How to Talk Cool Like Zora Neale Hurston

/ wlm3 / 2 Comments

zora-hatA while back, I posted a lament about a few endangered locutions of the Lowcountry of South Carolina, my native neck of the woods (and marshes, clay pits, swamps and beaches).

Some of the words I feared were kaput included swunny (as in I swear or I declare), reckon (as in I conjecture), right (as in it’s right hot), and whatchasaybo (as in hello, brother). The first three of these words my long dead grandmama used on a daily basis, but it’s been a coon’s age since I’ve heard somebody say, “I reckon it’s right hot.”[1]

The homogenization of the language is, of course, inevitable, but do lawdy I hate to see these old words and phrases go. They add Tabasco to the day-to-day saltine of cliché after cliché – awesome, dude, this guy, that time, etc.

What brings all this to mind is that I just finished rereading Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God for school, and I can’t think of another novel besides Huck Finn that makes such exquisite use of American vernacular, so I thought I’d share with you some of her locutions, no doubt rooted in the early 20th Century black vernacular of central Florida. Of course, I encourage you to start using these phrases in your daily dealings, especially with the Man.

Monstropolous – no definition needed here. Cf., Camille, Hugo, Katrina. In TEWWG, the sentence “The Monstropolous beast had left his bed” describes the hurricane that rips through “the Muck,” i.e., the Everglades, putting a tragic end to the idyllics.

Mouth-Almighty – a noun describing a know-it-all that won’t shut the fuck up[2].  You know, Donald Trump, Chris Matthews.

Protolapsis uh de cutinary linin“  – Oscar Scott uses this phrase to describe Jane’s second husband, Joe Stark, the mayor of Eatonville. Oscar says that “you kin feel the switch in his hand when he’s talking’ to yuh [ . .] Dat chastisin feelin’ he totes sorter gives you the protolapsis uh de cutinary linin’,” i.e., an unsettling feeling in your stomach.

The go-long – a phrase suggesting a long lasting relationship in the Al Green sense of “Let’s Stay Together”: “You got me in the go-long,” Tea Cake says to Janie.

Combunction – I suspect this is a combination of combustion and gumption, a positive word denoting bad-assedness. In TEWWG, Tea Cake declares himself “ a son of Combunction.”

Cuttin’ the Monkey – from its context, I suspect cuttin’ the monkey means playing “the Sambo” for white folks, engaging in self-deprecating minstrelsy to curry favor with overlords. It’s a term of derision.

In TEWWG coon dick means bootleg whiskey, but according to the Urban Dictionary, it now is “a term used for yelling insults or obscenities at pedestrians from moving vehicles “ as in let’s “go coondicking after the movies” or “Brandon is one hell of a clever coondicker.” The Urban Dictionary does credit the term to Hurston’s novel and identifies its new denotation as having been coined in Kendall, NY, by a group of teenagers.

Tsk tsk.

Well, gotta go. Hope you enjoyed this monstropolous post from the original mouth-almighty, one crazy combunnctious curator of cool-sounding colloquial jive.

z-drum

[1] A coon’s age dates from the early 1800’s when folks considered raccoons to be long-lived animals.

[2] The consonant t-sounds and the three successive assonate u-sounds mandate the use of this phrase rather than the effete runs his or her mouth.

I Blame It All on the Old Man’s Lullabies

/ wlm3 / 2 Comments

Anyone who regularly reads this blog knows that it’s rife with typos, misspellings, and undiscovered auto-corrects.

Who’s Whose fault is this you ask?

Not mine, damn it. I proofread several times.

Why then all the errors?

It’s because I’m almost as auditory as Ray Charles (minus the musical talent). I don’t see words, I hear them, and after a couple proof-readings, they completely disappear.

So you possess visual detail perceptual differences?

Yes, I’m a ducking imbecilic moronic retread when it comes to detecting typographic details, and I blame my father for this.

82

So you’re blaming your dead father for your own inability to focus on the arrangement of the Roman alphabet to insure its sequencing conforms to standard usage? Genetics are to blame then?

No, not genetics. By rocking me to sleep each night until I was pushing three, my father rewired my brain so that auditory images have stunted my capacity to process visual imagery. I’m a throwback to the Homeric ages, to the Skops of the Anglo-Saxons. I can recite poetry from memory like an iTunes playlist but can’t manage sometimes to find words like “initiatives” in a dictionary.

