad for Pity's sake" (116-117). Here is the praxis of photography - rejecting a reality mediated by images and rushing into a flat, dead world - the world of the referent. One disengages with illusion and confronts in the photograph "the wakening of intractable reality." One wakes up to the object. Or, the objects wake one up.

And I could delve back into my fundie religious sonnets for y'all too. Oh, I know you want to see those.

Thing is, I know the thing is "how embarrassing," but I find all this silly old stuff inspires affection I never had for silly, youthful me... I was such a sweet thing. Naive, dorky, over-everything. But in a way I find makes me smile now.

I just went looking for my old notebooks: not found where I thought they were. It's astonishing, though, how much damn paper I have. 8 file-cabinet drawers' worth? Not good.

I found on a disk this story I wrote. for a creative writing class. I remember being pretty desperate to finish it before the due date at end of the semester.

Moum left him there. Some birds were trilling in the back yard. The woman with the goiter said something that Sean couldn't make out. When Moum came back she set down on the table a plate holding a green lemon and a knife. Sean tried to cut the lemon, but the knife was dull and flimsy and the juice spurted out and ran down his hand.

The girl was whimpering in the next room.

"I can't cut this," he said.
"I have to cut for you?" Moum said, smiling: she was having a good time. She pointed at the closed door. "You want to look?"

Fuck no, he didn't. He shouldn't even have come. He got up and walked across the waiting room, splaying his sticky fingers. He stopped at a bookshelf and pulled down a heavy blue textbook. The doctor had evidently chosen for the best illustrations. There was a little drawing of what Sean supposed to be the uterus, a full-page diagram of the reproductive tract, and some other pictures that he didn't recognize. The text looked like it was written in Hungarian. He had to suppress a laugh.

I don't remember how, or even if, the story ended. I think I got an A-.

I always thought it was owing to Robert Emmett.

Yeah, there's no question it was owing to Robert Emmett, and the naming trend had to do with certain political aspirations...In Ireland, the surname Emmett as a first or middle name starts to appear in the latter half of the nineteenth century. What interests me is that my Canadian ancestrals start naming their sons Emmett and Parnell in the late 19th and early 20th centuries... And there's no Internets, of course, and they're in the backwoods of Renfrew County, and they're poor and illiterate. So presumably they shouldn't have been tied into any transatlantic exchanges of information, and yet, somehow or other they must have been, because the trend is unmistakable. The influence of the priests that they imported directly from the motherland, is the best guess I have come up with so far.

No more masturbating to Robert Mondavi.

207: Yes, but he leaves behind a rich widow, and gay marriage is now legal in California.

I met my first Emmett, Irish-American, in fact professor of history with Ireland his speciality, in grad school. Born about 1930.

What MC says about the transfer of ideas is probably true; I'm sure newspapers, not even necessarily for them but into the community, were quite rare.

Years after we no longer lived there, we would occasionally drive to Deep River or Petawawa to see friends and relatives—I was born in Renfrew County. A pretty lonely landscape along the road, similar to the American shore of Lake Superior, in UP Michigan and Wisconsin. I remember there is a roadmarker for where Champlain's lost astrolab was discovered.

Who is Wittt?

Schrödinger schreibt an der Tafel. Dorothe geht ins Zimmer.

D: Guten Tag. Was machen Sie?

S: Ich habe ein neue Gleichung erfunden.

D: Das ist interessant, aber...riechen Sie an etwas?

S: Nein. Vielleicht mussen Sie baden.

D: Aber ich denke, dass das Gestank aus dem Karton kommt.

S: Das ist unmöglich.

D: Warum? Haben Sie etwas darin gestellt?

S: Ja, eine kleine Katze.

D: Eine Katze! Haben Sie ihr Futter oder Wasser gegeben?

S: Nein.

D: Nein! Wann haben Sie sie in der Karton gestellt?

S: Vor zwei Woche.

