b(oston)s(cholar)

This is amazing.

2011-10-04T12:21:00.002-04:00

I just discovered Mimpish Squinnies, by a British horticulturist and explorer named Reginald Farrer who was working in the early 20th century.

Apparently, this was reprinted in 2007, but there are no copies to be purchased anywhere, and if I wanted to see an original, I would need a car and time to go out to Smith. That isn't going to happen. But in the meantime, contemplate the grotesque beauty:

All I can say about this one--um, Teeth?

I have made a deposit.

2011-08-15T09:43:00.002-04:00

Of one dissertation.

Finito.

Caput.

Done.

No more infinite regress revisions.

I don't have to go to work all day and come home and work all night.

I don't have to depend anymore on the delicate equilibrium of caffeine, booze, and nicotine will hold the threads of my sanity together and my brain cells awake and firing.

I can play with my friends.

I can go to bed at a reasonable hour and maybe even make dinner, take a stroll, pay my bills, and otherwise behave like a functional person.

That is, for about 10 minutes before I have to get my job search materials ready, plan a class and then teach it, work on getting an article published, etc. etc.

But let's not wreck this fantasy.

Graphic Observations, Part 2

2011-08-03T22:32:00.013-04:00

In my superficial peregrinations through science at BRU, I learned the best-named piece of experimental equipment ever: the quantum cat.

So, here is my explanation of what that is (don't trust it too much--I'm sure it's about 90% wrong):

Short version: A "cat state" is when Schrodinger's cat really is both dead and alive.

Long version, in case you don't know all about Schrodinger's cat: Erwin Schrodinger was a quantum physicist back in the early days, and he came up with a thought experiment to show what quantum theory in those days couldn't explain. Some early quantum mechanics physicists came up with statistical equations that treated subatomic particles like both waves and particles. That was all very well, except you could only use those equations to describe where a subatomic particle probably was or how fast it was probably going. Not both. Some physicists theorized that the act of measurement itself determines the state of the particles, wherein all probable states "collapse" into the observed state.

Don't worry if that sounds like mumbo-jumbo to you--that just puts you on Schrodinger's side.

Schrodinger invented a hypothetical scenario that translated all this into the human scale: A cat is put into a sealed box in which there is a Geiger counter hooked to a vial of hydrocyanic acid. If the Geiger counter detects radiation (that is, measures subatomic particles flying loose from their atoms), it drops the vial, cat dies. So, a scientist knows the probability of that Geiger counter detecting radiation, so can calculate the probability of the cat biting the dust. Schrodinger was probably saying that, according to the flavor of physicist I have been describing, the cat is both alive and dead until the scientist opens up the box, because the Geiger counter couldn't have measured the subatomic particle until someone was around to collapse it into an observable state. So, regardless of what's actually true of subatomic particles, the point to Schrodinger's cat is that Schrodinger is saying that this shit is crazy.

But then there's the quantum cat, a laser in which subatomic particles are inhabiting diametrically opposed conditions at the same freaking time.

There's a lot of development in quantum theory and qualifying conditions that explain why the quantum cat can happen, but let's just inhabit a stoner's state of mind and believe that the cat really can be alive and dead at the same freaking time!

So, after reading all about this, about a billion ideas came to mind about how I could employ this quantum cat for jokes and/or puns. There were many considerations, e.g. who has "quantum cat" in their mental reference files? or should I use my powers of anecdote to make another pussy joke? But, then, it came to me: (1) Blog! Explainin' time! (2) I could use this dual state laser to make light of the problem of gender perception that has stuck in my craw since the very first day I arrived on campus.

Presenting...

Without further ado................

.............drum roll please!......................................

Graphic Observations, Part 2: Feminism and Lasers

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Was the punchline worth the set-up?

Graphic Observations, Part 1

2011-08-02T16:42:00.004-04:00

Today, a friend was a very good friend to me and sent me the Surviving the World website, in which many pithy observations are made in chalkboard form--often including graphs. I am also fond of this one, because I have fallen so much in the past few weeks I have a bruised and abraded limb I like to call the Apocalypse Leg.

It was perfect, since every time I successfully completed a task at BRU today, I could reward myself with 30 seconds of funny.

Anyhoo. I felt inspired to map my own head fluff onto a graph. Particularly, I thought a chart would be a perfect vehicle to describe a phenomenon I have pondered since my first days at BRU. Walking in the hallways, it seems like the options are:

(1) To be trapped behind a herd of parents and children on campus tours whose slow-as-molasses pacing seems to be the product of confusion, awe, and infinite time to waste.

(2) To be mowed down by a student or professor whose lightning pace is spurred on by SO MANY IMPORTANT THINGS TO DO.

I would happily set my cruising speed at a light jaunt that will get me to my next cup of coffee soon-ish, but not return me to my desk before the computer headache has dissipated. But this is rarely possible.

So, I propose this possible correlation:

P.S. I think there will be more of these graphs to come. This amuses me.

I am very serious.

2011-07-27T14:56:00.003-04:00

Once again, Melissa leads the way to feminist glory.

That brief post underscores that absolute jackholery of commanding someone--usually a female someone--to smile. It's never about being nice. If someone is actually experiencing negative emotions, nothing could be more calculated to make that someone feel worse. For instance, I have a very vivid memory of a smile command I got when I was walking to school the morning after I got the late night call from my mom that my grandma had finally, after a long and painful struggle with cancer, died. Who knows why I thought I had to go to molecular chemistry class that morning, but there I was, shuffling to class, head down, glazed eyes. Some older gentleman walking towards me gave me a folksy "Buck up and smile!" I practically jumped out of my shoes and then burst into tears. I have no idea how the man responded. Not being a feminist lady yet, I had no idea why, after drying my tears, I felt so angry. And then I felt guilty, because it seems so wrong to be angry at an old man with apparently kind intentions.

But after that, I started noticing it all the time. It happens to me all the time. I have a thinking face that looks like I'm about to disembowel a dragon that has already set me on fire--somewhere between determination, anger, and pain. I wear this face so often, I've earned two vertical lines on my forehead right above my nose before I was 16. I hated them then, but rather like them now--they are the sign of books read, problems solved, dissertations written. They're not pretty, but pretty's not the point.

And that's precisely why it's so irksome. I've gotten the smile command with disconcerting frequency in the past year--lots of books to read and problems to solve means the dragon face gets a lot of use. The really galling part is that the smile command is almost inevitably followed with "You look so serious." And that is always 1 part surprise and 1 part query, translating to "What in the world could you possibly think about that is so serious, little lady?!" As if it's such a wonderment that a woman is thinking serious thoughts, that it's necessary to stop and inquire.

Dropping the dissertation bomb usually earns me an apology, or at least an apologetic tone. But that never saves me from being annoyed--not only have demeaning things about my pretty little head been assumed, but my train of thought has been interrupted (and perchance lost) because someone is annoyed I didn't smile at him. It's bad enough my face is not wholly my own business--but my time and thoughts, too? I mean, if I really do look that serious, it seems like an obvious and reasonable thing for another person to conclude I think that whatever I'm doing is more important than silly chit-chat about my face.

Which leads me to suspect that the second sin of an unsmiling lady (the first being failure to fulfill the obligation to be a dancing doll for the dudely onlooker) is thinking that anything about yourself (your time, your thoughts, your face) belongs to yourself. How selfish! Which is probably why if you protest too much (i.e. at all) against the smile command, the most common retort is "Bitch!"

I'm the Doctor!

2011-07-14T10:47:00.003-04:00

Well, maybe not the doctor, but I'm a doctor.

I don't have much time for details--revisions, job, etc., but in honor of the occasion, here are two delicious cocktail recipes involving pomegranite juice and gin, both of which were invented in for my recent post-defense Harry Potter movie binging:

#1: The Fleur Deliqueur

1.5 parts Henrick's gin
1 part St. Germaine
3 parts lemonade
Dash pomegranite juice

Stir vigorously and pour over ice. If you want an impressive gradient, reserve the pomegranite juice until the drink is assembled and let it settle to the bottom.

#2: The Ginny Fizzly

8-10 blueberries, muddled
1 part gin
Dash pomegranite juice
Dash lemon juice

Shake vigoursly and pour over ice, topping off with tonic water. For prettification, a lemon curl.

This Blog is Still on Hold...

2011-03-29T12:02:00.003-04:00

...but I can't find enough internet venues to declare that I have a complete draft of a dissertation.

This message brought to you by the creepiest botanical illustration ever illustrated. (It's a fly-trap. Or so Curtis's Botanical Magazine claimed.)

