Rage Like a Dog

All these essay titles look the same: A Semester's Worth of Blood, Sweat and Tears from one English Major

Stylistics:

They Say He Walks Through Walls and Stuff: Point of View and the Characterization of Dr. Manhattan and Miracleman

(Figures for the above contained here)

Children’s Lit:

“Hulk Smash!”: Transhuman Instincts and the Search for Identity in Feed, The Incredible Hulk and Animorphs

American Lit:

“I Guess I Buy It:” Neuromancer and Progress Towards a Sufficiently Advanced Underworld

No-one really wants to read what you had to tell your professors about your favorite science fiction stories this semester, but it is fun to pretend.

A warm glow in my ipants told me I was going the right way. A moth fluttered into the glow of my integrated GPS, flapping futily into my eyes, the hallucinatory green arrow cutting through it for one mile until the ping sounded and I turned left.

names

discopantsandhaircuts:

I want to name my son Greenup (a name I found on a headstone in the “family cemetery”) and his middle name will be Locust, which was my cat’s name, haha. I like the sound of the word too. Maybe Greenup Locust Brent or Greenup Brent Locust after my dad’s name. My daughter will have the name of some sort of naturally-occurring stone or something like Pearl or Opal or the name of a fruit or vegetable. Persimmon, Rhubarb… Something good. If I ever have kids, that is. I’m rooting for a boy.

That is a cool approach; it doesn’t require flipping through a book of baby names, and more importantly, Greenup Locust Brent is a name with some personality to it that the kid can work with or against. And nature is a classic source of naming. A really, truly good name should be like the sand in the oyster (or was it clams?) the little first bit you give them to work with to become something shiny and round.

“Math,” “Phoneme” and “Atom” came about from this idea- they’re names of things that make up other things, either by serving as components or structures on which you can build patterns. Alternatively too, you could name your kids for their most significant accomplishment. This would involve a lot of renaming, as you go from “Passed Through Cervix” to “Ate a Really Quite Impressively Large Bug” to “Knows Everything About Frogs.”

names

distinguish jack from john, jose and roberto from lashawnda and tyrell, and kids named apple and moon science from the fine upstanding folk with the tight collars.

It weirds you out that people seem so adverse to the names “Atom” and “Phoneme.” “Mathematics” could very easily be called “Math” for short, which is a perfectly namely-sounding name. Names should be things again. More “Water Lily” less “Brad.” Everyone knows what Water Lily means. Brad means your parents were scared.

Not enough people would name their children Motherboard or Rollercoaster and this honestly makes you nervous in its own way.

And so he believed that Fate existed only long enough to curse us, and so he sought salvation in choices, and so he tattooed “if found, please freeze contents” on his forehead, and so the avalanche pinned his arms and legs, and so he thought “of course” as the rocks came crashing towards his head.

“Morning Father,”

Robert said, stuffing a pile of papers into his briefcase. “What dost thou make of the sun this morning?”

Father Sunbeam barked and sniffed Robert’s rear end. Robert nodded, accommodating. His phone rang. “Hello? Hey there. Not much. Yeah, at five. See you then.”

The sun this morning turned out to be nothing in particular.