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 testiclesCertain poets here and in FranceStill sigh over established and natural factLong since fully discussed by Ovid.They howl. They complain in delicate and exhausted metresThat the twitching of three abdominal nervesIs incapable of producing Nirvana.
