I have, like Sanda, been reading and reading and reading... I'm trying to keep on top of things this year, and it's working so far. I'm done all the reading for this week and through about half of it for next week, which is an accomplishment. I think every Arts student gets to a point about six weeks into the semester when they* realise that they've gotten behind and they've just got to try to get SOME of the reading done, and keep up with essays, assignments, tests, etc.

Most of what I've been reading about has been discourse analysis in one form or another. The only exception would be my Psycholinguistics class, which is a little bit boring because I know all the linguistics stuff already, and the prof is a linguist, not a psychologist, so who knows how much psych stuff we'll actually get done?

Advanced Topics in Discourse Analysis is my super-cool one-person invented class, where I get to read a billion books about different ways that people analyse discourse. Discourse is sort of a tricky thing to define, and that's actually what I've been reading about in the last couple of weeks -- what the hell IS discourse? Answers range from "language in use" (so, actually interacting, rather than making up sentences for examples in textbooks), to "language above the level of the sentence" (so, how utterances interact with each other), to Foucault's idea of "a range of ways of talking about something." Foucault's idea is very interesting. He's talking about our collective idea about something. So, when it comes to sexual desire/experience, we have this binary idea about women where they're either chaste/pure (good) or sluts (bad). A lot of our vocabulary and grammatical usage about women and sex reflects this idea about female sexuality. Discourses (in this sense) can change, and there are always competing discourses (in this case, a feminist discourse would challenge the madonna/whore discourse), so it's interesting to look at how they duke it out.

So, that's discourse as an idea, whereas a more linguistic definition of discourse talks about it as a practice. So, it's language in a social context, being influenced by and influencing the world around it. It's not always just language either. For instance, when we say, "Could you pass the salt?" it's kind of snarky and mischevious to say "Yes" and not actually do it. It's funny because we're acting like the question is actually what is said -- inquiring as to your ability -- rather than an indirect order. It's looking for salt, not "Yes." However, there's nothing in the question that really indicates that, except for our cultural knowledge that we usually ask for salt indirectly. It's a formalized use, sort of like phoning and saying "Is Kathy home?" rather than "Put Kathy on the phone." A direct order would be rude for certain cultural reasons, so we ask indirectly and the underlying order is understood. Discourse analysis tries to break that down and see how it works.

*On the singular they: I learned last week that this usage actually goes back to the 1500s or farther back, but in the 19th century, some fucking prescriptivist decided to outlaw it and that generic people are "he". This GUY also decided that in order to align with the "natural order" of things, men must come first in expressions, i.e. "man and wife," "Mr. and Mrs.," etc. Sometimes I can't decided if the men who decide these things are full of themselves or just reeeeeeally insecure. Anyways, there's no grammatical reason why it's bad, as it's been used for so long. It's just a language change that got interrupted by someone's obsession with their penis. Example:

Singular 2nd person: thou
Plural 2nd person: you
Singular 3rd person: he/she/it
Plural 3rd person: they

Thou has disappeared. It's okay, there there, ssh. We can deal with it juuuuust fine. P.S. Jane Austen used singular they all the time. P.P.S. If we get y'all to distinguish plural you from singular you (a former plural), are we going to get th'all someday? HOW AWESOME WOULD THAT BE?

School is kind of a mixed bag this year. My courses are not so inter-connected as they usually are, though they're all drawing on previous courses. Language and Gender is a second year course with a lot of frosh in the class, so there's a lot of "here's how do your readings!" and lectures about plagiarism and planning your time and "stereotypes are overly general." Really?

On the other hand, here's a random bit from my Sociolinguistic Variation and Change readings from last night:

"A similar concern with accountability to the data subsequently became the hallmark of variationist work; Labov's principle of accountability extends the general philosophy of accountability to a specifiable procedure which is the cornerstone of quantitative method... Replacing induction with a hypothetico-deductive mode of reasoning, the generativists argued that no corpus of data, however large, can usefully serve as a basis for linguistic generalizations since any corpus is a partial and accidental collection of utterances."

It's a 4000 level seminar-type course, so the learning curve is a bit steeper. It's interesting to switch gears between classes--I'm expected to know so much more in some classes than others, so I relax in the lower-level ones and then have to kick into a higher gear when I get to Sociolinguistics.

I'm going to apply to at least two programs for next year:
1) York's Graduate Program in Theoretical Linguistics (Master's)
2) Centennial College's Book and Magazine Publishing (which involves a lot of editing)

If I get into both (ha!), I have NO IDEA what I will do.

First of all, you will see the LibraryThing blog widget on the sidebar now. Blame languagehat for feeding my list-addiction, as well as my need to have my books in some semblance of order. Tagging! Awesome!

So, I have a class from seven o'clock until ten o'clock at night, plus an hour commute home, and that's just not cool. But I went to it tonight and it is HOLY HECK awesome. It's called Bad Girls In The Bible - Part One: Hebrew Bible, and it is taught from a comparative literature/jewish midrashim/feminist type perspective, and it is the first time it has ever been offered, and the prof is quirky and funny and has that Jewish accent that I've never actually heard in person, and they're using the Tanakh translation which I've always liked but haven't read since leaving the faith. So, I will get to delve into some feminism and religious studies and get mad about the Bible but maybe also find some redeeming qualities in the stories too. Perhaps it will balance out some of the rage that usually boils to the surface whenever I think about those stories and how they've affected me and people I know. It will be the bible minus evangelicalism -- heck, minus Christianity!

