I knew there was a reason why we didn’t go anywhere this winter break. Usually when Daya’s school closes we try to take her somewhere–NYC, DC or Baltimore–but this semester closed so late that we thought we would stay in Lock Haven. Turned out to be good; our friends from Dallas want to visit us (Lock Haven is fast becoming the vacation hot spot of Texans! Second set of friends coming to see us in a space of two months!) and they will be here tomorrow; I have cooked a lot of food for them and Daya is excited to see Y and S, their daughters who must be all grown up now. It would be wonderful to see them all; been such a long time. But it is particularly appropriate that I am here though because yesterday our friend S was suddenly hospitalized and had to be rushed into emergency surgery at 6 in the morning to remove multiple blood clots from her leg. I am glad I am here to help her and be with her–I can’t believe it–we were just talking in the department last week–she is a very healthy person and now this– it is just unbelievable to me. I gave my first insulin shot to a cat today. S has two beautiful cats and the kitty cats are obviously missing her and they were kind of edgy but the little cat sat quietly for me while I lifted his skin up behind his neck and gave him an insulin shot–it is that under-the-skin kind.  What a Christmas. Our friend J has surgery to remove tumors from his abdomen in two weeks, S is in the ICU, my mother needs eye surgery–so much pain in this world–what a christmas. But Merry Christmas, one and all;

Love and Joy come to you,

And to you a wassail too,

And God bless you and send you a happy new year

And God send you a happy new year!

Here’s a wonderful song–Dayani loves this song when I play it in the car!

A week that killed me with grading–four courses and an overload–but I posted the last of the grades an hour ago and I feel so good! Now I can sleep! The linguistics and grammar kids have learned so much; this is why it is so wonderful to be a teacher. What more can you ask for in life? Now I will do all the christmas stuff which I have been very delinquent about–I put up the tree but that is it. Have to send the cards to India, England, North Dakota and Texas and wrap the present for Daya, get a haircut; every time my hair grows an inch I feel so handicapped.  Krish, Dayani and the dogs–they all have longer hair than I do, at this point. But anyway all day I was thinking of this astounding scene in Avatar where the bombs finally blast, shatter, fragment and annihilate the oldest tree in the Na’avi forest.  You should see the movie just to see this scene. It is an incredible scene. You see the tree falling falling falling in stages; when a huge tree falls your senses cannot grasp the magnitude of its destruction all at once. You have to see it in stages and that is what Cameron shows us. It brought me back to when I was growing up in India–I must have been 11 or 12 and we had this huge, huge tamarind tree in our backyard–it was a very big tree–spread out its branches would have been at least a half a mile long in circumference. Very big tree with beautiful sturdy long branches. One spring all the tamarind trees got this heavy ant infestation and our tamarind tree got infected as well. And reluctantly we had to cut this tree down. So we called these men who cut trees for a living and they arrived with their saws and ropes. Unlike here in the US, tree-felling is a low-tech event in India-everything is done manually and takes at least a couple of days from start to finish, especially for such a big tree. I remember them felling that tree–I would sit in the little verandah behind the kitchen and watch them cutting the tree–the first thing you notice about a tree getting cut is the smell of its sap, killing a tree releases a smell, an organic smell, like blood or sweat, the smell of it getting cut, the bone like insides of that humongous trunk, the smell of these men who wrestled the tree down–thin, wiry men, but they were strong enough to confront the resistance of earth, of trees–they smoked beedies–hand r0lled tobacco–sweat running down their back–hacking hacking away at that massive and calm tree trunk with their hand-saws, unmoving, and how they cut and cut and cut into it until it finally started to topple down. It took them two days to bring that tree down and then to dig up the root from under the ground.  Occasionally they would look my way when they started to hack really really hard and splinters started flying from the tree, they would look my way, and tell me, daughter, go inside, these shards will get in your eyes. It was my job to bring them water to drink once in a while. I would stay there though and when these men took a break to smoke their beedies, I would go out to where the tree lay in shambles, branch lying upon branch, piled high in no order, I liked to climb that pile. It was like a trampoline–very airy and light and bouncy because the branches were all still with sap and not dried up and dead yet. I would walk all over those fallen branches; it was just this most wonderful feeling. I would run inside and call Appu and ask him to come out and walk with me on the branches. We would stand there and start jumping up and down careful not to fall through the branches. We also had to be careful not to get bitten by the ants that were living on the leaves. It took these men about a week to remove the entire tree from our backyard and everyday we would go out and jump on it–each day it started to bounce  less and less–getting fried by the sun and drying up and dying quickly.  The hole where that tamarind tree stood was like a crater; what these people who cut down trees for no reason and destroy the environment do not realize is that you are really upsetting the earth, the soil layers, the strata when you do stuff like this. If a tree cannot be saved, it is understandable, but this wanton destruction is so unwise.

