Devenish

Click to play She used to work in a diner Never saw a woman look finer I used to order just to watch her float across the floor She grew up in a small town Never put her roots down Daddy always kept movin', So she did too. Neil Young Unknown Legend A police car and a screaming siren Pneumatic drill and ripped up concrete A baby wailing, a stray dog howling The screech of brakes and lamplights blinking That’s entertainment, that’s entertainment The Jam That's Entertainment This evening it had been my intention to bring myself and my reader up to date with family news, until I was waylaid by YouTube (sic transit...). The rot, in point of fact, had set in much earlier in the day when I pulled out two cds at random from my collection at work—Friday is my non-teaching day btw—to see if they really sounded better than the so-called 'lossless compression' that is an iTunes AAC file (They do , though only 75% good as vinyl, even with a dull pick-up cartridg...

Most of my teaching these days is pretty low-level stuff: of the five undergraduate courses I teach, only two have explicitly metalinguistic content. The subject matter of the other three is entirely up to me, provided that I teach English reading, writing and something interesting (respectively). (The word respectively was in fact one of the topics that came up in yesterday's Reading class—which shows how hard it is to escape from linguistic concerns). As for the 'something interesting' class (aka Kisoen-shu 'Introductory Seminar'), one of the chosen topics for this year is Singer-Songwriters, in which I introduce my students to (to me) interesting popular music dating from the time that most of their parents—sometimes grandparents—were children themselves. So far we've looked at songs by Harry Chapin, Ralph McTell, Don McLean, Joni Mitchell. I've had a great time, though probably they would rather listen to J-pop or watch paint dry. Too bad, sho ga ...