This Blog is On Hold

2011-03-11T18:57:00.004-05:00

I'm dissertating. Defense date: 4/27.

This message brought to you by Sydney Owenson, purveyor of sentimental botany. And tits.

One for the serious complaint log.

2011-02-22T13:07:00.004-05:00

This morning, while trying to convince myself that I do indeed enjoy oatmeal for breakfast, I flipped on the Today show for some brainless chatter. The chatter was indeed brainless, but no less inspiring of RAGE, for all that.

I'm too lazy to find a video of what I saw, so I will just describe with as much sarcasm and hyperbole as I can muster:

A lady was on talking about the so remarkable and surprising findings that women average one breathtakingly negative thought about their bodies per waking hour. Of the sort, this lady explained, that that if a significant other was to say suchlike to a woman, that it would be considered relationship abuse. For example, "you're so fat, you don't deserve to have anything you want" or "why would anyone want to have sex with you, with that repulsive belly," and so on.

Minus the impervious-to-all-evidence-to-the-contrary sense of surprise that people in the media express about institutionalized sexism, so far so good.

But then the conversation turned to what you can do about it.

It turns out it's so easy to point the finger at the fashion industry, everything you see in advertising even marginally related to femaleness, the countless monthly publications dedicated to making you feel like you need to be slimmer, sexier, and sassier, public and private fat-shamers crouching in every corner in wait to make you sorry you thought/spoke/felt/existed, "friends" who think the way to bond with you is to describe in excruciating detail each thing they hate about their own bodies and expect you to do likewise, etc. etc. etc., the real problem, ladies, is YOU. And yes, they really did mention all those institutional reasons for why you feel bad about yourself--but just to point out how wrong it is of you to think that these might be actually reasons for your bad body image.

The thing is, YOU think you're fat, so it's entirely YOUR personal problem. And if your daughter expresses negative body images (even at the tender age of 3-6 years old, the TV lady said a study found), that is also YOUR FAULT. Your mission, according to TV lady, is rewire your brain by willing yourself never to think negative thoughts about your body. Because, "neurons that fire together wire together," and if you don't exercise your positivity, your brain is physically imperfect.

So, I guess the problem is not that your body is all wrong and you have to will it, starve it, torture into compliance with impossible standards of beauty; the problem is that your brain is all wrong and you have to will it and discipline it into compliance with standards of mental health that are just about impossible given your actual material environment.

Ah well, it's probably easier to work up a delusional state than it is for me to work myself out into a size 2.

The content of the piece was enough to rouse the rage in me all on its own, but the thing is, right now I'm so, so sensitive to displacing the blame for sexist bullshit about female bodies onto the individual owners of female bodies.

As far as my own body image goes, I usually exist in a very fragile detente between the cultural ideal of what my body should like and what it actually does look like. This is partly about the fat-shaming above described. Turns out, between the stress eating and all the sitting around I do for my dissertation, the size 12 I walked in the grad school doors is ancient history; I will probably walk out the doors with a size 20. I try my damnedest to be kind to myself and look through the eyes of my friends who like me and like the way I look. But I can see the way that some people look at me (or not look at me at all), and it's difficult to maintain the sunny outlook.

The other part is about the precise shape of my body--which is, even in a thinner state, fit to burst with feminine goodies. So, it's tough to figure out how to dress it that (a) suits my feminine tastes and flatters my shape, while somehow (b) looking like someone who might have "serious" ideas. So, specifically, I don't want to wear a sack or eternal turtlenecks, even though that would efface my breasticles enough to satisfy (b). I can't wear button-downs, which normally might fall within (a) and (b), because not even the fat-lady stores make them for women with much up top and I'm not rich enough to afford the one or two brands that make them by cup-size. The jersey dresses and shirts that satisfy (a) never satisfy (b) because anything lower than a crewneck is lowcut on me and a crewneck oddly just makes my boobs look even bigger. So, what I have settled on is to wear the jersey dresses and t-shirts and try (and only partially succeed) in covering up with an eternal succession of modesty camis, scarves, and cardigans. I thought all was well--I have a reputation for being one of the better dressers in the department, and I never felt like any undue attention was being paid to my body over the words coming out of my mouth.

But then, I was informed by one female prof whose opinion I trust, that my clothing was inappropriate.

"For the jobmarket?" I asked (because, well, duh--I was already planning on the torturous search for an appropriate suit and some shirts that could at least be tailored to fit correctly).

Yes, that, but also always, it turns out. Because we all know what sexists oldsters inhabit the academy. And I don't want to give out "another" message. And by the way, I'm never supposed go visit (male) Professor X in the outfit I'm wearing right now. But, I should't be paranoid because, no, nobody's ever actually said anything about it.

I tried to take this in the spirit of constructive advice in which she said this was given. I couldn't because it was also revealed this professor also just disapproved because "bodies are distracting"--which is a whole other topic. So I will just stop at the advice to hide my body so as to avoid the lechery and misogyny of some old (gatekeeping) farts.

So, yes, I agree: I won't hang my tits out for a job interview, and I will wear something that looks like the put-together professional people will want to hire.

But, no, I'm not going to put on some shapeless sack. I know I might be putting my employability at risk by dressing like I'm not ashamed of my female body. But really, is the answer to institutionalized sexism just to internalize the sexism? The way I dress is not going to change the sexism, but I am more certain than ever that changing the way I dress is going to change me. Since I have had this conversation, I can barely get dressed to go to my cafe or brunch or whatever non-professional life-activity without having to note precisely and exactly where my neckline falls and having some minutes of angst about whether that's too low for the world to see. Now I get to enjoy the exquisite self-consciousness of having a body that neither conforms to the general standards of femininity and is too feminine according to the standards of the narrow community of academia. Because being "feminine" or "sexy" is mutually exclusive with being capable, serious, and smart. Neat. Just fuckin' neat.

I'm just starting to be able to stare down the little slut-shaming voices in the mirror in the morning. Which is the only way I can manage to come around to feeling OK about myself. I just don't think I'm capable of the kind of double-think that would allow me to externally conform to the masculinist standard of dress but somehow internally resist believing that dressing any other way makes me incompetent, superficial, and stupid. If I'm going to start shopping for turtlenecks and the fleece tuxedos that people 'round here wear all winter, the slut-shaming voice is going to end up being my own internal voice. Just like that fat-shaming voice that the TV lady wants me to internalize.

Besides, I can't afford a new wardrobe. Feminism, at least, is free.

One for the silly complaint log....

2010-12-29T13:41:00.003-05:00

There are certain words that have recently entered the lexicon that just stick, stubbornly and irritatingly, in my craw. Like "leverage." It doesn't bode well (as far as my approval goes) that this one derives from the financial world. It suffers mightily in my opinion since every time I see it in the business context, it seems to be a euphemism for obtaining something by means that will not bear examination well, or as a cover for the fact the speaker has no idea how to obtain that thing at all. But I almost forgive the word, since when it is applied in everyday situations hilarious mental imagery abounds. As in, "I will leverage you that muffin." I get a picture of the muffin being catapulted to me on a lever... a sort of fat-man-on-a-see-saw deal. Also, "leverage" is slangy, and will probably disappear soon--it's a self-solving problem.

But the one I have not yet found it in my heart to forgive is "gift" as a verb. For instance, I read something yesterday to the effect of "My slight acquaintance gifted my daughter needlessly." Which demonstrates my practical objection: the possibilities for amphiboly* are great. In this construction, it sounds like there was some strange child abduction scenario, but I gather somebody gave a her daughter a gift when no gift was thought of in return.

But my real objection is that it's tool-speak. Somebody wants to sound smart but actually doesn't have a wide-ranging vocabulary, so the simple "gave" is axed for the verbulous "gifted." Just like when my students, desperate to raise the tone, keep repeating "due to" all through their essays even though I tell them "since" or "because" are perfectly acceptable choices. And they're more elegant too, since they won't seem like an intrusive verbal tic.**

I suppose "gift" as a verb is not more tool-ish than "leverage," but I suspect that since it's not really a slang term but a change in use/construction, it will inhabit my craw for a very long time. Future students, beware. I will be permanently grumpy someday, instead of just by fits and starts, I imagine.

----

*"Amphiboly"=a grammatical construction that leads to ambiguity, multiple meanings, and is the cause of some of my favorite lame jokes. For example, the classic Groucho Marx line (recalled from memory, so very likely not verbatim), "I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I will never know."

