Johnathan Viner's newest show via fecal face.

Facebook Can't Speak English

We see it all of the time in society: Apostrophes running rampant, commas splicing sentences into useless fragments, and subject-verb agreement being thrown out of the door.
Well, Facebook has joined the long list of businesses that can't seem to hire a decent writer.

When you log into the social networking site, the first place you are taken is to what is called your "News Feed." This is where you are updated on friends of yours joining a group, changing their status, becoming friends with others, or sending invitations to invite you to do something fun with them.

Here's what my newsfeed said today concerning one of my friends:

Ian Holloway changed their profile picture.

If you don't see the problem, then I suppose we are all losing our language again. The correction would be his or her instead of their. Because the gentlemen mentioned in the above sentence is only one person, the plural word "their" makes absolutely no sense!

I have gathered a few other instances of bad grammar being found in society below for everyone:







Because my friend Ian was victim to this language atrocity, I beleive it is only right to have today's hair be a tribute to him.

New Books, Old Books

I recently picked up The Book of Other People edited by Zadie Smith and it's becoming one of my favorites. Just published in January of 2008, it's a cornucopia of authors from what I can only call the 826 crowd. 826 being the address on Valencia street in San Francisco where the McSweeney's crowd first opened a writing workshop for youth. They have now sprung up all over America and the proceeds for this book will be going towards the 826 New York Chapter.
So the book started with only the instruction to "make somebody up" and write a story about him or her. Some authors were more non-traditional with stories about a pet or what you can only call a "thing," while others like Chris Ware create a realist comic strip story. The group of authors is wonderful :Dave Eggers, George Saunders, A.M. Holmes and Miranda July to name a few; you know... the cool crowd. There are other authors that are common names, but I had yet to explore for myself, like ZZ Packer, Toby Litt and Jonathan Lethem.
Oh, and as a bonus, Charles Burns does the cover art probably due to his recent affinities with The Believer.
I first fell in love with short fiction when I was in high school. I've always been wary of fiction novels because of the fear of investing time and money into a story that can leave you feeling as if you walked in a circle and come out of the experience the same. Short fiction is terse, but no so much. Longer than poetry and shorter than a novel, it becomes the perfect bowl, or bed, or chair in the Goldilock's house of literature. In short fiction, I believe the sentence structure and transitional aspects of story from paragraph to paragraph become amplified in importance and provide this magnifying lense on what makes literature so utterly beautiful.
As for old books, There are a mass amount that I think someone should take the time to meet again for the first time. On my mind this week is, of course, Faulkner. I began graduate school with no clear idea of what my thesis work would be. I knew it would have to cover short fiction in some way, but there were so many authors and aspects of their work to take pleasure in that a choice had to be made. I happened to take a Survey of American Lit class where we only read Faulkner. Comparative to now, I knew nothing about his work other than the required reading most of us faced back in high school or undergraduate American Lit classes. After reading 10 novels within a six month period, I was completely hooked. I have often hated the glorification of work to the point of worship, becuase when you finally see what all the hype is about most works just let you down. As for Faulkner, I do believe he is a literary genuis. His book, Go Down, Moses, which is either a book of short stories or a novel in short fiction chapter format (depending on which critic you are reading) is amazing and must be read if you haven't done so.
To summarize here would only butcher the tandem plots taking place within the novel, but I can say that I have never seen an author actually verbalize those feelings that we are unable to express due to the shackles of language. He does it almost perfectly over and over again using these 26 symbols we call an alphabet. It's worth a fucking explative.



So...there are two books worth seriously checking out; I mean, like, "underage abortion" seriously.

Today's hair is a bit non-traditional. Perhaps a pun is in order.

Real Mayo (squeezable)

John Edwards, Medieval Feminist Lit Clit, Apple Corporate Hegemony, and 2008

Quite a few developments in thought have been happening since the Christmas break has come to a close, a new year came into existence, and I, once again, had to lace up the ol' shoes, eat an egg, and begin research again towards my M.A. in English Lit.
I've decided it is much easier to use sub-headings after not posting in so long. Let's see how it works out:

The 2008 Presidential Election

Is it incredibly wrong of me to already feel completely over-saturated and gorged due to the talking heads on television ruining an election that has yet to take place? If anyone out there is thinking in their right minds and not completely interested in the downfall of America to the corporate whore sponsorship of our food, medicine and public schooling, then you are probably planning to vote for John Edwards.
The media has gotten together and played rock, paper, scissors with our democratic nominees and apparently Edwards lost. Debate after debate, Edwards is being ignored at an exponential rate. I found this video recently, which disturbed me for quite a few reasons.
First, It's becoming alarmingly clear that I will once again be voting for the lesser of two evils in this campaign, and second, Edwards has been the first candidate in a long time that has sworn off taking campaign contributions that will later affect the way in which he runs this country. Edwards eloquently points out that Clinton has taken more money from big business to fund her campaign than any other candidate, dem or rep, in history, but she was recently put into 2nd place by the one and only, Obama. Watch Obama struggle through his explanation here. He basically avoids the question by discussing a bill he proposed that would disclose monies taken from lobbyists, as if this would somehow revolutionize campaign financing in any way.

