Deadlines

I have students who have deadlines on D-Day and submit drafts on the midnight between D-1 and D-Day, asking for help. What is the point of that?

Listen up, ladies and gentlemen. Here are things to think about.

First, you need to know what you don't know. I suggest you attend lectures and tutorials, and if those are too boring, spend the time reading the material and making sense of it. Somewhere in all that, you will learn what it is about the material that is impervious to the razor-edged sharpness of your brain. Alternately, you might learn that you know it all. Good for you.

Second, you need to list the things you need help with. Don't come to me with, "I don't know anything, help me." I will proceed to spend time showing you what you do know. But that might not help you with what you don't know. And trust me, everyone knows some things. I can prove it to you.

Third, if you have not overcome the difficulties highlighted in the two previous paragraphs, and you come to me with only a day or two left, pray for miracles of cognitive blossoming. That might help. I can then help you blooming students in the confidence that not my will but the divine will shall be done.

Last, you really might be screwed, and it will certainly not be something I am to be faulted or blamed for. (Incidentally, you should know the difference between 'fault' and 'blame'. If not, search this blog till you find it.)

Hot Nights

Sweltering, the air bakes itself into a meringue around you, somehow dry but sticky given the slightest chance. It seems churlish, temperamental, maleficent. It is a Hot Night, one of those in which every few minutes brings a flash of heat that makes you wonder if menopausality is to be your fate.

And then the corner of your eye is tugged towards Seth Grahame-Smith's sublime effort. If 'prosaic' is to prose as 'poetic' is to poetry, then this man has ennobled the former and raised it to the realms of the latter.

Why all of that?

For the spawn of Grahame and of Smith hath wrought a mighty deed. He hath co-opted that doyenne of ancient chick-lit, Jane Austen, and created from her carrion a true classic in a Mary Shelley Frankenstein sense. He hath taken up his pen to write Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and I do not speak in jest. It is classic. It is wondrous, and Bingley will never seem the same again to you.

Read it! The first paragraph alone is worth the price of admission.

IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was this truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead.

Glorious, glorious prose. Even in the hot and heavy dead of night, it glows.