**Maybe I should tell them I hear them saying, in their nasal mutant Valley girl voices, "I won't be able to hand in my paper due to my dead grandmother" in my sleep. And they should leave off both the "due to" and the dead grandmother before I lose my shit.

10 things I'd rather be doing than sitting in this Starbuck's, not dissertating:

2010-12-21T13:34:00.003-05:00

1) Napping in my sleep cave (aka dark, over-warm, closet-sized bedroom).

2) Finishing my oxalis painting that has been sitting on my desk, half finished for months.

3) Making poor-man's boeuf bourginon in my new Le Creuset dutch oven (which I could combine with any other home activity).

4) Holing up at the nearest theater with a nip and a bucket of popcorn--preferably watching Burlesque, Country Strong, or some such piece of fluff. I'd do Black Swan if someone would go with me--too scary for viewing solo.

5) Getting a haircut so my bangs quit poking me in the eye.

6) Knitting while watching my favorite shitty movie of all time, Invasion of the Bee Girls, which happened to be in the $3 set of 72 drive-in movies my friend brought over to my house. The mad scientist is a woman, for once. Granted, she dies at the hand of the patriarch. But still.

7) Buying a book at the Harvard Book Store and settling in for a couple of glasses of the inoffensive and cheap house red at Shay's.

8) Flying home. Which I will not do at all this Christmas. :(

9) Snowball fighting. I've never had a proper snowball fight, and it snowed for real for the first time this season yesterday.

10) Wrapping myself up in a blanket and quietly sobbing on my couch.

Tantric Chocolate

2010-12-13T18:50:00.006-05:00

So, I had a glorious birthday. There was sushi on Saturday. There was the Slutcracker on Sunday afternoon (the most entertained I've been in ages). And then there was Christmas tree decorating Sunday evening. Just like last year, the tree is both amazing and disturbing:

Also, my haul was good. There was the Le Creuset dutch oven I always wanted, a J. Crew necklace, a Sense and Sensibility comic, a strange little salt and pepper shaker where the salt comes out of a little dude's head and the pepper comes out of his pants, fancy wine, etc. etc. But in among a gift basket of Dark and Stormy makings was a bar of bacon chocolate.

I was a little wary of bacon chocolate--but turned out, 'twas quite tasty. But the best part was the packaging. It has a photo of this Nigella wannabe:

In addition to the annoying "I'm a sexy chef lady" picture, there is equally obnoxious "I'm a sexy chef lady" text (transcribed verbatim):

I began experimenting with bacon + chocolate at the tender age of six, while eating chocolate chip pancakes drenched in Aunt Jemima syrup, as children often do. Beside my choclate-laden cakes lay three strips of sizzlin' bacon, just barely touching a sweet pool of maple syrup. And then, the magic--just a bite of the bacon was too salty and I yearned for the sweet kiss of chocolate and syrup, so I combined the two. This was a turning point: on that plate something magical happened, the beginnings of a combination so ethereal and delicious that it would haunt my thoughts until I found the medium to express it--chocolate.

from there, it was just a matter of time...and what began as a love of salt and sweet quickly unraveled into an obsession. No longer could i wait to unveil the royal coupling in solid bar form, a deep mild chocolate with bits and pieces of Applewood smoked bacon and just a sprinkling of Alderwood salt. Really, what doesn't taste better with bacon?

Peace, love and chocolate, Katrina.

Breathe...Engage your five senses, close your eyes and inhale deeply. Be in the present moment, notice the color of the chocolate, the glossy shine. Rub your thumb over the chocolate bar to release the aromas of smoked Applewood bacon flirting with deep milk chocolate. Snap off just a tiny piece and place it in your mouth, let the lust of salt and sweet coat your tongue.

[Column break]

After graduating from Vanderbilt University, Katrina attended Le Cordon Bleu in Paris then furthered her food studies through extensive world travel. Beginning in Pain and working with the great Adria brothers of El Bulli, she continued traveling eastbound studying the indigenous cuisines of Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Thailand, China and Australia. Upon her return, Katrina founded Vosges Haut-Chocolate with the concept of Travel the World through Chocolate in a mission to create a sustainable luxury chocolate experience, to bring about awareness of indigenous cultures through the exploration of spices, herbs, roots, flowers, fruits, nuts and the obscure.

I keep looking for the irony. I can't find it. I look for it in the pretentious-yet-casual punctuation and precious-yet-repetitive diction. I look for it in the tantric yoga directions for consumption. I look for it in the philanthropic project of raising awareness of indigenous cultures through nuts and the obscure. I know it's just a bar of chocolate, but I would really, truly love for there to be some irony there. I get the picture that this Katrina person would really, truly love to be the next Nigella, what with her pretty face and hair, and phone sex food descriptions. But she needs some serious guidance from some consultant-types, or at least some poor schlub to write her copy that will speak up when things get ridiculous.

Tone. Tone is so important. And just a sprinkling of subtlety. Make it Alderwood subtlety if you want.

But also. Bacon chocolate. Not bad.

Something for your head....

2010-12-09T09:10:00.003-05:00

'Tis bitter cold out and I've been shopping for hats. I bought hats. My head is still cold. Brain freeze and all just by going outside. But maybe I should get this one:

I mean, it's wicked freezing and it still stands strong. No shrinkage at all! I wonder if it has little blue friends, or if it spends a lot of time gazing at sunsets with its significant others from matching bathtubs.

Maybe it's worth dropping the $148 at Anthropologie. I can walk around and intimidate all lesser hats with the size of my cloche.

The Land of Cleve: An Illustrated Tale

2010-10-09T21:04:00.019-04:00

This weekend, I set off for Cleveland to present a paper about my main man, Erasmus Darwin. I don't know if I was over the moon to go to Cleveland--it's not the world's most happening place and my one friend who lives here is gone to a wedding.

But--there were some interesting points.

1) I flew through Baltimore, which is my favorite airport because it looks like Darth Vader's house.

2) I saw this the moment I came out of the RTA. Cleveland rocks. Rocks crafty.

3) When I got to Shaker Square where my friend's apartment is (free lodging--woot!), I got dinner at happy hour at a wine bar. First off--happy hour! In the land of Boston, it's illegal to have happy hour. But not so in the Land of Cleve. Second--I got to eavesdrop on a conversation that started off with a paean to Ronald Reagan (apparently his inaugural speeches are tear-jerkers) and ended with an argument about whether George H. W. Bush was superior as a model president. The first half of that convo was expected--but isn't saying H. W. is awesome like saying Millard Fillmore is the best president ever?

4) The conference hotel totally looks like the Gilded Age exploded.

5) I actually rocked my presentation. Maybe it's because Cleveland rocks. Even my coffee cup was happy for me.

6) Today, I went to a panel and the lunch/plenary talk and then ditched the rest of the day to go to the Museum of Art. It was an excellent decision on my part, because I saw:

a golden microscope,

the Western Union founder wearing bitchin' sunglasses,

and the Thinker's junk.

7) On returning, I went to the most awesome bookstore called Loganberry Books. It was huge. And full of old and wonderful books. I got a $4 illustrated edition of Wuthering Heights. I bought it because of this pretty drawing:

But was rewarded with this amusing drawing:

8) And lastly, the lady at the book store directed me to a Japanese place across the street. I ordered sashimi and got this:

Which, you know, looks and was good to eat--but it's cooked. This was even after the guy took my order and pointed out that it wouldn't be thoroughly cooked. That "thoroughly" should have tipped me off to the fact that there would be any cooking.

But at least there was this lovely garden patio to eat my cooked sashimi in:

And so, tomorrow--back to Boston, where the tuna is uncooked and the hours unhappy by law. Huzzah!

Good advice, indeed:

2010-09-13T13:54:00.006-04:00

Some Ultimately Irrelevant Reasons Why I WIll Never Write "An Indelible Portrait of Our Times"

2010-09-09T16:40:00.006-04:00

I'm a big sucker for Franzen's schtick, so I preordered Freedom and blew through it at warp speed once it arrived. I've always had a soft spot for Franzen's prose stylings (I even got through The 27th City, even though it's as dense as a brick) and his sympathetic ass-hat characters. Freedom is free of electropointilist santas, which is almost a disappointment to me, but I was totally absorbed. It seems he managed to fall somewhere between family portrait and social novel--which is no easy feat, and something he seems to have wanted to be able to nail. So kudos to him.

