John Steinbeck and The Chinese Grammarian

I had once bought The Portable Steinbeck anthology for my "Of Mice and Men" paper in Ms. Rizzo's class and never once looked at the other stories. Within, I have annotated stickies that read "Lennie...you're retarded." haha so true.

Last night, I read "The Red Pony." First thing is that Steinbeck is a really good author. In enlightened prose (ref. editor's intro) "his poetic rhythms recall to me the Homeric spirit in American literature." I gauge his goodness by way of how he makes me feel. For example, a lot of authors make me feel illiterate and retarded. I'll be reading and everyone seems chill until the farmer's wife kills herself. Oh, she was depressed? Steinbeck makes it very clear what the characters are feeling by their realistic dialogue without being blatant, giving me the sense of feeling intelligent and sensitive to subtle things.

However, on the subject of animals, these past couple days have been very sad. Last night I saw gruesome photos of a dog hacked at the face on the local news (nevermind the constant kindergarten slashings in China). In the first chapter, 10 year-old Jody cares very much for his pony gift, only to have the ranch hand carelessly leave it out in the rain, subject it to strangles, slowly waste away, then getting its eyes eaten by buzzards (btw, the pony dies). Really not a happy story: boy eviscerates many small animals, ranch head kills mother horse to birth promised colt, and father and mother argue about inlaws. At the same time, there's appeal in the childish themes of curiosity of the outside world ("beyond the mountain ridges") and cross-generational relations ("He looked over his shoulder to see whether Billy had noticed the mature profanity"). Finally, the anthology concludes with Steinbeck's Nobel acceptance speech: "Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tin-horn mendicants of low-calorie despair." Worrrddd...?

Next! I found a small pocketbook 高中英语词汇手册 wedged between some dictionaries. My dad used it in high school to learn English and now I'm ironically trying to pick up some Chinese from it. The range of difficulty is really dynamic, where on the same page you have
tend [tend] (3) vt. 他照料了病人。
test-tube ['testt ju:b] (12) n. 小心别把试管打碎了。
and
tearful [tîr'fəl] (14) adj. 她眼泪汪汪地看着我，好象乞求我的怜悯。
the Bastille [ba-steel] (3) 巴士底狱是巴黎的国家监狱, (1789年)在法国大革命中被摧毁。

I can't believe I was still at Penn <48 hours ago.