Sometimes you feel like a nut...
This is a follow up post the the other day’s post. They are, however, being posted at the same time: they were written on different days, but I seldom upload the pieces on the same day that I write them.
So here I am, (barbeque sauce on my titties) teaching English in Bolonga to Italians of all ages, infant to retiree. It turns out that my English is not very good, insofar as I do not speak the same (artificial) dialect as the textbooks. Of course, most of what they do at this private language school is teach to the test, which, as far as I can tell, is all that anybody ever does. The test, of course, is handed down by the dons at Cambridge who are, as we all know, the final and absolute arbiters of the English language.
My English, of course, is not Cambridge standard—indeed, I doubt very much that the very Cambridge dons speak their own standard dialect: they certainly don’t speak it with the preposterous parody of received pronounciation presented by the recorded listening exercises. I speak a vernacular dialect of English developed in the North American colonies over the last four hundred years; the only reason that my idiolect approaches the standard at all is that I have been exposed to so many different dialects of English: over time, they average out into a roughly standard variety of North Atlantic common English. But my usage and style are certainly not those of the textbook: I don’t know that anybody’s usage is like that.
Of course, there is accidence and essence. But this isn’t a post about language: it’s a post to follow up on my being (a gerund takes a possessive pronoun because it acts as a substantive in the sentence) officially stupid. Of course, that was flamage. However, it wasn’t completely untrue: I didn’t get the grades that I would have liked to get at university, and it didn’t seem to have anything to do with how hard I worked or how much I studied. Rather, my problem was that I fundamentally misunderstood the entire program I was in (I’m boutta start flaming again (boutta = about to, an auxiliary verb for a very proximate future)).
But I’m not sure what to do now: I guess that I could still apply for this program; I don’t know (my mother hates that tick; I think that it comes from texting too much: I tend to say “idk” a lot). But if I did, what would I do then? It would improve my French and my Italian, and it would be very interesting, but I don’t honestly believe that I have anything to contribute to the sum of academic knowledge. Here I am, essentially a creative writer of essays (I want to be Charles Lamb when I grow up, but I’ll probably end up as Christopher Smart. There’s worse things, though: Christopher Smart’s poetry was set to music by Benjamin Britten, which puts him in the illustrious company of William Blake and Wilfred Owen), poetry, and short fiction. I don’t have the stomach or the inclination to be a real scholar, as evidenced by my ecclectic and idiosyncratic interests and hobbies. Being a scholar is about pleasing publishers and editors and focusing on a single subject of which you acquire a profound mastery. Does that sound like me?
This blog has become remarkably personal, hasn’t it? And isn’t my style all over the place? I’m not sure where I’m going with all this, and I’m not sure what you think of it as you read. I’ll admit that the main inspirations for the style and method of these posts are my personal diary (which is stuff that’s so absurd I won’t let anybody read it until after I’m dead and buried) and the long, rambling text messages I send to my friends, who must surely scroll past them, rolling their eyes. But I’m having fun, and isn’t that what it’s all about? For it was testified somewhere (Heb. 2:6), “you should not waste the internet’s time by writing random bullshit on your personal website. Only make a blog if you have something to say.” I say, “nuts to that.” It’s not as though many people are reading this anyway, and those of you who are clearly don’t value your time or bandwidth very highly.
