Paraphernalian

AP English Literature Exam Reading Day Seven: "Ignorancy"

2008-06-12T09:26:00.000-04:00

Essays are a lot like dates--sometimes the bad ones are better than the mediocre ones, because at least after the bad ones you have a funny story to tell your friends.

That said, I hope I never find myself on a date with anyone this stupid. (I am actually considering establishing a writing requirement.)

"Ah, the one with the books. I really haven't read a good decent number of these books. But 'Pride and Prejudice' is one of my favorite movies."

"'Juno' is a heartwarming film with the Academy Award for best screenplay by Diablo Cody." (I'm still not sure what this has to do with 'Pygmalion.')

"Now I've just derailed my train of thought."

"People trust their tatoo artists too much." (Okay...)

"All people do not come from the same environment; everyone has different characteristics." (TRUTH.)

"In the world there are several different kinds of people." (So I think we should label them for easy reference.)

"Darcy is a good catch by any standard."

"Frankenstein good, monster bad."

"She is modest and very gentile."

"Him not knowing who is truly was was used to do things in the exchange of nothing else more than confusion."

And that seems like as good a place as any to be done...for another year.

AP English Literature Exam Reading Days Five & Six: "Increadible"

2008-06-12T09:24:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, in my haste to put as much distance as possible between myself and the worst writing in the world at the end of the day, I accidentally left my list of abominations (I mean 'insights') to share on the table. So today you get a double dose--enjoy it while you can! Only one more day of reading left!

"The play in which I feel is most beneficial to the question is that of the novel 'Frankenstein.'"

"Mr. Collins is everything Prince Charming is not."

"Mr. Gatsby lives in a neighboring egg."

"Love concurs all."

"I think 'Hamlet' would not have been as good if Hamlet just mowed down Claudius with a couple of uzis in the beginning of the second act."

"The meaning of a work is sometimes more subtle unless it is brought to light by something else."

"Dr. Frankenstein is really the one who started it."

"'Oedipus Rex' by Sophocles is a dramatic irony."

"Because Jocasta defied the prophet and disrespected the gods she was bound to have karma boomerang back at her."

"Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' is a novel that offers characters of foil."

"Have a delicious day!"

"Life in the concentration camp was not a walk in the park."

"It caused Hamlet to go crazy and over-kill Claudius."

"Mr. Darcy is immediately hated for his failure to jump on any girls at the ball."

"A being that was not in a womb of a woman has more feelings than a being that was in a womb."

"Hello...my name is Inago Montoya, you killed my father prepare to die."

"Good people can still have the wrong idea."

"She wears revealing oprah dresses." (This one took me a second...what is Oprah doing in an essay on 'Age of Innocence'? That would be "opera.")

"Blanche is a pedophiliac sexual entity."

"God was at that time a man."

"She was only like 15."

"It takes one to know one."

"I will write this essay using the book 'No Country For Old Men,' which my English teacher says is a book of literary merit."

"He has various moments where his IQ drops below 40 and makes you want to slap him." (I can certainly sympathize.)

AP English Literature Exam Reading Day Four: "Radicalistic"

2008-06-12T09:23:00.000-04:00

"No high-paying job or girl can replace one's innocence."

"Behind every man there is a sidekick, the guy you can count on to only cause you more trouble and in the end make your life harder. But this is irrelvant because in Don Quixote the sidekick is 10x cooler anyway. Seriously, he's so cool."

"Jane does not seem to find Mr. Collins's flaws when he arrives at their house despite his rat-like personality."

"Over the years, monsters have gotten a bad reputation."

"At the end of the story, Beowulf is fixing to die."

"The relationship between these characters becomes the focal point and illuminates the meaning of the work!" (Exclamation point!)

"'The Awakening,' by Emily Bronte..."

"Hamlet is intelligent to the point that he can act insane with little problem." (I can do that, too!)

"Times grew more stressful for Lear as he battled with insanity."

"Their relationship was one of sarcastic values."

AP English Literature Exam Reading Day Three: "Disencouragement"

2008-06-12T09:22:00.001-04:00

In eight hours today I read 173 essays. Just so you could enjoy these:

"Most women dream of guys on the monotonous track."

"Adam only drinks one time in the novel and the day after completely regrets doing so even though he seemed to be much happier when he was drinking." (Funny how that works.)

"Jim is steadfast and wise but not the quickest wolf in the pack."

"When evil is used correctly, it can be just as beneficial as good can." (I kind of feel like this might be some sort of Bush administration talking point gone horribly wrong.)

"Women should only be around in small doses for entertainment purposes." (I wonder if this kid will be entertained by the small dose of a score I gave that essay.)

"The main character in Hamlet is Hamlet."

"Laertes got involved and disencouraged Ophelia to like Hamlet."

"Sophie was married to a weaker and less built man. So Sophie was more in control of him because he knew he would get hurt if he messed up."

"'The Color Purple' has a 'girl power' theme." (Whodathunk Alice Walker was just another Spice Girl?)

"Gatsby's neighbor always would spy on Gatsby and would be all up in his business."

"She is just like hi nothing else."

"Ah, Don Quixote the great of all knights and his squire Sancho." (Ahhhhh.)

"To borrow a phrase from Tim Leary, should we all just 'turn on, tune in, and drop out'?" (I kind of wish I could...particularly since this was the last line in an essay about MACBETH.)

"Iago is a backstabber and a weasel."

"At this point I'm just wondering what is he thinking." (Me, too.)

"Hannah Peace had sex with men after her husband died just to be pleased."

"Lesbianism was said to have been popular because each woman could relate to each other on the issue of feeling unloved and unwanted." (I only have a certificate in Women's Studies, but I'm pretty sure that's not how it works.)

"The novel was written during a very talked about period of time."

"No time! Be nice!"

AP English Literature Exam Reading Day Two: "Foilification"

2008-06-12T09:21:00.000-04:00

More from Louisville (thankfully, the bourbon capitol of the world):

"To be a foil, or not to be a foil, that is the question." (Is it? Is it really?)

"Cannot remember the author. Mary Shelley? Maybe. Mary Shelley!!! :)"

"The protagonist of a novel is the center of the story for a reason." (One hopes.)

"He's cowardly, untrustworthy, and likes shooting random crap with a slingshot."

"He is not the brightest gem in the bucket."

"She apparently is leading the life of her dreams, has a rich husband, three healthy kids, and no issues whatsoever."

"The clash of personalities between Hamlet and Laertes represents the classical feud between the jocks and the nerds. Although it was written in a time period when neither jocks nor nerds existed."

"It was a time when being African-American was embarassing."

"May I go to the restroom?" (I kid you not.)

I need a drink.

AP English Literature Exam Reading Day One: "Foilization"

2008-06-12T09:17:00.002-04:00

Note: I have been cross-posting these notes on facebook, so if you're an avid facebooker, I apologize for the repetition.

Some of you know that for the third year in a row I am participating in the AP English Literature exam reading. This year the reading is being held in Louisville, Kentucky, and thousands of English teachers and professors from around the country have gathered to read almost a million essays AP English Literature students wrote for their exams this year. For eight hours a day for the next seven days we will gather in a freezing cold conference center to read and score some of the most abysmal writing by the (supposedly) best literature students in the country.

The highlight, of course, is the stupid, ridiculous, and hilarious gems of literary insight culled from these essays. Back by popular demand from last year, I offer these gems to you for your reading pleasure (since mine will be so very minimal for the next week or so).

I am grading question number three, in which students are permitted to use any novel to answer the prompt. This year, the prompt requires them to identify "foils"--minor characters who serve to enhance, establish, or emphasize traits of a major character. Needless to say, "foil" has already caused some serious foibles. Aluminum. Tin. "Foilization". And, of course, much "foiling."

Today was only a half day of reading, but here's the best of what I have for you so far:

"In Shakespeare's well-known novel, 'Othello'..." (Almost a Ph.D. in English and I have never read a single Shakespeare NOVEL. Imagine that--and they're so well-known!)

"Dr. Frankenstein is cold, unloving, disloyal, and enlightened."

"And it was all simply by being honest, but evil."

"Kate then seems like an awful jerk and it's no wonder no one wants to marry her."

"The relationship between Jack and Ralph would mostly be a hate one."

"You need characters in novels to get the meaning of books." (Aha.)

"Claire illuminates the meaning of 'Farenheit 451' because she is the embodiment of the meaning of 'Farenheit 451'." (RIGHT.)

"In 'The Iceman Cometh' the classic use of foil is exemplified." (I can only assume this is the covering of leftovers, but I could be wrong.)

"It's difficult to find one thing more likely to ruin a relationship than the accusation of murder." (Seriously.)

"Adele was also popular with other ladies, perhaps because she was so fond of the expected lifetyle of the wives, which will be referred to as wifestyle."

And this last may be the strangest thing I have ever read in an AP test booklet (which is really saying something, especially considering that I have found money, pornographic drawings, grocery lists, and football plays in them before):

"Within ourselves sleep many guilts. Many doubts, many fears, many lies. Looking in we view past their snorting, snarling heads and catch only the tips of their horns in the flowerbed of ourselves. But reflected in others, a cold chilly breeze to wake us, we suddenly turn ourselves to shield our own perspectives; and deny."

Perhaps the strangest part about it--it was the last paragraph in an otherwise very average essay about 'Death of a Salesman.'

More tomorrow from Louisville. In the meantime, work on your "wifestyle."

Consolatory Reading.

2008-05-28T07:56:00.002-04:00

Some recent blog reading inspires me to ask a question of you, Dear Readers: what are five examples of texts you turn to when seeking consolation? (Like, perhaps, when you are suffering from sleep depravation, looming deadlines, and a malfunctioning coffee pot on a muggy Wednesday morning in May?)

They need not be consolatory in any kind of typical way--just the things you turn to as you would to an old friend, for something familiar and comforting.

I have been thinking of my own, and this is what I have come up with so far:

1. Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot (yeah, yeah--shut up, Eng Sem'ers)
2. Saturday, Ian McEwan
3. Howards End, E.M. Forster
4. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
5. A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf

(My goodness, that's a white, elitist list, isn't it?)

Post your answers in the comments so we can all have them at the ready when we need some comfort.

One of those days

2008-05-28T07:19:00.004-04:00

You know it's going to be one of those days when...

You were up until 1am, and woke up at 5:30am to discover that your coffee pot isn't working.

At the top of my list of ways you don't want the universe to choose to hate you: malfunctioning coffee pots.

The Banning of Belligerent Activities.

2008-05-23T08:23:00.002-04:00

I had considered an outright ban on classroom laptop usage to be a bit too draconian a solution to classroom web surfing and IMing, but apparently the law school at the University of Chicago disagrees.

Wallet Archaeology

2008-05-22T13:49:00.002-04:00

My wallet has been on its last overstuffed leg for a while now, but I only just found what I deemed to be a suitable replacement this week. This morning I undertook the task of transferring all of the cards and i.d.'s and random bits and pieces that are somehow considered important enough to be toted around with us day after day after year. But, as usual when you move, clean, or change out a daily part of your life, there were a few surprises, like:

-a D.C. Metro card with $15.95 on it
-a Trinidadian dollar (perhaps more surprising: I have never been to Trinidad)
-a ticket stub from a performance of "Mary Poppins" in the West End of London in August of 2005
-10 pence (I may be wrong, but I think England changed over to the Euro sometime around 2002...)
-a voter registration card from the address I lived at two voting precincts ago
-a frequent buyer card from a coffee shop in Santa Barbara, where I have not lived in five years, or visited in three
-a ticket to tour W.B. Yeats's tower in western Ireland
-a bank account card for a bank account I closed three and a half years ago
-my British Library card
-at least a dozen business cards of people whose names I do not recognize

Now the question is: how on earth will I live without this stuff in my purse everywhere I go???

Tips for the Belligerent

2008-05-21T14:02:00.004-04:00

This one goes out to all of you aspiring Belligerentsout there.

Here's a tip:

The next time you want to try to get away with an entire semester of IMing and web surfing during your college class, try to abstain from doing so on the one day of the semester that a tenured member of the English Department faculty stops by to observe the class and sits directly behind you.

(Muwahahahaha! Gotcha!)

Oh May, Oh My.

2008-05-20T09:40:00.001-04:00

Yes, I am still alive.

I am just so supernaturally productive that I can easily find a couple months go by without having a passing second with which to blog. You know how it is.

(Yeah, right.)

The semester ended, my gradebook closed (although, believe it or not, I am still meeting with students to 'discuss'--i.e., listen to them tell me why they innately deserve an 'A'--their grades), and I have embarked on what must needs be The Most Productive Summer In History. Check back in at the end of August--I should have two more chapter drafts, a conference paper, and a revised first chapter completed. When you check back in and discover that none of these things has actually come to fruition, please don't remind me of this post.

A quick hit-list from my couple months of blog silence:

-If you haven't seen "I'm Not There" yet, blow off your work/school/childrearing responsibilties for a couple of hours and get thee to a Blockbuster. While there's a distinct possibility that this movie only makes so much sense to me because I've been reading and teaching and writing about waaaay too much James Joyce lately, I still think it's utterly astounding.

-This blog is now being written by an offical member (by baptism) of the Presbyterian church. I took the plunge (or liberal sprinkling) a couple of Sundays ago and am now much holier than I have ever been before. I think you can legitimately expect to receive heavenly benefits just for reading this blog from here on out.

-Mark your calendars! The AP English Literature exam reading in Louisville, Kentucky is coming up in just a few weeks, and once again I will be blogging daily with an updated list of the stupidest, most ridiculous and hilarious things the (supposedly) best and brightest American high school students write in their essays. It's a more-or-less complete violation of the confidentiality agreement I sign as a reader, but some things are just too funny to be kept to oneself. And even in Louisville there is only so much bourbon to erase the pain of seven eight hour days of bad essay reading.

-In a stunning example of my own stupidity and ridiculousness, I have signed up to run the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C. again this year. I am still trying to figure out why...maybe I'll know at the end of another 26.2 miles. Or maybe I'll just be too tired to wonder anymore.

-I bought orange shoes. They are awesome.

My Home Away from My Department

2008-03-27T17:52:00.000-04:00

Today I attended a lunchtime workshop in the Women's Studies department on the topic of "Creativity in Academic Writing." I have a certificate in Women's Studies and so am a sort of satellite member of that department, but since I completed all of my WS course requirements almost two years ago, it's been a while since I've been a regular in those parts. After the workshop today I remembered all of the reasons why I love that department and would rather hang out with that crowd than with my own English department any day.

The topic of the discussion today is one that has been coming up regularly for me since I started grad school, but especially since I began teaching and writing my dissertation, and even more so when I decided to start writing this blog. Unlike some of my fellow grad students, I am not a poet, short story, or novel writer. I have never considered myself to be a 'creative writer,' and have never taken any courses in 'creative writing.' When I was in high school I wrote for the school paper, and besides the odd news article, wrote a regular column that ran on the op-ed page. Even though it definitely wasn't scholarly or academic in nature, and was markedly more informal than anything I would have written 'for school,' my column was still a public expression of personal opinion and personal perspective.

Apart from academic or scholarly writing, most of my writing since I started college is in the form of correspondence (these days, mostly electronic) and this blog. The blog is by far the most informal form of public writing in which I have participated since high school. Somewhere in those intervening--what? nine?--years it somehow became problematic for me to have those informal and public expressions of personal opinions and perspectives attached to my name. You have all been witness to the problems associated with the attachment I used to think nothing of sending into the mailbox of nearly every person I knew (and their parents! and my teachers!). Even though my opinions are hardly contentious, and my topics never stray into the realm of the salacious (hi, Mom!), libelous, or obscene, I have now been conditioned to purge my public life from any taint of the personal or--even worse--unprofessional. The Director of Graduate Studies can't know I have a blog...because then he'd know that I spend my time not reading...and not writing an article/book/grant proposal...or not thinking serious thoughts! And as we all know, serious academics--real academics--can't even watch an episode of The Simpsons without finding a handy pop cultural reference to the postcolonial condition of the silenced subalternate subject to work into her next lecture/article/book (but really--why else would you turn on your television except to collect handy pop cultural references with which to sprinkle your otherwise serious academic work?).

Unlike my fellow graduate students who are creative writers, and who struggle to find ways and time to continue working on their poetry and fiction as they also work in academia, my struggle with the relationship between creative and academic writing has more to do with the stifling of the emotional, personal, or subjective impulse in academic work. This is a large part of what was discussed in the workshop today. Why is feeling deeply for something and thinking deeply about something a mutually exclusive practice? Why do we divorce our feeling for the things we study from our study of them? Why do we spend our lives learning and studying the most intimate details of fictional and nonfictional human lives but insist on excising our lives and lived experience from our reckoning of all of that humanity? Why do I spend nine weeks teaching Ulysses--a novel so up-close and personal that we stay with the main character as he shits, farts, fucks and jerks off in the course of his day--but tell my students to get rid of the personal pronouns in their papers about that same novel?

The ivory tower is rarely the haven of the great risk-taker. The liberalism and radicalism to be found here often has more to do with theory than practice (sometimes literally). The reason I so love to be in the Women's Studies department is not just its fundamental interdisciplinarity (let the students of women's pre-natal cardiac health sit down with the students of nineteenth century women's painting and share what they know!), but the committment to vulnerability and openness that lies at the heart of many of the feminist and gender theories that founded Women's Studies as an academic discipline. If you are a woman, your lived experience as such is important and should be brought to the table of discussion and dialogue and study as much as anything else. Your fear and shame and discomfort, your pride and anger and pain, your pleasures and desires and creativity are meaningful aspects of your existence. But as members of a much larger academic community made up in many cases of much more established disciplines, Women's Studies departments still find themselves trying to validate their work in those same often stultifying and depersonalized terms. Those who risk stepping outside of the box of the impersonal, the objective, and the jargon-filled proof of esoteric mastery more often than not find themselves unpublished, untenured, or jobless. Not a pleasing prospect for the Ph.D. candidate planning her first go at the academic job market next fall...

These issues certainly weren't resolved in the course of an hour and a half long workshop, but raising them and airing them--and hearing them voiced by respected scholars who already have publications and jobs and tenure--was a positive step and a reassuring sign. I am not so progressive as to think that we should completely abandon the more formal and tried-and-true forms of literary study--you have to master the fundamentals before you can play in big-leagues, after all (i.e., practice your free-throws and your subject-verb agreement!)--but I do think we can stand to make some room for the people behind the professors we are all mostly just pretending to be.