And of course, I was very curious to see how the novel matched up to all the critical jizzing about it being "an indelible portrait of our times" (a phrase to be found both on the book jacket flap and in Michiko Kakutani's Times review). Obviously, this is to be taken with a grain of salt, being the usual empty clamor to be found on book jackets. But it seems like the general consensus is that in writing Freedom, Franzen has proved himself worthy to step into the shoes vacated by the likes of Updike, Roth and other Big Dudes of Literature. So, I guess Franzen will be the model of literary excellence on which all obnoxious lists of "best newcomers" or "best books of the year" or "best books ever" will hew to.

Besides this, the spectacle of crowning the new literary king is fascinating, if irritating. Even Vogue had an interview and write-up, with its trademark modifying clauses cataloging his stylistic tastes (and a leading paragraph that misunderstands the difference between an old-fashioned roman--as in bildungsroman--and a new-fangled lovely-dovey romance). But I suppose it's necessary to know that Franzen maintains a boyish je ne sais quoi, despite his requisite writerly tortoiseshell glasses. But everyone seems so happy that the king has been crowned. And who is Franzen's agent?--Seriously, you can't pick up the silliest mag without finding a gushy review! Said agent must have deep and dark magical powers.

Despite my love for Franzen (which, I confess, is in a very small way based in the fact that he came to speak at my Master's institution at the plea of my ex-BF, shat publicly all over the usefulness of the MFA to a bunch of MFA students, ex-BF included, and gave me the only signed book in my possession with my name spelled correctly, while telling me that my ex-BF's douchey friend had gossiped about my break-up sorrow and that he thought ex-BF and friend appeared to him like a couple of asses...ah, schadenfreude is rarely so thoroughly satisfying), I'm disappointed with all the fanfare.

To explain, let me detour in What I Think about When Taking Walks:

Though I am a budding literary scholar, I have no pretensions (failed or otherwise) to making it in literature myself. It's not my bag.

But sometimes, when walking to the bus or the cafe or the grocery store, I imagine what kind of novel I would write if I did in fact write one. Other favorites: how I'd spend my lottery winnings, the restaurant I'd run if I had one, the layout and decor of my dream house, and (more susceptible to actual practice) interesting cocktails to concoct. But in the novel game, I try to think of what might have some kind of general appeal.

Sometimes I think I might set it in my homeland of the Central Valley in California--I knew so many weird "characters" there... so many people so screwed up by some conjunction of religious/gender/sexual ideology, or by failed/stalled/costly attempts at upward mobility, or by generational conflicts of immigration, etc. And the place is just aesthetically weird. It's the exburban apocalypse--if I were blindfolded and dropped off somewhere, I couldn't tell you what city I was in, it's all the same relentlessly beige stucco strip mall-subdivision-strip mall sequence everywhere but the rotting city centers. But then, you can find farmland next door to the Starbuck's. And when the purple smog lifts, you can see the giant jagged mountains ringed around the place. It's ugly and beautiful at the same time. And people are so desperately loyal to it all--the people, the landscape, the stuckness, that it's tragic and admirable all at once. Plus, they are so kind and aggressively friendly, despite being so frequently royally fucked in the head. It would be a lively book, at least. Lots of color and drama, a little social commentary--the stuff of the middlebrow. Could work.

Sometimes I think I might set it in my present and more rarified home of Camberville, if the book market could bear another university novel set here. But I couldn't bear it either--there are enough novels about highly educated people who don't realize they are still as foolish as everybody else. I do suppose I might be kinder to the fools than is fashionable to be, and have something to say about the perils of not having a mantle of entitlement to wrap yourself in and still trying to believe you belong. Still--no general appeal here. Nobody gives a crap about the overwound anxieties of academics but themselves. Though I might get nice reviews from other academics.

Sometimes I think I might write a paean to my beloved eighteenth- and nineteenth-century courtship novels in which I use the cattle drive to matrimony to talk about a more serious subject. There might be a string of semi-autobiographical hurtful nice guys (you know, a la Edward Ferrars); there might also be something about be something about feeling like you deserve the actually nice guy (and the actually nice job, the actual respect, etc. etc.). I would liberally besprinkle the whole thing with Jane Austen references and hope she wouldn't roll over too many times in her grave when they slapped a pink martinis-and-shoes cover on it. Marketable, with screen play potential--would never be considered art, though. It might be called "witty" or even "smart," but never thought "serious" or--"indelible."

So, as for why I have dragged you through my mental frippery:

I kept thinking about my silly fake novels because one of the main points of Franzen's is the emotional and ethical burden of having too many choices--the effect of privilege and of living in an intensely consuming society. I take Franzen's point. But the point is given from a position of so much obvious privilege--yes, most people are party to consumer culture to some extent as Americans, but I'm pretty sure that most people don't have a panorama of choices like these characters or are even conscious of or feel entitled to them if they've got the wide-angle view. I don't fault Franzen for this--he is doing what he does best. But I realized that the pattern in my hypothetical thinking was the difficulties of coming to the knowledge of having a choice, deserving the successes (and not just the failures) that result from that choice, and the mental and material reasons why that choice might not succeed if you're a certain kind of person--by gender, class, geography, generation, race.

It's not as if I grew up so very poor--just with this certain kind of working class mentality that there's one way to do things and that deviation from that way leads to "consequences"--no neutral term, designating the many ways to take the fall from the lower middle class to poverty. Stick to the straight-and-narrow, and you'll be rewarded with a mortgage, a car, a husband, some kids. Fail--get sick, develop a drug habit, get knocked up, lose your job, etc.--and you could easily become the welfare queen bogeywoman in the flesh and blood. There a common sense to all this--an awareness of the fragility of class status if not of the bigger reasons for this, but not a lot of room for ambition or even just wanting something different. And even with a sense of wanting "something else" there aren't a lot of places to go to figure out what that is or how to do it. And for all the lipservice paid to the wonders of higher education and bootstrapping class mobility in general, not a lot of encouragement to think you deserve it. Short version: once again I am perplexed about these WASPs and their privileges and how it comes to pass that representing them is so goddamned important.

The major problem that I have is that in order to make it literally true that Franzen's novel is "an indelible portrait of our times," I can only imagine that Michiko Kakutani meant "our" in the possessive sense, not the inclusive sense. As in: we are the sort that run everything, so it's "our" times. Not: here is a sweeping view of American life that a lot of people can call "ours." For many of the people I have known (and in a much smaller sense for myself), the generalizing and standard-making move that the critics have made would turn Franzen's novel into a very galling taunt. If, you know, they bothered with New York Times asshats. Which is nothing that other people haven't said better in all the meta-commentary about race, class, and gender in Freedom commentary.

But I'm deeply irritated with the need to label something the rubric of all that's good and literary, especially if it's to tell us that some nebbish white dude bemoaning the burdens of privilege is, as it has been for so long, the newest and latest and best thing. All it means is that I'm damned to seeing Toni Morrison as the tokenist two-fer on every list of "best" literature forever and ever, amen. Granted, even if I did have the novelistic chops to write any of my hypothetical books, I don't believe they qualify any more than Franzen's (or any other Big Dude of Literature) to be the rubric by which all other books are judged. That would be as silly and small-minded as using dudely privilege as the metric. But that's the point--nothing different will be considered as the real deal (god forbid, something as different as stories told from non-heternormative, non-white, non-masculine, and/or non-upper middle class perspectives) so long as we trumpet such familiarly exclusive viewpoints as the end of all art. Wouldn't it be nice not to have to trumpet any single thing as the thing?

And après Franzen--le deluge?

What I Learned This Week in the World of Sex, Dating, and Romance

2010-08-16T20:14:00.004-04:00

1. Putting frogs in tiny taffeta pants was an important advance in the knowledge of sexual reproduction. I wish I was an eighteenth century scientist. So much more opportunity for arts and crafts.

2. It takes precisely 4 minutes (the time it took me to figure out how to turn off the chat function) to get 3 kinky proposals online on OKCupid. It takes one hour in a bar on a Thursday afternoon when all you really want to do is read your book on frogs in taffeta pants to get 1 kinky proposal. So, depending on whether you like kinky proposals, use this piece of information accordingly. If you don't like them at all, just stay home and stay off the internets--or else find out some way not to be a female in public spaces.

3. Every dude I date should be really faithful to me, because I'm friggin' poor.

4. Lady superheroes are hawt, because they wear those costumes and they might slap you around a bit before you get it on. But only if they're not too super--nobody likes an effective female superhero. So Buffy, listen up: your purpose is to be sexy, not to do emasculating things, like kicking evil's ass. Also, get some kind of costume.

