Primrose Road

Dear College Students,

If your email address begins with SexxxyThang69 or the like, please seriously consider creating an email address that uses your first initial and last name, first name and last initial, full name, etc., especially if you're (1) communicating with professors or (2) sending out resumes with your email address printed on them.

Rhetorically yours,
PR

In case the jury was still out on whether PublishAmerica is a legitimate "traditional publisher" (as they describe themselves in press releases) or a scam that takes advantage of aspiring authors with no understanding of how the publishing industry works, please enjoy the following excerpts from local newspapers reporting on their towns' very own PublishAmerica authors:

(Incidentally, isn't describing oneself as a "traditional publisher" the equivalent of a lawyer calling him or herself an "honest lawyer" or a doctor calling him or herself a "legitimate physician"? The adjectives do not exactly reassure clients in these cases ...)

• Goshen, New York: "There are two sides to every person’s life. A dark side and the side that makes them a warmhearted, caring person, according to the publisher. “Dark Knights and Stallions” is the story of one such person set to verse."


• McConnelsburg, Pennsylvania: "My book is spiritual and reflects how the world is today," Burdette told the "News." "We're all seeking for something - spiritual or positive knowledge to help us get through the life. I believe we are living in perilous times today with the rapid increase of violence, corruption, murder and crimes." ... "Ginny's Book of Poetry" includes at least 100 original pieces with titles ranging from "Love Can Last" and "Three Wishes" to "Broken Spirit" that attest to the trials and tests of Burdette's life ... "Poetry has meaning whether it be spiritual or not. A lot of people have told me already that my poetry contains a lot of meaning and has made them cry," added Burdette, who has been travelling around the tri-state area doing book signings and speaking about her words of inspiration." The author also has two more books coming out within the next ten months (another book of poetry and a children's book), which will also be released by PA, which is described in this article as "a traditional advance and royalty-paying book publishing company based near Frederick, Md., that represents almost 35,000 authors."


• Maryland: A 472-page tome "in which the title character an astronaut who works on a secret surveillance satellite. While in space, he survives an attempt on his life, then returns to Earth to find himself, inexplicably, in a psych ward where he meets Starr, his OxyContin-addicted love interest. The two set out to uncover the source of an unusual glimmer off the coast of Australia that Matthew saw in space." But wait, there's more: "What ensues is a plot filled with conspiracies to control the world, world war and trips all over the globe to find the nails that were used to crucify Jesus and secure the sign on the cross that proclaimed him king of the Jews." (OK, so I suppose we should give the guy credit for thinking about the DaVinci Code market.)

As always, if any of the authors above take issue with my posting excerpts from press releases and newspaper articles, I refer them to you-know-what, which they are free to make fun of on the Web. Please focus especially on the chapter written partly in Polish, ok? ;)

On Saturday, SigOther and I went out for a drive and wound up in Providence, Rhode Island.

Here's how this happened:

11AM, driving north on Route 1: "Let's check out two or three more towns in Connecticut and then we'll turn around."
11:30AM, where Route 1 merges with I-95: "Might as well get on 95 for a while until we get to East Lyme."
11:45AM, past East Lyme: "You know, we're only about half an hour from the Rhode Island border."
12:15PM, Conn-RI border: "We're only 44 miles from Providence ..."

Some advice: if you drive three hours north, you have to drive three hours south on the way back.
It was a good thing we stopped in Providence for lunch, or we might have decided to head on to Boston.

I've been tagged by squib, which means that I'm required by international law to do this meme.

She's given me the letter "P."

Potato: As a dramatic writing major in college, I wrote a play called "Nine of Cups" that took place in a motel on the Jersey Shore. When it was staged as part of a festival called You Hate Me, only one line consistently got laughs --

RACHEL: I could get married again someday.
MARK: And I could be a potato.

I also have a Mii on my friends' Wii named Kartoshke, which is Yiddish for "potato." And this demented potato cartoon is irresistable, don'tcha think?

Pink Hippo Butt:


Pericles: Shakespeare's only play starting with a "P." Definitely Shx's creepiest work ... not Macbeth-creepy or Richard III-creepy, but 'Tis Pity She's a Whore-creepy.