Etiquette?

2008-03-24T09:20:00.003-04:00

This post on Paper Cuts raises my reader's hackles--well, not the post itself, but the post to which it responds.

I think I am most effronted by the idea that anyone should makes rules about the books others choose to own and have in his or her home. Though it may seem like a strange thing for someone studying to be a professor of literature to be insulted by rules made about books, reading, or literature--who are literary scholars, after all, but professional literary rule-makers?--this 'edict' seems to make books into mere status symbols. Even if Matt Selman is arguing for a sort of 'honesty' in the books one displays in one's home, what his rule really accomplishes is just another form of elitism. Why should anyone be able to tell you what books you can have or where you are allowed to keep them in your own home?

With as many books and as little space as I have at my disposal these days, I wonder where Matt Selman would have me keep the books I haven't yet read safely out of 'public' sight...under the bed, perhaps? In the dishwasher? Surely nothing could be worse--or more duplicitous!--than having a vistor in my home believe I have read Madame Bovary when in truth I have not.

Things I Didn't Know About Grad School Before I Started, Part 1

2008-03-20T13:57:00.004-04:00

(Sure to be the first installment of a multi-part series.)

1. If you're a grad student you are also an amateur caterer.

One thing I didn't know about grad school before I started was how much of my time spent pursuing a MA and Ph.D. would also be spent carting ice, sodas, water, wine, and juice across miles of pedestrian campus. I didn't know how adept I would become at preparing fruit trays, aesthetically pleasing displays of cheese, and graceful arrangements of cups and napkins. I had no idea how to calculate how many lemon bars the audience at a guest lecture by a professor emeritus at a second tier liberal arts college in New England specializing in the intersections of Renaissance drama, queer theory, and ecocriticism would be likely to consume at a reception held at 5:15 p.m. on a rainy Friday in April--but I do now!

And they say grad students don't learn practical skills! I am counting on some of this coming in handy if I find myself unable to procure a job in academia and am forced to become a caterer full-time...

Whitewashed.

2008-03-05T06:39:00.002-05:00

More proof that I am well on my way to becoming an Advanced White Person: #81.

Whiners.

2008-03-03T21:02:00.003-05:00

That would be you. Yes, you. I took the blog down a couple of weeks ago after a colleague in my grad program found it and I was unable to undo the persistent google-link to my 'real' name. Fearing untold ruin was being done to my scholarly reputation with every post I wrote about cookbooks, bad dates, and painting my toenails, I decided to do away with The Paraphernalian. And then you started. Every day, multiple emails (many decidedly paranoid in nature) demanding to know why I had decided to lock him or her out of my blog. And then, after I had written each one a careful and consolatory email in response, every day, more multiple emails asking me to reconsider. The following are actual quotations from reader emails:

"I mean, what kind of a scholarly reputation do you really expect to have anyway?"

"You're not on the job market YET."

"How many of your students actually know how to read?"

"Can't you just write your blog in an email and send it to me and a few of my friends?"

At first I thought that last one was the most ridiculous of all. And then it occurred to me: most of the people who read this blog are my non-academic friends, and I'm really only concerned about keeping the odd googling job search committee member or conniving student out...so why not just make it an exclusive, invitation-only affair? That way I get to keep priming the pump of my dissertation with this decidedly non-academic writing, no one who doesn't need to know about my life outside of the library is the wiser, and you can all stop filling my inbox with your bitching and moaning? How's that?

Addendum: should you decide you would like to share this blog with the 'uninvited,' I will require proof that he or she is not a) on a job search committee for an institution of higher education, b) on an editorial board for a peer-reviewed academic journal, c) possessing access to an active English department listserv, or d) one of my past, present, or future students.

Resurgam!

February is the quietest month.

2008-02-22T08:56:00.004-05:00

Blog-wise, anyway. Or for this blog, rather. It's actually the lack of quiet in the rest of my life during the month of February that leads to the electronic silence. Papers to grade. Ulysses to teach. Fellowships for which to apply, and interview, and interview again...and conference papers and articles and reviews and the looming job market at the end of this year, reminding me that I should definitely try to add my dissertation to that list of things to do as well...

My 27th birthday was on Wednesday, a very bright, blue, spring-like day immediately followed by two very cold, dark, and rainy ones. The kind that make a meteorlogical idealist (i.e., Californian) like myself believe there should be a law requiring all cold, dark, rainy days to be spent at home and in your pajamas. But I have spent the few spare moments in the last couple days relishing the simple pleasures my birthday brought this year. A beautiful new bread knife. The pleasant shine of ten manicured fingers and ten pedicured toes. And the long-awaited, long lusted-for pages of this gem:

Breakfast, Lunch, Tea: The Many Little Meals of the Rose Bakery is another one of those cookbooks that will have you packing your bags for Paris, but also promises many simple pleasures to be had in the comfort of your own home...like fruit taboule and cheddar cornmeal scones and ricotta, tomato and thyme tart...

Maybe I just wish I could stay home and play in the kitchen on rainy days...

Consider your audience

2008-02-05T15:56:00.000-05:00

Hold it just a second there, kid! Who will be reading--and grading--your paper? The instructor for the course. And the gender of the instructor for the course is...?

Actual quotation from student paper: "The study is the man's room of the house."

Right.

On my honor.

2008-02-02T17:15:00.000-05:00

This weekend has been all but entirely committed to grading the twenty-four first drafts of the first paper I have assigned my class this semester--a 4-5 critical analysis of the first novel we read. Very straight-forward, nothing fancy--I even explicitly instructed them not to use any secondary sources. Just the novel and their own brilliance applied to a detailed analysis of the text. The draft as part of the assignment is mostly just for the purpose of nipping any serious writing problems in the bud--or at least seriously addressing them if they cannot be so summarily nipped--before they have to submit the final version (and risk the nasty surprise of a bad grade because they overlooked the importance of having a thesis statement). I don't even give the draft a grade--I just comment and hand it back so they can revise for the final submission--but I do take both the draft and the final version into account when assigning the final grade for the paper. I like to reward effort and improvement...and considering my recommendations.

I hate grading. As far as I'm concerned, grading is the worst part of this whole teaching gig. It is a pain only slightly ameliorated by the occasional encounter with a very fine paper. The pleasure of this occurence is, of course, largely created by the huge amounts of truly horrible writing that constitutes most of what must be read and graded, and so even the pleasure of such an event is soured by the knowledge that it must come of so much suffering.

I settled in at my desk today bracing myself for the worst...and didn't encounter it. The first two papers were quite good--the third wasn't quite as good as the first two, but didn't cause me to get out the sackcloth and ashes--and the fourth was truly outstanding. I perked up. I indulged in some optimism. I began to look forward to a semester of reading the fresh and invigorating insights eloquently articulated by my obviously brilliant students.

And then I read the fifth paper. Which was truly horrible. A complete failure to address even the most basic requirements of the assignment, of the text at hand...or of writing in English. I furrowed my brow. I chastised myself for my false hope. I began to look forward to a semester of long and arduous meetings with this student, of painstaking work to make her writing comprehensible. And then I discovered a suspiciously apt phrase...and then a reference to an obscure poem by a famous British poet...and then I started Googling.

Oh yes, my friends. Copied straight from two different websites that were the first hits on the list.

The discovery of academic dishonesty is vastly more painful than having to read and grade the worst essay ever written. It's pain on almost every level. The pain of discovering deceit in a fellow human being. The pain of having your intelligence and attention insulted. The pain of having the value of your assignment and course and learning discredited. The pain of knowing that someone is so desperate to succeed that they would steal and lie for the mere appearance of actual accomplishment. The pain of knowing that someone's parents are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year so that their child can fake an education. The pain of knowing that you are about to spend precious hours of your time and energy preparing a case for the college honor council...and the list goes on.

Even if I hadn't noticed the (obvious and flagrant) instance of plagiarism in this paper, it still wouldn't have gotten a good grade. Not only because it was a draft and wouldn't be graded at all (what was she thinking?), but because it didn't make any improvement on the quality of the analysis. If anything, it made it even more uneven and incoherent.

If I had my 'druthers' I would mark the hell out of this paper, invite the student to a meeting, point out the plagiarized passages, confirm that she knows how to properly use and cite a source, tell her to rewrite it, and that if it happens again I will report her to the honor council. Unfortunately, taking matters into my own hands would mean that I am in violation of the honor code--failure to report a known instance of academic dishonesty is itself a breach of the code.

Damn Google.

In which I also begin to wish I lived in the 19th century

2008-02-01T17:41:00.000-05:00

Today my earlier confrontation with Belligerent Boy (my new name for the student/adversary of my previous post) entered the digital age. Surely as karmic punishment for adding an online interactive mapping assignment, a text annotation wiki assignment, and a reading journal blog to my syllabus this semester, Belligerent Boy has begun chatting online with his classmate (whom I will now refer to as Belligerent Buddy) on their laptops during class. While they're sitting next to each other. And silently snickering over their obviously hilarious and undetected digital conversation.

I've heard stories that kids do this for a while--and of course it was going to, as soon as wireless technology became ubiquitous. I have just been sheltered from this development because most English majors at our school haven't yet joined the laptop-as-notebook revolution that has become the rule in so many other departments--even otherwise tech-savvy grad students in our department still tote pen and pad. But most of my students this semester aren't English majors--they come from far-flung corners of the campus where they teach strange things like "science" and "math"--and they have brought their new-fangled notions into my naive and Luddite classroom (with exception of our Smart Board, Blackboard site, and Web 2.0 assignment schedule, of course).

But now the question is--what to do? If they were having a private side conversation aloud during my class I would simply call them out on it and tell them to shut up or get out. But there's no way of proving that's what's going on (one click destroys the evidence) and it is silent (although still distracting to myself and probably also to their classmates).

Gay Boyfriend says there's nothing I can do (besides trying to figure out their screen names and IMing them during class to tell them to cut it out--hard to do when you're, you know, teaching the class). Is it true? Has technology thwarted my best attempt at classroom management?

In which I begin to wish I was a middle-aged man

2008-01-31T18:42:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I had a confrontation with one of my students during class. We had just finished reviewing our quizzes (I frequently give short, ten question quizzes on the reading assignment for the day), and I was about to move on with announcements about the paper assignment coming due and the reading for our next class. When I hear a gruff male voice from the side of the room.

"What are you planning to do with these quizzes?" he asked.
"I am planning on grading them, posting the scores in the gradebook, and using those scores to compute part of your grade for the course." I replied. Read the syllabus, I thought.
"Are you going to drop any of them?" he said.
"No, I don't think I will," I said. And certainly won't after this little outburst, I thought.
"I just don't think these quizzes are fair. They're totally punitive," he said, his volume rising.
The class began to twitter.
"If the quizzes are punitive they are no more so than any other form of grading," I answered. Seriously??? I thought.
"They're, like, totally punitive! These questions are ridiculous! I read this stuff, but I can't be expected to know the answers to questions like this!" he barked.
"These questions are designed to hold you accountable for completing the reading assignment with attention to relevant details in the text. I know they're difficult. But the details are important and I expect you to know them," I answered. Bite me, you little punk, I thought.
He begins to grumble under his breath, and I take the opportunity to move on with the class.

Thinking about this whole little episode later, and about what I should take away from it, I couldn't help but think that a student wouldn't have dared speak that way to a middle-aged male professor--much less in front of a class. I work really hard at my classroom management techniques because I know that my age and gender put me at a disadvantage, but this was disheartening. Did this happen because I am clearly a push-over, or because I clearly don't have a penis?

(Now, if after I turn in my final grades for the semester you learn that I was gunned down outside my home by a student exacting vengeance for a bad grade on a Mrs. Dalloway reading quiz, you'll know what really happened.)

Message from a tea bag

2008-01-24T18:30:00.000-05:00

This, from the tiny paper tab on the end of my tea bag string.

"Our intuition lies in our innocence."

Only a slight improvement over the 'You can do it!' I recently found on a tampon wrapper.

Paraphernalian, Sommelier

2008-01-19T16:33:00.000-05:00

When I moved into The Attic I resolved to start keeping a better record of my wine consumption. My very elegant recording method: a sheet of notebook paper tacked to the bulletin board in my kitchen and the ballpoint pen usually lost somewhere in the Basket O' Junk on the counter. Despite its aesthetic shortcomings, this method has served me quite well. But today I realized that I have run out of room on my sheet of notebook paper and it is time for a new one--and time for The World to benefit from my...well, drinking, I guess (that doesn't sound very good).

Being a graduate student (i.e., poor), I rarely spend more than $12 on a bottle of wine (and $12 only on special occasions or when I receive my tax refund). I also don't usually care for sweet wines. Lacking the refined tastes and vocabulary of the professional sommelier or amateur wine snob, the only distinction I really bothered with on my list is the most perfunctory: "Would I buy and drink this again?" + is an affirmative, - a negative. Not reported: all of the bottles of Trader Joe's Two-Buck Chuck (which all know is a usually safe and always cheap bet) and anything I had in a restaurant.

+ Beringer Founders Estate 2005 Chardonnay*
- Smoking Loon 2004 Chardonnay
+ Rex Goliath 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon*
+ Toasted Head 2005 Chardonnay
+ Kunde 2005 Chardonnay
+ Chateau St. John 2005 Fume Blanc
- Le Paradou 2004 White
- Goats Do Roam 2006 White
- Black Mountain 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon
+ Gnarly Head 2005 Zinfandel**
- Black Chook 2005 VMR
+ Black Chook 2005 Shiraz Voignier
+ Beringer Founders Estate 2004 Shiraz
+ 4 Sisters 2006 Sauvignon Blanc
+ Clayhouse 2004 Petite Syrah***
+ Crush Pad 2002 Red
+ Banrock Station 2004 Shiraz*, ****

* recommended by Food & Wine Magazine
** I had this one the first time at a local wine tasting about a year ago and jotted it down because of its unique spiciness and pepperiness. I have bought it several times since. Standard grocery store issue, usually only about $10.
*** This is the only bottle that totally blew my usual wine budget. I had it at another tasting, loved it, and couldn't leave without a bottle (I later assuaged my guilt over this purchase by sharing it with a friend as part of her birthday present).
**** They also make the only Riesling I have ever been able to abide (usually too sweet for my blood). SUPER CHEAP at around $4 a bottle.

Doing my part.

2008-01-17T08:13:00.000-05:00

Sad newsfrom Steve Jobs, via jbj at The Salt-Box:

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Just in case this is the sad truth, I have decided to do everything I can to combat America's illiteracy, largely by making my 20th Century English Novel class read four novels in the next fifteen weeks, including one of 783 pages.

That should bump our numbers up!

4 out of 5 Ain't Bad, or How to Know You're Not a Supermodel

2008-01-11T09:21:00.000-05:00

My early bird project (now parodically--is that a word? it should be--titled "Make Me An Early Bird") is still underway. I managed to stay on early bird schedule four out of five days this week, thwarted this morning by the premiere of Bravo's "Make Me A Supermodel" last night. (This writers' strike has completely undermined my television standards.)

For all of you who have (quite rightly) turned to the great Russian novelists, local theatres, museums, and concert venues, and continuing education classes for your evening entertainment in these spare television days, allow me to summarize what I learned last night:

-If the skin on your thighs visibly moves when you walk, you are not a supermodel.
-If you refuse to wear a thong on national television, you are not a supermodel.
-If you have any skills, training, or manifest intelligence that may qualify you for an occupation other than supermodeling, you are not a supermodel.
-Nikki Taylor is less annoying than Tyra Banks.

Were these pearls of wisdom worth the sacrifice of my early bird schedule, a few chapters of Zadie Smith's On Beauty before bed, and some work on my fellowship applications before dawn this morning? Absolutely not. I already knew I wasn't a supermodel, and everyone knows no one is more annoying than Tyra Banks.

Souper.

2008-01-10T10:57:00.000-05:00

Tis the season for soup. I think I began to feel the urge last week, when it was freakishly cold outside (for a Californian living in the South anyway--not for any of you hearty Midwestern or Yankee types), but this week, even though it has been unseasonably warm, it has also been gray, heavy, and damp. And my soupy cravings continue.

Fortunately for me, two of my favorite cooking bloggers have been happy to comply with my tastes this week. If you also find yourself feeling souper (I'm sorry--I just can't help myself) this time of year, check out Heidi Swanson's 101 Cookbooks post on lentil soup and, my all-time favorite foodie, Clotilde Dusoulier on Chocolate & Zucchini with a surprisingly simple recipe for leek and potato soup. I've made batches of both this week and have been reveling in the delicious, warm (and nutritious!) simplicity. Perfect for curling up on a winter's night to watch primary returns and wishing more things in life could be so.

Right on time.

2008-01-07T17:14:00.000-05:00

I used to be an early bird. Growing up, both of my parents were early risers--a family habit exacerbated (but also aided!) by my father's owning and operating of several espresso bars when I was in highschool. Coffee is largely a morning business, but the nice thing about having to get up hours before dawn to start brewing someone else's coffee is that at least you don't have to worry about not having access to plenty of your own. And when you spend your summers rising at 4am, zero-period doesn't seem so ungodly early anymore.

These dawn-sniffing habits served me well in college, and I also credit them with getting me through my first and most difficult years of grad school--I could always count on getting several solid hours of reading and writing in long before anyone would dream of scheduling a class or meeting (or being awake themselves). And all of those years of early rising conditioned me to do my best work before noon--by 3pm I am already fading, and by 8pm my brain is pretty much good for nothing.

Something happened when I suddenly found myself sans classes to take or classes to teach in my fourth year of grad school--I still had plenty of things to do, but no daily schedule according to which they had to be done. With the exception of a part-time job (for which I could more or less make my own schedule) and the odd meeting or lecture to attend, my time was my own. And gradually I started to greet the day later and later. For a while I felt guilty getting up after the sun did, but it was hard to miss the dark circles under my eyes or the desperate search for stimulants in the late afternoon. Unfortunately, my brain didn't cope as well with my new schedule as my under-eye areas and caffeine addiction did--instead of simply starting my productive and coherent hours later in the day, I seemed to just be sleeping through them.