You poor man.

Oresteia -ChorusThere’s more. Not only did my father stunt my ability to process visual keys, his choice of lullabies created in me a tragic view of the world. We’re talking a heavy dose of Stephen Foster and a host of cowboy songs that are about as upbeat as your typical Greek chorus.

Here are few examples of Daddy’s standards.

He might start off with something like Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More”:

There’s a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,

With a worn heart whose better days are o’er:

Though her voice would be merry, ’tis sighing all the day,

Oh! Hard times come again no more.

‘Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave,

‘Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore

‘Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave

Oh! Hard times come again no more.

jeanieAt least we don’t know the “pale, drooping maiden’s name” or the color of her hair, unlike in the plaintive “I Dream of Jeannie.”

Her smiles have vanished and her sweet songs flown,

Flitting like the dreams that have cheered us and gone.

Now the nodding wild flowers may wither on the shore

While her gentle fingers will cull them not more:

Oh! I sigh for Jeanie with the light brown hair,

Floating like a vapor, on the soft summer air.

Then there was the “Streets of Laredo”

“Then swing your rope slowly and rattle your spurs lowly,

And give a wild whoop as you carry me along;

And in the grave throw me and roll the sod o’er me.

For I’m a young cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong.”

“Go bring me a cup, a cup of cold water.

To cool my parched lips”, the cowboy then said.

Before I returned, his soul had departed,

And gone to the round up – the cowboy was dead.

We beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly,

And bitterly wept as we bore him along.

For we loved our comrade, so brave, young and handsome,

We all loved our comrade, although he’d done wrong.

49-311094

However, the song I remember that most haunted me was the pathetic and cruel “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.”

“I’ve always wished to be laid when I died

In a little churchyard on the green hillside

By my father’s grave, there let me be,

O bury me not on the lone prairie.”

“I wish to lie where a mother’s prayer

And a sister’s tear will mingle there.

Where friends can come and weep o’er me.

O bury me not on the lone prairie.”

“For there’s another whose tears will shed.

For the one who lies in a prairie bed.

It breaks my heart to think of her now,

She has curled these locks, she has kissed this brow.”

“O bury me not…” And his voice failed there.

But they took no heed to his dying prayer.

In a narrow grave, just six by three

They buried him there on the lone prairie.

And the cowboys now as they roam the plain,

For they marked the spot where his bones were lain[1],

Fling a handful o’ roses o’er his grave

With a prayer to God his soul to save.

By the way, any idea how you spell yippy-i-ti-aya?

[1] Not my fault, dammit: sic!

Excitable Jack Horner

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment

another  from A Child’s Meth Lab of Verses

 

meth lab of verse

 

Excitable Jack Horner

Excitable Jack Horner

sat in a corner

eating his curds and whey.

 

He put in his thumb

and pulled out a crumb

and like an ass began to bray.

 

littlejackhorner-national

 

from A Child’s Meth Lab of Verses

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment

meth lab of verse

 

 

 

Bad Choices

 

In Nashville, Mississippi,

not far from the Rio Grande,

there lived a French Canadian trapper

named Hedrick Eckelmann.

 

He wrote a short novella

about the Second World War.

It ran ten-thousand pages;

he called it Less Is More.

 

He married a gal named Betty Sue,

who gave him two fine sons,

but she died a virgin at 44

cleaning one of his guns.

 

Terribly devastated,

he remarried within a week,

and lived happily ever after

until he choked on a steak

 

right outside of Nashville

in the heart of the Lone Star State,

right across the river from Canada.

Damn, he could’ve had a V-8.

A Sub-Literate, Sorrowful Not-Walt-Whitman Hitching

/ wlm3 / 2 Comments

walt hitching

I missed a bus in Baltimore, and with no place to stay, restless, desperate, running low, I thought I’d try to hitch a ride.

I should have known. Ain’t no decent man gonna pick up a hoary-headed hobo nowadays.

I stood on the shoulder, stuck out my thumb, squinting down the highway through the afternoon exhaust, hoping that some good Samaritan might stop.

Eight hours later, round about one or so, a jacked-up pick-up pulled over, one of them monster pick-ups, black, four-door, with a stunted back seat of sorts.

