Trackback should be working now… now on to getting my Awasu news aggregator all set up, and testing my own RSS feed (and making it available on my site). No rest for the wicked…
Month: July 2003
The Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata (…and my musings on Western and Japanese modes of reconciling civilized life with human emotions…)
(I should begin this by saying I don’t know a damned thing about Japan. I know a few books, a few movies, and I’ve known a few people, but my knowledge of Japan relies solely on this. Therefore what I am writing about here involves a lot of what I imagine or induce from the literature and art I know about. It could be grossly erroneous. As always, if you think so, please do comment and tell me what else I should see, read, listen to, or look at. That said…) I have just, a few minutes ago, finished reading …
Times and Activities
Here’s a handout to be used with 20-sided dice, which works on present perfect and on telling times. The idea is, the students roll twice, to obtain a time and to obtain an activity. Then they role play phone calls from one to the other, at first just answering the phone and roleplaying as if they were in the middle of that activity. After a few tries, get them doing followup questions. Of course, the phone call is coming from overseas and the friend who is calling has no idea what local time is. So students get practice at transforming …
Pain
So here’s what I have learned in the last few days… 1. It’s amazing how radically your view of a situation can change. Sometimes pain is self-inflicted, and very often I think the effects of emotional pain of this type can be overcome far more easily than one imagines. 2. It’s amazing how quickly back pain can result from improperly executing the head motions in the butterfly stroke. We’ve just begun learning to do it. I made a joke in Korean about how our classs used to look like a bunch of retarded frogs, but now we look like retarded …
Illicit/Impossible: Romantic Neuroses and History
History isn’t always what is convenient, comfortable, or acceptable to us, as I’m reminded reading this article sent to me by my friend John Wendel, about what’s going on at Thomas Jefferson’s old estate, Monticello. Here’s a snippet: The country has been fascinated for the better part of two centuries with the question of whether Jefferson followed his father-in-law’s example and fathered children by Elizabeth’s daughter, Sally. Leading historians who doubted this have done an about-face since genetic evidence linked Jefferson to one Hemings child. There is a growing consensus that Jefferson fathered most, if not all, of Sally’s children, …