Samar > Recent Status Updates

‘No, no, no, you chump. You must have heard the expression “the egotistical sublime”? These people aren’t writing about dandelions and daisies, they’re writing about themselves. Romantic poets are more obsessed with self than the most therapy-addicted Californian you can imagine. “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, “My heart aches”, “My heart leaps up”

Innocent words, virgin words, words uncontaminated and unviolated, the very mastery of which announces us to possess a relationship with language akin to that of the sculptor with his marble or the composer with his staves. Not that anyone is ever impressed, of course. They only moan about the ‘impenetrability’ or congratulate themselves for being hep to the ellipsis, opacity and allusion that they believe...

Extremely funny and subversive so far. Strange for a gay writer to have so many opinions about women. Really lives up to its reputation as far as linguistic pirouettes are concerned!

I could have tolerated Edison’s garrulousness if it weren’t for the fact that he never said anything. I mean anything with honest emotional content. He loved to spout information, and he wasn’t a bad raconteur. But Edison could talk all day, at the end of which no one knew him any better than before.

Not an easy read s far! Her sentence structure and vocabulary are quite challenging.

That is, I pick him up at the airport and he is so— he is so FAT that I look straight at him and don’t recognize my own brother, and now we’re all acting as if this is totally ordinary. The decorousness, the conversational looking the other way, made me feel a fraud and a liar, and the diplomacy felt complicit.

Although no prodigy at the piano, the girl had a precocious sensitivity that would either be the making of her or woulddoom her for life as an easy mark.

It is astonishing that so many people do not recognize the extent to which hypocrisy and drivel poison the whole atmosphere of school. And where will you find more concentrated hypocrisy and drivel than on the walls of classrooms, and in the halls, and on the facades of school buildings?

One of the common sources of difficulty with teachers can be found in the fact that most of them simply move from one side of the desk (as students) to the other side (as “teachers”) and they have not had much contact with the way things are outside of school rooms.

Declare a five-year moratorium on the use of all textbooks. Since with two or three exceptions all texts are not only boring but based on the assumption that knowledge exists prior to, independent of, and altogether outside of the learner, they are either worthless or harmful.

parents.

One of the most consistent findings in school effectiveness research is that the involvement of parents makes a significant difference for students and staff.

The informal network is filled with hostile people. Gossips fill the grapevine with innuendo and the latest dirt. Their tittle-tattle frequently moves outside, leaving parents to fret and assail the school. More positive or pleasant staff are driven out, thus draining the school of positive talent.

“The thing about cross-cultural relationships is that you spend so much time explaining. My ex-boyfriends and I spent a lot of time explaining. I sometimes wondered whether we would even have anything at all to say to each other if we were from the same place,”

souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well-fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things

“Speaking of accents,” Obinze asked. “Would Nna get away with that if he didn’t have a foreign accent?” “What do you mean?” “You know last Saturday when Chika and Bose brought their children, I was just thinking that Nigerians here really forgive so much from their children because they have foreign accents. The rules are different.”

Afterwards they would return to America to fight on the Internet over their mythologies of home, because home was now a blurred place between here and there, and at least online they could ignore the awareness of how inconsequential they had become.

Ifemelu imagined the writers, Nigerians in bleak houses in America, their lives deadened by work, nursing their careful savings throughout the year so that they could visit home for a week, when they would arrive bearing suitcases of clothes and cheap watches, and see, in the eyes of their relatives, brightly burnished images of themselves. Afterwards they would return to America to fight on the Internet

''It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.''