D: Zwei Woche! Haben Sie verrückt geworden? Sie haben Ihre Katze getötet.

S: Wie wissen Sie? Wie können Sie wissen? Sie haben den Karton nicht geöffnet. Vielleicht sie ist tot, vielleicht nicht. Wer weiß?

D: Die Katze kann für zwei Woche ohne fressen und trinken nicht leben. Jetzt weiß ich, dass das große Gestank aus dem Karton kommt! Glauben mir, die Katze ist tot! [Dorothe öffnet den Karton.] Sehen Sie?

S: Sie sind richtig. Schade. Ich habe diese Katze geliebt. [Schrödinger wirf den Karton weg.] Aber Sie wissen noch nicht, ob sie tot war, als Sie den Karton geöffnet haben. Vielleicht stirbt sie sofort nachher. Ich bin ein berühmte Wissenschaftler und ich weiß das noch nicht.

D: Genug! Ich fahre ab. Ich muss der Zauberer finden.

S: Der Zauberer? Wie wissen Sie, dass er am Leben ist?

I was born in Renfrew County.

Hey! I'm going up to Arnprior next Saturday. For real. Do you know Killaloe Station, near Eganville?

the American shore of Lake Superior, in UP Michigan

One of my very favorite places in the lower 48. Perhaps I'll write a poem about the Painted Rocks. Or not.

Killaloe Station, near Eganville?

Afraid not, although I remember Arnprior. Aside from the drives I just described most of my memories are from early childhood. Things like my first revolving door, Beamishes in Pembroke, which I remember you noticed before. We didn't have a car when we lived there in the early fifties, but there was a bus from Deep River on Saturdays.

Beamish's

I remember Beamish's! But my peeps are Ryans and Harringtons up at Killaloe Station.

Do you know Sheenboro, across the river and up the road apiece from Pembroke? Very French-Irish that whole area, with the men working as shantyboys for lumber baron Booth, and if you didn't fit that profile, they would probably let you know that you were not welcome, in subtle but no uncertain terms.

None! None more pretentious!

Once, after I had accidentally cut myself, I maintained my coolheaded complacency long enough to reason that obviously the thing to do was take my dip pen and write, in blood, the immortal lines of Goethe, "bin so in Lieb zu ihr versunken / als hätt' ich von ihrem Blut getrunken".

Whatever quality that exhibits, I doubt anything exhibits it more.

I appear not to have written any seriousish poetry in a form I can access. I think there might be some for an application essay I didn't take seriously on a floppy disk somewhere. And I distinctly remember shredding my handwritten stuff a few years ago when my family moved and I was getting rid of old stuff in storage.

I came to the conclusion that the best I can do is reshape existing poetry with new words.

here is me on sontag and fascism for a pop culture under grad seminar

Perhaps it would be helpful to clarify terms and positions before we get to the meat of this paper. I use code as defined by Barthes, and explained by JVA Cuddon, in the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory, namely that it is "a cultures system of signification through which reality is mediated" (143)--here I would argue the reality mediated depends less on time and place, and more on audience intention. It cannot be denied that that the authorial intentions of this text were in line with the intentions of fascism, namely power, order, control and the elimination of a dissenting other, and in some ways these intentions are determined by time and place, but this does not mean that the text has not been used in other places, for other purposes.
There are no dead texts, or to put it another way, a text can be revived when it needs to be, for a variety of aesthetic and political purposes. When a text is revived outside of its specific location it mutates. With this film, it is impossible to revise it straight, the Nazis are so evil, its functional lessons are extracted, and the movie can not quoted directly. This essay then has two parts, the first is a discussion of how the film was made, its purposes and intentions, and its history in a context of Third Reich Germany. The second is an exploration of the history of the film after it left the Nazis hands, and how it's themes and meanings

This has been a great journey into my college self. From an essay on Adrienne Rich's "Twenty-One Love Poems":

