May 14, 2008
Fifty Ten Fold
Filed under: Music
I haven't done a meme in almost a year. My favorite of the ones I've seen bouncing lately around blogs I read is a version of the last one I did, oh so long ago; even though some of the questions are different, I don't see much reason to do it again, so I'm going with the meme I like second-best.
I got this from McCutcheon's Squishy Thoughts. Here's how it works: you take the questions, get your itunes ready, and hit "next." Each song that comes up is the answer to the question before you.
I think the quiz was designed by high school students, because there is an emphasis on things like "best friends" and "the person you like." Some of the questions were so adolescent I had to change them, and I also had to put the whole thing in some coherent order--they were utterly random. I know, I know, that's really geeky of me, to revise a meme, but I can't help it.
Anyway, despite those flaws, the meme still appealed to me, so here it is. It tells you more about my music collection that it does about me, but what the hell.
1. How would you describe yourself?
Sixty-eight Guns (The Alarm)
2. What is your motto?
Send for Henry (Trashcan Sinatras)
3. What do you think about often?
In Dulce Decorum (The Damned)
That one’s true--I do think about World War I fairly often.
4. What do you think of your family?
Big Sister’s Clothes (Elvis Costello)
Indeed!
It’s easier to say ‘I Love You
than ‘Yours Sincerely’
I suppose
All little sisters
like to try on big sister’s clothes
Continue reading "Fifty Ten Fold"
Posted by Holly at 3:55 PM | Comments (0)
May 13, 2008
Yogurt: What Else Could a Woman Possibly Need?
I found this on Salon's Broadsheet--it's too good not to share. It's "'substitute for human experience' good," at least for "the class that wears gray hoodies," sporting the "'I have a master's but then I got married' look."
Posted by Holly at 8:58 AM | Comments (8)
May 12, 2008
Habits vs. Routines vs. Accomplishments, and the Overriding Significance of Goals
Filed under: Education, Mormonism, Philosophical Musings
Last week someone emailed me a story from the NY Times, and when I read it, I happened to look at the list of "most popular emailed stories." Near the top was something titled Unboxed: Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? Which was a question I wanted to read about and have answered.
One of the reasons I continue to value my Mormon upbringing was the whole goal program I grew up with. There was this official church curriculum for teenagers, which presented them with six specific areas of well-rounded humanity--physical health, spiritual development, social interactions, personal ethics, I don't remember them all--and we were expected to set and complete two goals in each area every year while we were in junior high and high school. If young women completed the program satisfactorily, they got a really ugly necklace. I don't remember what young men got. Maybe a merit badge; their version of the program might have been tied up in scouting, which the church has sort of commandeered.
I used the goal program to great advantage, collecting a slew of virtuous habits such as thrift and punctuality. I made running three miles every school-day morning a habit--albeit one I hated--and the fact that I managed to do that for a full year helped me acquire that necklace I never wore once. I wasn't in it for the necklace, you see: I was in it for the habits and the accomplishments themselves.
Continue reading "Habits vs. Routines vs. Accomplishments, and the Overriding Significance of Goals"
Posted by Holly at 8:23 AM | Comments (10)
May 9, 2008
What Literary Critics Actually Do
Filed under: Literature
Over on Letters from a Broad, there’s a discussion about individual tastes in literature, and how to think about things when personal tastes violate the received wisdom and authority of experts in literature--people with PhDs. The discussion really upset me, not because anyone said anything particularly insulting or offensive--on the contrary, many comments were quite astute--but because it made me confront, more forcefully than anything has for a long time, that most people don’t understand in the slightest what I do. They don’t understand academia in the humanities; they don’t understand the way literary scholars approach the study of literature; they don’t understand the way literature is taught or the rationale for it.
It’s not like this is necessarily anybody's fault; relatively few people get PhDs in English, so why should the rest of the world understand what it’s like to do that? The grueling hours involved in being a grad student and teaching freshman comp (which is the primary way graduate studies in English are funded), the sheer drudgery of grading paper after paper (many of which are heartbreakingly bad), aren’t the least bit glamorous, so you can’t blame people for not wanting to hear more about the whole business. And in order to get a PhD, you have to study something in such depth that sometimes you can’t even explain easily your specialty to grad students focusing on other periods or genres of literature.
Continue reading "What Literary Critics Actually Do"
Posted by Holly at 8:29 AM | Comments (6)
May 8, 2008
The Joy of Making Holes in Your Knitting
Filed under: Knitting
I wrote the other day that socks are not my choice for knitting. No, what I really like to knit is stuff with holes in it--in other words, lace. Here's the last project I finished before I started the socks:
That view shows it draped over a chair so you can see what it might look like when worn; here's a view that shows it spread out on a bed, so you can see how big it is:
I loved making this shawl--just LOVED it. I liked the lace, which is a basic leaf pattern I learned quite easily. I could have managed the body of the shawl on my own, but I knit it as part of a class so that I could learn to do the Vandyke border. That was tricky enough that I'm glad I had someone walk me through it, but once I understood it, it wasn't hard.