“Hop in, old man,” the driver snarled. “Let’s go. Ain’t got all night.”

I slung my bag into the bed, climbed my way way up, and slammed the door.

The passenger rolled up his window, the driver grabbed the wheel, put the pedal to the metal, war-hooped a holler, laid some rubber, and we was on our way.

The two of them wore their baseball caps backwards, nothing but kids, white, maybe twenty or so, but right off I could see their eyes lacked light, like they was lost.

(And I could’ve been sleeping in that depot waiting for the morrow).

“How much you plan pay us for this ride?” the driver drawled. “We ain’t no commies, ain’t got no use for no freeloaders.”

I told them I was bust broke, that if I had me some money, I wouldn’t be standing on the side of a highway at one a.m. in the morning.

The passenger punched me in the chest, slapped my face, and while I was wallowing, jacked my wallet.

The driver pulled over, hopped out, slung me to the ground, climbed back in, then drove off with my bag in the back rattling around in the bed of the truck.

That was a month ago. I’m back in Mayo now writing these so-called adventures on scraps of paper.

I keep them on my person, in the pocket where my wallet used to be, so on the day they find me dead, they’ll know a bit about me.

A Review of Punditry re. the Republican Debate

/ wlm3 / 2 Comments

Jimmy Carter, one of the Right’s favorite punching bags, commented recently that the United States was no longer a democracy but an oligarchy. Although perhaps hyperbolic, Carter’s comments do highlight some uncomfortable facts. For example, according to the New York Times, “fewer than four hundred families are responsible for almost half the money raised in the 2016 presidential campaign, a concentration of political donors that is unprecedented in the modern era.”

Not surprisingly, one of the most pressing issues for these donor families is the abolition of estate taxes.   How many family estates pay taxes, you might wonder? In 2015, 1.2% of the population paid “death taxes” as the Koch brothers call them, or the “Paris Hilton tax” as EJ Dionne of the Washington Post labels them.

Of course, loopholes large enough for not only camels, but also elephants and asteroids to pass through are there for the exploitation, so when you get down to it, the effective tax rate for the estates of this 1.2% of the population boils down to a paltry 16.6% on average. And get this, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, only “20 [that’s 4 x 5 = 20] small business and farm estates nationwide owed any estate taxes in 2013.”

So does repealing the estate tax make any sense for a government that spends in excess of 600 billion dollars a year on defense alone?

You betcha, if you’re one the Koch brothers or the other 400 families who have raised half of the money flowing into these so-called super PACs.

Next question. How many of the Republican presidential candidates are for the abolishment of estate taxes?

[cue sarcastic laughter]

Which brings me to last Thursday’s presidential debate, which I sort of watched while checking out tweets. (Given my delicate sensibility, my enduring such a grotesque circus is tantamount to drinking that rancid pre-colonoscopy concoction).

More to my taste is reading the pundits’ “takeaways.” Who were the winners and losers?

Well, here’s Hoodoo’s run-down of the conventional wisdom.

The BIG WINNERS according to the pundits:

Carly Fiorina

WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 18: Carly Fiorina, former CEO of the Hewlett-Packard Company, speaks at the Heritage Foundation December 18, 2014 in Washington, DC. Fiorina joined a panel discussion on the topic of

As far as biography goes, Ms Fiorina, the daughter of a law school professor, dean, and federal judge father and a portrait/abstract artist mother has the advantage of growing up in relative poverty, despite the fact that her parents gave her a grand piano as a wedding gift. She touts her career arc as rising “from secretary to CEO,” and it’s no lie.

During summers while attending Stanford, she worked at Kelley services, and after dropping out of UCLA’s School of Law, she served time as a receptionist at the real estate firm Marcus and Millichap. Later, she earned an MBA from Maryland and a Masters in Management from the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

Obviously, she ain’t no dummy, and besides that, she’s articulate and quick on her feet, attributes she displayed Thursday night and a rare commodity among most of the other “contestants” on the stage of what seemed more like a gameshow than a debate.

So I agree with the CW on Fiorina. Don’t be surprised if she ends up being a vice presidential choice, despite her first ex-husband Todd Bartlem’s accusation that during their marriage she had an affair with her soon-to-be second and later ex-husband, Frank Fiorina, a senior executive at ATT. Obviously bitter, Bartlem told that paragon of journalistic excellence the Daily Mail that Fiorina “los[t] her humanity” in a “pathological” pursuit of power.