5. Not giving a shit works like magic when you're dating. Totally ups a person's appeal. I don't give a shit right now, so it's like rainbows and unicorns up in here. Still working on what to do when the magic fades.

Violet Crush

2010-08-15T16:31:00.007-04:00

I have not been posting--instead I have been a very, very good grad student, churning out the pages exactly as I ought to do.

And you know, having a discomfiting host of anxiety dreams about writing, my (un)romantic life, &c--all designed to leave me scratching my head and feeling very disturbed by the quirks of my subconscious.

But then, last night I dreamed that I was writing, writing, writing, and I looked up and the table was covered in violets (my most favorite flower), brought to me courtesy Colin Firth c. 1996 (aka Mr. Darcy).

I haven't thought of my old Firth-as-Darcy crush in ages, but it certainly was charming to see him there with his best I'm-so-in-love-with-you gaze on. And also, violets smell wonderful.

It seems my subconscious has a conscience--I wish it would it feel a twinge of guilt more often, and bring me similar pleasant surprises now and then to make up for its general nutjobbery.

On a related note, I wish I had sprung for the DVD version of the BBC Pride and Prejudice way back when, rather than the cheaper and now obsolete video cassettes. I finally had to give them away to someone who actually owns a VCR. I'm just not going to plumb the depths of Craigslist for Jurassic Age technology, even for Darcy. And now I am Firthless, except for the very inferior film adaptation of Les Liasons Dangereuses, called Valmont. I bought it thinking I would like to see more Firth in costume drama, but I'm always thrown off by his weird mullet pony tail. Besides, Firth is less compelling than Malkovich, even if--and perhaps because--Firth's a good deal more plausible as a seducer of all ladies, being much more handsome and charming and much less creepy. Go figure.

At all events, I need to correct this tragedy of obsolescence--I could go for a long P&P session right now.

This movie was... not alright.

2010-07-28T10:12:00.008-04:00

Yesterday, I headed to the cinema with the BFF to see The Kids Are Alright--we were excited since it got such good reviews--groundbreaking, incisive, etc.

Oh, the disappointment.

It wasn't bad, exactly--you know, wasn't tortuous, like, say, Sex and the City 2 might be (really, truly, I would never waste $10 and 2.5 hours on something as shitulous and inane as that... never!).

But it wasn't as good as promised.

For instance, there's the whole weirdness of the heterosexual love affair with the sperm donor... with that hairy man-ape Mark Ruffalo... whose character is too obviously a skeezy, self-centered, aging hipster jerk to be reasonably attractive to... well, anyone, much less someone who is not generally interested in men. I mean, dude sported a motorcycle and a leather jacket and intoned like he was the fount of wisdom, while actually saying a pile of stupid. Some half-arsed explanation was given about Jules (the cheater) wanting to be seen/noticed. But the man-ape didn't seem to notice much about her, except her thong. I was inclined to be skeptical of this whole large and central piece of plotting, since it seemed to tack so neatly along the "every lesbian just needs to find the right man to give her a good pounding" lines. I was partially mollified by the ending, in which the man-ape is excluded from the family as the skeeze-ball that he is, expunging the encroaching triumph of the heteronormative family (ape-man even suggests they take the kids and couple up permanently) and restoring the happy lesbian-led family (the classic comedic structure, a la Shakespeare, with a twist).

Except for, there's that family. None of them are particularly bad people... or particularly good--mostly, just annoying. The couple spoke in this weird patois of new age-y psychobabble, the usual long-term relationship in-jokes and pet names, and straight-up WASP-y asshat cruelty. For one, because this is being sold as a "portrait of the modern American family," I spent the whole time wondering whose family this was supposed to be--I've never seen the like in my whole life IRL (though in some movies... I guess these people are out there somewhere?). For another, since some of it was played for satiric laughs at the direct expense of the characters--and all of it seemed self-absorbed and inane--I had a hard time mustering enough sympathy for anyone to give a flying fig what happened to any of the adult leads.

I suppose they were going for "average but good family, with warts and all," which I appreciate in theory. But in practice, the movie was so non-comittal about what made them good or bad or anything in between. I think part of the problem was that a lot of the characterization was done by expositional dialogue rather than by demonstration. So, for instance, one of the couple, Jules is supposed to be a micromanager--we know this, because when Nic goes to pour herself a glass of wine, Jules tells her to go easy on the day-time drinking in front of company, and Nic retorts that it goes the same for the micromanaging. But that single request for moderate day-time boozing is the only example of the micromanaging. So it's hard to say if it's even much of wart worth presenting, much less to care enough to try to fit it into your understanding of their relationship. It felt ultimately, as if "micromanaging" is the de rigueur problem to analyze or talk about, and so there it was--i.e. felt completely false and slapped on.

The other part of the problem was that there was a whole compendium of nit-picky warts presented, and not a lot of information about what makes the particular family worth valuing. Their problems aren't big enough to be compelling, and their virtues are too small and/or invisible to be endearing. The kids, are in fact, alright, so one guesses that they must have been good parents. But you don't see a lot of this good-kid creation in action. They have dinner together, which is nice. And they are seen laughing together over TV, occasionally. There is some familial Scrabble-playing, which can be fun. Which isn't persuasive to me as loving family--particularly since the interactions between parents and children often seemed detached. And anyway, my ghoulish family was not opposed to board games and sitting at the same dinner table together... there has to be more to it.

It seems like this movie was made to be representative of too many things to makes sense: the movie was so busy sketching in half-satirical, half-loving portraits of families, long-lasting marriages, of lesbians, of being middle-aged, of self-centered aging hipster dudery to develop depth in anything. And it was sold as too representative for me to be easy on it, in terms of politics. (And why, btw, did this family have to be so very white upper-middle class?) If this had aimed at the usual kind of family foibles comi-drama, except the family has two mommies, I would have enjoyed it so much more--instead of "representative," the movie might have achieved "recognizable humanity."

I guess it's groundbreaking in that there are lesbians, in a family, and the main problem is that there are regular "We're a regular family, too" kinds of problems. I should have known. Putting it like that, I realize I was bound to be both bored and disappointed.

I don't just paint kitty cats, just so you know...

2010-07-24T13:28:00.006-04:00

Also, I desperately need my own camera, so as I can take better pictures of my own, instead of relying on other people's fuzzy and tiny iPhone pics....

I've got friends at the Oasis.

2010-07-23T13:44:00.006-04:00

BFF and I have been having a very stressful time of it lately, for our different and various reasons, so BFF made this awesome plan for this morning in which we would get massages and then go to lunch. It was a brilliant plan.

So, when we get there, BFF is assigned the lady-massager and I am assigned the dude massager. I was a little nervous--I'm the sort that always chooses a lady-doctor, gyno and otherwise, since I find it much less nerve-wracking to have a lady poking around my nooks and crannies. I don't even think its quite about the sex thing (some of my lady-doctors have preferred ladies and I don't think I would choose a male doctor no matter what his orientation). Part of me thinks that a person with a woman's body should be more sympathetic (e.g., doesn't tell me to have a baby to cure my menstrual cramps or say any pain or illness is "just in my head"), but I know by experience that's just plain wrong--women can be douche-canoes as much as men. (Which is why if I ever hit the lottery jackpot, so shall too the Planned Parenthood... they never treat me that way, no matter who is treating me. Long live PP!)

Anyway, I just am more comfortable with women, and I know it's not logical, and that is all I can say about that. And since massages are all about poking into nooks and crannies, my ladies-only rule felt like it ought to apply. And I know there are embarrassing difficulties about being bare-assed under a sheet (I'm... ahem... well-endowed in the boobular region): it's not easy to keep everything under the sheet when you're being pulled this way and shaken that. And I'm just not a naked person.

But, I told myself "woman up; it's just a massage" and went along with it.

And it started out fine--dude was excellent at working out all the giant knots in my back, which was my main desire.

But then he moved my arms to my side, palms up. Which, you know, is SOP for massages, so fine.

But then he leaned over me.

And I got a handful of balls.

And I told myself that it was probably an accident (though I have my doubts... I'm usually pretty aware of where I'm shoving my junk and it seems most people are). I moved my hands closer in next to my body, just in case, however.

And then it happened again.

And again.

But I didn't say anything, because I am always mousy in these situations. And also, the massage was good, which is a silly reason, but there it is.

So, I was really wishing I had gotten the woman instead by the end.

