Saturday, July 26, 2008
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You're To Kill a Mockingbird!
by Harper Lee
Perceived as a revolutionary and groundbreaking person, you have
changed the minds of many people. While questioning the authority around you, you've
also taken a significant amount of flack. But you've had the admirable guts to
persevere. There's a weird guy in the neighborhood using dubious means to protect you,
but you're pretty sure it's worth it in the end. In the end, it remains unclear to you
whether finches and mockingbirds get along in real life.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
You're Siddhartha!
by Hermann Hesse
You simply don't know what to believe, but you're willing to try
anything once. Western values, Eastern values, hedonism and minimalism, you've spent
some time in every camp. But you still don't have any idea what camp you belong in.
This makes you an individualist of the highest order, but also really lonely. It's
time to chill out under a tree. And realize that at least you believe in
ferries.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
5 comments:
Actually, my father was instructed by Inez Hubbard at Crystal Spring. She was his favorite teacher. We would often walk by her house (many years ago, after she retired), and I was struck by her small stature, helped along by osteoporosis. I was taller at five or six then.
About accents: I really like our Germanic hinge-words even if my own diction makes frequent use of French-on-loan. Oftentimes, people say that "you don't sound like you're from around here." Meeting my mother, with her idiosyncratic, instaneous change of register from "Latin verbs spoken aloud" to a slight drawl (I've been asked if she was from Savannah, if that gives you any idea,) one would think that I am an exchange student.
Maybe in my attempt to resist acculturation, or self-invent, if you will, I have incorporated succinct, Goreyesque models or the threads of some academic essay or Elizabethan sonnet I've envied.
Yes, language is a means to hide one's true meaning, which may be a refusal of the ordinary or the banal.
I dismiss the idea and others who embrace it, however, that a regional dialect is something shameful or that is sounds ignorant...I will say that I wish people would be more thoughtful of the things they say--avoiding generalization--only because the world is words.
Southern expressions are some of the richest: they have a very visual quality...Early Cormac MacCarthy (who came from rural Tennesse) writes as a beautifully as Dante, who wrote in the vernacular.
I was reading Charles Wright's "The Appalachian Book of the Dead" and John Ashbery's "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape" because it is time that I look to something that embraces where I live...the pockets of country and the underpass painted with cartoon, the rarified reading and recirculated hospital ward air...
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177976
*McCarthy
I hate strangers asking me where I'm from so I just make crap up, or agree with wherever they want me to be from, and let my mind wander to happier places.
The preservation of regional accents is another reason to kill your TV.
Yes, the thought suddenly occurs to me a bit late that I had hijacked this musing...
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