OH, YOU TALK ABOUT IT, TALK ABOUT IT, TALK ABOUT IT, TALK ABOUT IT
My Question of Sentence class is amazing. The basic aim of the class is to discuss the definition and concept of a sentence not solely as a grammatical unit, but as a rather contested and radical unit of discourse. (ROCK!) And the professor, Paul Hopper, is the kind of guy who has amazing asides and great incidental knowledge that he can sum up without even thinking about it. It's certainly unlike the other kinds of English classes I've had so far, but I'm liking it a great deal. For example, today he told us that a certain typeface in the '60s attempted to introduce a new piece of punctuation: the "interra-bang." I am SO not kidding, that's exactly what it's called. The interra-bang is a question mark and an exclamation point tethered to one another by the lower dot in each mark. I wish I could draw one for you.
Today I went to the first Women's Center meeting I've been able to make in my three years here. It was pretty interesting, although I felt that it ignored a lot of very necessary discussions about politics of the personal and public varieties. I hate to say this on the air (as it were), but I will: I felt that a lot of the ideas about gender expression and gender politics were very rudimentary; a knowledge of such didn't surface at all in any of our discussions about the vagina monologues or the sex worker art show. Hell, I got the sense that a lot of those present weren't even all that familiar with the idea of sex work (rather than old fashioned "prostitution.") In fact, the moderator for the meeting said that "sex work is the informed decision to work in the field of prostitution; it's like the good way of being a prostitute." Excuse me? What? Interra-bang?! Don't worry, I'm not just going to vent here, but I want to have some ways of getting into this discussion at next week's meeting rather than just letting it fly at my first. Let's just say for now that I felt the whole collective atmosphere was a little faulty in this most recent meeting.
In other news: it's still damn cold. I love my roommates. Everything else, I can wait to decide on.
My Question of Sentence class is amazing. The basic aim of the class is to discuss the definition and concept of a sentence not solely as a grammatical unit, but as a rather contested and radical unit of discourse. (ROCK!) And the professor, Paul Hopper, is the kind of guy who has amazing asides and great incidental knowledge that he can sum up without even thinking about it. It's certainly unlike the other kinds of English classes I've had so far, but I'm liking it a great deal. For example, today he told us that a certain typeface in the '60s attempted to introduce a new piece of punctuation: the "interra-bang." I am SO not kidding, that's exactly what it's called. The interra-bang is a question mark and an exclamation point tethered to one another by the lower dot in each mark. I wish I could draw one for you.
Today I went to the first Women's Center meeting I've been able to make in my three years here. It was pretty interesting, although I felt that it ignored a lot of very necessary discussions about politics of the personal and public varieties. I hate to say this on the air (as it were), but I will: I felt that a lot of the ideas about gender expression and gender politics were very rudimentary; a knowledge of such didn't surface at all in any of our discussions about the vagina monologues or the sex worker art show. Hell, I got the sense that a lot of those present weren't even all that familiar with the idea of sex work (rather than old fashioned "prostitution.") In fact, the moderator for the meeting said that "sex work is the informed decision to work in the field of prostitution; it's like the good way of being a prostitute." Excuse me? What? Interra-bang?! Don't worry, I'm not just going to vent here, but I want to have some ways of getting into this discussion at next week's meeting rather than just letting it fly at my first. Let's just say for now that I felt the whole collective atmosphere was a little faulty in this most recent meeting.
In other news: it's still damn cold. I love my roommates. Everything else, I can wait to decide on.
