Jenny Islander @ 89: a wonderful description of the process. It is definitely a trick of listening, like the process of learning to feel a perfect fold in paper or recognize a note in tune. (Sometimes I suspect that my pantheism and that certain wise stripe of mystic monotheism look exactly the same from a certain angle.)
Xopher @ 83: There's a Satanist in my neighborhood who wears horns. Under his skin. (The implants have been expanded over time to the point where they extend the length of his forehead.) He is recognized as having a sort of representative status -- and I highly respect that kind of sheer physical honesty.
(Taking here some religious assumptions, not necessarily endorsing those assumptions full bore, but giving them credence for at least the duration of the verbal gag --)
Take a man to church, and he's got access to God for a day.
Teach a man to pray in the broad sense described above, and he's got all the God he likes, for a lifetime, free of tithe, figurehead, and extraneous interpretation.
Now, that's what I call a bargain.
For some reason I think this David Bowie song is beautifully applicable.
Abi @ 866, Laurence @ 868:
I also see an implication that if "landica" was a terribly obscene word, they knew how to find it.
I can't decide who that makes culturally superior.
Lexica @ 99: If that's all true, I say you STILL don't get to penalize others for their lifestyles. Why? Because you're worrying all the time, and that kills you faster! Oy vey!
Chip @ 655: Admittedly, I have no objection to the positive high school experiences of others. Only to the notion that these experiences are universally possible, or worse yet, mandatory.
Joann @ 684: Lit-fi sort of stumbles on the tongue, but "liffy" is great.
As regards the talk of genrelessness: I think it's an application of the fallacy of whiteness. There's a genre there, but as its space is officially defined by the quality of not being another genre, talk about it often results in confusion and defensiveness.
Spatula, via my childhood, is definitely a pancake turner. The Snead, who is from the DC area, thinks it is one of those rubber or silicone flat things, which baffles me because I have no idea how you would turn a pancake with one of those. Hmf. You people and your silly dialects.
I am reminded of a comment from Portnoy's Complaint about the panic experienced in school upon being unable to remember the English for "spatula", which was obviously a Yiddish word.
Ethan @ 604: Please put me on the contact list as well, if you'd be so kind. I am not generally terribly well-employed, but I'm a case study in how to weld together an impressive educational record starting from a really, really bad one and an unusual learning style.
Re: Lit-Fic, etc, I'm going to review here my favorite of the terms with which I am familiar. (It's an ongoing debate at my MFA program, now that the genre and general fiction programs are getting along well.)
Lit-fic -- I rather like this one. It's simple, it doesn't have a case of "I will call you MY short-bus word because YOU are calling me YOUR short-bus word", but it does have the sort of casual, diminutive sensibility of "sci-fi" -- which, IMO, levels the playing field.
Disadvantage: it doesn't actually say anything about the genre.
Vanilla fiction, mundane fiction -- Not bad; these terms sound slightly sneering while not actually meaning anything unpleasant or inaccurate. Ignoble words with noble enough meanings -- worldly, common-denominator, and I will be the first to say and what do you think is wrong with that?
Disadvantage: might make people go 'what'? ("General fiction" is a little funky but might fly better with the people who write it.)
I'm for dividing the genre into "vanilla/mundane/general fiction" and "experimental fiction", personally. Experimental covers the kinds of style-and-form play that fall into this category. Vanilla/mundane/general is any non-experimental story that simply contains no supernatural elements or subject/form elements that make it another genre.
I decided to dissect this terminology and make a full fix in my blog; check it out here.
It's always Patriarchy Pretend Hour somewhere!
*headdesk*
I actually recall both "potholder" and "hotpad" to mean different variations on the same thing. A hotpad is one of those little square ones that kids do on looms with the weird elastic fabric bands. I imagine this may have something to do with the fact that these may either be set under a pan, or used to wield it. I remember making many of these little elastic squares for relations. A potholder is a more general term, covering these, the storebought ones, and mitts.
(For reference: I grew up in LA County, but my dad's from Canada.)
PNH @ 516:
This being your blog, your existence may need no justification, but I've got to say I really appreciate it when someone comes out and says they didn't finish high school. Thank you. Hearing someone actually talk about these things is refreshing.
I was only in high school for a year. I got my GED and muddled around in lots of maladaptive environments until I found a couple of self-directed ones, and I'm well aware this was equal parts luck, unwillingness after the first several tries to accept a teaching system that did nothing for my learning style, and having a family well-off enough that this meant slow progress rather than homelessness.
I find it spooky when people say high school is how you learn life -- I have to bite back remarks like oh, is that how you learned that working yourself sick was normal and okay, or yeah, if the people some authority figure says are your peers don't like you, you might as well shoot yourself.
It's where a person learns some things about life in an authoritarian society. Not having those concepts drilled so deeply in makes living different. Choices and sacrifices that people make in order to live are more visible as choices and sacrifices, not automatically assumed. I could write at length on that subject, but on the West Coast it is bedtime for one anti-authoritarian blog-bat.
To jennie above, and as addendum: I somehow missed the latter third of the MFA-related subthread. I did a search on this page to try and follow the discussion, but apparently Mozilla's find-in-page function has a limit on how far it'll go. So I missed a number of comments on the skim, and hit them on the full readthrough, and saw that, in fact, My Existence Has Been Justified.
Whoops.
Regardless, I'm glad I got to throw in a bit of praise for Stonecoast and Jim Kelly.
And, really, Doyle @ 329 bears some loud repeating:
real scholars don't say "where did you study?" as much as they say, "who did you study with?"
Re JC #2, David Wald #9:
That's intriguing. That creates a new model in my head for trademark and trademark enforcement. It's as if we've been saying for a long time that, if you want to keep a gate on your property, you must make a lot of use of the gate; and people have been interpreting that to mean that you must keep the gate closed and locked, or bargain for a toll, as the "use of the gate" must be keeping people off your property. If you leave the gate open, it's as good as having no gate, right?
I think this is the first time I've seen anyone figure out that they can open the gate and let someone in without making the gate useless. Why'd it take so long? No idea. I blame dualism.
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