After BFF and I had left and were heading out to lunch, I shared my story and asked her how hers went. She said it might have been weirder: the woman played Ben Harper the whole time, while singing along loudly (face right in BFF's face), chewed mint and blew mint-breath in her face (on purpose, for some unspecified aromatherapeutic purpose), said they had a special connection, and then massaged BFF's face with her own face. BFF says that despite all this, the massage was still effective.

I'm not sure, but I think I still would have preferred the lady.

So a few lessons for me:

1. I feel completely justified in my no dudes in nooks-and-crannies situations rule. Though, now with the added reason of not want to put myself in situations where balls get shoved in my hand. Ladies generally don't have balls, so that is unlikely to happen with them.

2. It's very possible to invade someone's space and make them uncomfortable, while naked and under a sheet, no matter what the gender situation and without it being sexual at all.

3. Don't go to the Inman Oasis.

Two birthdays, two cat portraits:

2010-07-11T22:00:00.008-04:00

I know some mother effin' cat people (and not cat people in this sense, or this sense). So, it seemed to make sense to paint them portraits of their fave kitties for their birthdays.

This first is of the ingenue Wesley (left) and the evil and well-named Spike (right):

This second is of my own cat, but the recipient of the painting seems to have a special love for the 'Corn. I don't have the time or will to explain the hows and whys--it just is. And so:

So, I've decided that there has been enough "art"-as-therapy for the week, and it's back to the dissertation grindstone. That is, unless, someone has some expendable cash and a photo that I can turn into a kitty portrait.

Why I am drinking this afternoon:

2010-07-07T13:55:00.002-04:00

I don't know what it is with me and breaking up in hot weather. You wouldn't think it would matter, but it really doesn't set well with my coping mechanism, which is careening between lethargy and OCD-like bursts of activity.

For example, some years ago--back in my Master's days--I lived at home, with a giant, suburban-sized back yard, which was constantly overrun with cantankerously rooted and giant weeds. So, when I had a big break-up, I spent three days playing WordTwist, zombie-like, and then for my big re-entry to the world of the living I decided to renovate the rose bed. It takes no brains, the vigorous activity fills the void with OCD-bliss, and then there's something accomplished in the end.

It was a big heat wave in may (think 90-something or 100 or so). I spent all day out there. I put sunscreen on at the beginning, but went into active-zombie-state and forgot to put more on while cathartically chopping away at the soil with a hoe. I burned. Bad. I burned right through my clothes. I still have the lines on my back. I couldn't wear clothes for a week. My mom had to buy me burn salve. It was excruciatingly painful. When I get raging melanoma on my back one day, I'm sending this dude the medical bills.

And yet, it was still very satisfying to do it.

So now, there is this heat wave. If you live on the east coast and have a TV, you might have heard about it. Apparently, it's the apocalypse, because tar balls and the World Cup aren't news anymore around here.

And I am desperately trying to scrub my apartment to reach that OCD bliss--I can't spend another day playing solitaire and reading the internets. But I keep collapsing into a puddle into the couch.

Because it turns out it is the heat apocalypse. It's effin hot. As evidence: there are sweat circles behind my knees.

But now everything is that half done state of disturbed dirt and piles of crap that can't just be abandoned. And which are also driving me crazy.

Maybe it's time for afternoon beers....

Cure for the Summertime Blues

2010-06-30T09:15:00.003-04:00

I made this recipe up all by myself. I'm proud of it--it approaches a Craigie cocktail in taste and strength.

Step 1: Puree one half a large peeled cucumber

Step 2: Dump puree in a large shaker. Add a tablespoon or so of roughly chopped, bruised fresh rosemary, a generous splash of lemon, and a heaping spoonful of fine sugar, and stir.

Step 3: Add a few shots-worth of gin (Hendrick's complements the herb and cucumber combo best) and some ice.

Step 4: Shake until your arms fall off. Keep a tight grip on the top, so as to not have expensive gin explode all over your kitchen.

Step 5: Pour into martini glasses garnished with a cucumber slice and a sprig of rosemary.

Step 6: Don't gulp it down. 'Tis potent stuff.

Time goes by so slowly...

2010-06-24T13:55:00.004-04:00

So, I threw a Hail Mary pass the other day, relationship-wise, and the receiver fumbled on the other end. And that sucks mightily.

My friends congratulate me on my bravery and rational choice in not letting a long and painful LDR limp to its demise. But at the moment, I see no cause to join in and self-congratulate. There's not a lot to say about how I feel, except my main goal is not to burst into tears in public and to make gestures at being functional--as in, go to work, make dinner, work on the dissertation. I don't hold myself to high standards on any of these things; I just want to keep going through the motions so that my life is still in one piece when I stop feeling bad.

But, holy shite! It feels like every minute lasts twenty--which is the opposite of what usually happens when I work. And plus, it is really hot and even more humid. And that has a certain slowness to it that is just exacerbating the problem.

I'm usually so absorbed, quittin' time comes around, seemingly, right when I get started. And now, I mostly want to punch the screen every half second and flee the cafe. But, it wouldn't be any better if I packed up the laptop and went home to mope--the only difference it would make is that I wouldn't have anything done for my new Charlotte Smith chapter, and I would feel bad about that, too.

At least I'm working on Smith's novels and not her poetry--the poetry is like "Good Morning, Heartache" on loop, with flowers.

Not sure I could take that. Too easy to lapse into maudlin poor-me-ism with that sort of thing. And clearly, I'm already squarely in poor-me territory.

Two things that frustrated me last night:

2010-06-16T13:19:00.004-04:00

(1) I'm a Celtics fan.

(2) While watching (and yelling at) the game last night, I was leafing through Jerome McGann's Poetics of Sensibility, and found a Marxian reading of the marginalia scribbled into a volume of L.E.L.'s poetry by some random previous owners, consisting of "Yes." and "My heart." I'm saying, there's a whole chapter about the commodification of poetry based on those three uncommunicative words. I was already annoyed (as I generally am) with McGann with his stance as Grand Poobah of Literature, both in style (like, he's more Harold Bloom than Harold Bloom or something) and substance (do you know what the big problem with feminists when they revive long-lost ladies' texts? They never pronounce on the aesthetic value! Which McGann will do, and how! He'll rescue lady-texts in ways that ladies never dreamed of! Thanks, dude!). But holy Flaming Touchdown Jeebus, any reading of any flavor of three little scribbled words is just jumping the literary shark. Must be nice to just make stupid shit up and get it published.

This Week in Kitteh

2010-06-16T07:14:00.002-04:00

(Furry happy monster taking naps.)

WV Travelogue (parenthetical)

2010-06-13T09:51:00.009-04:00

Thursday, I hopped on a plane and flew to Baltimore, where BFF was waiting for me. We drove to DC, where I have never been. We walked the capitol mall, saw the big Washington Phall... er... Monument, the WWII and the Vietnam War memorials, and the Lincoln memorial. I wanted to stick around for the 3pm Lincoln Memorial talk by the park ranger--everything is supposed to be symbolic there, like the number of steps and columns, and the position of his hands, etc., and I like nerdy and trivial facts. But instead, we ended up running away because he kept pacing and yelling about how everybody thinks General Lee's head is on the back of the statue, or that his hands spell out "A" and "L" in American sign language. (Neither is true, don't dare forget!) Ranger-man had crazy in the eye, so we ran away.

We didn't get to do much, since my plane was a little late, the mall is vast, and we had an 8pm reservation at Lot 12--the restaurant in Berkeley Springs BFF used to work. Berkeley Springs, WV has a long history as a resort town (George Washington took a bath there once; they still have his tub), and Lot 12 is fancy. BFF had a case of deja vu, since nothing about the place or the fancy waitering rigmarole had changed since she left six years ago. We ate gnocci, halibut, and duck, and then retired to the bar to chat with the waitstaff after the few other diners had left. There was much gossip, and everyone couldn't wait to tell me how lovely they thought BFF was once she left to powder her nose. My one regret is that we forgot to check out the murals BFF painted for peanut prices before we left.

The next day and a half was a packed agenda: there was lunch at the Stray Cat (where there is plenty of cheese for your chimichanga but not lemon for your tea), the record store (where I bought an awesome and rare Nirvana album for a friend's bday present), a hike up to a view of Keyser from a mountain (and a bug bite on the eye), a trip to Gabe's (somewhere between Walmart and Marshall's) where I bought $6 shoes, barbecue on the deck at home, and a trip up the mountains to the World's Most Adorable Bluegrass Bar, the Purple Fiddle, on which trip I experienced the pleasure of beauty on the way up (my first sighting of lightning bugs, and then wildflowers, trees, grand vistas, etc.) and sublime terror on the way down (hairpin turns in the dark!). I must say, BFF rocked the winding roads--howsoever, I looked at the stars (so many!) as much as I could so I didn't have to look at our progress down the mountain.