In her memoir Tough Choices, she describes the marriage’s dissolution this way: “While we were married, we weren’t peers.”

Ouch!

Marco Rubio

rubio_perplexed_master_0Like Carly Fiona, Rubio was also lucky enough not to be a beneficiary of great wealth. (Some people have all the luck; sorry, Jeb). In fact, Rubio’s father worked as a bartender, as Marco likes to boast.

CW went gaga over Rubio’s performance. He took on Hillary’s claim of “living from paycheck to paycheck” to great applause and spoke of the 100K of student loans he racked up and repaid in full, though he wisely didn’t mention the $80,000 boat he purchased while paying off his loans, his liquidating a $68,000 retirement account, nor did he mention his failure to make mortgage payments on his home for five months, nor the fact that he had a lease of $50,000 on a 2015 Audi Q7.

Now that’s what I call living from paycheck to paycheck in style!

I disagree with the CW that Rubio was a big winner because of his statement that he doesn’t believe in abortions even if the mother’s life is at stake.

Not to mention rape and incest.

I can see the Hillary commercial now. Female voiceover, pregnant mother with damaged fetus that threatens her life makes the excruciating decision to abort. Cut to subsequently born happy white children skipping towards a swing set to be pushed by surviving, smiling mother.

Or, how about a couple of shots of the baby in David Lynch’s Eraser Head?

John Kasich

pic_related_111014_SM_John-KasichOnce again Kasich is fortunate to come from modest means; his father was a mail carrier.

During the debate, I agree he was very effective. His response to why he had expanded Medicaid was superb, essentially, “duh,” who in her right mind wouldn’t?

Though the pundits universally adored it, I was less impressed with his non-answer on how he would explain to his hypothetically gay daughter why he doesn’t support marriage equality. Rather than saying, “because the Bible tells me so” or “I believe that sexual orientation is a choice,” he dodged the question and boasted that he had recently attended a gay wedding and added, “If one of my daughters were that, of course, I would love them.” (my italics)

Well, duh, who in his right mind wouldn’t?

Still, if you’re a rational Republican willing to compromise on your contempt for the poor, Kasich strikes me as eminently electable.

THE SO-SO WATER TREADERS

Jeb Bush

I actually think Jeb was a loser and agree with Frank Rich’s assessment that Bush speaks “with all the conviction of a robo-call.” He needed to create some sparks and didn’t.

Plus the poor bastard is a scion of one of the 1.2% of the families who will have to pay some estate taxes when #41 passes from, in Richard Wilbur’s words, “this rotten/Taxable world to a higher standard of living.”

Scott Walker

walker super durpThe conventional wisdom — too scripted — which maybe was a good thing. I can’t find to share the mean-spirited image flashing its way through cyberspace the night of the debate, a motion gif that makes Dukakis in that iconic attack ad featuring him in a tank look like Sean Connery’s James Bond in comparison.

So the picture above will have to do.

Mike Huckabee

An articulate spokesman for the 5th Century BCE, but will his message appeal to 21st Century voters?

Chris Christie, Rick Perry, et al

 Yawn.

BIG LOSERS

Rand Paul

Rand Paul

Though some have touted him a winner, most see Rand Paul as a loser, and I agree with the latter. To break out of this pack, you need charisma, and in Paul’s case, a new hairdresser.

And last but not least

Donald Trump.

ptbOh, where is HL Mencken when we need him?

Dead and gone to hell, according to all these men and woman of faith.

I so wish someone had asked Trump about his metaphysical beliefs. Perhaps he would have identified himself as the Messiah.

I would, though, if I were Fox News, not be so gung-ho in expelling him from Republic contention. As my favorite saint, Teresa of Avila, famously put it, “More tears have been shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers.”

A Trump independent candidacy would doom the Republicans.

Bottom line: All these candidates seem to care about are rich folk and fetuses.

That may be enough if you have the 1.2% shoveling unlimited money your way. For as PT Barnum said and Donald Trump’s ascendency proves, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

The Not-So-Official Donald Trump Campaign Theme Song

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment

Campaign theme songs go all the way back to Andrew Jackson’s “The Hunters of Kentucky” with these inspiring lyrics:

We are a hardy, free-born race,
Each man to fear a stranger;
Whate’er the game, we join in chase,
Despising toil and danger.
And if a daring foe annoys,
Whate’er his strength and forces,
We’ll show him that Kentucky boys
Are alligator horses.