And I'm really pleased with and proud of how well it turned out. I think it's flat-out gorgeous.
I also discovered that I like shawls as garments. I have not worn shawls much before, but actually they're a great garment for someplace like Arizona: just enough coverage that your skin isn't cold, but not so heavy that you get overheated. And they're pretty. I wish I had realized sooner that I love shawls, but I intend to make up for lost time.
Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (5)
May 7, 2008
It's ALWAYS Her Fault
Filed under: Feminism
I can't even comment on this story about a man who faced no charges or prosecution for killing his wife's lover, while she was tried and convicted for involuntary manslaughter, so I'll let columnist Jacquielynn Floyd and blogger Melissa McEwan do it instead, and provide this link to background on the case.
I will only add, that if the jury in Texas were to decide the Johnny Vegas business, I'm sure they'd figure out a way to make it all the fault of the woman he had hauled on stage. Don't punish the man with the gun or the power; punish the woman. At all costs, punish the woman.
Posted by Holly at 9:05 AM | Comments (14)
May 6, 2008
Now I Can Say I've Done It
Filed under: Knitting
A million years ago, I mentioned that I wanted to learn to knit socks, just so I understood how to turn the heel. Well guess what: I spent three Mondays evenings getting instructions on sock knitting, and last week I finished my first sock and started my second. The completed sock looks like this:
The second currently looks like this:
I do like the yarn I got, though I had a hell of a time finding something I liked well enough to knit with. It's more subtle in its self-striping than some yarns, and it would have been fun to work with something more dramatic, but unfortunately the taste of the owners of my nearest yarn store doesn't match my own: they favor pale and bright colors while I like dark colors.
Continue reading "Now I Can Say I've Done It"
Posted by Holly at 10:05 AM | Comments (3)
May 2, 2008
Hey, Don't You Know Sexual Assault Is FUNNY and FUN?
Filed under: Feminism
Good god. Some British "comedian" has apparently... I don't know what to say. Go here and read about some piece of shit with the stage name Johnny Vegas who got up on a London stage last week, announced that he had no material, and so decided to have some woman from the audience carried on stage so that he could sexually assault her. Mary O'Hara, a writer for the Guardian, saw the "performance" and wrote a blog entry about all the ways in which it "crossed a line." And of course people come along in the comments and defend Vegas, and explain why it WAS funny AND entertainment to see a young woman assaulted and humiliated in front of an entire audience.
And then there's the nightmarish story of Josef Friztl, the Austrian who kept his daughter Elisabeth in the cellar for 24 YEARS, during which he repeatedly raped, beat and brutalized her, and father seven children by her.
OK, one was intended to be an evening of "comedy" where what really mattered was that the man doing the assaulting got off on it, while the woman being assaulted did not, so that eventually the assaulter wanted to be hidden from public view (he asked that the curtain go down so no one could see the end of his "act"); one was intended to be a way of life where what really mattered was that the man doing the assaulting got off on it, while the woman being assaulted did not, so that eventually the assaulter wanted everything hidden from public view.
Anyone seeing the connection here?
Posted by Holly at 8:29 AM | Comments (30)
April 26, 2008
The Jane Austen Survey
Filed under: Austen
My life lately has been Austen-tastic. That's one of the things I want to blog about if I ever get a couple of hours in a row when I can concentrate.... Anyway, as I've mentioned before, I'm not only a Janeite but a lifelong member of the Jane Austen Society of North America, though I've never yet attended one of the conferences. I hope that will change in 2009; the focus of that conference is on siblings in Austen's work, a topic I wrote a pretty decent paper on as an undergrad.
A full exploration of the Austen-tastic-ness of my life will have to wait until I've got time to write about it properly, but in the meantime I'd like to invite any Janeites who read my blog to take the Austen survey. The point of the survey is to gather information about the sorts of people who are Austen fans (my guess is they're pretty damn diverse); the results will be presented in a breakout session at the 2008 JASNA Annual General Meeting, in a presentation entitled "Anatomy of a Janeite."
Survey participants need to have read all six of the finished novels. If you have, please complete this survey.
Posted by Holly at 4:44 PM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2008
Please Consider the Environment Before Printing This Email
Filed under: Environment
I just got an email from some university staff person who has to send messages to some huge list. I almost didn't read it, but then thought, "What the hell; I can skim it in 15 seconds, and it might be relevant to some aspect of my life." The actual content of the email wasn't anything I need to know, but her signature caught me: it read, "Please consider the environment before printing this email."
I have friends and colleagues who print out all their email. It makes me crazy. It's such a waste--of paper, of toner, of energy, of space, of everything. I realize there are times when you have to print out an email, but 99 times out of 100, you don't.
One of the reasons I still like and use the email organizer Eudora is that it lets you have all sorts of signatures and choose a different one each time you send an email. On my old desktop I had something like 30 signatures. On my laptop I've only entered ten, one being my home address, another being my work address, a third being the url for my blog, and the rest being quotes I like, including this favorite, something US Grant wrote shortly before he died:
Continue reading "Please Consider the Environment Before Printing This Email"
Posted by Holly at 9:38 AM | Comments (3)