Today I realised that all the girls I used to sit with in Linguistics classes actually graduated last year. I have no in-class friends anymore! Mwah!

Shadflies:

A bit about shadflies for those not in the know. These things descend on Brockville like a plague for a week or two every summer. You have to use the windshield wipers to get them off your car. Sort of like how you have to push frosh kids out of your way to get anything done at York anymore.

I appear to have started a crocheting/knitting club at York. Want to join? I have actually been thinking about doing this for a long time, but then I realised that official York clubs have constitutions and treasurers and presidents and I am not interested in that. I just want to crochet things for homeless people. Of course, I also want to sell some stuff through the club to raise money for yarn for crocheting for homeless people, so maybe we are in need of official club status. I think we can get around it though.

I accidently informed Chris that crocheting is also known as hooking ("crochet" is a French word meaning "hook")... which makes me a hooker... and leads to puns like "hookers do it with chains." I must watch my tongue in the future. He teases me enough already, there's no sense giving him more ammunition.

Listen to this. This is what is happening in New Orleans. This disaster is so much more than a natural disaster. This is an ethical disaster, a governmental disaster, a human-rights disaster. People are dying and starving and rather than helping them, they're treating them like criminals. They're FINALLY letting the victims out of the city (they were locked in and barred from exiting by the National Guard), and they're going to send them to a camp where they'll be met by the National Guard who will check them for guns.

MeFi thread with lots of links: "The Red Cross has been ordered to stay out of New Orleans. Critical firefighting equipment is being left untouched. Chicago's offer of manpower and equipment is "snubbed" by FEMA, according to the Mayor. FEMA "forgets" to tell the military to airdrop food and water to the survivors. Northern Command has been ready for days, just waiting for the President to give the orders. Feds delayed paperwork giving permission for National Guard to act. Louisiana begged for federal help on Sunday in a formal request, but the Bush administration says they didn't know anything about problems until Wednesday. Meanwhile, reporters apparently grow weary of the spin doctors."

MeFi thread with link to incredible video of reporters just LOSING IT: FOXNews reporters finally tell the truth about something and disagree with the party line.

Reuters report, Friday:

"I had to walk two blocks to get here and I have arthritis and three ruptured discs in my back," said Selma Valenti, 80, as her husband lay beside her, being revived by a policeman in riot gear. The two had eaten nothing since Wednesday. Valenti and her husband, two of very few white people in the almost exclusively black refugee camp, said she and other whites were threatened with murder on Thursday.

"They hated us. Four young black men told us the buses were going to come last night and pick up the elderly so they were going to kill us," she said, sobbing. "They were plotting to murder us and then they sent the buses away because we would all be killed if the buses came -- that's what the people in charge told us this morning."

Other survivors recounted horrific cases of sexual assault and murder. Sitting with her daughter and other relatives, Trolkyn Joseph, 37, said men had wandered the cavernous convention center in recent nights raping and murdering children. She said she found a dead 14-year old girl at 5 a.m. on Friday morning, four hours after the young girl went missing from her parents inside the convention center. "She was raped for four hours until she was dead," Joseph said through tears. "Another child, a seven-year old boy was found raped and murdered in the kitchen freezer last night."

All this while being LOCKED IN THE SUPERDOME and being told by the National Guard that they're not allowed to walk over the highway bridge to another part of Louisiana. Not allowed! What the fuck!

Couple that with Bush staying on vacation until Wednesday, and Condi going shoe shopping while people in NO are dying.. they just don't give a shit. And they weren't letting foreign aid into the country until what -- Friday? Even Venezuela was offering aid -- Venezuela! It's not like they're on good terms with the US! But the government just didn't get around to dealing with offers of aid until... you know... after a good amount of poor black people had died. Now they're sending in armed guards and talking about "looters" and "insurgents" in New Orleans. Maybe these "looters" haven't eaten in three days and are starving, has the government thought of that? Maybe all that food in the abandoned and flooded grocery stores is going to go bad long before anyone can get back to sell it. If you're not going to let aid into the city, but you're not going to let them eat what is already there, WHAT THE FUCK??!

I find this so disturbing. I am SO angry. And at the same time, I'm kind of glad that this happened now, because Bush's mid-term elections are coming up and this reveals what a sorry excuse for a leader he is. Maybe this will help to strip him of some power. This is just one of the effects of the Iraq war on the American people. They've known that those levees needed to be reinforced for years, and that project was stripped of funding and the money was diverted to Iraq. This is what happens when you take care of the rich and abandon the poor. This is what happens when you send in the army instead of aid workers. This is what happens when you push the American Dream to the limit and just don't give a shit about people who haven't managed to make their millions. You treat them like lazy good-for-nothing criminals. You stop aid from getting through until you've gotten your photo-op.

I don't know how to deal with stuff like this. There are disasters, and then there is cruelty.