I resisted the snooze button a little more in the interest of getting the first chapter of my dissertation finished before the end of last semester, but I have finally come to the conclusion that if I am interested in getting the rest of the dissertation finished before the end of my twenties, I had better find a way to make myself into an early bird again. Today was my first day of attempting to hold myself to my rigorous bright and early schedule, and sure enough--here it is at 5pm and I have already downed two cups of green tea. Tomorrow I'll invest in some industrial-strength under-eye cream. I am hoping that the early bird gets the worm and the Ph.D. (and a published article, sixth year fellowship, and tenure-track job).

Why I have retired from dating

2007-12-15T11:44:00.000-05:00

Here's some more justification for my retirement from dating (as if I needed any more).

Even though I'm an American, somehow I'm just not flattered...maybe because what the author of this article estimates as the average American woman's monthly expenditure on beauty treatments is equal to the total of my monthly paycheck (I've always been a bit of an Anglophile anyway).

My Dissertation: The Original Soundtrack

2007-12-13T22:17:00.001-05:00

An idea for the novel writer from Maud Newton (via The Elegant Variation) that I am thinking of adapting for my dissertation writing purposes. Choose particular music that you listen to only when working on a particular section of your writing project in hopes of creating a kind of Pavlovian response/remedy for potential writer's block. Condition yourself to wax eloquent about Yeats every time you listen to The Beatles' "Rubber Soul," etc.

I can write (but not read) while listening to music, and I definitely still associate certain writing projects with certain albums I had on repeat while I was working on them. Of course, the danger of this technique is that you could lose the ability to enjoy the music you choose to write to very quickly this way--kind of like the writing analogy for music being ruined by its association with ex's. So I'll need to choose carefully, and I turn to you, Dear Readers, for help. Chapter Two is on Ulysses. Ideas?

Right on the Elephant.

2007-12-13T11:28:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the best sentence I have read all year, from probably the funniest grad student in existence, Acephalous: "This stubborn resistance to the empirical fact of my karmic debt likely means I'll one day turn Republican."

In Sweet and Loving Memory.

2007-12-11T21:40:00.000-05:00

My grandfather passed away in October. About a month before he died, he gave me his standing KitchenAid mixer--a standing KitchenAid mixer being the kitchen appliance I desired above all things. I think there's a good chance this one may be older than I am--its enamel is a very unassuming shade of cream, but a small circling of orange flowers and cornucopias around the metal band on the top seems a pretty clear sign that this is a relic of the late 70s, maybe early 80s.

Some of you may be wondering why this was my grandfather's mixer. It definitely was his, too--I can remember him using it hundreds of times, but my grandmother not even once. He was the cook in the family, and his cookies especially were the stuff of legend. Gingersnaps. Snickerdoodles. Peanut butter. Oatmeal raisin. Chocolate chip. He had spent decades perfecting his recipes, and it was a treat to sit at his kitchen table as he expertly rotated his cookie sheets in and out of the oven he had precisely calibrated to the clock on the wall.

If you met my grandfather in almost any other place than his kitchen, you would probably have trouble imagining him as an amateur chef. He was a tall, imposing man who spent his youth working on farms or farm equipment, his middle age in a B.F. Goodrich tire plant, and his last working years as a landscaper. He had a tattoo on one forearm (I think from his time in the army during WWII), and in his youth a shock of thick, black hair--which by the time I knew him had been replaced by a shiny dome (but a pair of bushy black eyebrows that bounced Groucho Marx-style reminded you of what used to be there). He was missing a finger on one hand from a wood-working accident (he had lots of stories about what had happened to that finger, none of them even remotely true). Probably the most imposing thing about him was his deep, bass voice. Even though he was a pious Catholic his entire life, that voice made him popular with every church choir in town.

If you can trace a love of reading through some kind of genetic inheritance, I think my trail leads straight to Grandpa. His working life didn't leave him much time or opportunity for education, but he was a lifelong and voracious reader. Keeping him in books in his last and less-mobile years could have been a full-time job--and finding one he hadn't read was difficult. As was trying to stay one step ahead of his rapier wit--if you thought he might be making fun of you, he probably was. It only took one look for the teasing twinkle in his eye to know for sure.

My grandparents lived in Oklahoma, so growing up in California I didn't see them more than a couple times a year at the most. And even though now he's farther from me than he's ever been before, over these past couple of months I've felt closer to him than I have in a long time. I use his mixer at least once a week for something or other, and every time I take it down off its shelf in my kitchen and see the inside of the well-worn bowl, covered in decades of tiny spoon- and beater-scratches, I think of him. I think of watching him as a little girl sitting at his kitchen table. I think of all of the years worth of good things he made in that bowl for the people he loved. And I think every good thing I make in it might be a legacy from him.

Chapter Two, or Why Am I Still Awake?

2007-12-10T01:18:00.000-05:00

On Friday I turned the first chapter of my dissertation in to my committee. It is about two months late according to the original deadline I set for myself, and certainly not the best thing I've ever written. Nor is it even really 'done' in any sense of the word (revisions, additions, pending committee approval, deciding what I have to say about the relationship between mail bombs and modernism, etc.). But it's a milestone of some kind, I think, and so I let myself have the weekend 'off' in celebration--which mostly meant a lot of time curled up on the couch with my dog and a copy of The Golden Compass (thank you, Andrea!).

But I have been having trouble sleeping this weekend. It is due in part, I am sure, to periodic dozing off while reading on the couch, but also, I've decided, because of tomorrow. Monday, yes. Walk the dog, take out the trash, go for a run, get hair cut, go to part-time job, work on mapping assignment for next semester....and? Wait, something's missing...conference abstract? No...fellowship application? Nope. Oh, yes. Chapter two. I guess it's about time to get cracking on that...

Happy Holidays, DNB-Style.

2007-12-03T11:34:00.000-05:00

A strange and wonderful thing, brought to my attention by a member of the Virginia Woolf Society listserv: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography advent calendar. Because, you know, nothing says Christmas like the biographies of obscure, dead British people.

paraphernalian playlist #4: the paraphernalian takes a turn

2007-12-02T22:56:00.001-05:00

I thought about all of the people I might ask to put together another playlist for me, but everyone I thought of is traveling or writing papers or taking exams or...making all of her Christmas gifts by hand. So I thought I'd give you all a break and take a turn. Suffer through as best you can. For those of you on a holiday-carols-only diet from now until New Year, be forewarned: this list is cheer-free zone.

1. Me & Mr. Jones, Amy Winehouse: I adore Amy Winehouse (cracked out though she may be)—not least because she sounds like a large black woman from Detroit in the 60s, but she’s actually a skinny little Jewish girl from England. And anyone who gracefully uses the word “fuckery” in her refrain deserves some credit (which reminds me—make sure you find the “Explicit” version).

2. Let Them Knock, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings: If you love Amy Winehouse, you’ll probably also love Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. They back her up on Back to Black, but Sharon and her boys can definitely hold their own.

3. Hold On, Hold On, Neko Case: You might know Neko Case from the stuff she’s done with The New Pornographers. Someone called her “the second coming of Patsy Cline,” and I think that’s pretty much right on.

4. The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out To Get Us, Sufjan Stevens: I know that Sufjan Stevens has become de rigueur for every over-educated middle-class white person my age, but I still love this song.

5. Rise Up With Fists!!, Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins: I listened to this song on repeat as I drove to campus for my Ph.D. oral exams. I think something in her “there but for the grace of God go I” struck a chord with me that day, but I love Jenny Lewis on every other day for the sheer cleverness of her lyrics: “Thought I saw you in Vegas. It was not pretty, but she was (not your wife).”

6. Winter in the Hamptons, Josh Rouse: One of my favorites finds from a mix given to me by a friend. Great for when you’re finally getting out of town.

7. Annabelle, Gillian Welch: I pretty much picked this one at random—anything Gillian Welch does is gorgeous and perfect.

8. Let It Ride, Ryan Adams & The Cardinals: On the album that was the reason for my one and only speeding ticket (6am on a Saturday morning in Twiggs County, Georgia).

9. Rowing Song, Patty Griffin: Much like Gillian Welch, Patty Griffin can do no wrong in my book. I think of this as my “Graduate School Theme Song”: “No one knows so many things…so out of range, sometimes so strange, sometimes so sweet, sometimes so lonely.” I think that pretty much says it all.

10. The Trapeze Swinger, Iron & Wine: This is one of those “only good thing about a really bad movie” songs—it played with the credits at the end of some travesty starring Topher Grace, but it’s not on any of the (all wonderful) Iron & Wine albums. I think it has a few of my favorite lines ever: “The Pearly Gates have some eloquent graffiti / like 'we’ll meet again' / and 'fuck the man' / and 'tell my mother not to worry'.”

My Secret Identity.

2007-11-29T20:07:00.000-05:00

So it has come to my attention that some of you are linking to my blog on your own blogs by using my full, real name. If you are one of these people (you know who you are!)--please change the link to the name of my blog instead. I am about to have a whole new class of curious undergrads--and, soon after, a whole bunch of people I want to offer me a job--all of whom I would rather not want reading about my adventures in cheese puffs and my bad dates. (You know how it is.)

So seriously. Change it. Now.

Time to move.

2007-11-29T14:19:00.000-05:00

Mark your calendars, put the house up for sale, and pre-order now: a new book by my culinary heroine, Clotilde Dusoulier, comes out April 22, 2008. The only problem with Clotilde's Edible Adventures in Paris? You have to get on an airplane to have the adventure. (This is why I prefer cookbooks--you can have the adventure in your own kitchen).

Guess I'll just have to move to Paris! Damn it...life is so hard sometimes.

Out of it.

2007-11-28T15:57:00.000-05:00

One of the idiosyncrasies of being a graduate student in literature is that you probably aren't on the cutting edge of current literature. This tends to make people I meet on airplanes very suspicious--I teach college English and I've never even heard of the New York Times bestseller they're toting? Clearly, I'm lying about what I do for (what passes as) a living.

Most English professors read in their field, and not much else (except for student papers...usually written about things in their field). And for most English professors, our field is not anything that has been written in the last thirty years or so. So I have gotten pretty used to checking out all of the end-of-the-year "best of" booklists and not recognizing (much less, having actually read) any of them.

This year, I am proud to say that I have at least heard of (thank you, New Yorker!) 5 out of the 10Best Books of 2007 according to The New York Times Book Review.

If any of you have actually read them and can tell me if any rate an appearance in my line-up of non-work-related Christmas break reading, please let me know.

New Favorite.

2007-11-26T21:34:00.000-05:00

I think Thanksgiving is my new favorite holiday. Quite frankly, ever since the death of Santa, Christmas has been on the decline for me, eclipsed by Easter in the church calendar and also by a number of much better parties in honor of St. Patrick's Day, the Fourth of July, and Halloween. But Thanksgiving has been steadily climbing the charts in recent years, and it shows no signs of backing down.

Growing up, Thanksgiving was always a solidly good time--a parade, lots of pie, the official start of the Christmas season--all nice things. But it was always celebrated with only my immediate family and occasionally a couple of visiting grandparents--none of these annual blood relative conventions some of my friends describe, with enough people to populate a small town descending on your house for a single day and leaving again before you've had a chance to figure out how you're related to any of them. I wouldn't say I was necessarily jealous of this kind of event, but I have to admit, I was curious.

This was my seventh Thanksgiving celebrated away from home and without any of my family. My last two Thanksgivings in college I was travelling, and in the years since I have been 3,000-odd miles and only a few weeks away from a trip home for Christmas--making Thanksgiving a silly expense of time and money for a trip of only a few days. I spent a couple of those Thanksgivings with the family of friends, but for all of the others I have cobbled together what I have come to think of as a Refugee Thanksgiving Celebration, gathering everyone I know who isn't leaving town to be with family in the largest home we have among us and coordinating one hell of a potluck. And no offense to my family, but these have been the best Thanksgivings of my life. Every year it's a new and surprising combination of people, and every year is better than the one before.

One of the reasons I have come to love Thanksgiving is how well it translates--no matter where you're from or what you do or believe, everyone understands the concept of being grateful for what you have. And eating. Everyone understands eating, too. And when you strip it down to its essential parts--as we traditionally do now with the Refugee Thanksgiving Celebration--it's just a group of friends getting together to eat and drink and talk and dance and play games and watch football and play frisbee and maybe take a short nap on the floor when the tryptophan kicks in. This year we were joking that maybe we should make fun of someone's haircut or job or boyfriend so that he or she runs crying to the bathroom, thereby making it a more authentic and family-like celebration. (In the end we nixed that plan and got out another board game instead.)

I know that someday it will more than likely come to pass that I will start to gather my fellow Thanksgiving Refugees early one November and discover that everyone has been claimed by in-laws or families of their own, and I'll have to find another favorite holiday. But in the meantime I am thankful for Thanksgiving, and I can hardly wait until next year.

Too far.

2007-11-21T20:55:00.000-05:00

A line has been crossed. I cannot follow.

Puffed Pride, Celebrity Neighbors, and Church Delinquents.

2007-11-18T11:21:00.000-05:00

So by now most of you probably think that I have been too busy wallowing in my pride over my German Chocolate Cake to blog this week, but you're wrong: I was also wallowing in my pride over my first foray into the world of puffs--cheese puffs.

I whipped up a batch on a whim one evening this week before a friend came over to share a bottle of wine, and I must say, they were outstanding. Another wonderful addition to the recipe box from Chocolate & Zucchini.

If you walk up the street where I live it is almost impossible not to notice a lot-sized garden adjacent to a turn-of-the-twentieth-century farm cottage directly across from the house in which I live. I have been peeking over the picket fence periodically since I moved in, marvelling at the paths and trellises and brilliant blooming things of all shapes, colors, and sizes, and dreaming of a Japanese lantern-lit garden party. I knew I wasn't the only one who admires this garden when it became a very popular stop on the town garden tour in September. But last week I discovered that my neighbor is none other than Ryan Gainey, a world-famous landscape architect. You can learn all about him and his amazing career (as well as virtually tour the garden across the street) at his website. He allows anyone to stop by and wander through for free, so if you come visit his garden, be sure to cross the street and come upstairs to the attic to say hello--if you're lucky, I'll make you some cheese puffs.

I allow myself to play hookie from church one Sunday a month. And it just so happens that my lazy Sunday is today. It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, and my agenda is already shaping up to be the perfect Sunday in my book:

-laze about in bed with coffee
-leisurely stroll through beautiful fall morning with dog
-ouef cocotte for brunch
-a trip to the farmer's market
-a handful of kitchen projects, including quiche dough and lemon butter cookies
-(and oh yeah, I almost forgot): laundry, cleaning, preparing for a presentation I have to give tomorrow, and wrapping up a section of my dissertation.

Even with that last item on the to-do list, it still looks pretty good to me. But I better get on with it, or it will be a very un-lazy Monday before I know it...

Pride.

2007-11-10T16:47:00.000-05:00

So two weeks ago I ran a marathon. But today I did something that makes me really proud--I baked my first layer cake. German chocolate with coconut-pecan filling. Of course, the battery in my digital camera was dead when I set about documenting this historic event, so the somewhat grainy picture above is from my phone...but I'm sure you can still see how wonderful it will taste at the church fellowship dinner to which I am bringing it.

You know you're a nerd when...

2007-11-09T13:40:00.000-05:00

...you shout "YEA!" when you read on The Reading Roomthat the next book to be discussed will be The Education of Henry Adams.

(Yeah, I know...but you aren't really surprised are you?)

Bridget, Carrie, and Me

2007-11-08T18:34:00.000-05:00

I was unwillingly inducted yesterday, after reading this article in CityJournal into what the author (more than a little condescendingly) termed the 'New Girl Order'--the ever-increasing numbers of single young women (or 'SYFs' as the author so belittlingly insisted on calling them) in their 20s and 30s who work, live alone, and marry and have children later and later in life, if at all. The author's main point was that you don't only find the Carrie Bradshaws and Bridget Jones of the world in the urban capitols of the Western world anymore--they've gone global, and are more and more to be found in Asia and Eastern Europe as well as New York and London.

Although one of the driving forces behind this demographic shift is the increasing number of highly educated women preparing themselves for lucrative careers through what a generation ago were prime marrying and childbearing years, the author still insists on repeatedly characterizing them as self-centered, materialistic, and shallow. Retail addicts and party girls more concerned with how their butt looks in their designer jeans than anything else. Take, for example, the following sample of quotations from the article:

In the past, women who delayed marriage generally lived with their parents; they also remained part of the family economy, laboring in their parents’ shops or farms, or at the very least, contributing to the family kitty. A lot of today’s bachelorettes, on the other hand, move from their native village or town to Boston or Berlin or Seoul because that’s where the jobs, boys, and bars are—and they spend their earnings on themselves.

Seek out the trendy shoe stores in Shanghai, Berlin, Singapore, Seoul, and Dublin, and you’ll see crowds of single young females (SYFs) in their twenties and thirties, who spend their hours working their abs and their careers, sipping cocktails, dancing at clubs, and (yawn) talking about relationships. Sex and the City has gone global; the SYF world is now flat.

And my personal favorite:

There’s much to admire in the New Girl Order—and not just the previously hidden cleavage.

There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding here about the reasons why the "Bridget Jones Economy" (as even The Economist has taken to calling it) has come about, a misunderstanding that somehow misses all of the things besides "jobs, boys, and bars" that have moved women out of the kitchen and into the university, the workplace, and her own home.

When I was in college our Student Life department organized a forum of women from the college staff and faculty to speak to female students about what has now become known as the 'work-life balance'--how to meet the challenges of both personal and professional life, more or less. I remember one faculty member--a very successful scholar who also held a prominent administrative position--being asked why she had decided not to marry. She answered, "I never decided not to marry at all--I just decided not to marry certain people." I thought she made a good point--the decisions we make in our lives are very seldom so explicit. She didn't wake up one day and set her course for being a successful, single woman in her 40s--she decided to go to this school, and to study that subject, and then to earn an advanced degree in this, and then to take this job in that city, and later that job in this one, and to buy this house and that car and to date this guy and not that other one. A trillion daily decisions bring you to where you are now in your life.