Here is a good poem — On Killing a Tree by Gieve Patel. I thought of this poem when I saw the tree-killing scene in Avatar:

It takes much time to kill a tree,
Not a simple jab of the knife
Will do it.
It has grown
Slowly consuming the earth,
Rising out if it, feeding
Upon its crust, absorbing
Years of sunlight, air, water,
And out of its leprous hide
Sprouting leaves.
So hack and chop
But this alone won’t do it.
Not so much pain will do it.
The bleeding bark will heal
And from close to the ground
Will rise curled green twigs,
Miniature boughs
Which if unchecked will expand again
To former size.
No,
The root is to be pulled out
Out of the anchoring earth;
It is to be roped, tied,
And pulled out-snapped out
Or pulled out entirely,
Out from the earth-cave,
And the strength of the tree exposed,
The source, white and wet,
The most sensitive, hidden
For years inside the earth.
Then the matter
Of scorching and choking
In sun and air,
Browning, hardening,
Twisting, withering,
And then it is done.

When you think of Hollywood saving the world from the evil forces, it is instinctive, almost natural for us to picture the Superman, the Batman, the Spiderman, the Hulk, the Iron Man–only a heavily weaponized human form, a human form outfitted with all kinds of mechanical accessories can combat the forces of evil and save the earth and all of us mortals from our imminent painful extinction. Keep this Hollywood trope at the forefront of your mind as you watch James Cameron’s Avatar. Avatar is a marvelous movie, and you will appreciate it a great deal more if you learn to see how Cameron has perhaps changed forever Hollywood’s ubermensch narratives. Although I always liked Cameron’s Alien (the first one–an interesting take on motherhood, that one is) I could not sit through Titanic and I have never seen the Terminator movies, ever. But I really liked Avatar; it tells an allegorical story through a sophisticated narrative that draws on everything from the Greek myths and Indian myths, to Gilgamesh, Edgar Rice Burroughs and the current US war on terror, with each allusion carefully notched along an axis of struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil that stretches back into the past and through the present and into the future. It is a long movie–nearly three hours–but you never feel the duration of time; the narrative is in real time and you really appreciate the time it takes for Jake Sully, the main character, to become an organic intellectual fighting on behalf of the good forces against the forces of evil. That is another dare that Cameron has answered in Avatar; it used to be that in the earnest West vs Non-west movies churned out by the Hollywood mill, you could write off every earnest western character that claimed his or her heart was with the poor Mestizo lying dead in some ditch somewhere; how can you be on our side despite what you profess, we could seriously ask these characters and we would be right and within our rights to do so.  To put it bluntly, can we trust the West to benefit anything or anyone other than Itself? It is a question that the whole world asks. James Cameron says, yes, we can, and I for one, believe him.  In the good fight, it is always the defectors that will tip the critical mass in favor of the forces of the good.  In Avatar, Jake Sully, the ex-marine becomes an organic intellectual seeing through the horror of the company he keeps and that keeps him and defects over to the other side through an organic developmental process; he needs this time, the three hours, real time, screen time, in order to see (and to show us, by extension) exactly, precisely and clearly, without a shadow of doubt, the horror and scope of his existence with the RDA corporation. When he defects over to the Omatikaya people he does it to save himself and them and in correct allegiance with the forces of good in nature.

