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Papers should also be required to be neat and legible. They should not look as if a stoned fly had just crawled out of an inkwell.

– Serge Lang, A FIRST COURSE IN CALCULUS, 5th edition

I bought this one on recommendations on the internet, and so far it is so much better than the actual required text for the calc class I’m quasi-taking. Even if the reason I got it so cheap is that the printer didn’t separate the pages right. I like to think it adds a little rustic adventure to my calc experience as I ponder how to turn the page…

So I’m working on my last paper of the semester, which means after a hiatus I’m back to watching ONCE AND AGAIN. …As in, I settled in yesterday after a long day of reading journal articles and practicing calculus* to watch one episode… and six episodes later, sun rising, birds chirping, said, Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

This compressed quarter-season of viewing began with the particularly MY SO-CALLED LIFE-echoing “Outside Hearts,” written by one Alexa Junge. My first thought? To wonder if Alexa Young, author of FRENEMIES (which I haven’t read), could possibly be a pen name for Alexa Junge. Because I could totally believe that someone who wrote this episode wound up as a young adult novelist.

Today’s Googling and IMDBing seems to make this unlikely (though not impossible), but now I’m wondering: anyone know of TV writers who also write YA? I’ve already read, and enjoyed, RATS SAW GOD by Rob Thomas (the creator of VERONICA MARS, whose first season I deeply, desperately love**, and the new 90210, which I’ve yet to see). It seems like these should be overlapping skill sets. Is the money so good in TV that once people are in it, there’s no point to writing novels? (Thomas, I believe, wrote novels before breaking into TV.) Anyone got recommendations?

* Yes, the weirdest way in which my summer plans altered this week is that I signed up for two math classes. This impulsive decision resulted from a professor, after reading another paper I wrote, pointing out that “I’m really pretty certain that this is true!” is less than convincing as a rationale for complicated claims about what happens when many things change at the same time. (He politely declined to note that my authority is particularly unpersuasive on such matters.) We’re going to see if this is as big a disaster as it clearly has the potential to be.

** Bonus: my viewing marathon ended with “Sneaky Feelings,” where a very young Jason Dohring (a.k.a. VERONICA MARS’s Logan Echolls) makes an appearance. Logan is the quintessential example of a character I know I shouldn’t love — because he’s a terrible person — but I do, I do. How do they do that?

I promise I have real book-related posts coming. I even have them half-written! It’s just, I’m in finals, and thinking a even little bit systematically about anything — even breezy teen romances — is a bit much for me. Thus, we have instead: this clip from one of my ongoing Self-Improvement Projects: Learning to Drive.

ELIZABETH: I am a driving machine! I handle motor vehicles with aplomb!
BOYFRIEND: You need to work on staying in your lane.
ELIZABETH: I move wheel, car obeys! I am its master!
BOYFRIEND: Did you see that stop sign there?
ELIZABETH: Whoa, why is that car coming toward me? Does it not grasp that I control the road?!
BOYFRIEND: Yes, the other cars are why you need to stay in your lane.
ELIZABETH: …Why are there FOOLS standing in the ROAD?
BOYFRIEND: You’re not going to hit them.
ELIZABETH: Don’t they care that they are PLAYING WITH THEIR LIVES?
BOYFRIEND: Please be less outraged by fools, more attentive to location of car.
ELIZABETH: FOOLS, GET OUT OF THE ROAD!
BOYFRIEND: …
ELIZABETH: Hey, that fool is my professor!
[Wild waving ensues. Unclear whether near-victim realized the precariousness of his own survival.]
BOYFRIEND: I think this is enough practice for today.

So after Emily put me on the spot by finally doing her part of the Frankie Landau-Banks discussion we’d both been putting off for a million years, I explained my own delinquency in the comments thus:

My post about Frankie’s feminism is coming, but not tomorrow. All of my posts have been delayed somewhat by my being at the Population Association of America annual conference, for which I have created the Largest Demography Poster in the History of Posters or Populations. I don’t believe that this can end well, but I believe it may well be highly amusing.

And because I know you all read this blog for updates on my demographic display activities: Despite a tremendous comedy of errors involving misbooked (me) and canceled (my professor) flights, a realization ten days before the conference that we had failed to book a hotel room (me) or had booked one in the wrong country (professor), and other assorted mishaps culminating in an Amazing Road Trip Adventure, our excessively large poster arrived (only a tiny bit mangled) in Detroit and was bestowed with a poster award.

Now, I am convinced that we won this award because our poster had the best color scheme of the whole conference. I feel strongly about colors, and other people, too, feel strongly about color combinations I pick out, though not always in the way I would like. Here’s a sample snippet from when Emily and I were experimenting with options while setting up our blog:

EMILY: That is the ugliest, clashingest color combination I have ever seen.
ELIZABETH: What do you mean? I wear these colors together all the time!
EMILY: You… often clash.

