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mallorys_cameraI woke up thinking about the curious contractile properties of time; how when I first read Scott Fitzgerald’s flapper stories (for example), their characters seemed to exist in a chronological epoch as distant from my own as the American Civil War or Catherine the Great. But really, The Great Gatsby was written a mere 27 years before my birth, and 27 years is nothing, 27 years is 1990, which I remember, though not vividly – I suppose it’s a condition of my particular form of PTSD that I don’t remember events sequentially though individual moments, unanchored from time, float up with an almost hypnagogic intensity.
What interval has to pass before a particular time period is mythologized by the present tense?
Maybe 30 years is the magic number. Lotsa 90s nostalgia websites out there. But nothing from the oughts.
###
Incredibly thick ground fog when I drove home from Dutchess Literacy last night. It’s been super-warm and raining hard. Quite the Washington Irving landscape with the enormous, looming, and now quite bare trees. I was driving so slowly, I expected to be overtaken by the Headless Horseman.
Attendance at my Intermediate English Class is still hugely – or should I say yugely? – down.
We did nouns and questions. They had a really hard time differentiating proper nouns from common nouns.
Allison, my predecessor with this class, avoided grammar altogether, but I told them I liked grammar.
“It’s like learning to cook!” I said brightly. “When you first learn to cook, you learn to make one dish! But when you get better at cooking, you learn rules! So you can make many dishes!”
Not sure this metaphor really plays, but it’s my metaphor, and I’m sticking to it.
###
I’m finding just about everyone in my day-by-day life incredibly annoying.
Could be lack of exercise.
I hate gyms.
I’m thinking of scoring a cheap Xbox, a cheap monitor, and a used copy of Dance Central. Making that my exercise routine for the coming winter.
What interval has to pass before a particular time period is mythologized by the present tense?
Maybe 30 years is the magic number. Lotsa 90s nostalgia websites out there. But nothing from the oughts.
###
Incredibly thick ground fog when I drove home from Dutchess Literacy last night. It’s been super-warm and raining hard. Quite the Washington Irving landscape with the enormous, looming, and now quite bare trees. I was driving so slowly, I expected to be overtaken by the Headless Horseman.
Attendance at my Intermediate English Class is still hugely – or should I say yugely? – down.
We did nouns and questions. They had a really hard time differentiating proper nouns from common nouns.
Allison, my predecessor with this class, avoided grammar altogether, but I told them I liked grammar.
“It’s like learning to cook!” I said brightly. “When you first learn to cook, you learn to make one dish! But when you get better at cooking, you learn rules! So you can make many dishes!”
Not sure this metaphor really plays, but it’s my metaphor, and I’m sticking to it.
###
I’m finding just about everyone in my day-by-day life incredibly annoying.
Could be lack of exercise.
I hate gyms.
I’m thinking of scoring a cheap Xbox, a cheap monitor, and a used copy of Dance Central. Making that my exercise routine for the coming winter.
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no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 03:38 pm (UTC)My latest ideation is holding a class in which anyone at any level can drop in whenevs. Drop the idea of a gradual ascent, since people have lives & such, and motivation is short-lived.
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Date: 2016-11-30 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-01 02:14 am (UTC)I'm sure you're one of the best. Tell them they're missing out. They are.
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Date: 2016-11-30 05:10 pm (UTC)We had sock hops with poodle skirts, even!
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Date: 2016-11-30 05:24 pm (UTC)if my memory serves me correctly...
Date: 2016-11-30 05:58 pm (UTC)The 40's kick was also there but earlier in the decade and much more short-lived.
Re: if my memory serves me correctly...
Date: 2016-11-30 06:03 pm (UTC)I sit (gracefully!) corrected. :-)
Re: if my memory serves me correctly...
Date: 2016-11-30 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 07:42 pm (UTC)Happy Days was the big push that started the 50s craze in Albuquerque...then the movie American Graffiti sealed the deal!
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Date: 2016-11-30 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 07:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 07:25 pm (UTC)