Pictures, rant about prof, metaphors, etc etc
Still quiet here. You probably guessed that, didn’t you? Here’s some pics I took going to the “Contreoverses” exhibit:
This is on a street next to the library, I forget which street, it intersects the Rue de Richelieu.
The library itself, from within the courtyard. Pretty, innit? Not to complain about my Analyse de Textes prof again, but she got on my nerves again when she said, “Which National Library is the exhibition at? The real one.” Of course, part of that is my irrational attachment to the Mitterand site, since I spent half a semester researching it, but it also cements my opinion of her as someone who really, truly has an apparent knee-jerk reaction against anything new. She’d already gone on a rather cliché rant about cell phones and email, which was of course entirely apropos the text we were analyzing, but the problem is I got the feeling she actually agreed with it. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except that this class was supposed to be about analyzing texts, not endorsing or criticizing particular opinions. If you’re going to teach analysis, teach analysis, and if you really believe in what a given text says, and can’t keep your opinions to yourself, either throw in other texts that you disagree with, or don’t teach that text.
The point, after all, is to analyze how an author says something, what methods they use. Not to evaluate their opinion. Not to argue for or against. A little opinion, a little snide remark every now and then, is entertaining. Too much is really, really irritating. If anything, you should present as wide a variety of viewpoints as possible, because people with completely opposing ideas on a given topic will be making completely different assumptions and implicit logical leaps; thus, you can make sure the students learn to analyze, instead of getting lucky because they happen to make the same assumptions as the author.
All of which reminds me of some random research I’d gotten to doing online — I don’t really remember why — about how people with Asperger’s Syndrome tend to have trouble grasping metaphors and figurative language. What struck me, reading explanations of this, was that everybody seems to treat metaphor and simile as some kind of code, a semi-random cypher. A is to B as x is to y and all that, where you just plug in things that “feel” the same and presto! insta-metaphor. Nobody gives any thought to all the assumptions that go into figurative language, and that’s a shame. It ends up being that people “get it” if they make the same assumptions as whoever coins the metaphor, and don’t get it if they don’t. I think there was an interesting discussion that sort of touched on this in Douglas Hofstadter’s Goödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. I think his example was the expression, “The Vice President is the spare tire of the government.” That one, of course, is pretty straightforward, because there’s only one real way in which those two things are alike. But when you get to stuff like “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” the analogy is so imperfect that it’s just begging to be taken apart and studied. And I get the feeling lots of people just sort of sit there and go “Oh, how pretty, roses, ooh shiny!” And language and logic just lie there, their potential unused, understanding bypassed just because someone couldn’t stop to think.
Right, where was I? That rant kinda got very tangential to itself. Whatever. More pictures:
This was security at the library. Real tough, huh?
Rue de Richelieu.
Somewhere nearby, pretty building. The 9th, I think.
My ingeniously duct-taped showerhead has been coming loose lately and threatening to fall off. Eventually it did, at about 6:00 AM yesterday morning, waking me up:
And today, I woke up about 6:00 or 7:00, I forget, don’t know what woke me up, but I checked the showerhead and found it thus:
So clearly I have to do something about it. I already tried adding double-stick tape underneath the duct tape, and around the edges, but the duct-tape adhesive is just about shot, so the double-stick stays on the wall and the duct tape comes off anyway.
About 9:30 this morning, the fire alarm woke me up. So yay. I got some clothes on and got downstairs, and literally just as I was walking out into the ground-floor hallway the alarm stopped. On the bright side, it got me up bright and early to do my laundry. And now I shall go to the American Express office, to cash some travelers’ checks to pay my last month’s rent. Whoohoo. But first, one last random pic:
Inside the Mysteries of the French Public Toilets! Oooooooohhhh……
