When I was 20, I moved to Rochester, New York to be with someone I loved (that is another story for another time). I was lonely there. I stayed with my aunt who left a couple of months after I arrived. Initially I stayed in her apartment but that didn't work out. My lover found me a room in a house with one of his friends. The friend, a Chinese exchange student, and I lived in a little three bedroom house across from the library. By exploring I found two essential things for life: a library and a cafe. Eventually hanging out daily at the cafe paid off and I meet some people.
At this point, I was trying to be goth. I didn't really have a name for it. I just liked vampires. Of course I also did the punk scene, and went to a lot of clubs so I could mosh. Basically I was a confused rural kid trying to hang with "city" kids. They accepted me into their little group. I think because I was darker than they were, and because I was in a very alternative scene (again another story...). But beneath it all, they looked down on me. I remember it all came to a head when a bunch of them (they all went to Rochester University, English majors) were discussing Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. I had read the book as a teen, and tried to join the conversation. They ignored me. When I complained about it to the lover. He said "Well what do you except you sound like a hick. You can't pronounce anything and you have a horrible accent." This was the first time I felt failed by language (or did I fail language?).
Back in Maine, I tried college again. This time I determined to finish. I started off as a Special Education major but changed to English the first day of classes. It went well at first. Mostly the accents resembled mine (but I was working on eradicating mine). The professor seemed interested in what I had to say about the books. He took me under his wing. Then I wrote my first essay. He refused to grade it, and asked me to rewrite it. When we meet to discuss it, he suggested I take English comp again. Language again...this time it was my writing. Shortly after he told me this I received the notice that my application for the creative writing program had been rejected.
Eventually, I erased most of my accent. I had enough for people to find it "charming." At university, I earned a reputation for being smart, and began to hang with the small group of "intellectuals" on our campus. My writing, both fiction and nonfiction, won awards. I felt I had overcome my failure with languages. I didn't control language but rather language and I had a relationship. It was a wonderful relationship. When I read D. H. Lawrence, I felt like I was making love. The escape books afforded me developed into something deeper, more intense. It was hard for the humans in my life to compete with words.
Jump forward to now. After all this work to be respected, I dropped out of the academy to teach in public schools for three years. I developed a different relationship with language. I taught kids who definitely did not speak the "king's English." And I watched the pain, frustration, and anger which rose when people commented on Ebonics or ghetto language, and I knew how they felt. You grow up talking a certain way. It is a part of your identity. You family speaks this language. And the outside world groups you based on that language, that accent. Changing that, erasing that, takes away a bit of who you are. You become a half person. You speak two languages. I talked one way with my friends and another with my family.
I taught long enough to redevelop the insecurity which plagued me as an early undergraduate. Now fully insecure again, I go to graduate school. I stumble a bit in the beginning but catch on. I feel confident again. My professors praise me. All is well. Then I apply for a teaching assistantship. There ends up being a conflict. They don't tell us who has been awarded. They act as if the candidates are awful. This does nothing to help my confidence. A professor, whom I like, tells me kindly that there is concern over my application because I mispronounce words. This, she tells, me is problematic because the students at UNCC need someone who is a good verbal example. And if I end up in a good Ph.D program, the undergrads will have no respect for me. I end up with the TA but I feel devastated.
What fails here? Is it me failing language? Is it language failing me? What happens to those who don't use language properly? And there is definitely a proper use. No matter what theories we want to pull out. The world demands that you speak in a certain way. And when you don't there are consequences. I sure this has nothing to do with language really. It has to do with culture and society. With class systems. With prejudices. With ways the system keeps people down. But for me, who is in love with language, it involves a break down. It's the little betrayals that a lover inflicts. And I am not sure who perpetrates the betrayal in this love story.
38 comments:
I am nosy and I am certain Ernesto has a more insightful and wise opinion on this but...your post reminded me of a paper I just wrote on the tragedy that befalls upon two Shakespearean characters—Cordelia and Coriolanus—after their refusal to speak. I was going to use Derrida's essay "Before the Law" in order to study this phenomenon but I, instead, used Luce Irigaray's To Speak Is Never Neutral.
Although I might not understand very well the impotence brought by language's excluding principle, I still would like to share with you three phrases from Irigaray's book (the essay is "The Utterance in Analysis") that I figured you would find interesting.
