checka it out titles that finally make sense.

well, I was touching up the blog design, trying to come up with something a little more hybrid. This could also be interpreted as trying to dodge writing up an ethnography that I’m struggling with.

Anyway, I get things to a point that I like them, and then proceed to republish not only my index, but my entire blog. And the worst part of all of this is I realize what I’ve done only when it’s too late to stop it. It’s a weird experience: watching each page of the old design get turned over. Racing through my archive and looking at the old style of pages one moment. Then simply hitting the reload button and finding the new look in it’s place.

I managed to make a few screen captures. But the old look, on any page you select, is history.

I guess its liberating as well. But I always liked aspects of the old design (though the CGI page load time sucked). Still, I feel like I just digitally remastered my past. Created a special edition.

After my second all nighter I succeeded in turning in my Language and Culture midterm. At this point I’m am hoping for a “b” though I’m willing to settle for a “b-“. It sucked. Two essays, five pages each. And here’s a sample question:

2. Why should ritual text-in-context be hypermetasemioticized in every respect? We have considered the role of densely laminated metricalization as the prime reflexively calibrated metapragmatics that regiments the signs within ritual so that the whole as well as its parts are determinate indexical icons, even if that indexical iconicity is only a figurative sign of aspects of the “conventionally cosmic,” i.e., the universe of presupposable conventions. But, taking one of the elaborate examples of ritual from our reading list, show how in addition to straightforward metricalization, the form is saturated with meta-semiosis layered upon meta-semiosis. (Recall here the relationship of the “literal” or everyday to the “tropic” or figurative in Jakobson’s account of “poetic function” in denotational language involves a metasemiosis moving from a lower to higher plane of meaning.) For the example you choose, explain the role of any folk metapragmatics that attempts to understand the possible/likely/guaranteed “effectiveness” of ritual as performed. Is there a Rhematic understanding of some principle(s) that make effectiveness transparent to local understanding, for example?

It literally took us one week to decode these things. Then almost another week to formulate our answers. I’m not looking forward to the final. And in the meantime I’m planning to take a long nap.

However, folks, start expecting e-mails as my life is sorta my own again.

the Reg is our post Soviet Block architecture library. And I’m here working on Language in Culture… in threory at least. I can’t concentrate and I need to get through at least 200 pages of reading in the next few hours. I’m not currently loving life.

I got a B+ on my Perpectives in Social Science Analysis Course. As I had been hoping for a B, this was good news. My gut is that this is the average grade. Basically what it means is that I can still get an “A” in the course, I just have to write a kick butt final, which I don’t expect will be anywhere near as intimidating. Well at least not quite as intimidating.

However, that can’t me a concern right now. Right now, Langauge in Culture is all that occupies my waking and sleeping hours.