In the creation of our poster, my professor and I went back and forth on many aspects of the content and design, but the one change I would not countenance was any alteration to our colors. Which stubbornness I felt was entirely vindicated by subsequent award.

And then, after all that, I looked at our blog and realized for the first time that the main visual feature of our poster — purple heading boxes fading from dark to light — is also the main visual feature of Underage Reading. Apparently, while I love all the colors, I do have a favorite. I do think our blog suffers, however, from lack of the green and orange accents that made our poster a winner.

Additionally: Emily and I realized too late that our blog’s purple-and-gray are also the colors of our high school. The less said about that, the better.

We are both blogging this week about Frankie Landau-Banks, her history, and its lack of reputability. Emily posts about the book’s use of language today; come back tomorrow (or however we space them out) for Elizabeth’s take on the book’s feminism.

Elizabeth had told me I would love THE DISREPUTABLE HISTORY OF FRANKIE LANDAU-BANKS, by E. Lockhart. Not just that it was a great book, but that I particularly would love it, and she couldn’t tell me why because that would ruin it, but trust her.

So I was at Barnes and Noble soon after that and picked it up to read a few pages and see if it was worth buying, and I got to page 2 and burst out laughing at “It’s not for me to pugn or impugn their characters.” And then I finished reading Frankie’s letter to the headmaster and really couldn’t contain my glee at “gruntlement”, and I called Elizabeth and left a long voicemail, in which I definitely gave up on words a few times in favor of happy squeal noises, and said I didn’t know if this was what she meant as the reason I would particularly love this book (as it turned out it wasn’t), but it was incredible and if there was some other reason on top of it I couldn’t even fathom what a great book this would be.

And while there are many great things about TDHFLB, having read it fully twice what I genuinely love most, is the language, and that’s for a few reasons. One is just I like language and puns and silly words and silly usages of words, and did I say puns? So reading that Frankie does not want to pugn anybody’s character is endlessly amusing for me. On a deeper level, though, I think Lockhart does an incredible job of using Frankie’s language and thought patterns (which relate properly to each other in the way that they do in real people) to create her as a character. And while lots of books have characters with clear styles of speaking, or accents, or slang, that help put them in a time and place and form a piece of the character, I can’t think of another book where not just the way a character speaks, but the way she herself explicitly thinks about language are so key to understanding her personality.

It also helps that Frankie’s particular attitude towards language happens to be very similar to mine. I like to use language the way it ought to logically work, even when that’s not how it really works. I always get annoyed at the redundancy of the phrase “from whence”; and when no actual word in the English language signified the meaning I needed to express in my senior thesis, I made one up and used it throughout. I was telling a friend of mine about TDHFLB and the neglected positives and it was only once we were deep in argument that I realized we were having almost the exact conversation that Frankie and Matthew have:

“Mmmm,” she whispered. “Now I’m gruntled.”
“What?”
“Gruntled. I was disgruntled before.”
…
“And now, you’re…”
“Gruntled.”
She had expected Matthew’s face to light at the new word, but he touched her chin lightly and said, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”
…
“Gruntled means grumpy,” he said, walking over to the dictionary, which stood on a large stand.
…
“Why? Frankie was cross that he was being so literal. “That makes no sense, because if gruntled means grumbly, then disgruntled should mean un-grumbly.”
“Um…” Matthew scanned the dictionary. “Dis- can be an intensifier, as well as a negative.”
Frankie bounced on the couch. “I like my version better.”

EMILY: And the best thing is, she comes up with these neglected positives, like where there’s a word with a negative prefix but the positive version isn’t a word or doesn’t mean what it should. Like, there’s disgruntled, but there’s no gruntled. Hee! Gruntled!
ADAM: But that doesn’t really work, its not how the language evolved.
EMILY: But gruntled!
ADAM: We have different attitudes towards language. I don’t like made up words.
EMILY: Or ept! Like inept, ept.
ADAM: Yes. I’m glad you’re enjoying.
EMILY: But they’re such good made up words. And sometimes you have to make up words, if the one you need doesn’t exist.
ADAM: Then you find a word that does exist.
EMILY: I like my way better.

A lot of folks have written a lot of great posts and comments about why TDHFLB is a great book, and Elizabeth’s going to write about feminism in the book tomorrow later this week, but ultimately, why I love it is neglected positives.

He tries to pump his fist in the air like he’s a pro football player, but he looks more like a lame college professor trying to hail a cab.

– Laurie Halse Anderson, WINTERGIRLS (the Advanced Reader Copy, so not the final version sold in stores).

In today’s Wednesday Words, the narrator Lia is speaking of her bigshot history prof father, and it’s worth noting that the paragraph preceding this was as follows:

“Excellent,” he says. “My editor is extending the deadline and she’s giving me another advance to pay for a research trip to London.”

N.B.: Do not enter academia thinking that you will get a book deal that pays for research trips to London. This will not happen to you. If you are a successful tenure-track or tenured professor in a book-writing field, however, you may get to write some books with print runs of about 1,000 copies. Dream big.