A Girl With a Sword

make it through this year

I was going to make lists of my top movies and albums and books from this year, but then I realized I haven't heard/seen/read enough to really do them justice. I haven't seen The Queen. I haven't heard the new Belle and Sebastian. But here are some lists that roughly represent 2006 for me. Lists are really the best way to express a period of time, anyway.

First, movies:
1. The Science of Sleep by Michel Gondry
2. The Departed by Martin Scorsese
3. Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola
4. A Prairie Home Companion by Robert Altman
5. Little Miss Sunshine by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris

Top five books I read this year:
1. Possession by A. S. Byatt
2. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
3. Watership Down by Richard Adams
4. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
5. Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner

My Five Top Albums of 2006:
1. The Crane Wife by The Decemberists
2. Ys by Joanna Newsom
3. Bottoms of Barrels by Tilly and the Wall
4. Rabbit Fur Coat by Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins
5. Cannibal Sea by Essex Green

The thing is, though, what really expresses my year is The Mountain Goats. I started listening to their song No Children in January, then I got We Shall All Be Healed in Febuary and The Sunset Tree in March. I heard Tallahassee in its entirety while driving to Little Rock in May. I started listening to Sweden a lot when I started grad school. Then I got Get Lonely in September and All Hail West Texas in October. I went to see them twice in November, bringing everything to a brilliant climax. The Mountain Goats weren't even on my last.fm charts at the beginning of the year and they hit the top by the end. Hooray for judging the year by lists.

what I'm trying to say

Sometimes I listen to people talk to each other and the way they miss each other and purposely say things that are impossible to pin down and never exactly what they mean forms a kind of rhythm. It's really pretty and one of the reasons it's so pretty is that it is always hovering on the brink of utter collapse of communication and descent into pointless argument. So so often this happens in conversations "but I thought you meant . . ." If we could just hold on to our individual interpretations and not seek after some real truth, how pretty our conversations would be. Like art. Urinals can be art, but usually art is less . . . utilitarian.

I watched this movie last night called Funny Ha Ha. From the beginning to the end it is full of these kinds of conversations, they just hover on the brink of actually being about something important. People are trying to figure out their relations to each other, but they can't come out and say anything because then feelings will actually get involved and spoil everything. And really, this is how most of us talk, mumbling, stuttering, saying what we mean but then taking it back the next moment ("I'm just kidding, just kidding"). The movie wanders with no clear beginning and no clear ending. It's about a girl who recently graduated from college and lives in a suburb of Boston. She's trying to find a job, she's confused about her friends, especially boys, but she doesn't have the words to ask questions. She doesn't seem to really need the answers either. In her post-college world, where everything seems insignificant if not pointless, even the small stuttering conversations are important. She meets her friend several times over coffee to "talk", but apparently making jokes about cows is as significant as discussing why her friend has recently made various life-changing decisions.

Hope gave me a book, which is really a magazine, called A Public Space. There's this essay in it about how the theme in rock music, especially punk, is a life-affirming NO. "These people say NO because they care very deeply about things, otherwise they wouldn't bother. Let's face the big uncomfortable truths, these bands implicitly say. And to do that you have to make a dark noise." The author, Michael Azzerad, complains that music today doesn't have this NO quality. He points out that, unlike during the Vietnam era, when the threat of war affected everyone, "Today there is no unifying fear or enemy. It's long been a commonplace that our culture is growing progressively more fragmented, so much so that no significant bloc of people can agree on what we're supposed to be rebelling against." Then he suggests another explanation "Maybe they don't get as frustrated with the world at large--because they don't have to deal with the world at large." Well sometimes dealing with these little lives, in which musicians apparently only sing about how their "alienated from their artsy girlfriend," is just as hard as dealing with the world at large. One of the "big, uncomfortable truths" of our generation is that we don't know how to connect with our friends and our neighbors, with the boy at the coffee shop and with the best friend's boyfriend. We've graduated from college, where we didn't know what to prepare for, we're out in the world unemployed and alone. Is it wrong to see life struggles in terms of ourselves? Isn't that where we have to start after all? And doesn't alienation from other human beings need a bigger NO than almost anything else? Knowing others--knowing self--knowing God, these are all related. As E. M. Forster says in Howard's End "Only Connect."

