Quizzes and ranting

Ad Mundo Exteriore,

Procrastination, thou art a very kindly friend.

( Quizzes )

In other news, I've decided to list some of my pet spelling and grammar peeves. Okay, once or twice, I can understand, especially in a long fic that has been hurriedly released. I make the same mistakes myself. But when they crop up every other sentence, it's enough to make your eyes burn. Yes, I have been perusing FF.net recently, why do you ask? >_>

"loose" vs. "lose": "loose" is an adjective that is generally used as an antonym for "tight", as in "I have loose, baggy pants." "lose" is a verb that is generally used as an antonym for "win", as in trivetmonger's song, "I win, you lose, I win, I win, I win, I win..."

"your" vs. "you're": "your" is a possessive pronoun, as in "These are my socks, and those are your socks." "you're" is a contraction for "you are", as in "You're my enemy." (Can you believe that a kendo club alumnus made this mistake in a recent email? Ugh, what's the use of a $40,000 education?)

"they're" vs. "there" vs. "their": "they're" is a contraction for "they are", as in "They're finally here." "there" is an adverb indicating place, as in "Finally, there is my limousine." "their" is a possessive pronoun, as in "Their limousine is finally here."

"definitely": "definitely" not "definately", the adverbial form of the adjective "definite". Just add "-ly". I don't know how that misspelling cropped up since it makes no sense phonetically. (At least to me.) But it's everywhere and drives me crazy.

I'm ranting to the wrong people, since all of you on my friends list usually have impeccable spelling and grammar. But since I can't fix the world, I might as well seek commiseration, neh? I'm pretty tolerant of bad writing, bad spelling, bad grammar, but I have my breaking points. -_-

I'm reading a paper of John Elsner on the Ara Pacis (the altar to Augustan Peace) for Rome of Augustus. After deciphering the pedantic language, I think his major point is that people who view art will all interpret it differently depending on the context in which they encountered it and their own cultural background. Uh...talk about self-evident truisms! He wrote a paper on this? It got published? All right, admittedly, his actual thesis is a little more substantial than that--about how the Ara Pacis' function as a place of ritual sacrifice determines its "meaning" more effectively than the simple combination of allegorical and portrait images on the reliefs--but his overly wordy, self-congratulatory sentence on how Roman audiences have "creatively constructed numerous meanings which might deconstruct, undermine, or conflict with each other" is just disgustingly useless. And again, to give him credit, he's arguing against the interpretive approach taken by Zanker, but one paragraph is enough to settle that point! He doesn't need to enshrine it at the center of his thesis statement as if it was something wildly original and worth talking about! That's not an idea or a concept, that's just white knowledge.

The whole mountain-on-a-needle impression I got from his paper reminded me of Stephen Dedalus' sophistic musings on the theory of aesthetics and the perception of beauty in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The prattlings of immature young dandies, if you ask me, the way the object of the subject's perception is supposed to move and be moved, blah, blah, blah (sorry for the mangling, but I don't have the actual text with me). Not that I'm criticizing Joyce--in fact, I firmly believe that it was his intent to present Stephen as still developing into an artist, still in the process of growing even at the end of the book. Portrait ends after all with the beginning of Stephen's vocation, not its climax.

Still, there's something really empty--who came up with that metaphor, "the chattering of sparrows" or something like that?--in the philosophy of aesthetics. I mean, analyzing what art is, the process of its creation, its importance as a medium--these issues are meaningful, but usually real artists are the ones to write about them. The philosophers, or rather, not philosophers, but academic pedants (as well as pampered intellectual popinjays) go on for pages about the perception of art, its meaning in the eyes of its viewers, the audience's "experience" of the wild cacophony of associations and allusions evoked by the image...>_< Um...for your information, just because you've stared for hours analyzing a silly statue does not mean that the average Roman citizen is going to do the same. He's going to glance at it briefly, think about it for a few seconds, and then move on to the next statue. Of course, the image may have a lasting impression on his subconscious, and you may just be trying to elucidate that mysterious subconscious processing of the image, but stop to think about how far you're stretching your statements before you invalidate them by sheer exaggeration! (This last exclamation being targeted more at Paul Zanker than Elsner.)

I enjoy art history and respect art teachers, but art historians are a different matter entirely. (I don't even mind the sane ones, but I highly doubt that Elsner is one of them. It's not even that he has bad ideas; it's just that he writes with a smirk. Argh. Oh, and I wish he'd stop saying, "Yes, if we look at the altar from this perspective, we may discover rich new depths of meaning," without going on to say what kinds of depths he's discovered! Coward.)

...Tari