Sometimes candidates choose already established tunes, like FDR’s appropriation of “Happy Days Are Here Again” and JFK’s employment of “High Hopes.”  Other times candidates commission original songs as Barry Goldwater did with the all but forgotten Tom McDonnell and Otis Clements number “Go with Goldwater.”  These songs are often flops. I seriously doubt that any of you codgers out there remember the ’68 election campaign song “Nixon’s the One.”

Nevertheless,  I can’t tell you how honored I am to have chosen myself to compose the theme song for Donald’s Trump 2015 campaign, which is entitled, appropriately enough,  “Donald Trump, We’re so Pumped.”  Let’s hope it ends up being more successful than the Republican candidate’s 1972 theme song “Nixon Now,” which you can experience for yourself here.

the donald

To be sung to the tune of “The Mickey Mouse Club Theme Song”

Ah, one, a two, sing:

Who’s the man in the GOP,

Whose best for our country?

D-O-N-A-L-D T-R-U-M-P!

*

Not Bush, Not Walker, Not Carson!

They’re as bland as they can be

D-O-N-A-L-D T-R-U-M-P!

*

Donald Trump!

We’re so pumped!

Donald Trump!

He’s on the stump!

*

Let’s raise a middle finger and fuck propriety:

D-O-N-A-L-D T-R-U-M-P!

*

Come along and join the throng

On the road to prosperity

D-O-N-A-L-D T-R-U-M-P!

He has a solution, embraces pollution,

Gets results, slings insults.

(Who cares if the rest of the world is retching?)

*

Who’s the alpha of the pack,

Who can heal our sick country?

D-O-N-A-L-D T-R-U-M-P!

*

Hey there! Hi there! Ho there!

He’s as angry as you and me,

D-O-N-A-L-D T-R-U-M-P!

Donald Trump!

We’re so pumped!

Donald Trump.

He’s on the stump!

*

Come along, let’s sing the song

And start a P-A-C

D-O-N-A-L-D T-R-U-M-P!

*

Yay Donald!

Yay Donald!

Yay Donald Trump!

Just Can’t Cut That Juice a Loose: KILLER ROCK LYRICS ABOUT SUBSTANCE ABUSE!!!

/ wlm3 / 2 Comments

Foreign_Affairs_Tom_WaitsI-and-I, that’s right, Mr. Hoodoo Man he-self, boon companion and devoted supporter of Mr. John Jameson, lover of hoppy craft beer concoctions, not to mention spicy Sunday morning bloody marys, has voluntarily climbed aboard that proverbial wagon that refuses to stop at taverns, bodegas, juke joints, and roof top bars.

Or to put it more succinctly, he’s quit drinking alcohol.

Why, you ask? Has Mr. Moore been stumbling in at 3 a.m. and slapping around his beloved consort Judy Birdsong?

Of course not.

Has he found that drinking has adversely affected his social life?

To the contrary.

Okay, is he chronically late, a no-show sometimes? Does he hire barmates to grade his essays? Does he put himself in risky situations? Is he a frequent visitor to emergency rooms?   Has he gotten a DUI? Recently made a complete and utter ass out of himself?

No, no, no, no, no, and “not that he is aware of.”

Why then?

The answer is vanity. Recently, he saw photographs of himself at his son’s wedding and realized that his once David-Niven-like svelteness had ballooned into a girth approaching Hitchcockian proportions. And even though he now possesses a Falstaffian paunch, his arms and legs have maintained the emaciation of his 97-pound-weakling adolescence.

John Falstaff by Eduard Von Grutzner

John Falstaff by Eduard Von Grutzner

He’s too vain to post a photograph, but picture a four-month pregnant Mick Jagger and you get the picture.

Why not cut out those empty calories? Why not give it a try?

So how has he been spending those hours not spent in drinking establishments?

Listening to songs about substance abuse, that’s how, and he’s come up with a list a few killer song lyrics devoted to over-indulgence, like this classic from Willie Nelson:

The night life ain’t no good life, but it’s my life.

Not only that, he’s going to provide sound samples to go along with a few of his favs. So sit back and enjoy

THESE KILLER ROCK LYRICS ABOUT SUBSTANCE ABUSE!!!