But perhaps the most stunning assertion Rich makes about the opposition between the natural and man-made worlds lies in "we want to live like trees, / sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air," a remarkable image. This is the state of being that she envisions which can withstand the opposition of those forces. It is the state of being rooted in the ground, in the natural world, but sprouting up into the polluted air, the man-made world. Perhaps this image, this life of the city tree, is also a model for a reconciliation of the public and private spheres. One will live rooted in the private sphere, but extend the limbs of influence and understanding into the public world, into the city. This image is much different from floating, from one sphere suspended above another. It is important to note that all these things happen, all these forces oppose eachother, in the world of the erotic. It is the way that Rich begins her attempt to weave all parts of life together, to understand the erotic not as a part of life, but as life itself. This is a very unique sensibility of the erotic, of the whole world, natural and man-made, public and private, as part of our lives as erotic beings. Because we love, and are sexual, and live here, in the world, and make the world, too, we can grasp the world inseparable from the erotic.

From the same essay. Note where I congratulate my own analogy:

It is notable that in a sequence poem, which by its nature fosters an awareness of time and linearity, the poet would choose to have a poem "float," out of the rhythm of the sequence but still attached to it. It seems that the poem could just as easily be at the beginning, or the end, or between any two poems, or between all of them. Perhaps we can visualize a huge canvas, with the floating poem printed in grey across the entire space, with all the other poems written under, in, over and between the lines. This is a remarkable model of two things that are firmly separated, but certainly connected.

I think leblanc might be a floozy.

This is a remarkable model of two things that are firmly separated, but certainly connected.

Awesome.

The "Madwoman" Speaks:
Voice and Agency Through Female Authorship and Self-Authorization in Tstisi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions

(excerpt)

Treated sympathetically by their female authors however, the readers come to feel empathy for these misunderstood characters and come to understand that the root of this "strange" behavior is the psychological tension created by feelings of displacement and dysfunction when the characters are expected to act within their proscribed gender roles in a new cultural environment where they experience too much conflict and confusion to do so. The female authors, in sympathetically revealing the roots of the psychological distress the characters experience, help the reader to understand that it is not inexplicable "madness" that drives the character's behaviors, but rather the sympathetic emotions of confusion and frustration. In doing so, the female authors allow the characters to speak for themselves where previously their voices went unheard by the male patriarchy--"madness" becomes a means of articulating this confusion and frustration. Though still incomprehensible and considered "mad" by her society, the female characters are at least able to react and articulate their feelings, thus challenging their proscribed gender roles and challenging the oppressive institutions of family and society in which they live.

I am actually editing a fucking awful article on sexual harassment right now. Fucking awful because the prose is so fucking boring because I am going through a section describing tables of data on why women don't report sexual harassment. I miss writing bad 10 page term papers for Criticism 100BW: Post Colonial Feminist Theory.

I cannot for the life of me figure out what this means:

By the time the Dialectic was written, the calendar had become primarily a broader heading for the repetition of time, and Adorno had never been one to shoot at clocks. That would seem to leave the project of the book as a strange post-calendar remembrance of the forgotten foundations of myth, a conceptual history (of the concept). With no pretense of arbitrariness, I have selected one example from Adorno's strongly interpretive discussion of this history--the episode between Odysseus and the Sirens from the Odyssey--in which to find a propadeutic for representational praxis.

Junior year.

Looking through my file cabinet, I also found one of the "Scott Baio for President" posters that I hung around campus during college council elections.

Wow, 226 makes me laugh. I don't have any idea what you're saying either. But it sounds publishable!

A Scott Baio for president poster sounds so awesome.

Whenever I think of "Charles In Charge," I wonder who in their right mind would hire a handsome college boy as an au pair for their teenage girls. Two different familes! The Powells and the....whatevers.

Nicole Eggers later went onto Baywatch, IIRC, and actually looked anatomically correct.

226 is amazing.