1. Our entry into discourse, and we have always been implicated in it, provokes our splitting.
2.A perpetually unrecognized law regulates all operations carried out in language(s), all production of discourse, and all constitution of language according to the necessities of one perspective, one point of view, and one economy…
3. Thus are revealed the effects of the submission of humanity to the snares of language.
There's not one world demanding you speak one way, but a class- and culture-based series of different worlds, all expecting you to speak a different version of English, and ready to judge you when you don't pick the right version for the setting. Classist, yes. But maybe also exclusionary in the way all us v. them groups are exclusionary -- language, along with manners & dress, as a way to show group membership. Not just in academe or the middle class, but across all groups. I learned to substitute "f" for "th" and to slur out a sentence without any vowels cause it helps me fit in better when talking to certain kids and adults in my work life. And I always feel privileged when some coworkers drop the "formal" English and start using their "home" dialect around me. But I know I'm privileged to have learned "standard" English at home (I can still remember saying research with the 1st syllable pronounced "ree" and my dad saying, "People who do it usually pronounce it re-search." what a snob) But where do we draw the line between preserving some kind of standard for standard English and not using language to support prejudices? Do you think there has to be a standard at least in the academic world?
And I totally empathize with being in love with language. Words are just WAY COOL. (wait, now I sound like a teenager instead of a PhD candidate!) Dave being a writer is definitely part of the reason I fell for him.
I love Irigaray. I need to go back to her as it has been awhile..too long really since I read her. No discourse is not neutral. And I think this plays into Rosslyn's ideas concerning standards and where we draw those lines. The problem is that standards are a way of excluding others. There is no neutral way to create such a standard.
And yes, dialect is one way that we mark membership. Viewed this way it is a positive move but the key for me is that there are certain dialects that acess one to power. Yes being able to speak "ghetto" might enable one to fit in with a group but the inability to not speak ghetto (I know a double negative) is what keeps some from power.
My own solution? Well I am learning to pronounce the way demanded. But I am also drawing a line. Much of the compliant is becaue I have a slight New England dialect and those complaining don't. So many times when they correct me, I look up the words, and I'm either a right or b, the word can be pronounced both ways. I won't be submissive before language. A relationship of equals is what I prefer...
And Rebeka, you are not nosy. I welcome any new reader to my blog. It's always wonderful to have other perspectives.
Ginger, I can't add any wisdom to what Ros says, but since when did that stop me?
You are right that I would understand where you were coming from better after I read this. I do. But again, language didn't fail you, you didn't fail language, you didn't "fail" anything but a bunch of assholes who hid their fears behind your supposed shortcomings - assholes you are seriously better off for having "failed."
I have had colleagues from Texas and Georgia who have destroyed their accents to make it in academia and while that helped them climb the ladder it didn't help them become grounded humans. To put it mildly.
We could say we live in a class/race etc-bound society but I think that we live in a world that's deathly afraid of the Other - and you represented the Other. So they destroyed you. It was safer for them - it had nothing to do with you as a person. You just blew up their power game, and they didn't have the guts to admit to that.
I work at UC Riverside, the darkest and least middle class of the UCs. It's full of kids trying to make their way into the system where capital circulates. I mean capital in a number of senses, including cultural capital. Obviously, in a fear-filled society, the "right" accent is cultural capital. (Ros is right, the right accent may mean any number of accents ...)
These kids don't have the right skin color, economic background, command of the king's English, etc. to slide right through the system. My own kids did. I can see the difference it makes.
That's the only reason I love working at UCR (except that my job is to be responsible for the library's humanities collections, and I have a relatively reasonable budget - but that's another story).
These kids need help, not shitting on. I work with them on the reference desk, and most of the lower division kids have trouble understanding assignments and formulating questions. They're not stupid, they just don't come from the "right" background. We in the library offer infinite patience - and the faculty is good about this too. This doesn't mean there isn't a dropout rate or anything, it just means that we "get" that "we're one, but we're not the same" ...
Had you come to a place like this, instead of the places yu went, maybe you would have been built up, not destroyed.
One "utopian" Riverside story: when in high school, my daughter and a number of friends went to Disneyland. Standing in a long line, one suggested that they find a woman up front, and stand next to her, and pretend she was their mother. Then they started laughing, because one kid was black, one Mexican, one Filipino, one Euro-Jewish. It wasn't that they didn't "know" this, they were just so used to it it didn't matter. But they knew they wouldn't find a suitable "mother" - not in this society (now if only Angelina Jolie had been up front in that line ...). To this day that story's important to me, because that situation is so uncommon ...
Thank you John. I think that langauge does play in these games. Maybe if we accept a pure language...which I am not sure exists but..again I'll need to think about this.