(I know it lacks that Buzzfeed allure of botched plastic surgeries).

Okay, we’re going to start with John Hiatt’s “Paper Thin,” whose first sentence has the panache of the opening of a well-crafted short story. Listen.

 

 

Here’s how the song ends:

 

 

(Saw John about a year ago in concert.  Here’s the REVIEW).

 

Okay, for our next lyric on substance abuse, let’s go way back to my tenth grade year of 1968 and the Butterfield Blues Band’s “Drunk Again.”  The song’s by Elvin Bishop and features the domestic trauma drinking can cause.  Here’s a snippet:

 

 

Of course, as Bob Dylan famously tells us in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” — “I started off on burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff” — alcohol is the ultimate gateway drug.  I betcha ain’t nobody ever shot up heroin who hadn’t started out on the road to perdition with wine or beer. You start off seemingly innocuously with a PBR and the next thing you know your rolling up bills and snorting cocaine or worse.  Here’s John Hammond, Jr’s superb cover of the Tom Wait’s classic “Heart Attack and Vine”:

 

 

That’s right:

Boney’s high on china white;

Shorty’s found a punk

You know there ain’t no devil;

that’s just god when he’s drunk.

Well, this stuff will probably kill you;

let’s do another line.

What you say you meet me

down on Heart Attack and Vine.

Love can be a drug, they say.  Wasn’t Robert Palmer “addicted to love?”  Here’s the great Lucinda Williams making the analogy:

 

C’mon, Lucinda.  You know what Willie B Yeats sez:  “Never give all the heart for love . . .

Okay, let’s end this thing on a positive note.  The resurrection of Tim Finnegan via Irish whiskey.  Here, the Clancy Brothers describe how dead Tim’s corpse is brought back to life during a drunken brawl at his wake, which is the song that gave rise to James Joyce’s last novel.

 

:

 

Mickey Maloney ducked his head
when a bucket of whiskey flew at him
It missed, and falling on the bed,
the liquor scattered over Tim
Now the spirits new life gave the corpse, my joy!
Tim jumped like a Trojan from the bed
Cryin will ye walup each girl and boy,
t’underin’ Jaysus, do ye think I’m dead?”

Come to think of it, quitting drinking altogether seems anti-Buddhist.  Maybe the middle way would be better.  Lose weight by exercising, eating healthily, and limiting one’s intake to a couple a day?

Sounds like a plan.

Elegy for Saisy Joy

/ wlm3 / 8 Comments

1

Our Saisy never really shook off that early abuse,

the beatings, starvation, the two-foot chain.

She’d wince when you went to pet her,

snap if you rubbed her head for too long.

As her rescue “foster mom” in Statesboro put it,

“That gal’s got her some food issues.”

Like stealing bread and hiding pieces ‘round the house,

gobbling down the rankest roadside carcass, knocking over

garbage cans, consuming their rotten whatever.

Afterwards, her Stygian, Technicolor diarrhea

would ruin our rugs.

2

Yet the rescuer’s daughter named her Joy

for that dervish dance when you’d grab a leash.

She’d rear and buck like a bronco, jump, hump her back,

swivel in a circle, smile like a very happy cartoon dog.

And what a beauty! that black slick fur, the brown undercoat,

distinctive of one of her breeds, the German Longhaired Pointer part.

On the beach or through the woods to the dock she’d strut,

a country beauty proud of her charms.

Indifferent to birds and squirrels, she hated cats,

despised UPS trucks. Her frantic bark was acquainted

with the dark — PTSD the vet once guessed.

3

That morning there would be no dance. She had died

in her sleep, and lay there on the rug peacefully unaware,

her eyes closed. She didn’t look dead, was barely cold,

but her teeth were clenched: no more biting, eating,

romping, barking, being. She hadn’t seemed sick,

was playful during her very last walk twelve hours ago.

To her it probably wouldn’t matter much, the vacancy

we feel when we return from work or a trip.

