Don't Sing

Don't. Sing.

We're not sure what this is.

From the looks of it, this is a pop-quiz short answer question, but the student didn't have any blank paper available, so he took out a page that already had some notes written on it. I spoke with Jim recently, and he wasn't able to identify the book or short story under discussion; if anyone can pinpoint the piece based on the contextual clues, the Archives would be eternally grateful to you. In any case, the exegesis begins with the words "This lady is pissed" and only gets sillier, concluding with a fulminating, existential rant. Oh, yeah, and a Limp Bizkit reference. Transliteration provided below.

 "Art for Art's sake"
New Criticism -T.S. Eliot/Ezra Pound
Utilitarianism-things gain meaning out of their usefulness
                   -humans had worth based on usefulness

Whats the story

This lady is pissed she is a servant and is fed up with doing servant type activities. She is disgruntled and longs to be out of doors like a wild bobcat. Much of this feeling (almost all) is conveyed through the arti subjects facial expressions. It just looks tedious and meaningless to her. Sunshine should provoke more emotion than that. (morning -- Beginning of day means nothing to her.) She wants to justify ripping someones head off.

Roman History Quiz

If you don't know the answer to the question, you've got to improvise. That means guessing, bullshitting,...or pretending that you're playing an entirely different game. In today's pop quiz, our hero Greg takes the latter route, asserting his parliamentary right to strike questions from the quiz and lodging protest at one question's flouting of his religious heritage. He asserts that the "Raging Rabbis" sacked Rome and that the "Jews" were the most fearsome fifth-century barbarians, before thinking better of it and answering "Gauls" for both questions, hedging his bets (why not?).

After submitting the quiz and receiving the graded paper back, Greg handwrote the original questions (to the best of his recollection) on the page at the bottom. I transcribe them here before the scan, then transcribe the answers afterwards.

1. What contributed to the spread of Christianity?
2. Who was Claudius's successor?
3. What was wrong with Roman agriculture?
4. What did Constantine do to the economy?
5. Who made Christianity the official religion of Rome?
6. Who finally destroyed Rome?
7. Who were the most fearsome barbarians?

1. Martyrdom
2. Nero
3. Motion to remove question from quiz (didn't produce enough food?)
4. I refuse to answer this question because it is not kosher for Passover. (New coinage?)
5. Theodius [Theodosius]
6. Raging Rabbis French Gauls
7. Spaniards Jews Gauls (why not?)

A Perfect Day for Bananafish

This essay regards J.D. Salinger's short fiction work "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", taken from his Nine Stories collection. The critical commentary is pretty rich, containing as it does such towering nonsense-tences as "His wife, Muriel, change some what isn't while her mother and father think she is crazy for even waiting for him during the war, little own deal with him now that he is like this." How does "let alone" become "little own", for starters? Language is a slippery eel, but the author can't even seem to hit the cow's arse with a banjo, as the Irish say.

But even more worthy of attention are the savage peer-review comments, which repeatedly ask "so what?" and demand to know "what are you babbling about?" and "what the hell are you talking about?" At least, I think it was a peer review...

Eating Disorder Quiz

...in which we learn that an eating disorder is "when a person has a problem eating stuff", that bulimia is "when you can't stop eating", and that, in response to an intervention, an anorexic is likely to respond "No, not me", "I'm fat", or "What?"

Amazingly, this quiz is actually incorrectly tallied, and should have been even worse of an F than it is. The grader ("I hope you did your reading assignment") forgot to subtract nine points for question number 5, which would make it a 9/58. Nevertheless, it gets a See Me! and an exalted place in these archives.