I am 26. A lot of friends my age are married, and more than a few have children, too--I am not married and do not have children. But that's not because I woke up one day when I was 22 and thought to myself, "I am more interested in shoes than I am in babies--I am going to stay single and move to where the jobs, boys, and bars are so I wear low-cut shirts, have killer abs, and flirt while I drink cocktails." I have, however, followed where my education, my career, and my personal affinities and inclinations have taken me--because I'm pretty sure that's more or less how one makes one's way through the world when one is free to make those decisions for oneself (which I am, but which countless generations of women before me were not).

Does the 'New Girl Order' have as much to do with a generation of self-centered and hedonistic women coming into their buying power as it does with a generation of women being confronted with more freedom, opportunity, and choices than women have ever had before?

Cake for the Hungry

2007-11-06T08:29:00.000-05:00

As part of my service pledge to my church this year, I am volunteering twice a month at a night shelter downtown. Sometimes I'm helping prepare dinner for a group staying the night, sometimes making bag lunches for the guests to take away with them in the morning, and a few times bringing my sleeping bag and spending the night to take a shift as a sort of watch-person.

Occasionally in highschool and college I would volunteer to prepare and serve a meal at a homeless shelter. So when I signed up for the meal preparation, I thought I had an idea of what I would be called upon to prepare. Stew of some kind seemed likely. Spaghetti, also a usual suspect. Macaroni and cheese, mixed greens salad, lots of Costco frozen dinner rolls and those crusty brown mystery caseroles were all expected fare. But when I was exchanging emails with some of the other people on the team for the first dinner we're preparing this week, I was asked to make dessert. I was informed that the guests go crazy for cake and ice cream. So last night I whipped up three giant Texas sheet cakes with homemade chocolate frosting (courtesy of ...yet another great recipe by The Barmy Baker) and picked up a couple gallons of ice cream.

Maybe Marie Antoinette wasn't so far off after all...

Dylan Days

2007-11-05T10:54:00.000-05:00

For reasons that remain somewhat mysterious to me, this week I have been on a Bob Dylan bender. Actually, it's probably not all that mysterious--I caught a bit of that Martin Scorsese bio-documentary on PBS the other night, No Direction Home (which is great, by the way, I highly recommend it). And I have been transfixed by the press photos for the new Dylan biopic, I'm Not There ever since they started appearing last year. But it's the early Dylan I've been playing over and over again, the Dylan of that very first album from 1962 (where he looks like he's approximately six years old on the cover) and The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963).

"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" (from the second album) has been a favorite of mine for a long time, but one particular line from it keeps running through my head: "I'll know my song well before I start singin'." The Ph.D. is a long season of preparation, and I think I find this idea encouraging in that context--when I start tallying up the years I've spent in (and money I've spent on) preparing myself for this career path, at least I can comfort myself with the idea that I know my song pretty well (assuming someone hires me to sing it, that is...).

The Toes of St. Petersburg

2007-11-02T08:25:00.000-04:00

If you ever need a good excuse for getting a pedicure (and who really needs an excuse for that anyway?), just run a marathon. It is hard to say what I was looking forward to most: crossing the finish line after 26.2 miles, or having human feet again.

I am a creature of habit (that's an understatement) and I like things a certain way (translation: I have borderline obsessive compulsive disorder). It drives me crazy if my bra and panties don't match each other. My belt must match my shoes, and my shoes must match my bag. And for the duration of the sandal-wearing season, I wear only pale pink nail polish on my toes, because a more dominant color would be sure to clash should I decide to wear something maroon or red. And don't even get me started on matching toenails and fingernails (neutral hands ONLY).

But now that sandal season and the marathon are over I am free to test drive my new favorite color in the OPI rainbow: "St. Petersburgundy". Normally I stick to the classic reds during the winter months ("I'm Not Really A Waitress" and "Kennebunk-port" being two of my stand-bys), but I am completely mesmerized by the Eastern mystery and slight suggestion of Communism in the deep, rich "St. Petersburgundy." I wonder if it will make me want to wear furs, eat caviar, play chess, or poison ex-spies with radioactive polonium-210...

How does she do that?

2007-11-01T11:10:00.000-04:00

A belated thank you post, dedicated to dear friend and blogger, scout. She very generously allowed my very uncrafty self to participate in her recent autumn swap. I knew at the outset that I was only going to be embarassed by having to send her whatever meagre handmade thing I could clumsily fashion with yarn and a crochet hook, but I so desperately wanted one of her beautiful book frocks (see picture below) for my very own that I was willing to risk humiliation.

Running around at the last minute to assemble my contribution to the swap, I stuffed the striped legwarmers I had made, a jar of peach butter from the farmer's market ("wrapped" in a plastic supermarket bag), a used paperback book, and a hastily scribbled note into a postal service mailer, crammed in a wad of bubble wrap, and sent it on its merry if somewhat pathetic way.

And a few days later I received a lesson in the art of packaging in the mail. A simple brown box, carefully labelled with a typewriter-style script. Inside, carefully swaddled in shredded brown paper, I unearthed autumnal treasure after autumnal treasure: skeins of organic yarn and thread in the colors of autumn leaves, a bouquet of number two pencils, a wooden apple, a miniature globe, two lovely little prints from what appears to be a French children's alphabet book, a few leather buttons, a moleskin journal, a collection of autumn-colored fabrics gathered together with ribbon and acorns, a packet of chai tea, and--a book frock of my very own!--in which I found a copy of The Golden Compass (and some bookmarks from the best bookstore in the whole wide world, Powells). It was literally breathtaking. So lovely, in fact, that I have tried my best to preserve its beauty as it originally arrived, and keep the box sitting on my desk so I can peek into it periodically and be comforted by its thoughtful and artistic charms.

How does she do that?

C'mon, Get Happy...It's Halloween!

2007-10-31T09:20:00.000-04:00

Oh, the allure of the meme. Ten things that make you happy, stat. (Courtesy of misshope.)

1. the J.Crew catalogue
2. the gurgling sound of the coffee pot brewing in the morning
3. autumn
4. new running shoes
5. sitting out on porches, decks, and patios
6. a good bottle of wine
7. the beach
8. bookstores
9. my dog
10. the feeling of having accomplished something.

A voice from the past on my walk with the dog this morning: Jack Prelutsky, children's poet par excellence. We had a cassette tape of his Halloween poems when we were kids that we used to listen to (ie, torture our mother with) for months leading up to Halloween. Today is the child's dream of a Halloween--clear, crisp, and just beginning to turn gold, orange, and red. And running on a continuous loop in my head is:

It's Halloween! It's Halloween!
The moon is full and bright
And we shall see what can't be seen
On any other night.

Skeletons and ghosts and ghouls,
Grinning goblins fighting duels,
Werewolves rising from their tombs,
Witches on their magic brooms.

In masks and gowns
we haunt the street
And knock on doors
for trick or treat.

Tonight we are the king and queen,
For oh tonight it's Halloween!

With verbal pyrotechnics like that, is it any wonder I decided to become a literature professor?

I think tonight I am going to sit out on my deck (5), with my dog (9), and a good bottle of wine (6), to pass out candy to all of the skeletons and ghosts and ghouls who are haunting the street tonight.

Happy Halloween!

The Character in the Mirror

2007-10-18T10:38:00.000-04:00

The online version of the New York Times Book Review has just taken on a great new project. It's called the Reading Room and it's basically an online panel discussion on a different 'great' book every month. The panel is carefully chosen by the moderator to represent a variety of bookish perspectives, and so far I have very much been enjoying reading them write about their first selection, Tolstoy's War and Peace. I think next time I might try to read along with them.

In a recent post, one of the panelists related an anecdote about how once on her Facebook page she had asked the question, "Which literary characters do you most identify with, or which remind you most of certain friends?" Apparently there was one friend who bore a remarkable resemblance to Prince Andrei from War and Peace (hence the anecdote), and it surprised her how many of her friends could accurately guess the identity of the Price Andrei-double.

I have been scanning my shelves and turning the pages of my mind, but this is a tough question to answer...is there a literary character you recognize as your double? Is there someone you know who reminds you of a literary character?

Gladys Saves the Planet

2007-10-17T08:00:00.000-04:00

Our region of the country, like several others, is embroiled in a serious drought. Smaller towns throughout the state have already exhausted their water supplies, and now experts are predicting that our city will soon have the distinction of being the first major American city to discover what happens when 4.5 million people run out of water.

I grew up during a record-setting seven years of drought in California, and when people first began talking of a similar situation here (where it was still raining multiple times a week) I thought they were crazy. But as things started to turn brown, I started to see their point--'dry' is a relative term.

My doubt of the seriousness of the situation soon turned to irritation with the efforts being taken (or, rather, not taken) towards conservation. The governor's advice for weathering the drought? PRAY. (What do you expect from a guy whose legal name is 'Sonny'?) Praying is all good and well, but not exactly a comprehensive conservation plan. And as I counted the numbers of residents conscientously watering the sidewalks with their errant sprinklers and hoses on my runs through the city, I started to understand that the governor isn't the only one who just doesn't get it.

As the situation has grown more serious, this has started to change. The local news and papers try to impress us with the idea that some things might be more important than having the best lawn on the block. But this morning I was walking the dog through our neighborhood and started talking to an elderly woman who was watering the flowers in her front yard using a large yellow plastic tub. She explained to me that she sets it in the bottom of her sink when she washes dishes and collects the excess water so that she can use it to water the plants. She said she has rigged up the same type of thing in her shower. I was so impressed with her simple yet effective efforts to conserve and recycle water--one little old lady quietly doing her part to save the planet she has called home for seventy-odd years.

Way to go, Gladys!

Cracking the whip

2007-10-11T13:11:00.000-04:00

Last week, in a fit of dissertation and self-frustration, I emailed my advisor. I don't email her very often--she's a busy woman, and is teaching a full load this semester while she also organizes a conference, sits on the board of a major grant-funding organization in Europe, runs a special program of study at our school, directs half a dozen dissertations, and raises two young children. I try to only bother her when I really need her help, but I had finally convinced myself that I had finally reached that point.

The gist of my email was this: please, for the love of God, kick me in the pants.

One of the reasons I like my advisor so much is that she is so laid-back--she prioritizes things well, doesn't sweat the small stuff, and manages to keep a cool and level head in the face of all of the blood-pressure raising pettiness and politics of academic life. But laid-back is not what I need right now. I need a drill sergeant. I need a noisy, bossy, demanding bitch to set standards and deadlines and expect me to meet them. And then get in my face and let me hear about it when I don't.

So this is what I asked her if she could be for me. And she kindly and generously agreed.

Part of this agreement is having bi-weekly meetings to discuss parts of my dissertation that I submit to her ahead of time (the great beauty of this plan being that, you know, I'll have to, like, WRITE something to be able to give to her). We met for the first of our crack-the-whip meetings yesterday afternoon. And it was tough, but very good for me. I walked out with a long list of things to do, in addition to a conference abstract to concoct, and a complete change of plans for my next chapter. I had explained to her that one of the reasons why I needed her to crack the whip for me was because my own deadlines seem to mean nothing to me anymore, no matter how deeply I mean to honor them when I set them for myself. She said she understood. "The kiss of death," she said, "is when you finally realize that all deadlines are self-imposed."

I wish I'd never figured that out. I think that's when that lovely motivational fear and I parted ways for good.

Dear Santa (2007, Vol. II)

2007-10-07T09:36:00.000-04:00

Consider this to be the cookbook edition of my Christmas list.

Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon. By culinary legend Claudia Roden. One of a small group of people responsible for expanding the horizons of cuisine in the UK in the last forty years or so. You might have read the fascinating profile of her in the food issue of The New Yorker a few weeks ago. I have the new edition of the book that made her famous, The Book of Middle Eastern Food, and it is amazing--in some ways, more like culinary anthropology and history than a cookbook. (Note to Santa: I would also be happy to have her
Book of Jewish Food or Picnics, and Other Outdoor Feasts).

The Perfect Scoop, by David Lebovitz. (To go with the paraphernalian's Christmas Wish List 2007 (Vol. I).

Tartine, by Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson. I am sure most of this is beyond my pastry expertise, but you have to have goals. (And I prefer goals that involve chocolate, sugar, and delicate doughs.)

Playing tag.

2007-10-05T07:24:00.000-04:00

Oh, dear. Besides phone tag (and chasing my dog) I haven't played this game in a long time...but my college buddy Grete (of paraphernalian playlist #1 fame has tagged me for this little questionnaire on her blog. I have to admit, Grete, I normally eschew such things--this is how much I love you...besides, it's Friday, too dark out to start running, and too early to start working on my dissertation.

4 Jobs I've Held:
1. barista
2. "direct lending operations intern" for a national sub-prime lender that is no longer in business (let that be a lesson to all who would try to keep me in a cubical)
3. fire station manual re-writer
4. a variety of library-oriented jobs: outdated pamphlet organizer, manuscript arranger/describer, digital text proofreader, opener of giant crates containing dust, mouse poop, the largest collection of 20th century poetry in English in the world (and a lot of old pictures of naked hippies)

4 Films I Could Watch Again and Again:
1. Amelie
2. Gross Pointe Blank
3. Rear Window
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

4 TV Shows I Watch:
1. The Office
2. Friday Night Lights
3. America's Test Kitchen
4. The Sopranos (I know it's over, but I'm a little behind the times)

4 Places I've Lived:
1. Northern California (born and raised)
2. Santa Barbara
3. for one semester apiece in college: Wenham, Massachusetts and roundabout the UK
4. Atlanta, Georgia

4 Favorite Foods:
1. peanut butter
2. sushi
3. guacamole
4. pina colada smoothies from Blenders in the Grass (everyone who reads this and lives within a reasonable distance of Blenders, please go have one...and drink it in remembrance of me)

4 Websites I Visit Everyday:
1. gmail
2. J. Crew
3. NYTimes Online
4. my blog reader

4 Favorite Colors:
1. green ("heather moss")
2. red ("garnet")
3. orange ("roasted pumpkin")
4. brown ("espresso")

4 Places I'd Rather Be Right Now:
1. London
2. Butterfly Beach in Santa Barbara (preferably with a pina colada Blenders in my hand...)
3. western Ireland
4. Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon

4 Names I Like But Wouldn't or Couldn't Use Myself:
1. Niamh (you want to torture a kid? name her something that's spelled like that but pronounced "Neeve")
2. Robert (there's something so distinguished about that name, but it's just been overdone, hasn't it? plus, I live in the South)
3. Finn (son of a friend)
4. Charlotte (the name of my mother's despised college roommate--I have been forbidden to ever give this name to anyone or anything)

And my 4 blogging friends that I'm tagging are:
1. misshope
2. sillymisserica
3. scout. (you're way too cool for this though, aren't you Andrea?)
4. G-Funk Hughes

madness.

2007-10-04T09:47:00.001-04:00

This remarkable picture, of poet Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" to a crowd in Washington Square in 1966, accompanies an article in today's New York Times about how some of the recent plans to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the court ruling that found the poem of "redeeming social importance" and not obscene were sidelined by fears that the FCC would fine a radio station playing Ginsberg's reading of the poem for indecency.

1957...2007...hmmm. I think we should all read "Howl" today. Preferably aloud. And loudly.

Collecting Hallelujahs

2007-10-02T19:22:00.000-04:00

I have had a lot of collections in my day. It seemed to be important to various members of my family that my brother, sister, and I all had some kind of a collection begun for us and regularly added to at Christmas and on birthdays and other special occasions--something unique and (somewhat) valuable that could be prized and proudly displayed in our homes for the rest of our lives...the rest of our lives beginning approximately "when you're old enough to appreciate it" (still waiting...but, shhh! don't tell my aunt that the crystal animal figurines are still in a box in a closet in my mom's house and 3,000 miles away from being proudly displayed in my home).

It seems to be some kind of strange genetic condition. My aunt collects spoons (yes, spoons)--the other aunt, glass paperweights. My mother collects things related to cows (cows?), as well as artisan nutcrackers. My sister collects versions of Cinderella, and my brother, X-Men comics. It's a family affair.

Some of my other collections have been of my own devising and development but not all have survived through the years. After Barbie, My Little Ponies, Carebears, and Pound Puppies fell by the wayside, they were replaced by a gallery of pictures of Jason Priestley carefully cut from the pages of Teen Beat, years and years of back issues of Seventeen, and a seemingly endless rainbow of scrunchies. All of this besides, of course, the soccer trophies and dance recital ribbons and spelling bee certificates.

With every time I have moved, I have become more and more loathe to accumulate all the stuff that seems inevitably to mean less and less to me the longer I hang on to it. A yearly purge ensures that the t-shirt collection doesn't get too far out of hand. And every once in a while I even (gasp) take a box down to the used bookstore (for store credit, of course, but still...). But I still find the old impulse rising to the surface every once in a while--as when I began my beer t-shirt collection last year (currently numbered at five and growing), and, well, right now.

I am innaugurating a new collection. I have been thinking about this one for a while, but I'm finally ready to commit. I am going to start collecting covers of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah.' The immortal version, of course, is Jeff Buckley's--and some (I know who you are!) will think less of me for not stopping right there and leaving it be. But even though I also am hard-put to believe that anyone could eclipse The Great One in this, there are still already a few others who have proven themselves capable of doing it up right: I am thinking specifically of Rufus Wainwright and Brandi Carlile (the latter's which, if you've never heard a woman's voice singing 'Halleljuah' before, offers up an entirely new way of hearing the song).

So help me out here, folks--who else do I need?

Eavesdropper on the run

2007-09-30T09:19:00.001-04:00

Sometimes I think I could conduct a very interesting sociological study based only upon the bits and pieces I have seen and overheard while out running. Yesterday I completed a 20-miler on my (long) road to the marathon, and here's just a short list of the things I saw and heard:

3 conversations between middle-aged couples that included the phrase "when the kids are in college"
1 conversation between a middle-aged couple that included the phrase "when the kids are finished with college"
2 conversations between two women about an absent third woman's cheating boyfriend
1 conversation between two women about an absent third woman's cheating husband
2 conversations between male cyclists including the phrase "piece of ass"
5 (yes, FIVE) conversations between male cyclists on the topic of stock options
3 conversations on the topic of the merits of various cell phone plans
1 conversation conducted in (what I think was) Italian in a very strong Southern accent
2 conversations on the topic of recent visits to OB-GYNs
3 large, burly men walking a small, fluffy dog
1 large, burly man carrying a small, fluffy dog
1 purple princess (age approximately 3 and a half years)

(I must have somehow missed all the discussions of art, music, literature, and international politics.)

