Job Discussion Forums

[Cool Teacher]

Stuff of Thouught by Steven Pinker.

Quite interesting but pretty difficult even for English teachers sometimes to understadnt all the different ways that we use verbs.

Chaper 2 was very confusing but then it became more interesting later. In some ways this book is arguing against other theories from people like Jerry Fordor, Sapir Worf and Lakoff & Johnson. I think his main point is that we have concepts and categories in our minds that are permenent parts of human nature and universal. Our language is constructed around this, not the other way around as some of his critics think.

Now I am reading Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors we Live By.

Has anyone any opinion on the big argument that Pinker and Lakoff got into a few years ago?

[Sashadroogie]

Great book, and great choice for review here. Some passages are a little on the heavy side, but there is no harm in that. Good to stretch the head muscle from time to time.

Lakoff tiff? Not often worth getting involved in academics and their rows.

[johnslat]

Just discovered someone that I think is a poet for the ages: Naomi Shibad Nye.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/naomi-shihab-nye

Here's a sample

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.


Naomi Shihab Nye
from The Words Under the Words: Selected Poems


Stunningly good

Regards,
John

[Sashadroogie]

The Foundation Pit - Andrei Platonov

Russia produces plenty of great writers, as is no secret. However, this chappie is on a different scale again. Even in translation, his books stand apart from anything else in terms of use of language, and in re-defining what writing is, what novels are. Yes, this one is gloomy and depressing. Yes, it is filled with obscure references to the language of Orthodox ritual and Soviet bureaucracy. But I predict that despite all this, he'll be remembered in the centuries to come as a major writer.

Ah, I won't give any descriptions of this particular book, except that it was banned, for obvious reasons, in the Motherland. Go and read it. And be amazed...

[coledavis]

Wilt by Tom Sharpe. I was thinking of being profound, but then I decided to go for something very English and, especially in the police interrogation of the eponymous hero, something that made me laugh out loud.

[Sashadroogie]

The Death of David Debrizzi - Paul Micou

A passionate novel about classical music and musicians that will have tears rolling down your cheeks. Some great Russian pianist vignettes, some superb descriptive passages about musical passages that you will swear you can hear - even the entirely fictitious Death Spiral by the equally made up composer Chanat.

Witty, elegant, subtle, sumptuous, but most of all musical, prose makes this a firm favourite of mine.

That's it! I'll have to take a break from Hegel and read this one again!

http://www.amazon.com/Death-David-Debrizzi-Paul-Micou/dp/0593023625

[Sashadroogie]

The Winter Queen - Boris Akunin

The first installment of the Erast Fandorin detective novels, and it is a charming introduction to an addictive series. For anyone who loves Sherlock Holmes, these books are a rare treat. Full of humour and wit, as well as obvious nostalgia for a lost Russia. Great, crisp prose style that seems to have been very well translated by Andrew Bromfeld. An added benefit for teachers in Russia is following the action and chases along the streets of Moscow, after one has figured out what the Nineteenth century street name is today. Good exercise for one's historical as well as geographical senses.