A stop-gap entry

If I'm not being especially garrulous this month, it's because I'm running short on energy for human communication. Not only a large pile of term papers to grade, but also two new cases of plagiarism amongst them. The situation is now resolved with these students, but the need to meet and make the accusation, and work through the reasons for it, and find a viable solution, and agree upon it, and give advice for the future, and be at once authoritative and understanding takes more out of me every time than I can spare. It is also something that happens in my classes with alarming regularity. Which is not to say that people plagiarize more in my classes than in other courses, presumably, but that an alarming number of faculty members here and elsewhere must be either missing it entirely or choosing not to pursue it. And in the internet age it is SO easy to locate their sources, unless they've actually paid money to have a paper sent to them.

So today I went skiing, and spent a lot of time in the trees just for the pleasure of there being no-one but me around - a kind of walk in the woods but with planks tied to my feet. The therapeutic effect was somewhat counteracted, though, by the family sitting around me on the train on the way home - people whose brains seemed to have shrivelled to the size and consistency of dried peas which rattled loudly in their skulls all the way back. I might sound like I'm being intolerant because I'm tired and crabby - but I think if you'd heard them you'd feel the same...

Deep-sea anglerfish and literary introductions

This morning I found myself telling my students that the introductions to the translated novels we are reading are like male deep-sea anglerfish, which latch on to the larger female and become fused with her flesh, as in the pictures above. The introductions, at the same time as being small literary works in their own right, become an inseparable part of our reading of the whole. You say these things if you're let loose in a classroom at 8 in the morning, especially if almost no-one has managed to watch the film you're supposed to be discussing.

The picture above is taken from this page, which looks strange enough for a second look. I don't know the original source, though.

Tech failure...

My computer suddenly collapsed and went into a coma on Thursday, and on Saturday morning the hard drive was pronounced dead and life support was withdrawn.

I now have a new hard drive (which I can't help but regard with some nervousness and distrust), and find myself disencumbered of the last six months of my life.

Sometimes complete strangers see me on the train working on my Mac and ask me about it - people thinking about purchasing one. Well, here is my report. My lovely PowerBook has been running smoothly for three and a half years now, apart from one glitch with the DVD drive at the very beginning. I've even dropped it on concrete floors and it has been fine but for some problems with a warped shell (if you drop it on the corner, the metal bends). My cheaper university-purchased MacBook, on the other hand, has been a pain from the start - crashes all the time, and has developed this hard drive problem in spite of me being much more careful with it. So yes, people, get a Mac, but get the more expensive version. And never get a white computer. What a stupid design. I had to stick contact paper on the place my hands rest, because I couldn't clean the dirty marks off properly.

Hwang Chin-i

My book on Korean poetry is late back to the library, but it's worth 25 cents to be able to write out one of the poems before I return it. It's by Hwang Chin-i [c. 1506-1544], according to the book "the most famous and the most accomplished of all Korean women poets." The following poem reminds me a little of Ono no Komachi. There's some sudden flash of red underwear in it.

I cut in two
A long November night, and
Place half under the coverlet,
Sweet-scented as a spring breeze.
And when he comes, I shall take it out,
Unroll it inch by inch, to stretch the night.

Peter H. Lee, Poems from Korea: A Historical Anthology
(Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, East-West Center Book, 1974), 77.

Is that a British accent?

I had a wonderful day of skiing yesterday at Winter Park - inches and inches of new snow before we arrived, and then it kept snowing for the first half of the day. The black runs suddenly became fun - they're usually just full of over-skied and bone-crunchingly icy moguls - and my too-long and too-fat skis suddenly came into their own in the deep powder. It was also a Friday and nice and quiet, both on the train and on the slopes.

As usual I had numerous conversations with strangers on the lifts. Lift conversations usually start with a comment on the weather or a question about how your skiing is going, and then you ask each other where you're from, and I usually say Denver, because that is where I'm from when I'm not in Denver. Then somewhere through the conversation they ask about my accent. Now, here's the confusing bit of the conversation. A proportion of people will ask, "Is that a British accent?" and I will naturally respond, "It's Scottish." Only from the response I get to that, I realise that my questioners always think I mean "No, it's Scottish," whereas from my side I'm obviously affirming and giving more specific information. I've worked out that "British" to almost all Americans is absolutely synonymous with "English." Yesterday I tried explaining a couple of times that I'm British too, and watched the confusion struggling on people's faces.

Let it be known that it's possible to be Scottish, British, and European all at once and without contradiction. Yes, it is.