And I am not crushed. I was for a bit, cried a lot, and felt miserable. But I have been lucky in that those who spoke with me for the most part were kind and encouraging. The undergrad. prof. took me under his wing, and guided me through the system. And the one who spoke to me here, is my advisor, and she's pretty amazing. Despite crippling bouts of feeling like a poesur (which I suspect happens to everyone), I know that I deserve my place as much as anyone. So not crushed, and still moving ahead.
I want to teach somewhere like UCR someday.
I read this after reading your discussions on Ernesto's blog.
I've had similar problems, although not with academe. There my accent causes no problems, although I do have some sort of northern accent. However I taught in an area of England which has a strong accent (and often considered very 'hick'), and most of the kids there thought I was foreign. The staff had no problems though. I now teach in the town near where I grew up and I hear how different my accent is from the kids', who come from only a few miles away. I have to rearrange how I speak to them, and find myself having to remember to speak my normal English again with staff.
I'm now looking at moving to the south of the country, where I'd expect the accent to be different, yet everyone there seems to speak a far more neutral English, and mine doesn't seem too out of place. Perhaps that's because I've only talked to people at the university.
I can't understand why someone wouldn't give you a job because of accent. Surely there's a massive prejudice issue there that wouldn't hold up in an industrial tribunal? Or do I only think that because I live in an area where the accent from 20 miles away is at times unintelligible? Or because I live in a country with awareness of accents?
Besides, even if you eradicate your accent in US English, you'll still have one in the UK or Australia or any foreign language you speak... It's a question, as others have said, of perspectives.
Jon
A New England accent is far nicer than a neutral US accent, if such a thing is possible. Isn't New England like thirteen states? How can it have only one accent?
Correction:
'a country with an awareness of accents' should read 'a country with a strong awareness of accents' - class prejudices here come through most in reactions to accents
Jon,
I have no idea why this is such an issue. I do misprounce some words (the curse of a reader who reads more than they speak) and this is also connected to my lower class status. My family didn't use "big" words at home, and so my exposure to complicated vocabulary came mostly from books. And I also misprounce when I speak fast which is often. I'm working on both areas.
But what blew my mind was when a prof. said "evolution" with the British pronunication, and then corrected a student who used the American pronunication. I am not sure what the real issue is but I have to work on it as I need the TA in order to get into a decent Ph.D program. I look at it as yet another game to play.
Accents are class related here as well. The U.S. just pretends that this isn't the case. We try to make excuses for it. There's an excellent documentary about class, the name escapes me but I'll find it which shows a contest in Baltimore, Maryland where middle class women compete to best represent the sterotypical working class women in Maryland. Lovely eh?
I think the issue with accents is this (but then I have a simple mind): chimps live in small groups. Single males that wander away from their own and too close to another group are often killed. They are perceived threats to the local "capital".
Humans are primates. Chimps are very near relatives. I think it's (almost) that simple.
Human groupings are more fluid than those of most primates who live in groups. Therefore it's not so easy to spot outsiders, i.e. threats. Language, accent, etc. are among the identifiers.
At least chimps don't pretend to be "civilized."
Sorry for overstating the case and saying you were crushed, Ginger. And I should note that my wife mispronounces words, too. Pronouncing words should never be related to intelligence. It's just a skill, and as such can be acquired.
As far as feeling like a poseur goes, it's enough for me to note that since everyone is, no one is, we're all just humans (primates), stumbling from one darkness to another.
It's okay John...I didn't take it personally just wanted you to know that I keep pushing ahead.
I have been thinking a great deal about territorialization (thanks to Delezue), and I think langauge also functions on that level...just makes outraged, you know? I see that this happens, and it does bother me. It bothers me because this territorialization becomes an act of power. And it's not just the power of "This is my group go away" but "This is my group, and we have food, water, and weapons so we will crush you." The power relations that operate in our setting off standards close some people off from captial. And that's done in my opinion in a very purposeful way.
And yes we are all just stumbling around whether we admit it or not. I just often struggle with actue feelings of unworthiness...as if I'm not staying in my place and there will be consequences...
What is the human universe if not the universe of violent "power relations"? Not that that's all it is, but ...
And you're right. If you don't stay in "your place" there WILL be consequences. But - If you do stay in "your place" there WILL be consequences.
I'm glad you keep pushing on.
I was talking to a good friend yesterday. She was "blocked" vis-a-vis writing because she too felt like a poseur. I think we discovered that she was still hearing her mom's critical voice in her head. I suggested she make that voice the major "character" in the next thing she wrote. Which she should start immediately. She thought that was probably right, but scary as hell. Well, yeah.