And as a further example of what I'm talking about, the title of this entry is from a song by Stars.

to be happy

I'm not sure why, but I really like the Enneagram personality test. I think part of it is that I pronounce it so that it rhymes with "Linneagram." Plus, I like the way it phrases things "I must be perfect and good to be happy." It's nice to know what I need to do to be happy. Too bad it's impossible. So last January when I took the test I was a 1, but now I am a 3. I feel this is a step up. I am now dependent on people rather than ideals. I don't need to be perfect, I just need impress my professors.

type--score--type behavior motivation
3 59 I must be impressive and attractive to be happy.
6 49 I must be secure and safe to be happy.
8 48 I must be strong and in control to be happy.
1 47 I must be perfect and good to be happy.
9 38 I must be peaceful and easy to get along with to be happy.
7 27 I must be high and entertained to be happy.
4 26 I must avoid painful feelings to be happy.
5 19 I must be knowledgable and independent to be happy.
2 18 I must be helpful and caring to be happy.

Main Type	Overall Self

Take Free Enneagram Personality Test

Some explanation: Your main type is which ever behavior you utilize most and/or prefer. Your variant reflects your scoring profile on all nine types: so = social variant (compliant, friendly), sx = sexual variant (assertive, intense), sp = self preservation variant (withdrawn, security seeking). (from www.similarminds.com)

a Minich Family Christmas

And here is William making his Harrison Ford face . . .

We had a happy Christmas, got up a little later than usual because we were all still watching Charlie Brown's Christmas at midnight last night, then we had to leave the milk and cookies for Santa and find the stockings so we could hang them by the chimney with care, so we didn't go to bed until almost one o'clock (when the Ghost of Christmas Past comes).  The gift-giving was a little groggy, but the presents were nice.  I got a big, fuzzy, fraggley blanket and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (which William ordered off ebay from Korea), a Joan Baez CD, because I realized that when I left Tami I no longer had any Joan Baez, and a picture book of intricate illustrations that is signed by the author with "especially by Linnea" written above the signature. My Mom met the nice old man who made the book at a craft exhibition in Omaha, but she could not explain the prepositional oddity.  Christmas in our family consists of eating Christmas dinner, playing with brandy and Christmas pudding for awhile (and maybe eating a few bites of pudding in the process), then watching our Christmas DVDs for the rest of the day.  We got the Cadfael series, Season One.  I was kind of unsure when William told me we had to ask for it for Christmas, but we watched the first episode today and it was really interesting.  Complex, made my brain feel more awake.  And then we watched this, which is way fun, lots of English people playing sultans and sultanas.  Christmas is all about fairy tales and myths and legends.  Then we watched more Black Adder, we're on Season Four now.  Brilliant, brilliant British comedy.  I don't know why I never watched it before: Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Brian Blessed, other less famous funny people.  And that was our Christmas, that, plus drinking lots of tea and napping.

And here's a picture of me and my fuzzy blanket and my crown:

old times

ah yes, it's finals week, and I can't help feeling that Christmas finals week should be happier. Even though I never had time for it, I miss the hall decorating.

and the trees in the Great Lobby and the fireplaces and the post-Madrigals gossip, telling stories about how Mark Geib wore Earl's Barbie dress and got dragged out of the Great Hall by Dr. Neilsen, and Hagrid bringing in the firewood . . . oh wait, I'm getting college mixed up with Hogwarts again. Ah, the good times, just makes me wonder why I'm here at this "awful school" instead of convincing my professors that I really failed my senior year so I could go back and spend time drinking coffee with Tuggy and Ashley Saturday and going to Natalie's birthday party.

if you always get up late you'll never be on time

blogging notes from today (most of this was written this morning and this afternoon, but I am just posting it now):

Okay, life is getting calmer, but I'm worried that my computer is picking up on my mood. It has started waking up in the middle of the night making noises, and then randomly giving me capital letters. Oh baby computer, just one more week and we will take you to the happy happy Apple Store of Omaha. Yeah, just one more week, one week from today I take my last exam and then drive half dead to Chattanooga. It will be beautiful and victorious and I will play We Are the Champions all the way.

