I declare this to take back the plightt.
Reclaim the value of Joke in the face
of the dominant academic paradigm:
“This is serious stuff. No fools need
apply.”
From the Indo European yek –which
mean “to speak” – “joke,” “ jewel,” “ jocose,”
“jocular,” “juggler,” “jeopardy” are all in
the family.
Can you figure-out the relationship?
Make sense of these jocular kin and
see how they get along—so to speak?
Speaking is a jeopardy—a juggling, a joke,
really. Get it? Do I have to spell it out?
Tell you the punch lines?
Consider the quiet silence of our classes.
Till someone speaks up: originator,
innovator, instigator, inaugurator, author
authorizing authority authoritatively.
Always in the beginnings: the word.
Casting perils.
Jeopardy.
Risky business.
I aim to speak out of 3 sides of my mouth
at once--and be understood.
Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis
Protagonism, Antagonism, Agon-ism
Symbolically, Diabolically, Parabolic
Get it?
Put it in play.
I’m serious.
My courses are about US-the-Readers,
miracle working resurrect-ers--raising the dead
My Environmental Studies Triad:
II. Ways of Talking about Hap
I. HAP
III. Ways of Talking about
ways of talking about
HAP
I. HAP = what's happening. Always beyond us and our
representation of it.
II = our common sense, disciplines, traditions, the
conventions we swim in, amniotic--our ways of
talking about hap.
III. Dry. Liberal Art Juggling. A JOKE, really.
Talking about our Ways of Talking, so to speak,
loopy, disconcerting, monkey wrenching--round
and round we go, down and down we go.
yekkety yek
(Did you think this course was JUST about 19th c. writers,
Linguistics? Fiction? It's about ways we talk and don't talk
about these things. Quiz: which counts most; what we
talk about? How we talk about what we talk about. It'll
be on the final, too.)
Improve my terms, I beg you to differ. Or what's a
college and colleague for?
xxxooo, Sam
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