Apple

Being an ipod touch owner, I have found myself wasting a disgusting amount of time on it. This is the due to the fact that it is one of the best inventions I have ever owned in my life. Apple recently told ipod touch users that for a mere $20 they could have a few new apps like google earth and Apple Weather put onto their ipods. I couldn't beleive the price for this when I jailbroke my ipod the day I bought it and installs all of these for free. I have over 50 third party apps on my ipod ranging from Apple weather and iphysics to ebooks, playstation, istudy. I've even recently found an app that lets me access my computer's music library from anywhere with wifi or access other ipod touch music libraries to hear what they are listening to out there.
The ipod touch is truly brilliant and all of the applications are free and accessible from the internet. It's no longer a portable music player, I read books, watch movies, play chess, nintendo, and psx, while studying for the GRE on this thing.
I also found out that Apple has recently been charging 3 dollars per application to iphone users. These applications, and I will explain why this term makes no sense, range from ibeer to imilk. They produce a video in your ipod/iphone resembling a glass of liquid that you can then pretend to drink. Sounds fun! But they are not applications at all! To see the way they are being advertised, watch this. And to see why they are not applications at all, but merely pre-made videos that in no way respond to your movements, watch this.

Christine de Pisan

I recently read an excerpt from La Querelle de la Rose where one can see Pisan kicking the Lord Provost of Lisle's ass in respect to his opinions on the famous poem: Roman de la Rose. The literary debate began after Jean de Montreuil spoke of the Roman de la Rose as a masterpiece for men to understand and adhere to in becoming more gallant. The poem treats women as sexual objects and posits the view that women are naturally unable to be trusted or depended upon. For the 15th century, Christine, mind the pun, had some balls! This might be the earlist peice of feminist criticism out there. If there are any earlier, please reply.

I would write more, but tomorrow is another day. Today's hair is...you guessed it. A tribute to John Edwards.

Gay men give better haircuts

faux literary criticism, a haircut, and a man who believes that a Christian god exists.
How Could I not post this?

Literary Analysis -- Hurston

Six Degrees to John Edwards

John Edwards has recently recruited Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins to join him on his campaign trail. This might be Edwards' attempt to use celebrity star power, similiar to the mighty "Oprackobama" that has recently taken liberals and soccer-moms by storm lately.
The complete story is here if anyone would like to read it.

Mentioned in the article above is Edwards' attempt to capitalize upon the famous "Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon" game, which cinephiles everywhere have been playing since Footloose popularized the hi-top, blinding white Reebok (circa 1980's foot bling).
I decided to play the game with the new political twist and below are my results:

1. I dated a woman named Sara who was a banquet coordinator at Pinehurst Country Club and Golf Course in Pinehurst, NC.
2. Sara met John Edwards (and according to her, his two spoiled brat kids who ran around trashing everything in sight) at a political function she had been the decorator for back in 2003.

TWO DEGREES!!!!

As for Kevin Bacon: Can anyone connect him to the guy that made the infamous "Chocolate Rain" video?

Today's Hair: Kevin Bacon with a Jack White (White Stripes) haircut.

Henry David "Thorough"

My fiancee is taking an undergraduate English course on American Lit and was recently doing a presentation on "Walden." The Professor who teaches the class has been a mentor of mine for almost a decade; someone who I've looked up to and has always taken the time to give me the advice I needed.
I decided to visit her class and watch her presentation (because she is beautiful and because we often compete scholastically).
As I walked in the classroom, the professor told me to do an internet search for "conquered" on one of the in-class computers. He contintued to tell me that I might think it's pronounced con-QUERED (con-chord) but it is actually CON-quered (conkurd).
I had no idea what in the hell he was talkiing about.

I found out that while he was studying Thoreau at UNC-CH, he met a scholar attending a conference from Concord, MA and this man had been very blunt about the fact that Concord is pronounced conKURD and that Henry David Thoreau's last name was pronounced the exact same way that the word "thorough" is pronounced. He mentioned that Thoreau enjoyed his last name being pronounced similiarly to this adjective.
Although, my mentor prof admitted he had never seen this fact about Thoreau's name in print anywhere, the scholar he had spoken with so vehemently demanded the pronunciation that it was probably true.
Interesting. Can anyone verify?

Today's Hair: Nikki Giovanni with a 'fro

Scrabble dictionary needs revamping!

After finishing a Scrabble game with my friends tonight, I began slowly boiling once again at the acceptable and unacceptable words found within the official Scrabble Dictionary.
For instance: "ZA" is an acceptable word because in the late 1980's a surfer with a cocaine nosedrip decided he was hungry and so shortened the word "pizza" to "Za."
While I (sardonically) respect the usage of the word, I am angered at how other words that are much more mainstream fail to meet the Scrabble dictionary criteria.
"taze" and "gat" have yet to be added just to name two off of the top of my head and both of these, "taze" in particular, have received a lot of media attention lately.
For a look at the infamous "Don't taze me, bro" incident, you can click the link.
I would agree more with the word "za" if other words that come from sub-culture jargon equally received attention in the Scrabble game. Hip-hop, which I am not a fan of, has given us "souf" and any number of words involving the letter z (realz, pleaz, nutz, skeezas, etc), which would make the game much more interesting. I wonder why a California-esque surfer word makes the cut and not one from an inner city sub-culture.
I sit on the descriptivist/prescriptivist fence. Language is a living thing and also very fun, which is why I find it amusing when people convert nouns to verbs, proper nouns become common (Q-tip), etc. On the other hand, incorrect grammar boils my blood for some reason.