Addendum: I just remembered--2 women sporting platinum blonde mullets (how could I have forgotten that!)

Last Friday

2007-09-28T16:42:00.000-04:00

There must be something about the last Friday in September around here. Some kind of a law or mandate that requires the weather to be perfect--deep blue skies, not too warm and not too cool, a pleasant breeze, and a soft, sunny, leaf-dappled light. It was exactly like this on the last Friday in September last year. And the only reason I remember that is because on the last Friday in September last year, I took my oral exams, and today I am looking back on one year of being A.B.D. (Hopefully, there won't be too many more to come...)

I have been in graduate school for a little over four years now, but it's been a year and a half since I was a student in a class, and a little over a year since I was the instructor in one. I don't have reading assignments, or seminar papers, or presentations to complete--I don't have papers to grade or lectures to prep or Blackboard sites to organize--and these things haven't been part of my life for a while now. I do have a part-time job, and a generous fifth-year fellowship that will allow me to teach just one upper-division course next semester, and next week I am starting a month-long seminar on classroom technologies. This time next year I should be going on the job market...but as I have yet to publish anything or turn in even a single chapter of my dissertation, that seems as laughably far away as it seems frighteningly near. Except for the fact, of course, that the fright is woefully missing.

I like deadlines. I like pressure. I do my best work under the gun, when I can feel someone's breath on my neck and can see the clock clicking down to zero. I am happiest when my plate is just a little too full. And even though a dissertation and the challenge of getting a decent job in an increasingly competitive academic market are certainly generous heapings on anyone's plate, motivation to plug away at these things seems ever more hard to come by. Looking back on more than twenty years of being a student, I ask myself what kept me working hard enough to get me where I am today--first, the need to get into college (and find a way to pay for it); then, the need to get into grad school (and, again, find a way to pay for it). Once I was in grad school there were more classes and papers and exams and a long list of requirements to fulfill. Now I am so close to finally getting to move on to the career for which I have spent all these years in training, and it feels like I'm running out of steam. Just when the stakes are at their highest, when what I risk is not just not getting into the school or program I want, but not getting a job, and having all of these years of work and debt and sacrifice be for nothing.

There is plenty in all of this to make a person reasonably afraid. But I'm just...not. I don't know if it's burnout or apathy or what, but unless I find some other way to light the fire of motivation beneath me soon, there's no telling how many more anniversaries of being A. B. D. I'll be commemorating.

What comes after the fear is gone?

Top Tens: Living Alone

2007-09-26T22:25:00.000-04:00

I think my habit of making Top Ten lists is a hangover from when it was one of my monthly jobs as an editor of the highschool paper. Today I offer:

TOP TEN THINGS TO LOVE ABOUT LIVING ALONE (because I just can't get over how much I love it...and how much I missed it.)

1. No need to dirty a glass when you want a drink of milk (or a bowl when you want ice cream).
2. You can cry over dumb things on tv (like the cheap emotional trick in every episode of Grey's Anatomy) and not feel dumb yourself.
3. Having your taste be the only taste that needs to be considered (that's always true, of course, but sometimes not recognized).
4. You can set world records for longest shower without guilt (except for maybe environmental...).
5. Nudity.
6. Talking to your dog like he's human (once again, without feeling dumb).
7. Not having to deal with the raised eyebrows that come of eating the Bad Day Dinner (goldfish crackers and beer).
8. Only having guests when you want them, and being able to have them whenever you do.
9. Justin Timberlake dance parties (my best moves only come out when I'm alone).
10. Uninterrupted mid-day couch naps.

Dear Santa (2007, Vol. I)

2007-09-23T15:04:00.000-04:00

Introducing the Paraphernalian's Christmas Wish List and the Cuisinart ICE-30BC Pure Indulgence 2-Quart Automatic Frozen Yogurt, Sorbet, and Ice Cream Maker. My desire for this kitchen appliance has been intensified by my taste last week of brown sugar and sour cream ice cream at a local restaurant I visited with Gay Boyfriend. (It was so good I called the next day to ask the pastry chef for her recipe...Ben, Jerry: if either of you are reading this, take note).

You too, Santa.

Coquillettes au Comté et Pousses d'Epinard, or Mac & Cheese for Grown-ups

2007-09-22T18:45:00.000-04:00

Clotilde Dusoulier is one of my heroes. I first learned of her and her remarkable little blog while at home last Christmas and reading that everyready fount of wisdom, the 'Scene' section of The Sacramento Bee. She is a 28 year old Parisienne who went to college at Berkeley and lived in the Bay Area for a few years after graduation working in the software industry before moving back to France. She is not a professional chef or a professional food photographer, and she explains that she originally began her foodie blog, Chocolate & Zucchini only to give her friends a respite from her incessant chatter about cooking and restaurants and places she had discovered to buy various delicacies. The rest is the history of an internet success--the blog garnered fans, the newspapers and magazines came calling, and then came the book contract. Her first book, Chocolate & Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen was published earlier this year and is a delight.

If you become a regular reader of her blog, as I have, you will doubtless become jealous of her beautiful Parisian life, as I have, and wish to be transported bodily to France, and, if possible, to her kitchen, to her regular circuit of fantastic restaurants, markets, and stores, and to her lovely circle of family and friends. But I think the thing I have come to best appreciate about Clotilde's blog is that she is 28. And women in their 20s can be very much the same everywhere--most of us don't cook for large families, most of us are busy young professionals and students without a lot of time and money on our hands, but many of us would nonetheless like to eat healthfully, conscientiously, and, well, graciously, if at all possible. And while most of us probably don't throw our doors open to the cullinary wonders of Paris every morning, we could all probably manage to take a page from Clotilde's new book and eschew the boxed, frozen, or canned dinner for something a little more...well, a little closer to 30, and a little farther from the dorm and microwave (and if you still have a cabinet full of Rice-a-Roni and Kraft Mac, yes, I'm talking to you). So while much of French cooking remains beyond my meagre reach (and budget), Clotilde's advice is almost always simple, achievable, and delicious.

For the past few weeks Clotilde has been on vacation, but she did not leave her fans in the blogosphere dark--she resurrected some recipes from her ample archives for re-posting. Since I am a relatively recent reader of her site, these were as good as new to me, and I made one of them tonight--Coquillettes au Comté et Pousses d'Epinard. Another wonderful thing about Clotilde's blog is that while she writes in English, she titles her recipes in French, so even something as otherwise unimpressive as "Elbow Macaroni with Comté Cheese and Baby Spinach" (the literal translation of the last)sounds--in the way of all things French--infinitely more sophisticated. But seriously--it's really just mac & cheese for grown-ups, and it took all of ten minutes to throw together. So the next time you find yourself tired and hungry and cooking for only one or two, add it to a glass of decent red wine, throw out the boxes of Kraft, and..grow up.

Risky.

2007-09-18T16:18:00.000-04:00

I don't tend to think of myself as being a risk-adverse person. I like trying new things. I like learning new things. I like to gamble. I like driving fast. I like roller coasters and white water rafting and someday I will own one of these (sorry, Mom). At the same time, I never trust my instincts, I always do my homework, and I floss every night (seriously--every night). So while I wouldn't say I'm risk-adverse, I'm not exactly a risk-taker, either. Although I've definitely gotten more daring (or possibly more stupid...but probably just more apathetic) as I've gotten older.

So I guess the bottom line is that when I take risks, they're calculated, and based largely upon the weighing of what I have learned from prior experience against what I might learn from the experience at hand. I don't think this makes me very different from most people--I think most of us calculate our risks, we just calculate them in different ways.

Some people are better at risk-taking than others. And by 'better' I don't mean simply that they are good at shrugging off and moving on after the losses that come of risking, but that their risks pay off more often. Which until recently I thought was just plain old luck/karma/being smiled upon by the universe, but I have started more and more to think has something to do with the quality of their calculation process or the skill they apply to it...someone suggested to me recently that the more often you take risks, the more often they pay off--the simple rules of probability at work. But I don't think it could possibly be as easy as that. Because it seems like for some people, the more risks they take, the more used they get to being poor/embarassed/rejected/injured. They might be sliding down a slippery slope, or they might be headed for one hell of a jackpot, it's hard to say. I think maybe what I once thought was luck and then thought was skill at risk-calculation might actually be an intuitive gift. Some people just know when to jump.

But if you know you're not one of those people, shouldn't you eventually figure out you're better off with your feet on the ground?

Reset.

2007-09-15T09:13:00.000-04:00

The posts have been coming few and far between of late, for many reasons. The least of these is certainly not that I have been battling a nasty little end-of-summer head cold that has sidelined me from marathon training, compelled me to sleep much more than I am usually inclined, and contributed to an overall brain fuzziness that does not lend itself to writing or reflection in any form (witness also, besides this blog silence, progress made on dissertation in last five days: zilch). I think this is my body's way of telling me that running 16 miles on a Saturday morning and then spending Saturday night dancing and drinking PBR in a smokey dive bar until 3am is not an advisable training practice (noted).

So this weekend, as my head slowly drains and I clean up after a blurry and largely unproductive week, I am feeling the need to rest and collect myself a little bit, in hopes of starting over on Monday. Fortunately, in my marathon training schedule, this past week was supposed to be a 'rest week,' so my low mileage hopefully won't set me back too far from my rapidly approaching 26.2 mile goal. Also fortunately, I still have three days to meet the next rapidly approaching page qouta for my dissertation. And, in my last bit of good fortune and rapid approach, the signs of fall are everywhere this weekend, with temperatures not rising far into the 80s, a quieter light everywhere, and my air conditioner turning itself off of its own accord for the first time since I moved in (surely the most promising sign of all).

I am off now to walk my dog, run my errands, clean my attic, and reset my life. I offer you my best wishes that Monday finds all of us well.

Goodbye, Madeleine.

2007-09-08T16:19:00.000-04:00

My friend Melissa's blog brings sad news of one of her fellow Smith alums today: Madeleine L'Engle passed away last night at the age of 89. While I loved A Wrinkle in Time (with which I am about to go curl up once again in tribute), and the rest of the trilogy, and all of those strange and lovely novels about the Austins, and her novels for adults (The Small Rain, Certain Women, The Crosswicks Journals), I think probably the book of hers that had the greatest impact on me is Glimpses of Grace. It's a collection of her thoughts and meditations (and some poems) gathered in a kind of daily devotional book to be read over the course of a year. In spite of my degree from a Christian college, all of the courses in doctrine and bible and apologetics, the years of mandatory chapel attendance, those summers at bible camp and in youth group and more Sundays in church than I count, I still think that it may be that little book that has taught me more about what it means to live as a person of faith than any thing else. It seems to right to honor a woman who has left an indelible mark on so many readers, young and old, and so below is the passage included in Glimpses of Grace for today, September 8:

Mercy and Truth Have Kissed

All I have to know is that I do not have to know in limited, finite terms of provable fact that which I believe. Infallibility has led to schisms in the Church, to atheism, to deep misery. All I have to know is that God is love, and that love will not let us go, not any of us. When I say that I believe in the resurrection of the body, and I do, I am saying what I believe to be true, not literal, but true. Literalism and infallibility go hand in hand, but mercy and truth have kissed each other. To be human is to be fallible, but it is also to be capable of love and to be able to retain that childlike openness which enables us to go bravely into the darkness and towards that life of love and truth which will set us free.

Therapies.

2007-09-06T13:02:00.000-04:00

I have long had a problem with self-medication. Not with pill-popping or shooting up or tipping the bottle a few too many times, but with a nonetheless dangerous substance--shopping.

As with most things, I blame my father for my retail therapy problems. He was always of the mindset that if you could buy yourself a smile on a bad day (or a good one, for that matter), you should. This is part of the reason why he ended up bankrupt at 45, and part of the reason why I should be as careful about my own tendency to indulge my insatiable desire for books and shoes and J.Crew sweaters as he should have been about his for Cadillacs and big houses and expensive suits.

I am coming down off of a truly horrible weekend. I won't burden you with the details, but let's just say that at points I actually wondered if it was really happening, it was so nightmarish. And of course, what's the first thing I think of to do when I'm feeling the need to pull myself up out of feeling down? That CD I've been wanting. That green dress that has my name on it. Those ridiculous red patent leather moccasins with which absolutely nothing will go, but to which I am powerfully and inexplicably drawn...

It's not like I don't have other coping mechanisms. I have watched five episodes of The Sopranos in the past three days. I have been devouring E. F. Benson's Lucia & Mapp novels. I run and do yoga and play with my dog and bake cookies and see my psychologist and try to get enough (but not too much) sleep. I talk to my mom on the phone and go to church and have dinner with friends and paint my toenails and throw impromptu iPod dance parties in my living room. Sometimes I even work. And even though I know my bank account is grateful for my efforts, I can't help but wonder if it's as grateful as I would be to have that new tote bag or that beautiful collection of Irving Penn still lifes...

Beautiful things are powerful things. And their power can be associative. It's a sad fact that sometimes relying on things for comfort is a safer bet than relying on people. But depending on aything is risky, and this is why self-medication of any sort requires careful attention to moderation. Which I guess means that buying one pair of shoes on a particularly bad day might be okay...but buying three probably is not.

Lessons.

2007-09-04T09:49:00.000-04:00

Things I learned this weekend, in no particular order of significance or chronology:

1. No one is as sane as one thinks one is.
2. Hope is fast, powerful, and dangerous.
3. There's no such thing as a sure thing.
4. The universe might hate you, and there's nothing you can do about it.
5. When in doubt, keep your mouth shut.
6. Dancing is strong medicine.
7. No one really wants what one thinks one can have.
8. Pessimism is underrated.
9. So is cynicism.
10. You can hate the game, not the player--but at the end of the day, the player chooses his game.

Light in August.

2007-08-31T12:02:00.000-04:00

It's coming...I can feel it. Fall is almost here. The Heatwave from Hell broke early this week, and we've had several days of misty mornings, afternoon thunderstorms, and mercifully cooler temperatures. Even though 'cooler' is still in the high 80s and low 90s, it's amazing the difference a few degrees can make--in my mood and general attitude towards life perhaps especially.

The temperature and the trees are still telling us it's summer, but a few mornings ago I turned a corner while I was out running and suddenly noticed a certain slant of light...the kind of light that makes you want to get out a sweater and buy school supplies and go to a football game. Or carve a pumpkin or bake something with apples or find some leaves to jump in.

I can hardly wait.

Dragons.

2007-08-29T13:02:00.000-04:00

I was in a giant box store a few weeks ago when I overhead a little boy (I would guess probably age four or five) very earnestly inform his father, "Daddy...daddy! The only thing I'm afraid of in the entire world is dragons."

My first thought was, Whew, kid. Are you ever in for a nasty surprise! But then I thought about all of the things I was afraid of when I was about his age: that deep dark farthest corner of the backyard at night, a huge and horrifically ugly yellow teddy bear that was given to me by friends of my parents, Michael Jackson in the "Thriller" video...and I thought--this may be the bravest little boy in the entire world! Step down, Harry Potter--we have a successor to the throne! You're only afraid of dragons? You aren't frightened by sixth grade bullies, the things that live under your bed, or the neighbors' doberman? Impressive.

The terrors of the backyard, the ugly yellow bear, and Michael Jackson have subsided in the past twenty years or so--but have been replaced by other and more persistent phobias. Disease, violent crime, war, and natural disaster claim thousands around us daily--but what are the threats of cancer, murder, and flood compared to: what if I linger in the land of ABD forever? Or what if the only job I can get is at Southwestern Kansas Polytechnic Community College? Last night my dog slipped his leash and ran down the street, heedless to my call, and my heart pounded like someone had put a gun to my head...because what would I do without the mutt who chews up my stuff?

It seems like it's mostly the things we don't fear that usually sneak up quietly and scare the living daylights out of us anyway, so maybe I should start keeping one eye open for dragons...

paraphernalian playlist #3: Hail Mary, or "Like The Cure, but with more cowbell."

2007-08-28T07:56:00.000-04:00

Mary is one of those people you can easily get confused by thinking too hard about how exactly you know her, so eventually you just stop and be glad that you do. The short story is that she is my Gay Boyfriend's soon-to-be ex-roommate--soon-to-be ex because she is also soon-to-be starting a master's program at Harvard (that's right--HARVARD). But that's only one of many reasons to be impressed by Mary. Besides being wicked smaht, strikingly beautiful, and quick to put anyone at her ease, she is one of those super-savvy music people who somehow always manages to know about the latest, greatest thing years before anyone else does, who has tickets to the show months before anyone even knows they will want to be there, and whose iTunes you always secretly want to get ahold of so you can plunder it for your own collection. So here's your shot. Paraphernalian playlist #3 is courtesy of Mary's outstanding taste in music. (Confession: I have already been enjoying it for about a week now. You will love.)

While I would never say that music has defined my life (in the way that some television shows have) it has certainly been a decent accompaniment to my nearly 25 (gasp!) years of life. My personal soundtrack is often all over the place, but I have a special preference for things that are moving and catchy, and a little fun as well. What follows is a mix of favorite new discoveries and some older Mary standbys. I hope you enjoy!

1. "Fake Empire" The National

It's possible I like this song because it reminds me of The Crash Test Dummies (deep voice twins), which reminds me of listening to music as a kid sitting on the floor of the living room, but it's also a great song. I love the build-ups and culminations that occur throughout.

2. "Jesus, Etc." Wilco

It took be several listens to Wilco to understand what all the fuss was about. It was this song that converted me, and is now one of my favorite songs. It's haunting and beautiful, and feels at once uplifting and crazy depressing. His got a way of singing that sounds so casual and relaxed, but still so enchanting. It is awful to say that I miss him on drugs?

3. "Someone Great" LCD Soundsystem

If a robot wrote an indie rock love song I imagine it'd sound exactly like this.

4. "Like U Crazy" Mates of State

This song gave me the idea of making an "I Like You" mix for my boyfriend at the time who "really liked me." In retrospect it's no wonder the relationship didn't work out. At least I still enjoy this great song though. It varies between a simple, catchy and upbeat sound and some darker, angrier moments—wait maybe that's a better description of that relationship.

5. "It's Not Worth Fighting" Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin

An adorable young band from the Midwest that is destined for modest indie-world success. Poppy and earnest, yet with a surprisingly mature sound as well that proves they are more than just a great name.

