Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Diagram Dyson! and Win Valuable Prizes - Afro-Rococo Flannelmouth Out- Faulkners William Faulkner


To tweak Sist'ah Walsh ( Joan Walsh of Salon.com - Hate Whitey, I posed a challenge - Diagram one of Michael Eric Dyson's sentences.

The former Chicago flannelmouthed say-nothing has made a fabulous career where his talents in saying nothing of consequence are valuable - The Ivy League and Cable News.

I used to tell my students at Bishop McNamara High School and at La Lumiere School that the longest sentence in English Literature belonged to William Faulkner in his novel Absalom, Absalom* ( it's about 1,250 + words).

Michael Eric Dyson whips out words like a jacked-up product shill on TV at 3AM, but generally is incomprehensible to human beings - with the exception of Bill Maher who did way too much glue sniffing as a child it seems.

Here's the Diagram Challenge -

And so when we think about warring against White Supremacy in American society, it is so seductive to believe and invest in the mythology of superiority, especially among White ethnic brothers and sisters, who, having been closed out of so much in American society, hold fast to that lie, hold fast to that myth, hold fast to that illusion because they have been so disenfranchised otherwise that they have to pump up the myth of their inherent superiority.
M.E. Dyson

In our comments section tell me what this means and if possible find the verb phrase. Sentence?

Absalom, Absalom - 1st sentence -

"From a little after two weeks oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that-a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown . . ."
ad infinitum . . . well, pretty long anyway.

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