World's Laziest Blogger, Part 37

So, between a particularly hardy flu and what seems like 3.7 million term papers, my brain is shot. On the plus side, I think I've lost about five pounds. Now I am a very sexy man (if you can get past the vomiting and the hair-tearing. Mmmmmm......sexy vomiting).

The two hardest things about grading are 1) figuring out what the hell they're saying:

The othering of the representative paradigm is identifiable with the imperative of the "I," by which I (pun intended!) mean the asujetissement of the deictic ego.

Um, ok?--what annoys me about this kind of nonsense is that I spend more time trying to figure it out than they did writing it. They don't know what it means, either. (And I don't think that "I" thing is even really a pun.)

And 2) giving much-needed criticism in a way that is not wounding. I have a student who expressed his disagreement with another scholar by calling him a "ludicrous pedant."

"Mr. Tennant," I wrote, "it is one thing to think that Harold Bloom is a ludicrous pedant and quite another to call him that in your work. Perhaps you could think of a slightly more professional manner of expressing your scholarly disputes."

By which I mean: "grow the fuck up already."

Although at least he didn't spell it "ludacris." Which I have seen several times in the last few years. No joke.

I'm in a state, as both my grandmother and Frank Black used to say. So instead of a thoughtful post, here is a (predictably grouchy) poem I like:

Fratres Minores

With minds still hovering above their testicles
Certain poets here and in France
Still sigh over established and natural fact
Long since fully discussed by Ovid.
They howl. They complain in delicate and exhausted metres
That the twitching of three abdominal nerves
Is incapable of producing Nirvana.