6. "Tonight I Have To Leave It" Shout Out Louds

This song sound like The Cure, but with more cowbell. A great song that will get stuck in your head and make you feel content and empowered all night long. I don't know much from this band, but want to hear more.

7. "All Fires" Swan Lake

A Canadian indie-rock supergroup? What's not to love?

8. "Quelqu'un M'a Dit" Carla Bruni

'Cause everyone needs a song in a foreign language to feel well traveled and cultured. Also, Bruni is proof that sometimes models-turn-musicians are actually really good. She's got a beautiful wispy voice and a great upbeat folky acoustic sound.

9. "I'd Rather Dance With You" Kings of Convenience

This song's got a fresh and fun beat and that poppy lyrical style that seems to be as natural to Scandinavians as blond hair and socialized healthcare.

10. "While You Were Sleeping" Elvis Perkins

A front-runner for my favorite new music of 2007. He's the orphan of an actor who died of AIDs and a mom who died in 9/11, so who can blame him for his tragically melancholy music. His whole album, Ash Wednesday, is a great listen. Recalls Bob Dylan's "Time Out of Mind" to me, if Bob Dylan had a pretty voice.

What's mine is mine and what's yours might be mine, too.

2007-08-27T18:52:00.000-04:00

I have noticed (yet another!) frustrating character flaw in myself of late. Why is it, that when we (I am going to make the hopeful presumption that I am not alone in this particular flaw...) make the acquaintance of someone we like, and then discover something we have in common with that person (hobbies, taste in music, food, movies, overpriced hair products, etc.) the experience of finding that something is shared is enjoyable, fulfilling, sometimes even a little bit exciting...but when an affinity is discovered with someone we don't like, the experience is irritating, angering, and sometimes creates a strange sort of territoriality around the shared thing/activity/experience? I find myself becoming unreasonably jealous in such situations (i.e., "but that's MY favorite tv show/band/wine/author/color!"), and am tempted to take one of two equally ridiculous tacks: 1) renounce the favored thing/activity/experience forever, because now it has been tainted by this new knowledge of affinity with the despised one and is obviously neither as wonderful or as enjoyable as it once was or 2) exponentially increase my interest/knowledge/enthusiasm for the shared thing/activity/experience, to somehow prove (to whom? not sure...) that MY devotion and connection to the thing/activity/experience is somehow more authentic and passionate than that of the other person. Why doesn't it work the other way, and knowledge of shared interests with someone I don't like makes me consider how I may have been too quick to judge, because someone with so much in common with ME couldn't possibly be all that bad?

(Don't worry, Dear Readers--I regularly see a licensed mental health professional.)

Atta, Poet!

2007-08-22T11:12:00.000-04:00

Check out my dear friend, Hannah Faith Notess's latest accomplishment: a poem published on Slate!

paraphernalian playlist #2: Songs from Silly Miss Erica

2007-08-20T10:48:00.000-04:00

My leetle seester taught Pre-K at a daycare center during a few summers when she was in college. Some of her young charges there affectionately dubbed her "Silly Miss Erica," and the nickname has stuck. While I can vouch for her ability to be seriously silly at times, I can also assure you that Silly Miss Erica takes her vocation as a third grade teacher at an extremely disadvantaged public school in Phoenix even more seriously than her car dancing, love of Cary Grant films, and careful diet of iced mochas and Cheez-its. Erica has wanted to be a teacher for as long as I can remember, and she has pursued her career with a passion heated by the fire of a thousand papier-mache suns in a third grader's model of the solar system. She is the undisputed queen of read-aloud, the bearer of the Yardstick of Power*, and Twinkie the Bunny's faithful keeper (puppetry being one of her many skills). You can read about all of her adventures on her blog, Actress/Teacher. And you can do so while listening to the following sample of her favorite songs (most of which, I can't fail to notice with my Big Sister's ever-watchful eye, are indicative of her unfailing idealism, romanticism, and refusual to be cynical--who'd believe she's related to me?)

1) “Everybody Knows” by Rufus Wainwright: Here is another wonderful sampling of Rufus’ strange, brooding voice as he covers Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows.” Personally, I had never heard the song before I heard Mr. Wainwright’s version, but I could have easily mistaken it as written by Rufus himself. Rufus tends to go with the more poignant of lyrics, either about the promise of love, the disappointment of reality, or some mix in between.

2) “Brighter than Sunshine” by Aqualung: A few years ago, this song frequented the pop radio stations, but I think it should be preserved for longer. Whenever I hear it, I feel my heart lifted a little.

3) “Anna Begins” by Counting Crows: One of my ultimate favorites! Do I need to really go over the beauty of this classic Counting Crows song? I guess the premise is falling in love with someone with faults and charms (does love exist in any other form?), with my favorite line being “Every time she sneezes I believe it’s love…”

4) “Mother,” written by John Lennon, covered by Christina Aguilera: Before you vomit over the inclusion of a Christina Aguilera song, this is from the “Instant Karma: Save Darfur” album of covered Lennon songs. The lyrics, classic Lennon, are profound and rather sad, and somehow Ms. Aguilera’s voice matches perfectly.

5) “Frontin’,” sung by Jamie Cullum: Jazzy Jamie Cullum redoes Jay-Z’s “Frontin’” in his usual classy style so you would have no idea that the song had such off-color origins if you weren’t listening closely. Fun and charming.

6) “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room” by John Mayer; Mayer claims a beautiful metaphor for the ending of a relationship. I know he has unfortunate connections with the radio and teenagers’ affections, but he truly is poetic when given a decent chance to be so.

7) “Reading Time with Pickle” by Regina Spektor; Spektor, possibly familiar to most because of her song, “Fidelity,” has a smoky, earthy voice. Her songs are odd: different from most, because of the frequent changes in pace and odd contortions of her voice she uses to express emotion. This song begins with her talking about picking up a jar of pickles and making “eye contact with a solitary pickle.” I see it as an ode to loneliness, but I would love to hear other interpretations.

8) “For Me, It’s You” by Train; A calm and delightful ballad about not having all the answers, but still understanding the human tendency to love. I don’t enjoy every Train song, but this particular one has undeniable charm.

9) “The Story” by Brandi Carlile: Her voice reminds me a lot of Melissa Etheridge. This one has a very pleasant melody that can make you think the song is about you, no matter how relevant it may actually be. Don’t you love songs like that?

10) “Not Ready to Love” by Rufus Wainwright: Can you tell where my devotion lies? Somehow, Rufus and I are kindred spirits. It was very difficult to choose only two of his songs from his long history of wonderful melodic poetry and comedic irony. “Not Ready to Love” is from his newest album, “Release the Stars,” and I see it as a tribute to fear, commitment, and the fear of commitment (or the commitment to fear?). All the same, it’s lovely.

*Note from Silly Miss Erica: The yardstick of power is actually a yardstick painted by Brent the Shuttle Driver. I use it as a pointer and call it "The Yardstick of Power" because 1) it's powerful and 2) it grants confidence to anyone who weilds it. I know, you're impressed.

Happiness is in the eye of the beholder's politics?

2007-08-19T15:15:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week I came across this article in City Journal by Arthur C. Brooks, and the following quotation in particular caught my eye:

...conservatives tend to be happier than liberals today. The 2004 GSS showed that 44 percent of people who identified themselves as “conservative” or “extremely conservative” were “very happy” about their lives; only 25 percent of self-identified liberals or extreme liberals gave that response. Conservatives believe that they live in a more promising country than liberals do, and that makes them happier.

"Believing that they live in a more promising country," in the context of this article, roughly translates into believing that with enough hard work and some persistent tugging on one's bootstraps anyone can succeed. There is also some kind of "trickle-down happiness" in play with this idea--apparently, seeing others succeeding creates a more positive outlook on one's own life because one recognizes the potential for one's own success in that of others (i.e., "if they can do it, so can I--let me tug a little harder on my bootstraps and see what happens.")

Is it just me, or does this idea seem to reinforce political stereotypes? Liberals really are "bleeding hearts"--they make themselves miserable considering and caring about the strife and struggles of the poor, disadvantaged, and downtrodden--while conservatives really are cold, hard-hearted and happily shopping for luxury goods to encourage the poor, disadvantaged, and downtrodden to hurry up and work harder so that they can join in the fun of buying a third yaht?

As much as I would love to believe that conservatives are happy because they are willfully oblivious to the pain and suffering of the world around them, and that my fellow liberals are the only ones with their eyes truly and honestly open, this seems a little too neat for my tastes. But maybe I'm one of the 25% of happy liberals, and my conservative friends (just kidding--I don't have any conservative friends!)--my conservative acquaintances are some of the 46% of properly miserable conservatives.

But wait...something's not quite right about that either...

The sound of music

2007-08-17T11:10:00.000-04:00

I learned a lot of things in my brief (and hopefully never to be repeated) return to living with roommates last year. I cannot live with people who: 1) spend more than an hour in the bathroom every morning, 2) think beige constitutes a color scheme, and 3) don't listen to music. This last was particularly confounding for me, as I grew up in a house with lots of music, and it's been my habit to have something at the very least quietly playing in the background most of the time when I am home. It should be noted that except on very rare occasions, the music I choose to listen to is not death metal or Broadway showtunes--I have wide-ranging but fairly unobtrusive musical tastes (witness the Death Cab for Cutie I'm listening to while writing this post). But besides the Top 40 radio they listened to in their cars, my roommates were not music-listeners, and except for whatever I had plugged into with my iPod, ours was a music-free (and, suffice it to say, largely fun-free) house.

Since moving out of there, one of the many aspects of my new place I have been relishing is the fact that I can return to a more active musical life. The attic is alive with the sound of music--and a healthy amount of NPR. It sounds trite, but it really is remarkable how transformative music is to one's mood, thought-life, and the general atmosphere of a space. Feeling quietly domestic and introspective? Throw on a little Emiliana Torrini or some Keren Ann. Need a pick-me up? Try a new favorite of mine, The Format, or possibly something from Mates of State (which, as a friend very aptly described this band, sounds like a high school cheer squad singing the soundtrack to an 80s brat pack movie). Indulging your inner indie-rock nerd? How about The Shins or The Decembrists? Moody much? There's always Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, or the soundtrack to The Hours (all, as another friend calls it, "suicide music"--but don't let that deter you). And for a lazy morning of sitting around drinking coffee and reading The New Yorker, there's nothing quite like The Bill Evans Trio's Sundays at the Village Vanguard...

All of this musical rambling reminds me: volunteers for paraphernalian playlist #2, please leave a comment to this post. My attic needs you.

Tips for the Poor Baker

2007-08-15T08:56:00.000-04:00

Ever since The Barmy Baker began chronicling her recent adventures in sourdough, and since good sourdough bread can be tough to find in the South, and also since my grandfather has just gifted me with his KitchenAid stand mixer, I have been thinking about expanding my novice baker's repetoire to include bread. One reason I have held off on this--besides the fact that I didn't have a mixer with a bread hook, and that it has been so ungodly hot that the idea of turning on the oven makes my stomach turn--was because I knew that the best way to get a really good crust was with a baking stone. I also knew from my mother's purchase of a baking stone many years ago that I would probably have to save some of my meagre grad student stipend for a little while before I could afford to purchase one. But when I was discussing this with her on the phone the other evening, she pointed me in the direction of this interesting blog post. Apparently you can purchase unglazed quarry stone at places like Home Depot and Lowes in squares to fit the size of your oven rack, and create a baking stone for less than $5. (Note: It's important that the stone be unglazed so that you don't inadvertently give yourself and your loved ones lead poisoning with a loaf of your delicious and deadly bread.) The stone works in exactly the same way as the expensive baking stones you can purchase at specialty cooking stores, and when a few years of use causes them to crack, it will pain you a lot less to replace $5 in Home Depot building supplies than something from your bridal registry.

(More evidence that Moms really do know everything.)

Singing Soprano

2007-08-13T09:21:00.000-04:00

It’s not unusual for me to arrive late to a party, and ever since the advent of Netflix and the distribution of television series on DVD, I have developed a tendency to voraciously consume an entire season (or three) of a television show that has been very popular but to which I was more or less oblivious while it was actually airing. This is due to a combination of factors: my inability to accurately recall television schedules, my growing intolerance for commercials, and the increasing number of quality shows that are produced only for subscriber channels that my grad student stipend won’t stretch to allow me to purchase.

Most recently, my obsession has been for the recently concluded HBO series, The Sopranos. Now I finally know what all of the talk for the past—what? eight?—years has been about. This show is incredible—an intimate portrait of a family, an incisive portrayal of contemporary America, an extremely smart satire of organized crime. I have always loved gangster and mafia movies, but I think it's the humor and pathos of this show that I find most charming. Most mafia movies are also about things like honor, loyalty, family, and, in the case of American mob movies, the forging of these values within immigrant communities. The lawlessness is tangential, and the violence is often emblematic of the cruel struggle of day-to-day life in this country. But whereas films like The Godfather or The Untouchables are colored by history and nostalgia, The Sopranos holds up the mirror to the New Jersey crime family in all of us: contemporary Americans struggling through day-to-day life in the early twenty-first century. Okay, so most of us might not run illegal drug and gambling rings, extort money from street thugs, or need to use the silencer on our concealed weapon--but there are lots of ways to be dishonest, manipulative, and hurtful without breaking the law, or anyone's kneecaps. And we all know how tough family life can be.

J. Crew, or What To Wear While You're Reading

2007-08-10T12:24:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I am known for having a bit of a J.Crew fetish. It all started years ago, when they were one of the few companies making really good (read: not cut for the cast of "The Golden Girls") jeans in a tall size that was actually tall enough for me, and it just sort of exploded from there. I obsessively check the website for sales and sold out items I have my eye on, and I can usually accurately identify J.Crew items I see on the street by offical style and color name (i.e., "Did you see that cable-knit dream v-neck in heather fawn?"). On most days, the only thing I'm wearing that's not from J.Crew is my underwear. It's bordering on unhealthy, I know. But I'm a preppie geek, and I'm not ashamed (much).

I have been glorying in the new fall catalogue. J.Crew practically specializes in fall attire, and every year the fall catalogue is like my porn. And this year, it's even more heady than usual for me, because they shot on location in Boston, with absolute mountains of books for props. Books and J.Crew? It's like chocolate and peanut butter, Jim and Pam, gin and tonic--some things are just meant to be together.

I didn't even think to question the utter perfection of this editorial decision until I read this post at another academic blog I sometimes peruse, Ferule & Fescue. For this writer, the books become both a feminist and a bibliophile issue. I, personally, am still torn--while I see her point about the way the books are used in the pictures, I'm not sure what difference it really makes for the purpose of a catalogue. Catalogues sell clothes. If you want insight, critique, or sensitive cultural commentary, pick up an academic journal or the Times Literary Supplement or something. These are two very different kinds of projects. Is it wrong to be pleased by eye-catching arrangements of pretty clothes and pretty books in a combination that makes the life of the mind look sexy? Or--more to the point for me personally, perhaps--is it wrong to want to wear the pretty clothes while you write your dissertation about the pretty books?

I am still deciding what I think about this. In the meantime, don't bother me--I'm spending some time with my new J.Crew catalogue.

The Literary Crush

2007-08-09T12:02:00.000-04:00

I came across this interesting little piecewhile procrastinating on Slate the other day. I'm almost always interested in surprising and unlikely literary influences, especially influences on those people who aren't necessarily members of an explicitly literary profession themselves, but I thought this idea of the 'literary crush' was both amusing and apt. I can think of at least a dozen books and authors I have had a serious crush on over the years. Just like a real crush, remembering some of them now causes me to shake my head and ask myself what I could have possibly been thinking to dote and obsess over something like that...while others are still shaded in lovely tints of rose, causing me instead to smile nostalgically and remember sweet reading memories...sigh...

Embarassingly, I have read Erich Segal's Love Story far too many times to count, and for years reading Judy Blume's Just As Long As We're Together was my last-day-of-summer-vacation tradition. I obsessively read ALL of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novellas during three months in seventh grade, and I still think of the first summer after graduating from college as "The Summer of Annie Dillard."

(Feel free to whisper your own literary crushes in the comments to this post.)

Code Red.

2007-08-07T17:02:00.000-04:00

It’s August again, and every year I find myself in the South in the month of August I kick myself repeatedly for not remembering to leave in July and not come back until September. No amount of air conditioning is a match for the oppressive combination of heat and humidity that has descended and refuses to budge until it has squelched the will to live from every living thing suffering beneath it.

As I’ve mentioned before here, I grew up in Northern California, and far enough inland that highs well into the 100-teens were not an unusual meteorological event. Far more unusual was any kind of precipitation between the months of June and September—summer was an uninterrupted string of hot and sunny days. Hot, sunny, and bone dry, I should say—if the thermometer read 112, it felt like it was 112. (This “heat index” business still seems to me deliberately misleading.)

This year my hatred for the Southern summer has been intensified by an alarming spike in pollutants compromising the air quality, and for the past several days the local news media has been referring the unhealthfulness of the air as a “code red”—so unhealthy that we are discouraged from being outside at all. Not that anyone in her right mind would want to be outside if she could help it—knowing that you’re inhaling a hot ozone soup only adds to the allure of the great outdoors at this time of year.

It hasn’t even been August for a week yet, but I’m ready to declare my very own “code red”—until this weather lifts, it is probably unhealthy to be around me, as my general crankiness and dissatisfaction with life seems to increase in direct proportion to the heat index. You can take the girl out of California…but you can’t expect her to like it.

Skillet wishes and cast iron dreams.

2007-08-03T15:56:00.000-04:00

On the way home from South Carolina today I passed:

1 tent revival
3 rodeos
5 handpainted signs for boiled peanuts
2 Cheerwine trucks
about a million Bojangles, Waffle Houses, and Mrs. Winner's
...and 1 LODGE CAST IRON SKILLET OUTLET, where I bought this outstanding example of authentic American craftsmanship:

I have long lusted over my mother's ancient (and giant) cast iron skillet, perfectly seasoned and imminently useful, and now I have my very own! I think it's the perfect souvenir for a little Southern road trip, don't you?

A word to the packrat.

