2 RBOC

1. Just 24 hours before I take the Things to RSA, I wrote my paper. This seems to me to be an improvement over my recent "strategy," which is to write the paper on the plane or in the hotel room the night before the panel. But that course of action will prove, I suspect, more difficult with two Things to entertain.

2. For reasons that escape me, I just opened to an essay in the flagship creative writing program "journal"--a term I use loosely because that rag contains so little of practical or critical value that it really more resembles a bitchy tabloid than a serious publication. In any case, the essay was about sentences, in praise of sentences really, and how sentences can transport us. The essay's first sentence reads: "I cannot begin with essay without admitting that: I am an English teacher, and yet the one thing I loathe perhaps even more than algebra is grammar." And yes, that first sentence displays the fruits of the author's loathing. And yes, the whole freaking essay is rife with grammatical errors. The author claims that s/he's only recently come to appreciate that grammar (which s/he mystifyingly equates with "syntax") produces the rhapsodic effects s/he seeks in good literature. S/he might ponder that point a bit further....