Oh, so sad! I just talked to a girl who works at the coffee shop I frequent and she said that they were told recently that they couldn't bring in their own CD's because of copyright issues! And they now have to play the XM radio that Starbucks has! This is so sad, mainly because they are not playing the crazy mixture of M. Ward and Tom Waits anymore, but also because it robs this crazy coffee shop of the influence of its employees. It's less individual now, how can they do this? How will people know the music unless it gets played in coffee shops? We need albums, not stupid radio stations. What can we do about this? Google searching hasn't turned up anything about this atrocity in other coffee shops, or any public outrage. Okay, back to work.

One more thing:
I am in good company. In response to the second paragraph of this: Amen, Amen, and Amen.  Etymology, man, oh my head!

rock and roll voice

Sometimes it's really cool being a linguist, because you get to read things like this:
"A good example is provided by Bob Dylan, who is from Minnesota, in the American Mid-West, and who has /ai/ = [ai] and non-prevocalic /r/ in his speech. His singing style incorporates frequent use of [a] and r-loss."

This is from Trudgill's article "Acts of Conflicting Identity: The Sociolinguistics of British Pop-song Pronunciation" (written in 1983). It's basically an article about how 'rock and roll voice' changed with The Beatles. Before them the voice was basically Black and Southern American, although apparently British singers got confused about what to do about their /r/ sounds, because, although most American accents have them, rock and roll voice doesn't really. So you have all these British singers who sound like American singers, except that they put /r/ in words like "girl" and "letter" (and then they put in their British /r/ too, so you have Paul McCartney singing "I never sawr them at all" in 'Till there was you' as Trudgill points out). But studies show that there is this drop in non-prevocalic /r/ (that's like in "girl", as opposed to the /r/ in "really", which is before a vowel) in The Beatles' music around the time Sergeant Pepper came out. Trudgill says that this is probably because of the British Invasion, British singers didn't have to try as hard to sound like Americans because they had become something of a standard themselves. He also points out that, although The Beatles weren't trying as hard to sound American, they weren't trying to sound British either, in fact, they had more of the Liverpudlian (that is just a great word) features on their early albums: rhyming "gone" with "one" (on With The Beatles), rhyming "aware" and "her" (on Rubber Soul, which song is that, though, I can't remember?).

Trudgill also talks about the rise of punk and how the punk bands were setting their standard as British working-class music. He analyses several artists here, The Clash, Sham '69, The Stranglers, and Ian Drury. He adds this nice comment after remarking that The Stranglers were more American in that they are more like the mainstream groups linguistically, "This is probably of more interest to rock musicologists than to linguists, but it is interesting to note that The Stranglers have been one of the groups accused of having 'sold out' and of not being 'really punk'. Perhaps giving your records Latin titles [like Rattus Norvegicus] does not help here either."

I love this stuff, just makes me want to be a rock musicologist. Funke, do you study stuff like this? What about Radiohead? What about Belle and Sebastian, who are Scottish, but sound English when they sing? Man, this is just what I needed now, school encouraging me to spend less time on my homework.

Don't Panic

Big, friendly letters.

Ugh, you can really tell it's the end of the semester. I work in the language lab here and it was crazy busy today, crazy busy for no reason, really, except that people are panicking. And I remembered how annoying this is to me, this sudden panic that just makes everything worse. And then I felt annoyed at myself because I've been doing it, too, this semester. These past few weeks I've gotten so much less done than I could have because of the stupid panicking. Gotta get the balance back. In college, at moments like this, I would sit there and tell myself that I loved this and I should be enjoying everything, and in college I really did enjoy most things. That's why I'm here now. I'm not sure why things are so much less enjoyable this semester. This place isn't really home, yet. I need to be comfy in order for my brain to be happy. But, whether or not I'm having a good time, I need to not panic, because, for one thing, it's not cool. As Hope told me often our senior year, always be cool.

(oh, and the picture was taken of me and my phonology notebook this summer, by a Taiwanese phonology professor who wanted to show his students that the feeling was universal.)