2007-08-01T19:45:00.000-04:00

Something important I have learned since becoming an academic researcher: you never know what might end up in a library someday, so be careful what you write down, what you send through the mail, what you leave on your hard drive, and whatever junk you tend to hoard in your bookshelves and desk drawers. It could end up in someone's dissertation someday. Because even if you aren't famous for anything in particular, someone you know could be, and your letters describing your sexual escapades and the pornographic joke gifts you send them could end up in Box 47, Folder 18, just waiting for an earnest young graduate student (such as myself) to rummage through them one day while in search of nuggets of pure truth.

(Not that it's not fun to find that stuff. I've learned a lot of limericks that way.)

Elevators and other Amusements

2007-07-31T16:50:00.000-04:00

Another exciting discovery, this one while riding a very slow elevator in the inn where I am staying in Rock Hill. Idly reading the elevator inspection certificate (which, if I were going to read it at all, I should have probably done before committing myself to riding this particular elevator...), I discovered that elevators in the state of South Carolina are regulated by a state "Office of Elevators and Amusement Rides."

I have not yet decided whether I find this bit of information comforting or not. Should I feel more or less safe, I wonder, knowing that my elevator is just as safe as the tilt-a-whirl at the carnival temporarily installed in the grocery store parking lot down the road?

Hunting the college

2007-07-30T21:03:00.000-04:00

I am spending this week in the small Southern town of Rock Hill, South Carolina, conducting dissertation research for my first chapter. By some strange stroke of luck (we'll go ahead and call it that), the papers of the particular author upon which my first chapter is focused are located at a teeny private college just a four hour drive north of where I live. And even though I have lived in the South for a just a week short of four years now, even though I have only been visiting Rock Hill for a little over twenty-four hours, even though I have yet to explore much of what this bustling metropolis I am sure has to offer, I have already learned so much. Here's just a sample:

-While on the last leg of the journey to Rock Hill, I began to doubt the validity of my Mapquest directions and pulled into a gas station to make sure I was still on the right track. A woman standing in line next to me at the counter overheard me asking how to get to the college. "You huntin' tha college?" she asked me. It took me a second, but I answered in the affirmative. "Jes folla me--easier to show ya than tuh tell yuh." So I followed her little blue Jeep (and the hand dangling a cigarette out of the driver's side window) on a twisting, turning path straight through the main gates. Lesson #1: "hunting" is a synonym for "looking." Lesson #2: It's usually easier to show ya than tuh tell yuh.

-An "ABC store" is a "package store". A "package store" (for all of my Californian friends) is a liquor store (for my first few months as a resident in the South, I thought that "package stores" were places where they pack and ship things...like very seedy UPS Stores). Neither ABC stores or package stores are open on Sundays (a girl can dream). Lesson #3: A den of vice by any other name...is still closed on Sunday.

-Any respectable household in a small Southern town must subscribe to at least three newspapers: 1) the local rag ("The Rock Hill Herald") 2) the paper of the closest large city ("The Charlotte Observer") 3) the national publication that best represents your political viewpoint (which here appears to be mainly "The Wall Street Journal"). Lesson #4: No matter how many papers a respectable household subscribes to, they're all probably still sitting on the curb in their plastic wrappers at 8am on a Monday morning, so runners should watch their step.

-There are about 50,000 people in the greater Rock Hill area. There are five bookstores in the Rock Hill phone book (one of them the campus bookstore, and two of them selling 'books and supplies for the Christian family'). There are six pages (front and back) of places to get your hair cut, colored, or styled. Lesson #5: Good hair is worth a thousand words, and looks best in church.

-"The war" refers not to our country's current military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Persian Gulf War, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, or either World Wars. Lesson #6: Wounds that don't heal eventually become living, breathing Ken Burns documentaries.

-It's not as hard as you might think to be related to the chair of the history department, the girl's softball coach, and the mayor, because they could all be the same person. Lesson #7: When in doubt, assume you're related. Lesson #8: Don't sleep with strangers.

Fear and the loathing in the library

2007-07-27T10:59:00.000-04:00

A few years ago, when I was a little bit younger and considerably more naive, I had a very educational experience in the library. A fellow English Ph.D. student several years ahead of me in the program took advantage of my aforementioned youth and naivete to pull a significant scholarly discovery out from under me and publish it as his own. I did my best to chalk it up as a lesson learned in academic dishonesty and being careful about who you trust--a lesson that became easier to swallow once this fellow student finished his dissertation, graduated, and left for his first tenure-track position a couple of states away, and I didn't have to look at him as often anymore.

Until yesterday. That's when he materialized in my little corner of the library standing next to one of my committee members, who told me that my nemesis had just been named an editor on the project collecting the prose of one of most important poets of the last century. One of the poets involved in the scholarly discovery of a few years earlier. My favorite poet. The project I have been manager of for the past year and a half. And would I please make sure he has everything he needs to get started?

I grinned and bore it as well as I could, babbling about teaching loads and book contracts and database passwords until he asked the question I had been dreading: "So what's your dissertation about?"

I felt like he had just asked me for my social security number, ATM code, blood type, and most embarassing memory in those five words. The idea of blatantly lying flashed briefly through my head, and was followed immediately by the idea that I could deny having a dissertation topic at all. This also seemed an unlikely tack. Why, oh why had I not anticipated the likelihood of such an ambush and months earlier formulated an answer specifically designed to throw known idea theives off the scent of my beloved topic???

Since I didn't have such a brilliant device on hand, I did my best to give him as vague and hopefully uninteresting a summary of my dissertation topic as I could, and then quickly changed the subject. But I was instantly filled with fear that in a few weeks time I will once again hear through the grapevine that my idea will soon be published as someone else's in the leading journal in our field. And my long-latent hatred for this man was rekindled, along with the resentful suspicion that none of this would have happened if I were not quite so young or quite so female and academia were not still such a sexist old boy's club in so many of its dusty corners.

My dissertation topic is great. I love it, and I'm proud of it, and I think it's going to be a really wonderful project. I should be able to share it and discuss it with other people--even people in my field--without fear that it will be stolen from me because someone thinks that being a young woman makes you a sitting duck for the patently ambitious (who are usually also the patently unscrupulous). It is hard to cultivate an atmosphere of open intellectual exchange and generosity when you're harboring such fears and resentments, but I worry that this may just be the cost of doing business at any level, even in the ivory tower.

At least this time around I can comfort myself with the knowledge that there are three tenured faculty members and multiple copies of my dissertation prospectus floating around as proof that this idea was mine first. I just hope he doesn't claim ignorance of this when he publishes an article on it in a few month's time...

paraphernalian playlist #1: Grete's Sounds of Summer

2007-07-24T20:04:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago I announced that the paraphernalian would be hosting my own version of iTunes (and Paper Cuts) celebrity playlists, where the celebrities from my life share a list of their own favorite songs along with some commentary about their choices.

Meet my friend, Grete. We met on our very first day of college, when we moved into the same section of Clark Halls. Another fellow English major, and later a fellow England Semester survivor, Grete has always been someone who stands out. Some would say it's because of the incredible virtuosity of her hair cuts and colors, the collection of interesting piercings she has had over the years, or her affinity for sporting skater/punk-inspired attire in rooms otherwise filled with Abercrombie and Fitch. I personally think it has more to do with the fact that she is someone who thinks, feels, and believes deeply, who isn't afraid to speak her mind and heart, and who never passes up a chance for adventure, or a chance to bust a move (and, seriously--this girl can dance). Besides being all of these things (and a seminarian to boot!) Grete has always been someone who is paying attention when it comes to music, and I knew she would be the perfect person to inaugurate this little blogging project. So, without any further ado, here's Grete's paraphernalian playlist:

According to iTunes, if I had 12 days straight to do nothing but listen to music non-stop, I still would not be able to get through my entire music collection. Now that you know this very important (possibly disturbing) fact about me you’ll understand why I’ve had to decide on a very specific play list rather than taking a stab at the virtually impossible task of sharing my ‘all-time favorites.’ These songs are a taste of the cream of the crop of what I’m listening to this summer. I’ve tried to represent artists that I’m excited about right now and to which I would highly recommend you incline your ear sometime soon. Enjoy!

1.) At the Bottom of Everything, by Bright Eyes. I only recently began exploring what Bright Eyes has to offer—another one of those too-many-people-like-them-so-I’m-over-it situations. I was missing out. Conor Oberst’s strikingly flat and shuddering voice combines with instrumentals that range from honky-tonk slide guitar to classic symphony (they’re playing with the LA Philharmonic in September, incidentally) to sound a desperate recall of the tech-savvy, war-crazed, voyeuristic lens we’ve all been handed here in States.

2.) Come Thou Fount, by Sufjan Stevens. “Come Thou Fount” is probably the most ordinary track you’ll get out of Sufjan, and it’s certainly not the reason that most people adore him, but his angelic voice and compositional genius aren’t lost on this my favorite of hymns.

3.) The Way I Was Made, by Griffin House. Griffin has turned out to be possibly the best musical recommendation I’ve ever received. At different times, Griffin reminds me of Ryan Adams, Mason Jennings, or Bob Dylan, to name a few. This song reminds me of Mason. It’s upbeat and clever, and when Griffin really gets into it you know without a doubt how naturally talented he is.

4.) Moses, by Patty Griffin (also Missy Higgin‘s cover). Patty’s talent never ceases to amaze me. I’m always a bit surprised at her ability to affect me, and “Moses” is an appropriate song for a woman craving commiseration. Although my good friend Monica would disagree, I think Missy Higgin’s cover proves a match for the original.

5.) Orange Sky, by Alexi Murdoch. “Orange Sky” happens to be one of my favorite songs of all time. I’ve enjoyed every Alexi song that I’ve ever heard, but this track is particularly refreshing because contains a sense of hope and communicates true love in a sense that is uncommon to much of contemporary folk

6.) The Poison, by Pedro the Lion. There are times when Pedro’s music steps a little too far into the darkness for my taste, or sanity. “The Poison” is depressing, no doubt, but the lyrics are some of his most solid poetry. It’s a good song with which to get some frustrations out, at the top of one’s lungs.

7.) Over and Over, By Katie Herzig. Katie’s another new discovery for which I will be eternally grateful to a certain Presbyterian from Pennsylvania. I’m very picky about female vocalists, and I really enjoy both Katie’s voice and her songs. I also recommend the track “Charlie Chaplin.”

8.) Burn One Down, by Ben Harper. I’m from Northern California, and it’s summertime. What else can I say?

9.) Oh It Is Love, by hellogoodbye. I wish all of hellogoodbye’s music were in the style of this track. Unfortunately, they’re pretty pop and certainly not acoustic, so don’t be fooled. This song, however, is delightful in its sweetness and simplicity; and (let’s admit it) encourages the possibility that one day I’ll have someone for whom I can make a mix with this song on it and mean it.

10.) Long Lost Brother, by Over the Rhine. I adore almost every track from this band, but this is the one I’ve been listening to lately. Karin‘s voice is sensual with more than a hint of lament. Like Pedro, Sufjan, and many others, OTR explores the nature of faith in the midst of a world that is more disappointing and difficult than the Church often cares to admit.

Ten good years

2007-07-23T18:57:00.000-04:00

I had an interesting conversation about marriage on a date the other night. Marriage might seem like an odd topic for a first date (and it is), but it's all a matter of context, right? Because, you see, my date was married. (Somewhere in Northern California, my mother just passed out...) My date was a soon-to-be-divorced father of two young boys. And, as a friend and I determined the other day--if you're not an asshole, you're almost entitled to two dates. If you're not an asshole and you're even remotely interesting, you could ostensibly get three. So, seeing as this guy showed no signs of being either an asshole or boring, I decided to overlook the kind-of-still-married issue and go out with him.

As you can imagine, someone in the midst of working through a divorce has some pretty strong opinions about marriage. And as someone who just watched her own parents go through one, so do I. But my companion for the evening had an interesting take on the matter: "All anyone can reasonably hope for, I think, is ten good years together," he said. "Ten years is a long time, and ten good years--that's an incredible gift. Things change. People change. And sometimes you have to move on for the sake of everyone involved and just be grateful for what you had while you had it--glad that you had it at all."

I thought it was a pretty equanimious statement for someone who is still paying a lawyer to arrange for alimony payments and custody arrangements. And it started me thinking about all of my friends who have gotten married in the past few years, and the not-a-few couples I know who have been doing the married thing for more than a few years now and are struggling to hold it together. As a former evangelical and a Christian college graduate, I have been well-trained to react against such an idea--marriage is supposed to be for life. And if you change or your spouse changes or things in general change, that's just tough--"for better or worse," and sometimes it's the latter, and that's what you sign on for. Exceptions might be made for infidelity or abuse, but that's about it.

I don't toe quite such a hard line as I used to, for a lot of reasons. But I was still a little bit surprised by this whole "ten good years" idea. I mean, obviously, he's right--ten years is a long time, and ten good years is an amazing gift. And people and things do change, and sometimes people are better off apart than together. But I guess my biggest question for this idea is: what happens if your ten good years don't come consecutively, in a row, like ducks? What if you have a few good years, and then a few crappy ones? Does that mean you call it off? Or what if you have ten good years and then someone loses his job or you lose a child or someone gets sick and things aren't so great anymore? Does that mean you're done and that's just the way it goes? Thanks for the good times, but I'll see you around?

I agree with him, but I also don't. Maybe its an evangelical hangover, or my inability to recognize when my persistence is a vice (in more ways than one) and I should let things go and move on. Or maybe I still have more idealism left in me than I realized. I don't know. But if I ever do get married, I want more than ten good years. But I also want more than ten bad ones--I want a whole life together. And lives should last more than ten years, and they should ride the ups and downs in whatever combination--or denomination--they happen to come.

My qualification to all of this is that I am young and stupid, have never been married and have no plans to be. All of you marrieds can correct me if I'm wrong...in the meantime, I'll keep riding the fence (and I'll probably go out with him again).

One of these things is not like the other...

2007-07-22T10:04:00.001-04:00

A quotation in this week's New Yorker caught my attention this morning. It was in an article on Asma Jahangir, a leading human-rights attorney in Pakistan. The quotation was from a man named Abdul Rashid Ghazi, one of two brothers who leads a group called Lal Masjid, a radical group of Islamist militants who lead various Taliban-like squads of vigilantes in Pakistan.

"The attack on Afghanistan caused a lot of resentment, and in the name of the war on terror many innocent people were killed. In the name of 'enlightened moderation' vulgarity has been promoted--women running in marathons, brothels, pornography in CD shops...All these things have been accumulating in the minds and hearts of the people of Pakistan."

Porn stars, prostitutes, and women runners. All vulgar threats to the sanctity of a culture. (Is it the shorts, I wonder?)

Lost on purpose

2007-07-19T09:40:00.000-04:00

One of the best parts about moving is getting to explore a new neighborhood, and I love to explore while finding new running routes. But being a woman, this being a city, and safety being an inevitable issue, sometimes I like to have a little bit of an idea of where I'm going before I head out the door. It also helps to have an idea of your mileage--for training purposes, and also so you don't accidentally find yourself lost and completely out of steam too far from home.

This is why I love the USATF Running Route Website. The USATF partnered with the folks at Google to produce this amazing little mapping tool. Just enter your zip code and you can choose between a map or a satellite image and then plot a course. You can save your routes for later reference, or search for routes others in your area have saved to the website. You can even add water stops to your route or keep track of the changing elevation (so you don't accidentally plan a run that's entirely up-hill). This website also comes in handy when you're travelling and want to go for a run in an unfamiliar area.

Happy trails.

What a difference a day makes

2007-07-16T11:57:00.000-04:00

Well--a rainy day, a carload a day for two weeks, many trips up and down a steep flight of stairs, a moving truck, lots of boxes, two large men, and a new apartment. (Clarification: the two large men were my movers.) Just about everything that could go wrong, did--from lost truck reservations to couches that wouldn't fit through doorways to stuck bedframes that refused to come apart--but I survived the move. So did my dog. And last night was our first night in our new home.

This move has been like coming out of a dark room into broad daylight--sometimes you don't realize how dark it is inside until you come into the sun. I think traveling can do this, too--leaving home helps you see it more clearly somehow. I knew my living situation for the past year was not a good one, but I don't think I realized just how miserable I was until I woke up this morning--to the inevitable day-after-moving mess, in a sleeping bag on a matress on the floor, with a mile-long list of things to do today--and felt like I had just been handed a check for a million dollars. Born again. A new lease on life (and on a little attic apartment).

I think tonight I am going to sit on my new deck in one of my new deck chairs, light a citronella candle, pour myself a glass of wine, and celebrate many things. That the last year of my life is over. That I have a new place. That this new place has a deck up in the trees. That I am the proud owner of two deck chairs. That it's summer. That I still have two and a half months to produce the first chapter of my dissertation.

And that one of my movers was able to pull my bed frame apart so that I have a place to sleep tonight. (It's the little things that count.)

Walking the walk

2007-07-13T17:32:00.000-04:00

A strange encounter of the neighborly kind this morning. For those of you who have never visited me in the 'home' (I use the term loosely) I will be moving out of in...39 hours (not that I'm counting or anything), you can't help but notice the giant white mansion with a bright red front door next door. I call it 'Tara.' It's usually surrounded by a fleet of shiny BMWs. The couple who live there are those cool empty-nester types--they own leather jackets and have hip haircuts and chic sunglasses and whatnot. All I know of them has been gleaned from watching them come and go for a year and eavesdropping on the incessant cell phone conversations the husband has in the front yard (from which information I suspect, but have been unable to confirm, that he is involved in the production of the television show, Prison Break. Either that, or he's actually involved in breaking people out of prison). Anyway...

I was walking down the driveway and up the street to where my car was parked this morning just as my neighbor was walking down his driveway with his two whippets (yes, whippets). I think in the whole year I have lived here I have probably exchanged no more than half a dozen words with this man, in spite of seeing him almost every day, usually more than once. ("Hi." "Good morning!" "Nice day"...okay, no more than five words.) This morning he calls out to me, "Now that's the walk of a confident woman!"

First off, I don't think he was being sarcastic. Secondly, just to clarify, this morning I was wearing my running-out-the-door-late, have-packed-everything-I-own-already, it's-July-in-Georgia finest of flip-flops, jeans, and a tank top. If ever I am going to be accused of walking tall and proud, it's going to be when I'm wearing my red leather Power Pumps, not my $12.50 J.Crew rubber sandals, you know what I'm saying?

