new xanga:

www.xanga.com/waxwing.

aurochsandangels discontinued.

A special danger area in Pnin's case was the English language. Except for such not very helpful odds and ends as 'the rest is silence', 'nevermore', 'week-end', 'who's who', and a few ordinary words like' eat', 'street', 'fountain pen', 'gangster', 'Charleston', 'marginal utility', he had had no English at all at the time he left France for the States. Stubbornly he sat down to the task of learning the language of Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Poe, Edison, and thirty-one Presidents. In 1941, at the end of one year of study, he was proficient enough to use glibly terms like 'wishful thinking' and 'okey-dokey'. By 1942 he was able to interrupt his narration with the phrase, 'To make a long story short'. By the time Truman entered his second term, Pnin could handle practically any topic: but otherwise progress seemed to have stopped despite all his efforts, and by 1950 his English was still full of flaws. That autumn he supplemented his Russian courses by delivering a weekly lecture in a so-called symposium ('Wingless Europe: A Survey of Contemporary Continental Culture') directed by Dr Hagen. All our friend's lectures, including sundry ones he gave out of town, were edited by one of the younger members of the German Department. The procedure was somewhat complicated. Professor Pnin laboriously translated his own Russian verbal flow, teeming with idiomatic proverbs, into patchy English.

I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a spacetraveller's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego. The sensation poor Pnin experienced was something very like that divestment, that communion. He felt porous and pregnable. He was sweating. He was terrified. A stone bench among the laurels saved him from collapsing on the sidewalk. Was his seizure a heart attack? I doubt it. For the nonce I am his physician, and let me repeat, I doubt it. My patient was one of those singular and unfortunate people who regard their heart ('a hollow, muscular organ,' according to the gruesome definition in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, which Pnin's orphaned bag contained) with a queasy dread, a nervous repulsion, a sick hate, as if it were some strong slimy untouchable monster that one had to be parasitized with, alas. Occasionally, when puzzled by his tumbling and tottering pulse, doctors examined him more thoroughly, the cariograph outlined fabulous mountain ranges and indicated a dozen fatal diseases that excluded one another. He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.

 "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say. I says you're lucky if her playing out of school is all that worries you. I says she ought to be down there in that kitchen right now, instead of up there in her room, gobbing paint on her face and waiting for six niggers that cant even stand up out of a chair unless they've got a pan full of bread and meat to balance them, to fix breakfast for her."

EDIT

Goals:

1.  Lose 15 lbs.

2.  Get a 5.0 GPA

3.  Gain emotional stability?

saw mrs. panico today!

she says she'll be back at the end of november...it's a shame that she didn't retire like two years after freshmen year...i could have had her for English III Honors.  She's really nice and a good teacher.