Writing, writing everywhere, and not a drop to drink ...

... that is, at least, no water bottles in the computer lab, where we've spent much of this glorious Monday writing and re-writing and writing again. We began this morning with an exercise that came to The Boulder as she was feeding her cat(s) this morning. After the class failed to recognize the daily quote ("We cannot allow a mine shaft gap!"), The Boulder led the class in a discussion of the difference between written language and spoken language -- the vernacular. We entered into a healthy discussion of language sub-groups, from the Southern idiom to 1337 H4X0R speak to sports speak. Perhaps the most interesting part was our discussion of these things --

-- which the class referred to variously as soda, soda pop, pop, a soft drink, and a Coke (incidentally, The Boulder votes for the term "Coke." Even if it's a Sprite, it's a Coke). This led to a discussion of OuLiPo, a French poetry school/movement/lifestyle/thing of general wonder and amazement. We discussed one of my personal favorite OuLiPo constraints: the transliteration, in which the writer takes a text from one language system -- for instance, Shakespearean English -- and translates it to another language system -- for instance, the language of British street punks, as in the famed and amazing OuLiPian transliteration of Hamlet by Richard Curtis. The class chose a language system and then worked to translate the aforementioned Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" into that language system. The class discovered that the poem is, well, pretty darn dark in any language system.

Once we'd worked to immerse ourselves in another language system, we began our discussion of Tom Wolfe's work and of immersion journalism. I revealed the reason why the students were to join another social group over the weekend: they are to write a New Journalism-style, Tom Wolfe-esque essay, in the language of that social group, about that social group -- which is, in fact, what they're doing now, typing steadily away at their computers in the Cherry Hall lab,

Post-Script

Schmoeku

Hilltop spirit, why
the angered eyebrows? Jell-O
wriggling in noon sun.