So the comment puzzled me. Not least because I feel like I've spent the better part of my lifetime being lectured on not slumping and standing up straight ("head up, shoulders back, chin up, chest out!" as my father would so helpfully remind me) and being proud of the height I have been curs--I mean, blessed with. But when you're a six-foot-tall thirteen-year old girl at the junior high dance, doing anything to intentionally make yourself look taller is simply contrary to common sense, and I spent years cultivating a slouch that would shave as many inches as possible off my apparent height.

Maybe it was realizing that slouching really does make you look fat, or maybe it was growing into the body I had at thirteen, or maybe it was just growing up, and realizing that there are some things you can change about yourself and some things you can't--and making yourself shorter can only come with age or some pretty serious amputations. However it happened, a few years ago I forewent my flats-or-kitten-heels-only policy. I started working on my posture both inside and outside of the yoga studio. I dated a former professional basketball player, for the first time felt short, and discovered that all things are relative. And then there's just something about having to stand up in front or a roomful of 18-year old kids to talk about Chaucer that seems to encourage the adoption of a more authoritative carriage...

At any rate, something has shifted. On the inside, I almost always feel like the flip-flop wearing loser schlepping down the road fifteen minutes late for where she's supposed to be, but it turns out that maybe even gravitas is something that can be faked until it's made. Or maybe that's all it really is anyway.

Now that's a scary thought...

The Wonderful World of Waugh

2007-07-12T17:30:00.000-04:00

A recent book review in The New Yorker has reminded me of an author that I sometimes forget I love: Evelyn Waugh. His grandson, Alexander Waugh, has written a memoir of the past several generations of men in his family, Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family. It was this recent publication that was being reviewed in the article I read, but while I don’t have an opinion to offer one way or another about this book (it sounds pretty good, I guess—that’s about all I can say), I can heartily recommend the work of the author’s grandfather. ‘Tis the season for making book recommendations, I suppose, so I am going to jump on the beach/cabin/long-plane-ride summer reading bandwagon and offer up this suggestion of my own. If for no other reason than that I think I am not the only one who sometimes forgets how wonderful is the world of Waugh. I am currently making plans of my own to return there as soon as possible.

I first encountered Waugh a few years ago, while reading for my qualifying examinations the summer after my first year in grad school. A Handful of Dust(1934) was one of the novels on the 20th Century British reading list (attention Eliot-philes—that title is indeed a reference to The Waste Land), and I think many will agree with me when I say that it may have one best endings ever. Waugh is not an author I ever heard discussed or saw taught in college (one of the reasons why I suspect he might be new to some of you as well) and his discovery was a hilarious surprise. His stuff isn’t funny in the Monty Python/Fawlty Towers/Black Adder mode of British humor—it’s funny in the wickedly smart/painfully true/remarkably incisive mode instead. His specialty is satire, and his comedy is decidedly black. I followed my introduction to Waugh a little later with Brideshead Revisited (1945), and loved this even more than the first—its subject matter and setting reminded me more than a little bit of Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001)—but again, much funnier (or funny, period, since Atonement really isn’t at all…). When I return to Waugh this time, I think I might pick up his first novel, Decline and Fall (1928)…If anyone gets a wild hair and actually takes my recommendation, please do let me know what you read and what you think of it. I mean, eventually you’re all going to finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and need something else to occupy your time, right?

Soulless bodies and bookless rooms

2007-07-10T06:00:00.000-04:00

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” Cicero

Ever so often I enter someone's home for the first time, and ever so often that home makes me vaguely uneasy. Not a strange smell or a seizure-inducing pattern of wallpaper or a dead body tossed casually into the corner--nothing so obvious as that. It usually takes me a few minutes to put my finger on it, but eventually it dawns on me: "where are the books?"

Not everyone is a reader. I get that. And not all readers are book readers, and not all book readers are book collectors--I get that, too. And after spending the last week and a half hauling fourteen boxes of books across town and up a very steep flight of stairs, I am definitely sympathetic to the worldview of the non-collector. But for all of the back-ache and hernia-risk of moving my books, I would as soon leave them behind as I would my dog or my favorite jeans--maybe even less likely to do so.

Before you start picturing my shelves full of autographed first editions, I should point out that my collection (though extensive) is worth very little to anyone but me--I have more than my fair share of tattered Signet Classic paperbacks and used bookstore bargain table finds. After spending a couple years working as a graduate student assistant in one of the foremost manuscript, archive, and rare book libraries in the country, I have an idea of what makes a book valuable, and trust me, Sotheby's isn't lusting after anything I've got at home. I've turned the pages of a first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Joyce's Ulysses (sticker price on this last: a cool $80,000). I've touched the Hogarth Press first edition of Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations inscribed by the author to his first love, Emily Hale. I've flipped through Sylvia Plath's copy of To the Lighthouse in search of her scattered margin notes. The thrill of all of these for a bibliophile was intense, but I would be pressed to trade any of the above for the first broken copy of Anne of Green Gables that my mom gave me when I was seven, or the dogeared Go Down, Moses filled with the exclamatory notes of a freshman English major discovering Faulkner for the very first time. My books and I go back a long way, and I can follow my path through life by scanning the titles on my shelves. Trade the first volume of Auden's poems, handpressed by Stephen Spender and one of only seven copies in the world, for my 1989 Penguin paperback edition of Wuthering Heights? I would as soon trade my firstborn for a pack of Bubble-Yum.

A friend of mine, a fellow grad student who studies Renaissance drama, has been known to say that "Home is where the Riverside Shakespeare is." No matter where she goes, this doorstop of a book is the first thing to be unpacked. It's the same copy of the collected works that every English major in the country is forced to buy, but for her, it's a lot more than that--after so many years and so many readings and so many memorable discoveries, it's a friend. And maybe that's part of what Cicero meant--rooms without books are like rooms that have never been warmed by friendship or by love, and a body that had never been warmed by either of those would be at risk of being soulless as well.

As much as I am creeped out by bookless homes, I am sure more than a few people are creeped out by my home, where even the appliances are sometimes sized up for their book storage potential. I have heard tell of the hazards of having too much of a good thing...but never of the danger of having too much soul.

Guitar lessons at Knob Creek

2007-07-09T12:27:00.000-04:00

I made a deal this summer with a friend of mine who plays the guitar. He gives me a lesson in exchange for a bottle of whiskey. I think it's a pretty good deal. Especially since I am a notoriously slow student, and teachers who take me on out of the goodness of their hearts usually regret it and quit fairly quickly (this is what happened with chess, driving a stick shift, and tennis). This way, when I need a fifth lesson in tuning, I just pour my friend another drink and feel less guilty about the pain and suffering I am causing. His roommates on the other hand...well, I can't afford to keep all of them in whiskey.

A few nights ago we had another lesson. Sitting out on his rooftop deck overlooking the darkening street and yards below, he taught me my first strumming patterns and we practiced my first song--a very minimalist (i.e., two chord) 'arrangement' of Springsteen's "Stolen Car." A pretty sad song for a start--but it's just slow enough that I might actually get it. (And that my friend won't be an alcoholic by the time I've learned how to play.)

Spam didn't make it.

2007-07-06T19:52:00.000-04:00

So you think you're in good shape. You're young, you're fit. You're getting ready for your first marathon, for heaven's sake. When the trail guide categorizes the Tallulah Gorge as a "strenuous to very strenuous" hike you're not yet concerned. When you hear the words "suspension bridge," "scaling boulders," and "the steepest half mile of trail in Georgia" you have a quickly passing moment of doubt.

After descending over five-hundred steps into the bottom of the gorge, crossing a suspension bridge that swang beneath our feet, passing a young girl coming out of the gorge who appeared to be dying of a combination of dehydration and panic, and receiving a stern lecture on slippery rocks, crossing falls, and hiking in the treeline from a woman stationed on a wooden platform over cascading whitewater, I was beginning to understand that the trail guide wasn't kidding.

When I heard someone just ahead of me on the trail comment that they shot scenes from Deliverance in this gorge, I began to be afraid.

The first challenge of the hike my friend and I undertook today was to cross the river just beneath some moderately sized falls by jumping from boulder to boulder. Excuse me, I miswrote--wet boulder to wet boulder. Just ahead of us on our river crossing were a very old man wearing a "Spam" t-shirt, a slightly younger man, and two teenagers. If I was afraid for myself, I was terrified for ol' Spam. As all six of us paused after our slippery crossing before picking our way among the trees and boulders on the shore, Spam and his companions urged us ahead to lead the way. After we had clambered and slid over a bouldery mile or so of shore, their little quartet was no longer in sight behind us.

The highlight of the hike was just before our next river crossing, where there's a beautiful swimming hole lined with sheer rock walls just beneath something called Bridal Veil Falls, which at the bottom of its cascade forms a natural water slide that you can ride into the hole. After a sweaty and strenuous hike on a sticky July morning, nothing could be more welcome (except for maybe not knowing that the "very strenuous" part of the hike lay before us on the other side of another river crossing). So we paused to eat the lunches we had packed and then violated every swimming and eating rule on the books to strip down to bikini bottoms and sports bras (alas--I did not have the Confederate flag string bikini ensemble of one of the other swimmers) and go for a ride into the very cold water.

As we climbed out of the hole we encountered two of the youngest members of the group that had been coming down the trail behind us. The young man looked at me solemnly and said, "Spam didn't make it."

I should think not.

Even if Spam had made it to the swimming hole, there is no way he would have survived the part of the trail that came next--a nearly vertical quarter mile of rock climbing up the other side of the gorge. This was like all-fours, billy-goat style hiking, my friends. About half way up, my friend turned to look down at me and said, "I forgot to tell you that I brought you on this hike today as an elaborate metaphor for the dissertation writing process." I summoned what little oxygen I had left in my lungs to ask her if it would still be an elaborate metaphor if I fell backwards down the gorge face to my death. (She didn't answer.)

We made it back to the top of the gorge (where a park ranger was checking permits--would they make you climb back down into the gorge if you didn't have a little yellow slip of paper, I wonder?) and slowly trekked back to the trail head. A thunderstorm was rapidly gathering over some neighboring hilltops, and it seemed we had made it back up the gorge face just before the rocks would have been wet and impossible to climb. And I thought about how maybe our little day hike wasn't such a bad metaphor for our dissertation writing after all.

(Spam was probably A.B.D. He might disagree.)

Three leg salute

2007-07-04T17:22:00.000-04:00

I have been working diligently in the last few months on getting my dog to walk beside me on the leash, as opposed to one of us towing the other. He has been getting the hang of it, slowly but surely, and I think The Dog Whispererwould be proud of our efforts. I have discovered a small problem with this method, however--walking beside me, The Dog sometimes slips out of the range of my peripheral vision, and since The Dog is a male dog, he often has already lifted a leg on something I would rather he didn't make his own before I have a chance to notice that he's hopping along on three legs instead of trotting along on all four. (Incidentally: if the owner of a red 3-series BMW convertible often parked on the corner of North Hills and Brentwood is reading this--I am really sorry about your rear driver's side hub cap.)

Today, this small problem nearly became a bigger one. Walking beside me, I turned to see The Dog about to lift his leg on one of the foot-high American flags the local veterans' league has planted next to every mailbox in the neighborhood. That's right--on the Fourth of July. During wartime. In the heart of Bush country. I jerked him away just in time to avoid being the lead story on our local Fox affiliate, but not before I had a few insights: 1) we should really try to fly the symbol of our nation high enough so that it can't be peed on, and 2) how ironic. The Dog marks his territory on the symbol we use to mark our territory. Iwo Jima, the moon, a red BMW, and more trees and utility poles than you can count--all things that have been claimed by some need of living things to mark what is ours, even when it isn't at all.

Punk'd?

2007-07-03T17:42:00.000-04:00

From Love in Chartres (1927), by Nathan Asch, page 32: "The window looked punk."

Excuse me?

Upon further investigation in the Oxford English Dictionary:

punk, a. 1. Of timber: decayed, rotten, punky. 2. Devoid of worth or sense; poor in quality; disappointing; nonsensical; "rotten". colloq. 3. Comb., as "punk-ass" a. slang, of a person: worthless, good-for-nothing.

Apparently, the use of the word "punk" is this manner dates from 1896. (Ashton has nothin' on those late Victorians.)

No do-overs.

2007-07-02T17:21:00.000-04:00

I was chatting with a friend last night about getting older. She's in her early 30s, I'm in my mid-20s--both of us spry youngsters by almost any standard (except for maybe that of our students, 18-year olds who think 30 is when you join the AARP and start thinking about hip replacements). My friend told me that when she was in her 20s she often thought that if she still felt the way she did so often then (about herself, her life) when she was 40, then she might as well just go ahead and throw in the towel. Living daily with all of the uncertainty, self-doubt, and confusion of that time in her life, the idea of carrying that load for twenty more years was not a pleasant prospect. Reassuringly, she told me that for all of the challenges that the intervening years had brought, things had improved--with a few more years came a lot more confidence and enough self-knowledge to weather the uncertainty and confusion with a bit more grace and a lot more equanamity.

Earlier yesterday afternoon I had been packing books for my impending move and came across a photo album. It was mostly pictures from college--dorm room antics, parties, afternoons at the beach, spring break trips, lots and lots of hugging friends. I was surprised by how long ago it all felt, and how little of myself I recognized in my image. Only four years since graduation--not long at all. But if so much has changed just on the surface of things--the changes in hair and weight and clothing--how much more has changed below them. And I couldn't help but think, "If only I had it to do over again...I could do it all so much better now..."

It's true. I could do college a lot better now than I could then. I could do highschool a whole lot better now, too. It would all be a lot more fun and a lot more hilarious--I would speak up and not care so much what people thought and know which classes I could afford to skip. I would stand up straight and wear more heels. I would know what I needed and what I didn't and how to take care of myself and be able to recognize when I need to listen to my instincts and when I need to ignore them and listen to my brain instead.

I could do all of this--and do it so much better--because I've already done it once, of course. I know what I know now because I didn't then and learned the hard way. I know what I regret and what I don't and when I look at the pictures I see the shortcomings of the person I was then because I'm not her anymore. And that's what we call progress.

And that may be the only reason to expect that things might get better.

(Well, that and the fact that my friend told me it will.)

Inspiration provided by Paper Cuts

2007-06-29T08:52:00.000-04:00

I am pleased to introduce what I think will be a very popular feature of Paraphernalian. I have been inspired by Paper Cuts, the Wednesday book blog of New York Times Senior Book Editor Dwight Garner. Every Wednesday the blog hosts a bookish 'celebrity' (i.e., the kind of person only a fellow bookish person would consider a celebrity) who supplies his or her own personal playlist of favorite songs, with a little bit of commentary for each choice. It is in the spirit of iTunes celebrity playlists, and kind of like getting a random mix cd from a cool friend (and then having a conversation with her about it).

So, my thinking is this: I have cool friends. And they have good (or at the very least interesting) taste in music. And I love getting mix cds. So why not take a page from Paper Cuts and iTunes and invite the celebrities in my life to create their own playlists, and host them here?

Why not, indeed.

Stay tuned for the first installment. (It should be coming along just as soon as I can coerce a 'volunteer'...).

Mutual admiration society

2007-06-28T08:11:00.000-04:00

My friend Andrea is someone you should know. Fortunately for all of you, through the miracle of modern technology, you didn't miss your chance by not going to college with her, like I did--you can visit her blog, scout. You will be dazzled and charmed by its beauty and wit (and that's just her blog).

Andrea is one of those people you would love to hate. When I first met her, freshman year, I wanted to do just that--I thought she was just another blonde Palm Springs princess of the type that seemed to overrun our little alma mater. She became slightly more acceptable to my mind when I discovered she was a fellow English major, even more so when she appeared as Hero in the college production of Much Ado About Nothing, and by the time we both found ourselves on England Semester together fall of our senior year I was prepared to admit I was wrong. If her penchant for Parliaments, Serge Gainsbourg, and whiskey weren't enough to prove to me that my snap judgement was exactly that, seeing her perform her karaoke rendition of "When I Think About You" ("...I dust that shelf"--it was a family place)--was enough to convince me that this girl was way cooler than I could ever hope to be.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Andrea (and there are many to choose from) is how gracefully she transforms any thing, setting, occasion, gathering, or outfit into something truly lovely. A Midas-touch of infinite variety and exquisite taste. Life is more beautiful wherever Andrea happens to be. And thanks to her blog, we can all be with her a lot more often.

In recent installments of scout., Andrea and Chef-Husband Aaron have packed up from their brief return to Palm Springs and hit the road in search of greener cities--namely, Portland, Oregon--where lovely adventures have already begun (as you can see and read).

Enjoy.

Extraordinarily loud and incredibly obnoxious

2007-06-27T18:51:00.000-04:00

No, not my meditations on the tragedy of September 11th and its aftermath--the title describes my date from last night (a catastrophe of an entirely different kind).

Time to sit up and pay attention, fellas. The following list are words, phrases and topics of conversation that should never be trotted out on a first date (or ever, on any occasion, in the company of anyone).

1. your ideas for a Nancy Drew-themed pornographic film.
2. how you've recently run out of relatives who can die.
3. how many times you can have sex during a single football game half-time.
4. the body parts you have photocopied while drunk at your ex-girlfriend's company Christmas party.
5. the story of how you hospitalized yourself for three days last winter with carbon monoxide poisoning after failing to open the flue on your fireplace before using it.
6. your impersonation of an African-American woman seeing a Harry Potter movie in the theater.
7. your ideas for a Harry Potter-themed pornographic film.
8. the size of your next-door neighbor's penis.
9. "cunt" (thankfully, not in reference to me or any part of my body, but nonetheless uttered loudly enough for the toddler sitting three feet away to hear clearly).
10. "Do the drapes match the carpet?"

These are not in any particular order and definitely not comprehensive--I am sure that many of the otherwise memorable moments from last night that I was unable to repress were mercifully drowned in the sea of chardonnay I consumed in the course of what may have been the longest evening of my life.

Some of the most delicious moments in the single life come in the first five minutes after a truly horrible date--when you shut the door of your home or car on the loser you just wasted whole hours of your life with and realize that you need never see him again, much less spend so much as another second in his company. That's when you breathe a sigh of relief, turn up the radio, dance up the stairs, and thank God that even if you have to die alone, at least the last thing you see on this earth won't be that guy.