Again, I'm glad you keep pushing on. We need you.
dear ginger: i don´t write in blogs as usual as you or john, but this time i wanted to make a remark: i´m gladly sorprised to find someone thas works from the resistence and is compromised about it. One day i´ll tell you many stories about scholling, teaching and being in places where the way you talk determinates many things.social behaviour is a complicated matter but political and ethical...
it´s language that we are made of, we need it to live by, to express love, fear, not just to comunicate. and john is right, those who think of you like a less person because your pronunciation or diction, don´t deserve another thought.
keep writing, thinking, loving...
brenda
oh my god, i just noticed that my las line is just like a famous advertising whisky campaign...
Please excuse my lengthy and potentially way off-topic comment! But, obviously, your interesting post got me thinking (for better or worse)!
Accents have always been interesting to me--particularly because, I think, I used to have one (a very strong one) myself! My parents and grandparents are/were avid readers and interested in intellectual things in some ways, and I think their interests helped to encourage my own interests. But--being from Boston!--they have/had amazingly strong Boston accents. I did too, up until high school, when I taught myself out of it. I was never ashamed of my accent or made to feel that it wasn't socially acceptable, but it never sounded good to my ears. So I learned to speak without it. Of course, it comes back on occasion, but less and less as years go by.
At the three universities I’ve attended I’ve met people who speak with all kinds of accents and in all kinds of ways. Only once—at UMF, actually—have I ever witnessed anybody (in this case a student) being maligned for a way of speaking. And I wholly dismiss the UMF incident as a particular and peculiar prejudice of the professor in question. In my opinion, it’s impossible to deny that there exists a “proper” language, both written and spoken. But the “proper” language is a construct. And in academia, there SHOULD BE room for, literally, new and all voices. Isn’t discourse the point of academia? Although I’ve spent something like the past 10 years in higher education, I’ve always felt, along with fascination, repulsion from academia. It too often betrays its own mission by succumbing to snobbery and false standards. Just like every other community of workers, academia falls into traps of pettiness.
We all (artists, academics, professionals, non-professionals, whatever) have something holding us back. Or something we imagine holds us back. Language isn’t it for me…mine is the pull of where I’m from. I grew up in (and my entire family lives in still) a tiny, insulated neighborhood of kind, close-knit, loving people who on the whole do not recognize or appreciate or understand art or academics as a goal and a life. This isn’t to say that they don’t appreciate or experience art or go to college. It’s more that the people who create art and teach college are OTHER people. And it isn’t to say that that’s true of everybody in the neighborhood. Of course, it isn’t. But largely—it is. And I have no illusions. I am a freak in that neighborhood. Every time I go home I am reminded of how much I am loved and how much pride my family and friends have for me—and how little so many of them (not my immediate family) understand my life. Why don’t I have a house or a truck or children or spend my weekends at bars? Why do I write? Library school was something they appreciated—schooling with a definite, professional goal. But now that I’ve gone and dropped out of that? I’m a freak. I don’t fit in. I don’t believe that my way of life is better or more authentic, intrinsically, than theirs. I DO NOT believe there is anything “better” in being an artist or an academic instead of something else. Trust me, I’ve considered the benefits of a life away from art or academia. It’s just that their life is better and more authentic for them, and my life is better and more authentic for me. And while there is a lot of love, there is, unfortunately, not a lot of real understanding (either way).
Maybe the trick is to just keep going on, persistently and with dedication, despite what may be holding us back (or trying to).
I’m so, so, so glad I had the opportunity to go to UMF. What a special community of dedicated, intelligent, hard-working people it often was. There have been times, when at Simmons or University of Toronto, I’ve missed UMF a lot.
Ginger, I highly doubt any of this has to do with you. I never even realized you had an accent. In my many years in grad school I've met dozens of people with strong accents from less than wealthy backgrounds. Never once was their accent or way of speaking an issue. Maybe what your professor said to you comes from her own personal issues, not with anything out there in academia. Professors are just people, after all, and they have their own insecurities, biases, and false conceptions. Maybe you should be skeptical that what she says is really true (especially in something as politically loaded as a TA assignment--the stories I could tell!). I've found that--barring jerks and assholes--undergrads, like advisors and teachers, will respect you no matter how you talk, so long as you are smart, capable, and good at what you do.