I went through a bunch of my BA and MA papers, and found that, yes, they are horrible, but only because they're so simplistic. I never had the nerve (or whatever that is) to create beauties like 226.

The papers I have on this computer mostly strike me as either dull or unremarkable. I wish I could find my spontaneous combustion Bleak House paper, but that must be too old.

This thread is making me self-conscious.

I'll half-participate, then; here's the conclusion to something I wrote mere days ago, for my German 102/105 class:

Wir können jetzt sehen, dass die Geschlechter eine komplizierte Rolle in dem Stück spielt. Obwohl die Weiblichkeit von Claire Zachanassian essentiell zur Handlung ist, auch ist es benutzt, um unsere niedrige Neigungen auszunutzen. Aber will ich eine ernste Beschwerde gegen Dürennmatt nicht machen; es ist schwer (besonders in der Zeit, worin Dürrenmatt geschrieben hat—1956), die Literatur ohne Fraufeindliche Untertöne zu schreiben. Wie die Bürger von Güllen, werden wir in unserer Schwachheit gefangen.

I was so pleased with the final sentence, the closest my paper ever came to a semblance of an academic work, that I decided to title it "Gefangen in die Schwachheit."

I do have one about Our Mutual Friend entitled "The Missing Wegg." It's about leg amputation and pronouns.

It's only recently become the case that I can stand to look at my papers again after having written them. For instance, I reread a paper I wrote last year and thought it was, well, ok. (Though the prof for whom I wrote it thought the paper I wrote for him this year was much better, even though I didn't think at the time I wrote it it was much good at all, which shows where my judgment is.)

Destroyer, if this thread convinces you to occasionally reduce your bullshitting by one-half and your showing off by one-quarter, it will have done its work. And your bullshit and showing off will be that much better.

(That's on general principles -- I didn't attempt to read your graf. My German peters out at "Kristin und Dorle planen ein Ausflug.")

I can't read my own MA thesis. It's horrible. I'm still working on the same ideas, but they've grown up so much in the past five years (as has my writing) that the whole document is intolerable.

Holy god. I dug out my old high school notebooks and just found a long, rhyming ballad telling a story about rape, ending with the line "Farewell to innocence!"

Actually, destroyer, the only advice I have to give you is to go to the DeLorenzo's on Hudson Street in Trenton.

I can't stand to read the stuff I wrote yesterday. I think my review essay on family responsibilities discrimination will be good, but that's because it's unoriginal. Right now, this sexual harassment law article SUCKS. And I am still writing it, and I hate what I wrote just five minutes ago.

Much less just one year ago, in my last attempt at creative writing, after years and years of having given up that impulse, and for good reason:

"Adam hated the sea. It reminded him of his exasperating parents, and their belief that the sea air would cure any one of the many ailments that had marked his childhood with derision and disappointment. The sea was medicinal, and ineffective. The sea reminded Adam of his own deficiencies--his weak and sickly body, and his inability to enjoy certain things that delighted others. But he acquiesced to her wishes, the way he always did. He had been in love.

He remembered that her hair was crunchy with salt, and her skin dry and powdery with the sand that was as fine as sugar. The smell of the sea made Adam sick; he thought perhaps it was the smell of decaying seaweed that made his stomach turn. But the smell of the sea on Laura was strangely intoxicating. Kissing her made him feel at once sick and excited.

Love had come over him in a wave of nausea, filling his mouth with her undulating tongue and her dreadful scent. He remembered that he heard the waves in the background, and he remembered feeling himself unmoored and unable to stand without difficulty. He had felt lightheaded, and strangely hollow. His every orifice filled with the sound and smell of the sea, and the sea was Laura. His senses were overwhelmed with the intensity of everything that he loved and hated in one breath, coming again and again."

Please don't ban me from Unfogged, btw.

I just wrote an unlambda interpreter.

So banned.

Songwriting is different. Of all the songs my band plays, the crowd's favorite is the one I wrote in college in 1996.

