Writing and the Gift

The ability to write well is a gift. I do not mean that some people are born with talent and others are not and only those with talent write well. I think some can gain the gift with diligent reading and practice. In fact, I recently listened to a magnificent interview with Leonard Susskind on this very subject (the Standford "How I Write" lectures from iTunes U). It always amazes me the way in which two textbooks of pieces of scholarship can relate precisely the same information and one is exciting and inspiring while the other is insipid and dull. I do not have the gift. I flatter myself to think that I have flashes of it from time to time, but my style is always slightly uncomfortable and self conscious as it stands one foot in the formal and one in the conversational sphere.

This comes to mind for two reasons. First, because I recently read some writing of a few of my friends. Each one has a distinct flourish to his style and each voice speaks distinctly from the text. Even though the writing is unpolished or not perfectly expressed in places, there is an engaging unifying principle: a real person speaks out of the page. Just as my art never found a stylistic guiding principle, I fear my writing is the same. Second, I just tonight finished reading Lévi-Strauss's Totemism, and I found his style absolutely enthralling. This is amusing because Totemism clearly aims at an audience other than the casual reader. Most of the work is comprised of either a detailed analysis of the history of anthropological and sociological scholarship concerning totemism and a detailed description of what cultural practices were misrepresented as totemism by previous writers. My background in this was minimal: I took one introductory level anthropology class a few years ago and that is the sum total of my experience. However, despite my lack of background, Lévi-Strauss was riveting. His writing style reminded me of the way an engaging professor might lecture; he leads his audience through his point of view, explicitly enough so that the audience follows, but subtlety enough that, in realizing his point, the members of the audience feel almost as though they have discovered the truth for themselves. That is a magnificent gift.

Prioritizing Intellectual Projects

I only have a few weeks of summer left. I have to start prioritizing my intellectual projects. It seems I have had a number of weeks the seemed to evaporate with little progress at all. However there are a number of things that I simply must do before I finish the summer.

1. Review my Greek Grammar and vocabulary in Hansen & Quinn.
2. Review my Latin Grammar and vocabulary in Moreland & Fleischer.
3. Finish the Crito.
4. Read more Homer.
5. Finish the Medea.
6. Write a draft of my personal statement.
7. Work on thesis revisions (for graduate school writing sample).

This means that a lot of other endeavors will fall by the wayside including Xenephon, Infinite Jest, most of the works on my reading list, re-vitalizing my French, etc (although some short lived things I may do just for fun now and then).

I have only seven weeks to prepare for my Greek and Latin exams (to get into the classes I desire). Wish me luck!

Thoughts on Plagerism Prevention

Many universities and high schools use a service called TurnItIn.com which scans the web, and archives of papers, journals, and books in order to determine whether a paper is plagerizing. I like the sentiment: people should certainly do original work and make sure that citations are full and accurate. However, I think this poses a serious problem for intellectual discussion and creativity. Here is the reason: most of the time (since I graduated from college) when I want to float an idea that I had or force myself to articulate my opinion of some scholarship I would write about it and post it on this blog or on Platonic Psychology. Now, taking the summer art history course, I have to be very careful. If I write an analysis something discussed in class and said topic shows up in a  paper, it is likely that my phrasing in the paper, by natural impulse, will sound like the previous work I have penned. Beyond this, friends of mine have had long discussions on Facebook about papers they were going to write. It seems absurd to penalize a student for using social media to discuss their academic pursuits. Isn't that the opposite of the goal of education?

I do see the obvious counterargument: most plagerism is plagerism and not students enjoying high-minded discussion on the internet. I also do not have any evidence such a scenario might happen, however, Turn It In is constantly expanding their database so it seems that one of these incidents is in the foreseeable future. In reality, I guess, my complaint is a selfish one: I do not want to live under constant fear that one of my papers is going to sound too much like one of my blogposts and get hauled into see some dean and try to talk my way out of failing a class. I can only hope it never happens.

Once Bitten, Twice Shy

I haven't posted a lot recently because things were quite busy when Cerinthus came to visit and unfortunately I caught some kind of horrible cold. On the other hand, my spider bite is healing rather nicely.

 

I am going to spend this weekend doing translation and studying for my German quiz. I am finding German easier after 7 weeks of class than I did at the beginning, but it is still a little troublesome. The problem that I have with German is that it seems to be in the no-man's land between an inflected language (a language with endings or inflections that indicate the part of speech) and a word-order language (where word order and prepositions determine the part of speech). In my experience of German, articles and adjectives have inflection, but nouns hardly change at all. Furthermore, word order is totally bizarre. Groups of words are often stuck together in chunks (e.g. a subject or object and a genitive phrase indicating possession) but these chunks can appear almost anywhere in the sentence. Perhaps it is just that my book focuses on reading instead of composition, but it baffles me how anyone actually speaks this language because the rules seem to be mystical rather than concrete. Maybe I'll get the hang of it at some point, but I don't think I'll ever be able to understand where German places its commas.