It was rather shocking how beautiful the mountains and vegetable life are in West Virgina, and how the nature creeps up to the very doorsteps, if it is allowed, even in a fair-sized little town like Keyser. BFF's house sits squarely within town, and it seemed just about every view from their deck (complete with traditional porch swing and non-traditional wireless radio) included a mountain. And every unmowable slope seemed overrun with wildflowers and garden variety plants turned feral. It seemed there was house after house along the highways, all neat and square with big porches for sittin', and a great expanse of proudly manicured lawn (tractor mower often in visible use)--a gesture against the ever-encroaching flora and fauna. It was a little strange to my eyes, being from central California, where everything is on the grid plan and the native nature is lowly growing and compliant--you have to travel a bit to see real trees and mountains, and even those are properly contained in their reserves and parks. And then there is Boston, where half the dry land is the pure invention of infill and necessity, and most places have long been paved or carefully gardened anyhow.

I do wish I could have stayed a little longer than the 2.5 days--it would have been fun to see a little more of the wildlife and go a little further into the depths of the state. I never get to see trees in their natural habitat anymore... And I forgot how fun it is to see a place that's actually different from what you know, just for the hell of it.

Ugh. The internets bit me.

2010-06-10T06:47:00.005-04:00

Ugh. So, the beautiful thing about writing a blog hardly anyone reads is I can basically say whatever I want. Which makes this blog, I guess, masturbatory. But masturbation has its place in a healthy sex life--why not extend the icky metaphor?

I have a lot of blogs that I read fairly regularly--they are necessary to my mental health when in the throes of editing pages and pages or moving files around or transcribing tales of tenure and promotion woe from council notes (that last one always puts my stomach in a twist--the horrible sexist, racist, and sometimes just plain asshole comments some very few people make! oh, the railroading! oh, the failures to communicate! oh, my future!). So, I'll stop a minute from the work, and read a little, and move on.

But yesterday, I made a mistake: I tried to participate. One of the blogs (a favorite, actually) posted about advisor fecundity--a study of how many professors professors churn out, basically. So, there is something so weird about calling it "fecundity"--one more in a series of anecdotal instances where I find that researchers (of all stripes, science or not) talk about their career as if it were their kid, as if their advisees were their kids, as if the particular research was their kid, or the research or brains was something to fuck or to fuck with, e.g. "the penetrating thrust of this seminal research." I particularly find this true when I get stuff to edit from math and physics--or when the scientist is especially famous. So, as I exchange all the "its" and "it's" and try for the sometimes elusive clear and simple explanation/not misrepresenting the research balance, I will also replace the baby-making language with something more neutral.

And so, I got excited when there was commentary about this particular phenomena, because sometimes I think I'm being crazy. (I'm not--would you let "the thrust of this penetrating research" go out into the world? That's the editorial equivalent of letting your friend leave the house with the barndoor open or toilet paper on the shoe.) So I made a remark. I tried to be cute--which is always a mistake. And I was ironically self-deprecating about my literary sensitivity to the use of words, which in a scientific context, was definitely a mistake. And, of course, I evinced a feminist opinion, which makes you troll food. If you go to the FSP blog (see link and blog roll) you can find my comments. You can see what assholery ensued.

I'm trying to avoid engaging with the "critiques" offered to my comments--that's only going to make me angrier, even if I did it in this relatively safe space. (If I did it there, I'd be internet toast.) But the one that tells me I'm stupid for "having" to reference the OED and was wasting my time (as if all I do all day is remove "penetrating" from documents) and should leave academia stuck in my craw. Clearly, a troll--but these are precisely the attitudes that made me always not-feeling-completely-at-home when I was in science, that kept me from leaving science for literature because of my (partially working-class based) shame of loving something "useless," and that I sometimes still get since I don't live in a bubble and still have contact with science-y places. The basic premise to the attitude is that words don't matter, words have transparent and singular meanings, that paying attention to words is worthless and stupid, and finally that *you* are stupid for spending time on it. (Yay for ad hominem attacks!) Sure, I'm not going to cure cancer with literature, but... but... oh, fuck it. Fuck you, anonymous troll! Words are lovely! Words are ugly! Words have many meanings and shades and histories that still fucking matter! Words have effects on people!--directly and indirectly! It's good to know about words! It's good to care about words! When people talk about research in terms of a dude-scientist fucking Mother Nature, some people might be skeeved out!

And there are so many things to say about what's wrong with that, from the gendering of who does science to perhaps saying something that doesn't feel too inviting to lady profs, students, and let's not forget my primary audience--donors. (And please, let's not piss off the donors--it's not like the federal money is flowing free these days.) It's not like the ladies will faint away at the use of such language (there are some tough, tough ladies at this university--they can fend for themselves, and they often have to). But, dude, there are reasons that STEM disciplines and this BRU in particular don't have 1:1 gender ratios... this is just one humble reason among so, so many.

Everything's a little queer tonight.

2010-06-09T22:15:00.006-04:00

This plant keeps coming to me in my researches this evening:

This was part of Thornton's Temple of Flora (1799-1807), inspired by my true love, Erasmus Darwin. The Temple of Flora was done by subscription, starting out with a very fine and well-known artist, and then coming to this unknown artist (who got better as he went along), and a last resorting to ladies who seemed to be talented without as much instruction as her brethren (oh, same old story over and over...). Thornton had to resort to cheaper and cheaper artists as his subscriptions dwindled, and finally he just gave up.

This flower must be why.

I love its hermaphrodite-y weirdness--it's like Georgia O'Keefe in a previous life, and queerer.

But it's scary. And check that bit of volcano and eruption lightening going on in the righthand background!--This labiophallus will zap you!

And there are other unheimlich flowers in the collection, like:

Nobody's writing about queer flowers this evening--everybody's talking about the picturesque, botanical portraiture, and the materialism of science. (So, more of the same as always...) But I can't help abandoning the text for the pictures. I get all worked up about the dragon arum and the night-flowering cereus. When I first saw them, working on my prospectus, my first response was "Hey, I know that story already."

The story?

It's like the night-flowering cereus is the gothic facade (portrait of a "lady," with a backdrop of moonlight and shadows and crumbling ecclesiastic buildings--there's something funny about the very delicately painted lady-flower, but you can't put your finger on it so easy), and the dragon arum is the gothic secret revealed (the "lady" has a big giant ghost penis).

I mean, take Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho: The heroine Emily is such a lady (and a botanist and daughter of a botanist, by-the-by), an orphan who is kind and lovely, and sings and poetizes and faints at everything. She wanders around, appreciating pretty flowers and picturesque views and emoting at them. She's just this side of birds and mice helping her dress and clean house. She arrives (in the moonlight) at a castle with the menacing Uncle Montoni, who tries to threaten her into giving him the property she just inherited from her dead aunt. It's curious how that aunt, who initially mistreated her, dies shortly after a partial reform. It's curious how Montoni loses everything before he can confiscate Emily's property and is executed. It's curious that Emily's very kind but intensely restrictive parents die just as she grows up and begins to fall in love. It's curious that everyone Emily likes does well, and everyone Emily hates dies or suffers grotesquely. It's curious that Montoni's old murderous (and powerful--a.k.a. the Dragon Arum) girlfriend calls Emily a "sister" of the passions. But she dies soon after she tells her murderous story and gives Emily the sister talk. (Emily faints a little.) And at this point, all the "evil" people are dead, and still the angst and creepiness are not dispelled. Perhaps because Emily's delicate femininity is a mask and vehicle for her (or the author's? the reader's?) rather effective desires. She kills off way more people than her "sister." Emily's a night-blooming cereus.

And see, that's where Thornton goes wrong. Radcliffe carefully divides her sweet Emily from anything too powerful, directly: she is a feminine little creature, who just so happens to get everything she ever wanted. Emily has the alibi of all the machinery of narrative that contrives to get her what she wants. Ghost penis effectively cloaked. And Radcliffe was popular. People were titillated and scandalated. People evinced disapproval and read anyway. Or just avowedly liked it and soaked it up.

But you can't give a lady-flower a honking phallus and expect proper-minded people not to protest...

p.s. And poor Thornton, by the way. Though The Temple of Flora failed back then, now you have to spend a pretty penny to get it or any prints. And poor me, by the way. I would love to have a real one someday. (Though one of these days I will get me a lovely reproduction.)

