It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadn’t been smoking much and it wasn’t headlights — but before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, to shore and safety.

-Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s new novel. This is my first Pynchon novel but if that quote is an indicator of the rest of the book I’m sold.

I just finished grading round one of test essays for an upper level undergrad media course. There were some priceless answers. Here are a few.

An answer to a “long essay” prompt about regulatory policy in the U.S. (the right answer would start with “there’s not much regulatory policy in the U.S. …”):

I feel as if there is a lot of regulatory policy that happens even though their is a freedom of press amendment. Today the very much controls what is put out there about themselves, and others. The same goes for market forces, if someone has the money they can pay to have an ad back another political opponent. Everything regarding the media is controlled by the government.

Very articulate.

Short answer, definition question: Define “interpretation.”

“interpretation is how the media chooses to understand information as.”
Right.

And in my personal favorite, a student inserts the word “whale” for the word “way.” I mean, they’re almost the same thing, right?

“in a whale, what it actually covers works as a basis for societal norms.”

This is going to be a fun semester.

School has been in session four weeks. A quarter of a semester. An eighth of the year, done already. I’ve experienced culture shock in more ways than one since August.

I drove home from campus a few weeks ago around 10 p.m. and in the five-block drive I passed at least that many gaggles of students grouped on the sidewalks, moving in various directions and clearly in various states of drunkenness. Wheaton this ain’t. SIUC has a reputation for being a party school. The grad students don’t live up to that reputation, but the undergrads seem to hold their end up just fine.

Possibly related to the above observation, undergrad students here are … sometimes not the brightest. Case in point: this is an essay response to a long essay question on an exam for a class I’m TAing. The question had to do with government control of the press in the U.S. (not much) and market forces driving the system.

I feel as if there is a lot of regulatory policy that happens even though their is a freedom of press amendment. Today the very much controls what is put out there about themselves, and others. The same goes for market forces, if someone has the money they can pay to have an ad back another political opponent. Everything regarding the media is controlled by the government.

Maybe I missed something, but that doesn’t seem like an essay, let alone “long.” And there’s actually a pretty low level of regulatory policy in the U.S., as opposed to, say, China, where you could legitimately say “Everything regarding the media is controlled by the government.”

My classes are a bit more challenging, thankfully. I’m a little confused about some things, like grades; I’m expected to get As in everything but also not supposed to worry about grades at all. I’m still not sure how those two things are possible at the same time, but I’ll hopefully figure it out soon.

My classmates and I are expected to read and comprehend probably 300-500 pages of material each week, including frightening things like integrals and derivatives that I forgot after freshman calculus. Statistics and research methods, the two “hardest classes” my officemates took in their entire PhD programs, are in the same semester for the first time this year, so I’ll be inducted into the “science” part of political science more quickly than might be comfortable. If I make it through the reading load and survive the incredible humidity of southern Illinois, though, I’ll be quite a bit smarter at Christmas than I was in August.

I didn't do anything to this photo — the colors are real. Actually, it looks a little washed out, but the sky is incredible.

This looks like a typical Sunday afternoon — my dad sitting next to the grill with a cigar and newspaper, making hamburgers.

I discovered these photos today in some old files.

“…They are not monuments, but footprints. A monument only says, ‘At least I got this far,’ while a footprint says, ‘This is where I was when I moved again.’”

-William Faulkner (somewhere in the Snopes trilogy)

by Ruth Moon

Masses of plaid flannel- and skinny jean-clad indie hipsters descended on Chicago’s Union Park July 17-19 for the 2009 Pitchfork Music Festival.

The festival can be important for musicians, especially bands just breaking in to the indie music scene, as it’s a physical version of virtual support from Pitchfork, one of the top reviewers in the industry. Musicians from the band Cymbals Eat Guitars (recently reviewed by Pitchfork here) called it “the culmination of everything we’ve worked towards, playing a festival this large and with so many people.”

But the festival’s musical offerings attract non-indies as well, like Chicago resident Mark Choh, 31, who loves discovering new sounds at music festivals where he doesn’t recognize most of the bands.

“I like the music and that’s pretty much it,” Choh said. “I don’t really align myself with the culture and the whole hipster thing, which I think is what a lot of people think about when you say indie. Indie is a subculture.”

There were 49,000 people at the festival this year, spokesperson Jessica Linker said, and Friday’s lineup of Built to Spill, Yo La Tengo, The Jesus Lizard and Tortoise sold out for the first time at 13,000 people.

The hippie vibe turned up as the evening wound to a close with a long set by The National. Most people watching were standing, packed in as tightly as possible. Couples on the outskirts of the crowd danced to the music as Matt Berninger and his band performed songs like “Fake Empire” and others from their newest record, “Boxer.” The set was easily the longest of the day as it went from 8:40 to nearly 10 p.m. It closed out a day of main-stage performances from Cymbals Eat Guitars, Fucked Up, Final Fantasy and DOOM. The sun set as The National took the stage, and as Berninger performed the stage lit up with blue, white and orange lights. The lights lit up the crowd as well as the performers, and the front rows of listeners bobbed their heads and waved their hands in time to the beat and sang along with Berninger’s vocals.

The night ended in keeping with the free spirit of the day as some people took the opportunity to lie down in the median of the street outside the park or sitting cross-legged in the middle of the park, dividing the onslaught of festivalgoers streaming out to the jam-packed train station.

invitation my brother designed for his senior recital — Lemony Snicket readers will especially enjoy it.

]]> http://forcompany.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/invite-snicket-style/feed/ 0 Ruth Recital invite