PhD Mobile: My former car, so named because when I went to Nebraska and had the plates changed, the first three letters of my license plate were "PHD." My officemate had the same letters on her plate. Nebraska is obviously the Unintentional Vanity Plate State.

Polish: The language in which part of a chapter of Blueberry Bridesmaids, the book I vanity-published when I was an entirely different person, was written. Especially disconcerting is the fact that I don't recall ever knowing Polish.

Purim: A Jewish holiday that celebrates the reading of the Book of Esther. In Reform synagogues like the one I went to as a kid, everybody dresses up in costume, eats hamentashen, and whirls noisemakers whenever the name "Haman" is mentioned in the reading. In Conservative synagogues like the one SigOther attends, Purim is totally Carnivalesque: the sanctuary has a dance floor, funny images are projected onto a screen during the reading, and prayers are chanted to incorrect melodies. Last year, the rabbi chanted Kaddish to the melody of "Thunder Road" and we all realized how suspiciously similar the two melodies are.

Posthumanism: The topic about which I should be writing an essay right now. Instead, I am writing a list of things that start with P.

I'm not tagging anyone because I don't have regular readers, so if you want a letter, please comment and I'll give you one.

Stanley Fish reviewed Frank Donoghue's The Last Professor: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities last month. Especially interesting here is the relationship between the adjunct "problem" in Research I and smaller liberal arts universities and the rise of the "for-profit" college in recent years:

"What is happening in traditional universities where the ethos of the liberal arts is still given lip service is the forthright policy of for-profit universities, which make no pretense of valuing what used to be called the “higher learning.” John Sperling, founder of the group that gave us Phoenix University, is refreshingly blunt: “Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop value systems or go in for that ‘expand their minds’” nonsense.

The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment.

In this latter model , the mode of delivery – a disc, a computer screen, a video hook-up – doesn’t matter so long as delivery occurs. Insofar as there are real-life faculty in the picture, their credentials and publications (if they have any) are beside the point, for they are just “delivery people.”"

Is the replacement of professor as teacher of "higher learning"/critical thinking with professor as deliveryperson of employable skills worth lamenting? Good question; worth thinking about, I suppose.

I've had wacky recurring dreams about my father lately:

I find him sitting on one of the chairs in my living room (or, in one case, we're taking a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge) and strongly suggest that he visit a doctor. "Dad," I say, "I'm only telling you this because you're the only person in history ever to recover from death. Doctors might be interested."

A decade ago, the Shakespearish were excited beyond belief about VR:

(1) VRML Dream, a "panoramic" Midsummer Night's Dream;
(2) a VR Globe;
(3) another VR Globe;
(4) another (more recent) VR Globe;

... and so on and so forth.

Today, it's TWITTER.
There have indeed been Twitter panels at academic conferences.
On Valentine's Day, "tune in" for Twitter of the Shrew, a twelve-day-long Twitter-based performance of The Taming of the Shrew (a scene a day) done with 19 Twitter accounts. They'll be "condensing the play’s iambic pentameter dialogue down to updates of 140 characters or less."

And in May, they're doing Hamlet.

Apologies to all ... both? ... of my readers for not updating more often. I'm teaching two classes, preparing a teaching portfolio, writing an essay, etc. ... all non-blog writing activities.

In the meantime, enjoy some Oprah hate.

My department prefers that we use "readers" for introductory lit classes, so I use the Bedford Compact Introduction to Literature, which is probably the least of several evils because its pages aren't as thin as Norton's. ;)

This semester, on a dare, I'm teaching as part of the drama unit Othello, the one Shakespeare play that the Bedford reader anthologizes.

The reader offers students "A Note on Reading Shakespeare," which advises:

"If you find the reading difficult, try listening to a recording of the play. (Most college libraries have recordings of Shakespeare's plays.) Allowing professional actors to do the reading aloud for you can enrich your imaginative reconstruction of the action and chaacters. Hearing a play can help you with subsequent readings of it."

While audio recordings may be used while you're reading, films may only be used after you've read the play:

"It is important to view the performance after your reading, though, so that your own mental re-creation of the play is not short-circuited by a director's production."

Because, after all, Will wrote plays specifically so that they might be anthologized and read by college students; he never intended them to be performed or anything. ;)

And the winning search that brought someone to Primrose Road in the month of January is ....

peple with low iqs [sic]