I used to feel bad I went to UMF instead of some fancypants place. I now feel proud of where I went, because I realized while at Tufts, Ohio State, and now Toronto, that people from the fancypants places are no smarter than the students from UMF. They just had better opportunities or money or luck, not better smarts. Being really smart and good at what you do, at least in philosophy, seems to level the playing field, and it doesn't really matter where you came from or how you talk.
Jess, I went to your blog after reading your post and noticed you read YA lit. And I noticed your links. Are you a librarian? Do you work in a library? My wife and I are both librarians (she's a city PL library director, I work for the U of California)? If not, why so many librarian links? Also, I should note that my daughter and wife are knitters (my daughter's a pretty serious one; see http://spinsterbat.wordpress.com/ . Both of them read Yarn Harlot every day.
Thanks everyone. I'll point that my accent was never mentioned. I asked a costudent if she notice me misprouncing words and she said "No.You have a slight accent that comes out once awhile.
But the issue was that I misprounce. I've been working on that...literally reading the dictionary LOL.
John B-R, Thanks for checking out my blog! I'm not a librarian; I just finished my first year of library school at the University of Toronto (hence the links to the blogs of fellow students), but I'm taking the next year off to do some writing (freelance as an educational writer and my own novel). My background is in children's literature. Are you a fan of YA lit? Thanks for posting the link to your daughter's blog, I'm excited to check it out!
Ginger: Sorry to go so off base for so long on your blog!! Just that your post was so interesting it got me thinking about myself and my educational experience. (PS I kinda like reading the dictionary, am I a total nerd???).
Jessica,
I wasn't complaining about the subject. I find the whole discussion of accents fasinating. I just felt like I should defend the professors who expressed concern a bit. They didn't mention my accent at all. But no never feel bad for going in new directions. I love it.
And I loved UMF as well. Dr. Gunn was the one who mentioned comp to me, and he was a total sweetheart about it. I ended up rewriting the paper and getting an A. He freed me up to write in my own style by the way. It was just a moment when I felt inadequate before language.
I too only heard a prof. once comment on an accent. And it didn't suprise me...it was in character. I did however notice that some students treated someone with a heavy accent like he was stupid.
Whoa, as usual, I'm late for everything. I am glad to see so many old and new friends chipping in the conversation!
This was a very good post, Ginger. It really addresses issues that are important to me as well, and that affect me in different levels.
It's funny to say this, I guess, but I find it difficult to articulate properly what I want to say about it. As a non-native English speaker, I have faced different obstacles, but I find amazing how some situations we have had to deal with are so similar.
I never had this problem in Spanish. Ever since I was a kid teachers at school would be amazed at the "long" words I used... all mainly because I read a lot from a very young age. My father never did any money, but all he had he spent on books. Se we grew up surrounded by books (mostly in Spanish, but if my father could read up to five different languages, so there were books in Russian, French, Italian and English too).
But in English it was a different matter. I really had to catch up with my classmates when I was a teenager, because I hadn't had a privileged bilingual education. I knew some English, mainly from reading comics and the stuff on the back of trading cards, but I was not remotely fluent. By the time I made it to uni to study an undergraduate degree in English Lit (at UNAM, Mexico), I really had to make a huge effort to improve my English.
I guess you could say I haven't suffered any form of discrimination because of my accent here in Britain. I've given a couple of lectures and participated in seminars. When I have presented in conferences in the US, I think things have been smooth.
And Jon is right, Britain does have a very storng awareness of accents (and this includes differences in pronunciation). While it remains, in my understanding of it, a class-structured society that still defines things as "chav" or "posh", in my experience it is a much more tolerant society in terms of phonetics. Nevertheless, I've been looking for a job that would help me eat better while being a student in London and, while they advertise themselves as "equal opportunity employers", they make a case of stating their preference for English Native speakers. Which de facto excludes a whole lot of us living in Britain, whether they want to accept it or not...
I live in a state of total linguistic confusion all the time. The other day this bloke at the bar where I dj was talking to me in Spanish (he was English) and I kept answering back in English. It was until he pointed out he was talking to me in Spanish that I realized what was going on!
In Mexico I always said that I had a "Copilco el Bajo" English accent. I never lived in any English-speaking country when I was growing up. I could read English before I could pronounce it, and most of my experience of it has been through books, music and film. It's been only until the last 7 years or so that I have been able to travel more and spend more time where English is spoken.
I get so frustrated when I do not pronounce things well or when I have no idea how to pronounce them... or when the right word just does not come, and something embarrassing comes instead...!
And of course the previous comment is full of mistakes. "My father never made any money.", for starters. So this just exemplifies the dilemma.