Aw, Wolfie.

There is so, so much gold here in the high school poems. This is my first sonnet, age 15 (I note "A PETRARCHAN SONNET" at the bottom of the page).

Chuckling while you slowly crucify me
You angry, scavenging carnivore,
Please, do stop, and torture me no more.
Oh, you are merciless and bloodthirsty
My eyes bleed and weep and now can not see.
You've masked your hideous hawk eyes before
No need to hide now; I know what's in store.
You'll slap me with your torturous beauty.

But oh, I must say it...love you? I do.
Like the grass worships and wants for rain-
A day with you would be my flying
But followed by ten days more of crying.
On me, you would leave an eternal stain
Of that glorious day I spent with you.

occasionally reduce your bullshitting by one-half and your showing off by one-quarter

I think the real problem is that you guys never had the outlet of blogging. Between that and campus publications, I'm all bullshitted out by the time I need to write for class. (Well, that's not really true: the longest paper I had to write this semester ended up inventing an "interim stage of memorialization" and involved repeated variations on the phrase "cultural process of narrative production.")

go to the DeLorenzo's on Hudson Street in Trenton

I've only managed to muster the energy to eat out twice this semester, and both times were mandatory byob parties at Chinese restaurants for some clubs. A trip to Trenton for pizza is beyond my abilities, though I'll bear it in mind if I ever make it to the vintage store there (which is the nearest one! incredibly).

By the way, belated thanks for your compliment on one my poems. (I don't read the archives, although I sometimes search them.)

I refuse to read my high school poetry, although as president and founder of "The Literary Club", I think I still have a few copies of our "journal" that we self-published full of my awful, awful crap.

My college poetry isn't much better, although I got one published in a regional journal. And the stuff I wrote when I was trying to cope with law school? Not that great either. My Asian American lit phase? AUGH. My slam phase? KILL ME NOW.

m. leblanc, we so would have been in The Literary Club together, and we would have gone to the local Gypsy Den cafe in Santa Ana's indie strip mall "The Lab" during open mike slam night.

Oh yeah, that's right -- you're a good writer. Carry on, then!

Literary Club

Dude, I was in the "Writer's Group" in high school, where we would sit around and read our poems to each other and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes (with the teacher!) and ruminate about how cool we were.

The poems I got published in our annual journal "Papyrus" were actually okay, but 98% of the rest of it is just awful and hilarious.

Extremely sexual and then VIOLENT! Like everything is going along, and then at the end someone gets hit by a car, stabbed, or struck by lightning. And I'm not even exaggerating.

Your advice always stands. Even the editors of our campus weekly, who define their style as "self-indulgent," saw to edit out the second of these lines:

And when even he does not demand respect, the continuation of the system in which he lives a miserable life, producing perhaps only one or two valuable things from which another profits, becomes morally tolerable. By all means then, reader, laugh at lolcats--laugh with the deep and hearty laugh of the capitalist oppressor, like the evil complicit motherfucker you are.

Augh, my best poems are in the wake of a breakup. Angry, sexual, hurt, with mythological metaphors. Oh how original, to use Persephone. Right now, I'm totally in love, and totally uninspired.

The one poem I got published in college? Asian American poetry. I don't even know what to do with it anymore.

I have a friend who's getting an MFA in poetry at UC Irvine, and she's awesome. She claims to like some of my stuff, but then I read hers, and seriously--there really is a difference between a true artist and a dabbler in finger paint.

First some very hard or even incomprehensible question is asked, and then some stranger using my name jumps in and offers what apparently was an adequate answer.

Yeah, I have this experience with my undergraduate philosophy essays. They were often very good* but I also equally often have no memory at all of having written them.

* sod false modesty, like, I don't doubt, lots of others here, I was all prize-winning and shit ...
** although it's been at least 5 years since I read them, since they are on floppies, and I don't even have a floppy drive anymore ...

From freshman year. The title: "Rousseau: Enslaver of Humanity."