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paralyzed ex-Marine in a wheel-chair joins the Research Development Administration (RDA) a corporation ruling earth on an expedition to Pandora, a moon of Polyphemus that orbits Alpha Centauri. It is 2154 and Earth has run out of green, of fuel, of all kinds of resources needed to sustain life; Pandora has a rare mineral called unobtanium that RDA believes will solve earth’s energy and economic crises. Sully is recruited by the RDA to take his dead brother’s place in a scientific experiment involving avatars; RDA scientists have created humanoid creatures with half human DNA and half DNA of the Na’avi tribe of Pandora. Each RDA project participant has a specific avatar that he or she controls; the body is Na’avi but the mind will be that of the human agent inhabiting and controlling the Na’avi body. RDA wants the human mind to inhabit the Na’avi avatar’s body in order to approach, learn and establish ties with the Na’avi people, a mutation of what in anthropology we call native informants. The Na’avi do not like or trust the humans. Thus the need for the avatar informants. It is a paradigmatic concept and one as old as imperialism itself. Avatar, a Sanskrit word is a concept from Hindu mythology, where it literally means a manifest form of an abstract deity descending (avatara is a cognate of avatarana which means to descend, to come down) to earth for a specific karmic purpose; often, it is to correct some dharma gone awry. Avatars are not alter egos, they are not dissociative personalities, they are not doubles; avatars may be properly understood as an ethical form of being in the world. Sully is paralyzed, in a wheel chair, does not shave, does not smell good, whatever–but he inhabits a functional Na’avi body through which he enters the Na’avi tribe where he befriends Neytiri, a Na’avi princess, who takes him under her wings and teaches him all kinds of tribal rituals; naturally, they fall in love, not long after. The graphics, animation and special effects used in this movie are extraordinary; the entire Pandora landscape is vividly lifelike, hyperrealistic, sensual, even erotic. The Na’avi people are an interesting adaptation of the human form; the animators have stretched the human form in interesting ways, added a tail, given yellow, diamond shaped eyes, and long braided hair to both men and women but the net result is oddly not distancing to us human viewers. The plot rolls along with Jake being claimed by both the seemingly innocuous science avatar project and also acting as a much more dangerous agent to Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) to identify where the mineral sources lie and to use his successful inroads with the Na’avi people to push them out of their territories a lot faster than they are ready for. It is a familiar conflict when civilizations clash with war as the only predictable outcome. The battle scenes of this movie are absolutely stunning; the intensity of Quaritch’s hatred towards the tribal people packed into heavy artillery and daisy cutters; the burning forests; the swirling black skies; to me, they were like the visual equivalent of reading the Iliad or the Odyssey or the Mahabharata; fantasy and science fiction directors will have to reckon with this movie in the future while filming battle scenes. Shock and awe at its most willfully demonic.

There is a wonderful scene at the beginning of the movie where Jake sees a big army tank roll by and we see arrows stuck onto the wheels of the trucks. Which is the better weapon? Any guesses? It was interesting to me how the non-diegetic contexts keep intruding onto the clash of civilization shown on-screen. The movie theater where we saw this movie–Cinema Center in Williamsport– previewed a mix of recruitment ads for army, navy, marines and the national guard before they started all the trailers for upcoming movies.  I guess they show these ads in small rural communities such as ours from where the military makes its largest recruitments for the wars we are currently fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. If history has taught us anything about the clash of civilizations it is that, as Neytiri tells Jake in the movie, “the great mother does not take sides; she merely adjusts the balance of power.” This is true. What is this great mother? And is it separate from us? The movie says no; it is the power of the collective. It is up to us to construct this balance of power, because if we don’t, we destroy ourselves, we destroy nature, we destroy life itself. So we see Jake, Trudy, Max, Norm, and the chief scientist Grace (Sigourney Weaver) all predictably defecting over to the Na’avi side and against the RDA and Colonel Quaritch who asks Jake the fundamental question underlying all civilizational wars: How does it feel to betray your race?  From Jake’s final choice–will he stay a paralyzed human or will he become an Avatar?–we have to assume that he feels just fine.

Related story here about syncretic religions when only a god can save us.

A beautiful video about sign language, deaf poets and poetry. A student sent it to me because it references Koko the talking gorilla. Beautiful video. Thanks Zach!

Here is your extra credit for syntax. Solve these and leave them in my mail box or bring to my office by tuesday 4pm. (Available points: 10 points)

Build trees for the following phrases.

Identify the nucleus or head word first.

All modifiers are attached at the XP level.

Determiners are attached at the XP level.

Head and complements are attached at the X’ level.

Notes:

1. Remember that all pronouns and cardinal and ordinal numbers are determiners inside an NP. (They are not adjectives; they cannot be inflected for grade–slow-slower-slowest (adjective); responsible-more responsible-most responsible (adjective). one-onn-er-onn-est? No. one-more one-most one? No. See why they are not adjectives?) (8 points)

singing in the rain

the lovely bones

is one thing

three cups of tea

by the people

frightfully clever

every significant detail

fostered international trade

Build trees for the following sentences showing the constituent phrases and the correct hierarchical merging of phrases to form the sentence. Label all nodes.(2 points)

The family returned to Boston.

