A Latina novelist spoke about white privilege. Students burned her book in response
“A language is a dialect with an army.” —Dr. Aaron Carton
I doubt Professor Carton—who was my linguistics professor in the 1980s—originated that definition, through I learned it from him. Two sentences, from two different reviews in the NYT Book Review, made me think of it.
Grading pet peeve: Students who, with no apparent purpose in mind, switch tenses mulitple times in the middle of a piece of writing, in the middle of a paragraph within that text, within way too many sentences within those paragraphs.
More muppets:
Major grading peeve: When students write without confirming their memory of the plot or argue based on the plot they constructed while paying only partial attention in class. Rarely do the mistakes I’m seeing result from honest-attempt misreadings.
Thinking about this in the context of MFA-related threads and levels of MFA-related debt: Someone wrote (can’t recall whom) there is no better way to tame an entire generation of young people than to force them prematurely to circumscribe their lives to pay off student loans.
Which makes me think it’d be interesting to write—maybe a blog post—about the one poem, from my first book, that I’d take back if I could.
Every book of poems is uneven in places. In a good book, that uneveness is part of the pleasure: moving with the poet as they work their way–formally, syntactically, musically, semantically, and not always successfully–through the problems posed by the content they’ve chosen.
“That’s when I saw: it was just one more leash.”