The conclusion: "With the best of intentions, he rips into the fabric of society itself. The ledger of the casualties of Rousseau's sophistry is written in blood; it is the history of twentieth-century totalitarianism."

Oh yeah.

In hindsight, I can't believe how gently the professor let me know that perhaps I needed to tone things down.

So wait, JM -- is "cry cry masturbate cry" from the text itself? I apologize for my ignorance; I was a social science major.

Somewhere I have a scene meant to fit in between chapters of The Great Gatsby, written for a high school assignment in the style of Fitzgerald, but it's only in handwritten form. I'm actually visiting parents right now and could find it in a box in the garage, but I don't want to explain why I'm digging through old papers, so I won't look.

Identified as a pastiche of a poem by Maxine Kumin, "How it is." The date on the poem, to the best of my recollection, would have been while I was still dating my first true love, whom I was sure I was going to marry:

I almost called you last night as I lay in the dark.
Three weeks since you left I lie here.
The cat I had to have jumps up onto the bed
because you are gone and he can.
On the corner of the nightstand, your water glass.
Beneath that, the poem which you wrote for me
two month ago after the play in the city.
In my eyes, a burning like desert
harsh heat of parched earth.
My limbs spread among our sheets.
I am cold and languid entwined.

I think of the day that you left me,
my friend, how I would turn things back, record
our voices into a less discordant harmony,
leave the talk show on the car's stereo,
pull again 'round the corner, slow to the speed limit,
recapturing the words of dispute and alienation
into a captivity of silence,
driving the discussion to a place
we could love in, a bedroom place
with low-light and candles, our words a verbal caress.

My husband, you have warmed me
with your wordless touch. My body eased
like a sleepy child cradled within your arms.
I will lie restless twisted in our debate--
forgetting reservations, schedules, too-important-work
wrapping my knees in these soft sheets--
and I will think of you.

Another excerpt from the "isn't it ironic" files:

The tolerance of the Wife for male inflicted violence is both sad, in that unchallenged submission to violence dehumanizes the victim of that violence; and disturbing, in that a figure so tolerant of such dehumanization is frequently seen by readers as a standard of independence and feminine self-reliance. The Wife of Bath is not a free-spirited woman exulting in her own sensuality; but instead she is a woman who finds her only sense of identity within the confines of marriage and is resolved to exploiting her own sexuality as a means of attracting a spouse. She is willing to submit to and tolerate violence in order not to lose her identity as a wife. I find it really frustrating to read that she is "wonderfully alive" She is not. I see her as a tragically defeated spirit, resigned to a life of marital identity.

I am actually editing a fucking awful article on sexual harassment right now. Fucking awful because the prose is so fucking boring

Get some of the hot stuff from 238 in there, then! Start with an imagined scene of someone being sexually harassed on the beach. Torment, agony, confusion...should she yield, or should she seek out precendents for a possible lawsuit?

244: Help!

256: awwww.....such a shame

248 perfectly describes my high school poetry, much of which was indeed published in our literary journal. Humiliating.

I added to the Flickr group a syllabic poem written by a nine-year-old at a camp where I worked in 2002. It's pretty amazing.

Looking through some folders (and resisting the urge to post anything), I came across one page in someone else's handwriting that looked particularly embarrassing and thought, "God! Who wrote this?". On a hunch I googled it, and it was the lyrics to the Procal Harum song "Luskus Delph" (but of course it was me who saw fit to save it back in the day...)

Tulips lips o Luskus Delph
Your baking breath breeds body 'x'
With silken measures try to gauge
The inside sweetness of your cave.

Procol.