I can still see her, though, at the top of the stairs,

beginning that dance, nodding her head, smiling,

humping her back, clicking her nails on the wooden floor.

saisy profile (original)

Miss Saisy

Low Stakes Testing

/ wlm3 / 2 Comments

LARGEIMAGE_301696 copyPangloss Academy is a non-profit independent school dedicated to providing affluent children with the self-confidence they’ll need to navigate an increasingly stressful world. Study after study has shown that self-confidence trumps intelligence in most everyday situations — like those fraternity and sorority rushes of college, the cocktail parties of young adulthood, and the parent/teacher conferences of middle age. Who’s more likely to get her way in an exclusive retirement facility, a wizened mathematician or confident, forceful Pangloss alum?

We believe that success breeds success. Our curriculum has been engineered to insure every one of our students graduates with a 4.0 GPA. While the children of your friends and neighbors are developing negative self-images as they struggle with high stakes Common Core exit tests, your sons and daughters will be accumulating confidence as they ace test after test.

For example, let’s take a peek at Pangloss’s exit exam for juniors.

* * *

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE DO NOT OPEN TEST BOOKLET UNTIL INSTRUCTED BY YOUR PROCTOR.

The following test will determine how much common sense you possess, and you know and I know you’re going to ace this test because you’ve aced every single other test you’ve taken. This sequence of success is called a pattern, and being able to recognize patterns is what success is all about.

Although the test is short and sweet, you have up to four hours to complete it, and don’t forget that if for some unheard of reason you don’t make a 100, you can retake the test as many times as you like until you’ve mastered the material.

Each of you has been provided with a sharpened number 2 pencil with an excellent eraser. If you find that you do make a mistake and need to erase, please raise your hand, and one of the proctors will come by and erase it for you to insure that the answer sheet is not smudged and the Scantron picks up the correct bubble.

Okay, ready. Please open your booklet.

Like every single test you’ve taken at Pangloss, this test consists of multiple choice and short answer questions. Please darken the appropriate bubbles in the multiple-choice section and write your responses to the short-answer questions in the blue books with the smiley faces you’ve been given.

Okay, let’s try the practice question. Darken the bubble of the letter that best answers the following question.

What is the second letter of the alphabet?

A. A

B. B

C. C

D. D

Yes, B’s the correct answer.

When you complete the exam, raise your hand, and one of the proctors will take it up and give you a coupon for a free ice cream cone at Ben and Jerry’s.

Turn the page and begin.

Multiple Choice

1 -4. Place the following historical events in the correct chronology. Place the letter of the answer that occurred first for number one, the letter of the event that occurred second in number two etc.

A.  The 2016 presidential election

B.  The extinction of the dinosaurs

C.   World War II (2)

D.  The building of the Egyptian Pyramids

5.   Who wrote Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony?

A.  Amadeus Wolfgang Mozart

B.  The Mamas and the Papas

C.  Ludwig von Beethoven

D.  Johannes Kepler

6.  Beethoven wrote nine symphonies.  What symphony did he write after his Fifth?

A.  Sixth

B.  Second

C.  Ninth

D.  A Concerto for Violence

7.  Who is the main character of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy Hamlet?

A. Hamlet

B.  Gertrude

C.  Clown (gravedigger)

D.  William Faulkner

8- 11  Place the following in ascending order from smallest to largest in relation to its size with the smallest going in number 7, the next larger in number 8, etc.

A.  an atom

B.  a swimming pool

C.  Lake Erie

D.  The Indian Ocean

You’ve now competed the multiple-choice section. Remember to write the answers for the following questions in the blue book with the smiley face on its cover. You don’t have to write in complete sentences, but if you want to, that’s okay, too.

Short Answer Questions

  1. Do you own a dog?
  1. What do you call either your grandmother or grandfather, you know, Paw Paw, Nana, etc. If you don’t have any grandparents, what do you call your mom and dad?
  1. This year you’ve studied American literature. Name one author you’ve studied. (If you draw a blank, see number seven of the multiple-choice section).
  1. In math we learned about pi, π, a mathematical constant, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. This ratio is commonly approximated as 3.14159.

Draw a circle.

  1. Pi has a homonym spelled p-i-e. Homonyms are words that sound alike but have different meanings. From the perspective of looking straight down from above, draw a picture of a pie. What do the two drawings you have made have in common? What is the approximate ratio of their circumference to their diameter. Carry the decimal point to five places. (See number 4).
  1. What reward to you get when you finish this test?

You’re done. Now raise your hand to receive that coupon for a free ice cream cone!

candidegarden-e1265986384504