The thing is, the more aware you become of language, the more maddening it gets.
This is the metalinguistic function of language, I suppose, as good ol' Roman Jakobson would say...
As I ended the post, I realized that this experience was akin to speaking two seperate languages. I do think though that at least people tend to be a bit more forgiving to those who have a "foreign" accent (at least in the academy).
And the forced self-awarness it so fustrating. Now that it's been pointed out to me, I am almost too aware of how I speak. And everytime someone teases me, even gently, about my accent, I am mortified. But I'm trying to get past it. I considered for a brief period of time taking those voice classes that teach you the "Standard American Accent." I am not kidding about this there is a "Stanard American Accent." By the way Jess and Matt, it's an Ohio accent. But anyway, I came to my senses and decided to live my multifacted strange accent (Maine, Boston, New York, North Carolina). And people will have to deal.
Ernesto, you were lucky to have such a wonderful world created for you as a young child. My mother did love to read, and passed that to us but she too was not educated beyond high school, and had/has a hard time pronuncing words.
My mom self-taught herself. She reads a lot, but she only finished junior high and was a secretary until she married my dad and stopped working... she doesn't speak any languages besides Spanish.
About accents:
Working at the healthfood store a couple of days ago i was on the register and this very sweet nice older lady asked me (while looking at my name tag): and where are you from Horacio?
Mexico -i said.
Oh no, you have lost your beautiful spanish accent -she said.
So are accents good or bad?
Accents can be romanticized or demonized depending on who you hang out with...
I have to disagree with the little old lady and say that i still have a spanish accent but i can almost erase it if i do a very strong effort... but why should I? i do it sometimes sometimes i don't it's just a game worth playing just to see how people react.
I suppose "self-taught herself" is a solecism or whatever it's called. (See?)
I just want to note that I'm from Chicago and have lived most of my life in the greater LA area. Nevertheless, I have been asked at least 1000 times, "Where are you from?" (In England they thought I was Norwegian, tho I'm as far from Nordic looking as I can imagine - for a person with European heritage, that is). But oh well, we're all strangers, nomads, and it's only at certain oases that no one cares where we're from. This appears to be one of them.
Language is a gun for hire.
who's shooting?
We are guns for hire. Our bullets are language. Who's NOT shooting?
Accents are the ammo for that guN?
ok my metaphor isn't working is it?
john, "who's not shooting?": so true.
Unfortunately, I woke this morning to the alarm (in all senses of the word): a radio broadcast listing all the military, civilian, etc casualties in Iraq, Gaza, Pakistan, Afghanistan, which then segued into a discourse re: Darfur ... if I didn't get out of bed, who knows what I'd have heard? Sometimes the bullets are real bullets ... which is not to discount the linguistic bullets, without which none of the real ones would get fired ... what a world (sigh)? (Pull out the arrow ...)
To: Anonymous: you write, "I think you are weak, shameful, hypocritical and revoltingly self-compassionate." (Pardon my correction of your bad grammar). Well, I can't speak for anyone else here, but I am all these things, and more. To quote Herbert Huncke, I'm "guilty of everything." But that doesn't mean you are anything else. After all, you hide behind anonymity to snipe at people. But maybe I'm reading you wrong, and you're a subtle satirist. In which case, bravo! You're a great comedian. Anyhow, peace.
To Jess: I'm not particularly interested in YA lit, tho the 2 librarians who work with the School of Education did report to me for a while. I just recognize the librarian's acronym. Are you writing a YA novel? Or?
And what does your husband work on? I'm very interested in philosophy. I know a bit about it, with a bent towards continental philosophy (sorry, A.) and neurophilosophy. If this isn't the place to answer, I'm at j@johnbr.com.
Thanks John. I ended up deleting both my nasty comments and the nasty anonymous comment. Your words were a balm that made me chill out and not act so defensively. Thank you.
Everyone else...what a great conversation this is. Blogging makes my myspace page seem so boring.
I'm so glad I didn't read the anonymous comments. They make me so angry.
(Recently I "sour-ratured" a post I made about pseudonyms being the refuge of the cowardly, I meant this kind of people).
Why did you delete your other post about your day, though?
Don't let trolls -or anyone- censor you!
Love,
e
Thanks Ernesto. I remeber you've had some problems with trolls.
I didn't delte due to trolls, just felt weird about the writing. I'm working on the one I sort of addressed to the troll but I wanted to solidfy some of the ideas.
Hugs and a kiss
G
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