“…there crops up in parts a certain rawness of absurdity that’s very displeasing, and makes it read like some clever lad’s dream: the thing hangs too loosely together…half worthy of Balzac.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“…too long, too static, too repetitious, too ponderous and a long list of other negative ‘toos’…he has no novelistic sense whatever; he just tells you every blessed thing the characters said and did and thought in the the order in which it occurred…most of the time it is solidly, monumentally boring.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“A scene in one of his numerous movie shorts required Benchley to be strung up in a mass of telephone wires above a city street. While waiting for the final camera, he called to his wife Gertrude, who was on location: ‘Remember how good in Latin I was in school?’
‘I do,’ she replied.
‘Well, look where it got me.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities
“365 Days of Haab: The Mayan solar calendar was divided into eighteen twenty-day months (vigesimal notation). This produced 360 days, or one tun. In common with many religious calendars of the world, the shortfall of five extra days added on to make the 365 days of the solar year was a spirit-haunted period of ill omen, the five nameless Wayab days.
The habit of multiplying by 20 continued beyond the year, so that twenty tun (almost a solar year) is a katun, which was a great unit of time commemorated with inscribed standing stones and pyramid temples. Twenty katuns produced a baktun and twenty baktuns produce a piktun of 7,885 solar years. We have not quite got to a piktun, though quite recently, at the winter solstice of 2012, we celebrated the completion of thirteen baktuns which some observers too to be a possible date for the end of the world. The thirteen-baktun date (21-12-2012), which was safely achieved, begins by starting the calendar back at Year One in 3113 BC.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged hispanic history, literary oddities, numeracy
“The occasional principal. An occasional principal feels called upon to exercise his authority at every turn, and is satisfied with his accomplishment only when teachers fear him. The principal hews exactly to the line. If his curriculum calls for compositions of three paragraphs in the sixth grade, then three it must be or the teacher will receive a demerit mark.
Such principals are rapidly giving place to a new type of educational director who rules by virtue of a scientific understanding of his work, and by personal qualities of leadership, rather than by authority which has been delegated to him. Such a principal deals with facts and with personalities; gives directions, rather than orders; leads, rather than drives; and expects his teachers to think for themselves.”
Excerpted from: Sears, J.B. Classroom Organization and Control. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
“…the form of the story is most unexpected.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“Systematic living. What is needed by teachers is the application of a bit of system and common sense in their daily lives. Teaching cannot be sedulously followed by young people without sedulously offsetting its inactivity with outside exercise and pleasure. Every teacher should set aside a definite time for exercise, and a definite sum of money of recreation and pleasure. A regular time for a walk, a tennis game, a horseback ride; and a regular monthly allowance for theater, opera, travel, of the entertaining of one’s friends, will take one out into the open air where acquaintance with nature may be renewed, furnish a host of new thrills, and establish new interests and new companionships, which will drive away care, renew one’s mental and physical vigor, and provide a saner perspective for the serious tasks of the days to come.”
Excerpted from: Sears, J.B. Classroom Organization and Control. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
“Intelligent living. As a matter of self-protection, to say nothing of the wisdom of living a joyous life, the teacher must look to the problem of keeping an adequate margin of good health. This is largely the problem of proper rest and recreation. It is such a simple truth to say that when one is tired and half sick most any sort of work becomes barren drudgery, and yet this explanation is rarely thought of by the teacher who retires in disgust after a long evening spent in the useless task of correcting papers.”
Excerpted from: Sears, J.B. Classroom Organization and Control. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
“Xiuhtecuhtli (Turquoise Lord) * Tecpati-Itzli (Lord of the Obsidian Blade) * Piltzintecuhtli (Our Lord Prince) * Centeotl (Lord of the Maize) * Mictlantecuhtli (Underworld Lord) * Chalchiuhtlicue (Lord of the Jade Skirt) * Tlazoteotl (Our Lady of Two Faces—Lustful Sin and Purification) * Tepeyollotl (Lord of the Heart of the Mountain) * Tlaloc (Lord of Rain and Fertility)
The Aztecs, like most of the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica, ran a number of sacred calendars concurrently, which made life more interesting, in terms of working out festivals and celebrations, as well as good, bad, propitious and impossible days, nights and months. Blocks of nine nights fitted into both the 365-day-long solar year (known as Haab), which was divided into twenty groups eighteen-day months, as well as the 260-day-long fertility calendar (known as Tzolkin) composed of twenty groups of thirteen-day months as well as twenty-nine groups of nine nights.
Twenty-nine is of course the unit of a lunar month, while nine months represent the gestation of both a human child and the complete tropical cycle of sowing to reaping for such vital crops as maize. So the Lords of the Night, in some South American cultures, appear also as the Lords of the Nine Months, or the Nine Judges of Hell, and other ninefold manifestations.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged hispanic history, literary oddities
“Actor, n. One who peddles ready-made emotion, and who, despising us for the qualities on which he feeds, is by us despised for the unwholesome character of his diet.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged drama/theater, humor, literary oddities
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