They faced winter with little preparation.

A very, very, cold friday evening, but LHU’s Jazz Ensembles at their Fall Concert, under the directorship of Prof. Severn and Mr. Chapman and featuring guest saxophonist (alto) Nelson Hill, entertained us at the Price auditorium with some real soul-stirring, toe-tapping, sweet and funky music. Almost all compositions featured the ensembles’ really strong rhythm section now–guitar (Tony Rodgers), bass (Charles Bungo), piano (Abe Nickle) drums (Juliano and Knarr) and percussion (Siedlecki)–showcasing some blistering trumpet playing by the students, as well as the sweet, sharp, intensely expressive, almost speech-like improvisational back and forth between Mr. Hill on the saxophone and Prof. Severn on the trumpet; it reminded me of the instrumental jugalbandis in Hindustani music. Very beautiful. I particularly loved the melodious but driving power of Hill’s “Milestones” from the Big Band section to the gorgeous improvisations on “Blue Monk,” the pounding and emotion-packed arrangements of “Killer Joe” and “Red Clay.” While Mr. Hill took a break the students did another rousing tribute to Ellington with some good solos (Roxanne Huber on sax and Scott Smith on trombone) paving the way for Mr. Hill to come back with another simple and powerful working out of Monk’s “Straight no Chaser.” The performance ended with Hammerstein’s “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise,” which, if you know the jazz standard is anything but “softly,” and was appropriately played with all kinds of clicks and clacks and some good strong foreshadowing music of what happens between sunrise and sunset. A beautiful evening to warm the proverbial cockles of your heart. Thanks for a great evening of music to the students of the LHU Jazz Ensembles, Prof. Severn and Mr. Chapman and the wonderful Nelson Hill.

Guardian’s review of the bard’s new album here. Apparently you hate it or you love it. I might be in the love it camp, I suspect–it is hard for me to not like anything Bob Dylan has sung. I try not to buy any more music–I haven’t heard the one from last year either and I think I won’t buy this either– wait to hear it on the radio or tv or something. But the collection looks good–it has both of my favorite favorite christmas songs–The Little Drummer Boy and First Noel. I love singing First Noel; it is such a beautiful song to sing. Tuesday was the Christmas concert at D’s school–the fifth graders sang First Noel really beautifully. D’s fourth grade sang Holly Jolly Christmas, Here we come a-wassailing and then the string kids — D is learning viola as well — played Jingle Bells. All good.

Dr. G. Devi

English 405 Final Exam Review

Open book. Text only. Study the slides and notes carefully. I am in my office 9-4:30p next week, so if you need help with anything, please come and find me here. Thanks for a great semester; you were a wonderful class. Remember, “To grammar even kings bow.” (Moliere)

Answer the following questions: Follow instructions and write the specified sentences. (25 questions, 25 points)

1. Write the grammatical form of each word in this phrase: “Serious errors in translation.”
2. What is the predicate in the following sentence? “My cat hid under the bed.”
3. In “My aunt tossed the salad,” what is the grammatical function of the NP “the salad”?
4. In “Jack read his poem to Jill,” what is the object of preposition?
5. In “I appointed him the executor of my will,” what is the grammatical function of the underlined NP?
6. Name the form of the underlined verb in “He may not leave yet.”
7. Name the nonfinite verb in “Are you speaking to me?”
8. Name the modal auxiliary used in “I should call her now.”
9. Identify the verb phrase and verb tense in “Until the war, London had been a wealthy metropolis.”
10. In “Dismissed from class, the parents picked up their children,” identify the dangling participle. Rewrite the sentence correcting the dangling participle.
11.  What is the grammatical error in “His answers sounds ridiculous.” How would you correct it?
12. “The plane flew over the ocean.” Is this sentence transitive or intransitive?  
13. In “Jay runs fast, Pat runs faster, and Chuck runs the fastest of all,” is “fast” an adverb or adjective?
14. What is the grammatical function of “over” in “Somewhere over the rainbow”?
15. Rewrite in prescriptive form: “Where did you get this from”?
16. In “Sam cut up the pie into six equal slices,” is “up” a preposition or a particle?
17. Change the following clause from declarative to interrogative: “You are ready to leave.”
18. What will the interrogative clause look like for “The show starts in five minutes” if we want a closed interrogative yes-no answer? Write out the question that will generate  an yes-no answer.
19.  What wh-replacement word do you need to turn this clause into a question: “He was cutting it with (something)”?
20. “Last night I go to the movies.” What grammatical reasoning would you use to explain why this statement is grammatically incorrect?
21. “Little boy caught ball.” What grammatical reasoning would you use to explain why this statement is grammatically incorrect?
22.  Rewrite using an interrogative tag: “You bought a new car.”
23. Use the following clause as an embedded, subordinate closed interrogative content clause in a complex: “she passed the exam.”
24. Embed the following question into a complex sentence as a subordinate clause (you have to create your own main clause) with the correct syntax: “Why did they change the date”?
25. Turn into an exclamative clause: “This is a disorganized mess.”