Humiliating
i liked all the poems posted here
isn't it wonderful to be that young sincere serious and open
256 a great poem, liked it very much
i wonder what happened that it did not come true
three days ago two of my friends got married
they knew each other from hs, he was a younger brother of her friend, they've been both to far and distant places like Bulgaria, Russia, Germany, the US pursuing their education, their grad studies and met last yr again and at last decided to be together
i'm so glad they are happy now, otoh almost twenty yrs wasted elsewhere

The two most likely sources of hilarity from my undergraduate writings:

My final paper for a 20th century continental philosophy class in which I had no idea what was going on. Naturally, my solution was to try to imitate the style of our readings. I remember the existence of this paper whenever I get something similar from one of my students.

My final paper for a religion class, when I was having a very hard time getting work done for emotional reasons. I wrote the paper in the form of a letter to one of my mentors (not the prof for that class) describing my turmoil in very lame terms. Not only did I turn it in, I gave a copy of the paper to said mentor, who was (in retrospect) remarkably unfazed. That was the only time I ever discussed a grade with a professor--because he called me into his office to tell me why I was not going to do well.

To this day, I cannot force myself to look at either of those, much less post excerpts here. I'm pretty sure that says something bad about me.

Okay, as an exercise, here's a further detail about the second story. The class was "Women's Spiritual Journeys". I rationalized writing the paper on grounds that my struggle could count as a kind of spiritual journey. I am not a woman.

I wrote a paper for my last PhD seminar that was so shockingly bad, the professor went to my advisor to beg him to show me something I'd written that wasn't horrible.

262: Why thank you, Ben.

the places perhaps it was

This thread has now reached the point where someone is going to start posting bits of Dylan Thomas or William Carlos Williams or Derrida or John Searle and see if anyone notices.

(True fact for Cala et al: I once saw a blind review of a paper by David Lewis that said, inter alia, "This paper reads like a parody of David Lewis.")

268 suggests a professionally perilous game, to wit, which prominent whatever's work would, were it excerpted sans identifying information to an audience that didn't know the paper or book from which the excerpt was taken, meet with the most scoffing?

I have a theory, but I'm not going to say.

268: Oh, that's great.

Thank you for making me not the last to relate a mortifying story, AWB. (Seriously.)

I have a theory about Ben's theory.

271: I have a theory about Ben's theory.

I bet I know what it is.

My guess is that JP is all wrong about Merganser's theory.

Prove it! old man.

It's just a fucked theory, that's all.

Sometimes the Cheech Proof is the best.

re: 269

This has been done on Flickr a couple of times with famous photographers' work. Henri Cartier-Bresson was one that I recall.

The comments were amusing.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrerabelo/70458366

That's awesome.

The best comments are those insisting that Cartier-Bresson only took pictures like that because of the limitations of then-contemporary technology and, were he photographing today, he'd have an aesthetic more in line with the deleteme voters.

re: 278

Yeah. He'd totally have shot in super-saturated colour, with everything at f32 levels of depth of field!

Further to this, being a photo-geek, it's amusing that people assume that photo technology has actually improved since Bresson was in his prime: in terms of deliverable image quality [not in terms of speed of delivery].

By all means then, reader, laugh at lolcats--laugh with the deep and hearty laugh of the capitalist oppressor, like the evil complicit motherfucker you are.

Okay, that's actually completely and totally awesome.

281: I still kind of like this

The comments to 276 are depressing.

No, they're great. This is why Bourdieu wrote "Photography: A middle-brow art."

They're depressing, not re. photography, but more re. just the nature of the internet and really petty pissing contests.

Gonerill may be using a professionally distorted version of "great".

Of all people to object to pissing contests.

157 its sections overlap slightly, looping in on themselves and among each other like slightly drunken porpoises.

Also, like knitting.

287: Why do you think I find it depressing? Duh.

Those comments are depressing. Petty vanity: 1, Obvious beauty: 0.

That American anti-intellectualism is always so irritating -- "Oh yeah? Well, that's just *your* opinion".

Without pissing contests life loses its zest, B. Obviously you've never been there.

My zest for life is sustained by strawberries and sunshine.

You've always been wholesome that way.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27wwln-medium-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1