Ask Alfred Soto

i mean vodka and coke isn't exactly on the level of pureed goat meat and tequila or whatever but i can't understand why it isn't the discerning man's tipple of choice.

should be i "*can* understand why..." clearly i had too many goat-a-ritas last night.

http://www.tumyeto.com/images/uploaded/___vodka-coke_opt.jpg

Andrew WK's smallest gig yet.

are you giving out more A's in your classes too???

Big college-administered grammar test next Wednesday. They're doing well distinguishing intransitive from transitive verbs!

lol

glad you're impacting them positively

It's got synergistic possibilities.

giving them great life experiences i trust

If you could ask Bryan Ferry one question, Lord Soto, what would it be?

"would you swoon as i croon your serenade?"

How have the New Romantics affected you sartorially?

I bought spectacular red pants at Target today for $15.

What's your favorite brad paisley album?

hey, so i've been reading a bunch of biographies, one of which was mccullough's "truman." i know you read a lot about presidents, so i wanted to ask who you think wrote the best fdr biography

A few!

H.R. Brands's A Traitor to His Class is the best recent conventional bio.

Last year's Fear Itself details how the reactionary and racist Solid South made possible the progressivism of the New Deal.

The New Deal: A Modern History is a good recent account of the first Hundred Days, including details on how much Hoover's outgoing administration helped.

And JFK bootlicker Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s Age of Roosevelt] has some beautiful portraiture.

Hey Alfy-poo, big starry-eyed question but if you could name THREE grammar/writing skills that your college estudiantes came prepped with, what would they be? Signed, humble public schooling human.

1. Writing more than five paragraphs is okay.

2. Thinking about how sentences look. Students forget 96 percent of what high schools teach them yet they remember that You Can't Start Sentences with Conjunctions.

3. A sense of humor.

I am stealing a lot of my writing and grammar lessons from Kelly Gallagher, who says "show me a five paragraph essay in a real publication and I'll buy you lunch."
Not sure if #2 you are saying teach the rule or know that it's a breakable rule?
Here's the experiment I'm doing this year (also stolen from Gallagher): having them reverse engineer sentence rules and structures from model sentences. (Really brief summary as a PDF here – http://teachwritingsecschools.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/sentence-of-the-week-assignment.pdf)
Number 3 can't be taught but it can certainly be encouraged and modeled, to use some teacherese. It certainly makes GRADING a lot nicer!!

A breakable rule. I had no idea it was a rule! I wasn't taught this.

Oh yeah – I was taught it growing up, and my little superego freaked out a little whenever I saw an author doing it in a book. My fifth grade teacher had the good sense to explain it was a breakable rule.
It's true; they have some weird ideas of "writing rules" but I think they're the ones their teachers marked them down for. Like my kids are gospel convinced a paragraph is exactly five sentences, because the teacher will say "write a paragraph to answer this question" and I guess – same structure – main idea, 3 supporting details, concluding sentence (that is like lukewarm microwave leftovers of the topic sentence). So my kids freak out a little when I show them real authors break that rule, too.

My kids also think you can't start a sentence with "because." ?!?!?

Students forget 96 percent of what high schools teach them yet they remember that You Can't Start Sentences with Conjunctions.

you'd think it's from high school, but lots of college professors (maybe less so in the english dept; i hope so) still enforce this demented bullshit.

well, the trend in net lingo is to use 'because' to introduce a phrase ("I can't see this guy because problems") instead of a clause ("I can't start a sentence with a conjunction because teachers hate it").

The science teachers explained that is a 'rule' in their classes because students tend to just use the dependent clause as a sentence: "Because of condensation."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWlLPJG9Cvg

OTOH I remember thinking as a student that "always answer as a complete sentence" was just a waste of time:

Q. Why does your water bottle get covered with sweaty beads of water in the heat?
A. A water bottle gets covered with sweaty beads of water in the heat because of condensation.

So much pointless writing! Could they not read the question themselves??

oh god it reminds me: one of my pet peeves is improper or promiscuous use of "due to," which theoretically you use only with a linking verb ("I was absent due to a cold"). Even worse: "due to the fact that."

i like that use of because (xxp) as long as it's in the service of melodrama. "But the evaporated water can never remain free; it is doomed always to be recaptured by gravity. Why? Because of condensation."

after blaming college professors for no-opening-conjunctions i should say that it was my experience in college that professors were constantly frustrated (and sorta blindsided) by the elementary-school paragraph recipes you guys are talking about tho. that isn't their fault. cuz man yeah it's beaten in deep, young. i still remember the posters: The Writing Process.

In the halcyon early eighties, I too was taught "You must restate the question in your answer." None of my teachers were pedants though! This was how they were taught -- ugh

i meant "you guys" in its rather spurious gender-neutral sense btw. i should have used "y'all". only being so detailed about this cuz the conversation's abt words.

btw I haven't see this Great Wave of Broken Sentences as a result of social media use; the sentences were pedantic and useless already.

i appreciate all the recs, and i'm going to go look into them now. thank you for taking the time to write that out

I hope these recs were impactful.

Came real close to making a "now that's what I call humanizing the vacuum" tweet after that last post, but thought better of it.

Flippant, but I would've meant well.

read any good books about lobbying / lobbyists? i'm RAing for a game theorist who studies political access and proves all these counterintuitive results about lobbying and it's cool and all but I'm kinda like hmm

This classic account is worth the read but it's about the nineteenth century. Matt Taibbi's Smells Like Dead Elephant examine the influence of money on the GOP Congress of the 2000s. I'd like recs too!

thx. 19th century definitely relevant

this is a brand new book on the topic that i will prob read: http://www.amazon.com/The-Business-America-Lobbying-Corporations/dp/0190215518

when i asked the prof this question he told me to watch tv series 'house of cards' and movie 'thank you for smoking' lol

one of the things these game theorists study is how politicians interact strategically with lobbyists, to extract the most $$$ out of them with the least political favours granted, so it's not obvious how effective a lot of the money thrown at politicians is. i'd love to read some first-hand accounts to see how the theory lines up

Alfred, would you recommend a biog of FDR?

Sure!

H.W. Brands' wrote a solid conventional one in 2008 called Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt; it's where I tell the curious to go. If you liked it, go to:

Ira Katnelson's Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time documents the lengths to which the New Deal and the Solid South, with its poverty and racism, remained wedded together.

The Coming of the New Deal, the second part of Arthur Schlesinger's battleship cruiser of a bio, deals with the nuts and bolts of the legislation. I think it's surpassed by Michael Hiltzik's The New Deal: A Modern History.

All of those except the first would be great mixtape titles.

I bought Traitor to His Class on Alfred's recommendation and yeah it's good. Oddly, I still did not entirely understand *why* he was such a staunch traitor to his class, that aspect of his character is still a bit of a mystery to me. The ending is also a bit abrupt, it's basically "and then he died. The End", with no real conclusion or summation or anything. Minor quibbles both, granted.

Hiltzik was a regular patron at UCI's library where I worked for years -- very personable fellow.

Thanks Alfred!

my pleasure!

jaymc had asked upthread for mixology tips. I wrote the following a few months ago and updated it yesterday.

You will know me by my hatred of bad drinks.

Each of those drinks has their place, (except the LI Iced tea)

Actually lemon drops are gross too and moscow mules are for ex girlfriends. Mimosas are the lifeblood of the economy.

Of the brunch economy.