Dr. G. Devi

English 280 Study Guide

Your final exam will have a closed book and an open book session.  Please follow directions. Review everything carefully. Since next week is finals week and we have no class, I will be in my office 9-4:30, grading maniacally. Please find me and ask me if you need help with anything, okay?  It was a pleasure to work with you this semester. Keep in touch. Thanks all. GD.

How about this overnight winter wonderland, eh? Beautiful!

CLOSED BOOK TOPICS (3-4 sentences) Answer any six questions. Please do not use text, notes or slides.

1. What are dialects? How are dialects studied? Give one example of a dialectal usage. .
2. Define Grimm’s Law. Why is Grimm’s Law important for an understanding of historical linguistics? Give examples of the Law.
3. Define ambiguity from a linguistic point of view. What are the two types of linguistic ambiguity studied in syntax? Give examples.
4. What are PS rules? Write two PS rule sentences.
5. What are the different plural morphemes in English? Explain the rule with examples.
6. What is the IPA? Why is it important to the linguistic study of the English language?
7. What is “hypercorrection?” What factors contribute to hypercorrection? Give one example.
8. Contrast standard versus non-standard languages and formal versus informal speech. Give examples for each pair.
9. Define each of these terms with examples: pidgins, creoles, lingua francas.
10. Define jargon and slang with examples.
11. Define synchronic study of linguistics versus diachronic study of linguistics. Pick any linguistic topic and explain how it may be studied synchronically and diachronically

OPEN BOOK TOPICS (You may use your textbook but no notes or slides allowed.)

Morphology: division of words into morphemes, naming constituent morphemes, inflectional and derivational morphemes

Phonetics/ Phonology: Sound system and sound patterning, IPA transcription, Minimal Pairs, syllable division

Syntax: Phrase Structures, Syntactic categories, Trees for basic and derived sentences

Semantics: Meaning properties of words and sentences, deixis, Empirical and Analytic Truths

Dr. G. Devi

English 405

Unit Test 3 Extra Credit

Please review the lyrics to the song “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite” by the Beatles (rest in peace dear John Lennon) and tell me all relevant grammatical information about the underlined words, phrases and clauses. The way to answer this question is not to think of meaning and to look at syntax and grammar. What tense is used? What part of speech is it? What kind of phrase is it? Are there modifiers and complements? Finite clause? Nonfinite clause? Main clause? Subordinate clause? Exclamative, declarative, interrogative, imperative, extraposed, passive or existential clause? Adjective or adverb? Preposition or particle? Count or non count noun? Each word in a language is a perfect grammatical entity that embodies some syntactic principle when it is merged with another word. Find out what that relation is, okay?  Copy the underlined items and write your answer next to it.  (10 points)

For the benefit of Mr. Kite
there will be a show tonight on trampoline
The Hendersons will all be there
late of Pablo Fanques’fair, what a scene
Over men and horses hoops and garters
and lastly through a hogshead of real fire
In this way Mr. K will challenge the world

The celebrated Mr. K
performs his feats on Saturday at Bishopsgate
The Hendersons will dance and sing
as Mr. Kite flies through the ring, don’t be late
Messers K. and H. assure the public
their production will be second to none
And of course Henry the Horse dances the waltz

The band begins at ten to six
when Mr. K performs his tricks without a sound
And Mr. H will demonstrate
ten somersets he’ll undertake on solid ground
Having been some days in preparation
a splendid time is guaranteed for all
And tonight Mr. Kite is topping the bill.