Ouch, It Bit Me!

So Cerinthus and I were walking along on our postprandial stroll the other night when I stepped on a small pile of leaves and something bit me! I was not sure at the time whether it was a bit or a sting but it really hurt all the way home. By the time I got home whatever it was seemed to have dislodged itself, but I put some "afterbite" on it and hoped it would be okay.

As the next day progressed, it swelled red and got itchier and itchier. The verdict from Servia and Cerinthus was that it had been a really nasty mosquito bite. I am not generally prone to mosquito bites, so I realized that my supposition that it was something significantly worse was unfounded. I took some antihistamine and put a band-aid over it.

When I took the band-aid off this morning, I was rather shocked. The bite is now bright purple and about the size of my pocket-watch's face. Other than it being (mostly) round instead of contorted in shape, it looks a lot like the brown-recluse bite I received a few years ago. Here's to hoping it isn't too poisonous!

More Information: We called a poison hotline and we think it's was a jumping spider. Nothing to do but wait and see.

My First Gai Pad Gra Prau

My First Attempt

Servia finally found some Holy Basil as I mentioned yesterday. I took a bunch of recipes off line but I made my own combination based on my memory of my favorite Thai restaurant in the city of my Alma Mater. This was my favorite dish. My version of it was way way too salty because the fish sauce we got was insanely salty. I really needed oyster sauce but I couldn't find any at the store where I got the chicken and the peppers. Here is a version of my recipe (serves 4-5 people):

Ingredients

• 1 lb of chicken breast, cut into bit-sized pieces
• 2 tablespoons sesame oil
• 6 sections of garlic, minced
• 1 shallot, sliced thinly
• 5 dried jalapenos with seeds, minced
• 3/4 cup crimini mushrooms, sliced medium-thin
• 2 red chili peppers (small), sliced into thin strips
• 1/2 a green bell pepper in thin slices
• 1/2 a red bell pepper in thin slices
• 1/4 cup holy basil leaves, fresh
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/4 cup fish sauce-- this was a complete disaster because of the salt. My suggestion would be 1/4 cup rice wine instead
• 1 tablespoon fish sauce
• 1 1/2 tablespoons cooking sherry (optional)
• 1/4 lime's worth of juice

Directions

• Do all preparations.
• Heat 1 tablespoon of sesame oil in a wok
• Add in the dried jalapinos, garlic, and shallots and cook for 1 minute.
• Add in the mushrooms and cook for one minute.
• Add in the peppers and cook for two minutes.
• Make a whole in the vegetables in the center of the wok. Pour in the sesame oil and then stir in the chicken and the holy basil. Cook the chicken until it is white on all sides but not brown.
• While the chicken is cooking, mix the sauce together
• Pour the sauce into the wok and cook for 3-5 minutes (until chicken is cooked through).
• Serve over jasmine rice.

Anyway, I will continue to experiment. It is my favorite dish and I will make it work eventually.

Holy Basil: Present and Accounted For

Servia is a genius. She finally found some holy basil! She found the plant lurking alone in a Home Depot amongst other herbs. I cooked with it for the first time tonight. It was good, but not perfect (I made a slight error with fish sauce). More updates after my German final tomorrow.

It's Just Wrong!

I've spent a lot of time studying Greek today, so I decided I would reward myself by listening to the Berkeley class on Archaeology (Anthropology 2AC from Spring 2008). However, I went to webcast.berkeley in vain; the class is no longer there. In fact, a huge number of classes are no longer there.


Distressed, I looked for an explanation on Berkeley's website. I found a letter to the large group of perturbed self-education fans. The general gist is that the Real Player server has been retired, and all those courses with it. The team has been unable to find what they believe is an adequate conversion format for the files and seem to be hoping for donations in order to increase the possibility that they might find something. They claim that they might obtain a temporary stint on another server, but they give not hint as to when this might be: "We have requested additional temporary storage space on a new server, when this space comes online we will restore the Real Player files and make them available for the public to download for a limited period of time (Contingent upon instructor approval)." I do not have much faith in this limited period of time because they provided no warning whatsoever about the websites renovation.


I find this whole move quite saddening. Berkeley's webcasts are on of the great ways for people to educate themselves for free, and they are cutting off access to those who would seek out that education. I am posting this same note on Platonic Psychology because I believe it's an important problem.