This Week in Kitteh

2010-06-07T22:04:00.002-04:00

I am going on Thursday to visit the BFF in her hometown in West Virginia. Her brother made her this Unicornskin cap for Davy Crockett and posted it on her Facebook. It is the best thing I ever saw. I am really excited about going to the WV.

It's a mystery.

2010-06-03T09:32:00.003-04:00

So last night, I was watching the Daily Show and Morgan Freeman was on, shilling his new "Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman." I guess it's another of those documentaries that are the average person's tour guide through high fallutin' theoretical physics and the latest and greatest from the final frontier--string theory, describing the first few seconds of the big bang, astrobiology, etc.

One of the subjects Stewart and Freeman talked about was dark matter and dark energy. Nobody knows what it is--but there sure is a lot of it. I think there is something like five times more dark matter and energy than the regular kinds. And all of that is a total effin' mystery.

And so, here we go--we're all going to label the mystery as "God."

I don't know why this gets my dander up, being atheist and all, but I hate it when people decide to equate God with mystery.

For one, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment, since one day crazy-ass physicists will figure one of these mystery bits of the universe (I hope so, since that's their whole crazy-ass raison d'etre). I mean, look at the Victorians. So many of them clung mightily to their William Paley Natural Theology view of the universe, where God is the direct, first-hand designer of each little thing. So when Darwin came along and said that nature is perfectly capable of designing itself, they took a collective shit. God would have to abandon his post altogether, or at least inhabit a much smaller space in the universe. And then you get tragic cases like Matthew Arnold, who lamented (to his wife, on his honeymoon, no less) the "Sea of Faith" receding "down the vast edges drear/And naked shingles of the world." Nobody wants to have an existential crisis every time somebody figures out something major about how the world works--I'm sure Mrs. Arnold didn't appreciate it, either.

And anyway, I don't understand why explaining something makes it less an object awe and wonder. For example, my knowing something more about genetics and embryology does not diminish my wonder that anything alive manages to reproduce itself. It rather seems all the more fragile (so many things can go so wrong at any moment!) and weird (did you know the cells that initiate the formation of your eyes pick up and move to start your heart? did you know we start forming ass first, and the ass forms in the dimple where the sperm went into the egg?) and, actually sublime (the complexity so vast not even the brightest biologist can hold all the pieces in his or her head--it's straight-up Kantian mathematical sublime). You can say the awe and wonder is about how such amazing order grew up willy-nilly out of chaos, or you can say it's about the vast imagination of the divine creator. It doesn't really matter which it is--both are just a decision you make about what the world is. But at least, in either case, at least the world doesn't disappoint you just because you know a little about it.

And also, let's talk about scientific knowledge and the average person. Yes, somebody out there knows something about the first nanoseconds of the universe or has a bunch of mathematical equations that say all of existence is composed of harmonic wiggly strings. But it took them a decade of two of post-high school education to be qualified to understand it. And some of them will say that though they've got the chops to do the equations and apply them to physics, they don't really apprehend what they mean--they can't quite fit their brain around it in the same way you could fit your brain around things like how airplanes stay aloft, how rainbows form, or why sometimes humans are born with little tails . (Unless you're on the same level as the Insane Clown Posse--then all these things are beyond your grasp.) But the point is--you don't actually know any of this stuff about how the universe came to be. For you (and me), it is still profoundly a mystery.

And anyway, wringing your hands about God's exact role in creating the universe misses the main point about having faith: if you have to willfully choose to be as ignorant and plain stupid as the Insane Clown Posse to see God in the universe, your faith is a sham.

And most to the point--why wring your hands about exactly how the world came about, and how hands-on God was about it? None of us were there, so none of us will ever know for sure. And the main point of religion is not coming up with theories about how the world came about--isn't it about how you behave towards yourself and others? I don't believe there's anything in the New Testament that talks about Genesis. I was under the general impression Jesus was all about mustard seed faith, lunching with the dispossessed, not throwing the first stone, and "God is Love" and whatnot. You can spend your time on all of the Jesus-y things without dropping a single tear about having to see the "naked shingles of the world." The naked shingles aren't really so bad--quite nice, actually. And really, if you're Jesus-y, however nice they are, they're beside the point.

The atheist has said her piece on true religion. Everybody can ignore her now.

Tattoo Ideas

2010-05-21T13:12:00.003-04:00

1. Last night, BFF and I were joking that I should turn my tramp stamp violet (in my defense, there was no such term when I got it) into a foot note to some lines from Beachy Head (semi-inspired by David Foster Wallace's tattoo of Mary Karr's name in a heart, which he subsequently crossed out and foot-noted it with his wife's name further down on his arm). It makes sense, since Charlotte Turner Smith's poem has a lot of the flowers and botanical foot notes. And then, you know, I can call my tramp stamp an "end note." Ha, ha, very punny.

The funniest part is I'm starting to think about it seriously.

2. You know I rock the cupcakes (and love unicorns):

Yes. I realize the irony of declaring my love of unicorns, given my last post.

Holy pornulation, Batman!

2010-05-21T09:42:00.007-04:00

Dear god, Rainbow Brite grew up to be a porn star!

Not that I had high expectations: the orignal Rainbow Brite was the most vapid cartoon of all vapid girly cartoons from the 80s. Girls like rainbows! Girls like unicorns! End of concept!

Still. At least the 80s version didn't look like she paid for her plastic surgery by swinging on a pole.

I really don't know why my mom let me watch that animated piece of retardation (or My Little Ponies or Care Bears), vs. the most awesomest, rockingest girl cartoon ever, Jem (which I was not allowed to watch):

Sure, Jem and her ladies are wearing sexy heels and short skirts--though not that short compared to the 80s rehash minis my students have been wearing. Meanwhile 80s Rainbow Brite is wearing really lame Ugg-style boots and looks like she's part human and part multi-color space mushroom. And her brains had as much power as said mushroom--just enough to rescue cheery cheerful color from the clutches of Murky Dismal. It's the cartoon equivalent of the jerk face stranger who tells you to smile (even though, say, you just found out your grandma died, because dammit! your function is ornament!). Jem on the other hand, endeavors to win back the family music company using a combination of technology and rock and roll. Much better role model, despite cartoon sexiness.

....hrm...

Maybe I shouldn't prejudge the new pornulated Rainbow Brite?

Maybe she's a cyborg superhero?

Maybe she conquers villains through math and her razor wit?

Maybe all those stars on her outfit are really ninja stars?

I want feminist laser vision!

2010-05-19T09:18:00.008-04:00

Also wanted:

A Super Disguise Mustache
Boomerang Book-Throwing Action
Brontësaurus
Pudding

Hooray for Mellons!, or the Magic of Not Having to Teach

2010-05-17T20:52:00.003-04:00

I am so freaking proud of myself!

Four days ago, I got myself a dissertation blog, in which I make plans and talk to myself about botany.

Using blog, I got myself a daily plan (habits and to-do lists) and a long-term plan (self-imposed due dates).

Then, I started putting plans into effect.

And now, I know what the heck I'm doing with present chapter! And now, after weeks of circling the "I'll just read one more book" drain, I've got pages written and little tidbits stewing in my head for more!

This is dramatic for me. I know this is what I'm supposed to do all the time. But I have just not managed it. Too many balls in the air.

It's amazing what happens when my inbox doesn't flood every five minutes with requests from students and random other departmental people, when I'm not making class plans and carting around reams of grading, when I'm not gimping around with a bum knee, befuddled by stairs and steep declines. Granted, I'm still working a few hours at the BRU... but it actually helps having a small amount of outside structure imposed on my life and a few hours thinking about other things (even if it's only about how to say someone's research is the most awesome thing that has ever happened without saying it's "seminal").

Someday, I will have to figure out how to balance all the things--the teaching, the researching, the writing, the booze habit. But, for now I'm so, so happy I get the pull the ladder up from the window in my ivory tower and just write. (And drink.)

Accessible, my foot.

2010-04-27T14:56:00.002-04:00

So here's a recipe for disaster:

1. Put a university atop a hill.

2. Put the humanities department on the tippy-top of the hill.

3. Do NOT design buildings with ramps and elevators. Put stairs everywhere.

4. Do NOT renovate, ever.

5. Put an English PhD in a leg brace completely incompatible with stairs.

6. Grab some pop corn and get ready for some laffs!

---

This week has taught me two things: that there aren't really any students, faculty, or staff around this campus with visible mobility disabilities and why. If I had a long-term mobility issue, I would take one look at this campus and flee as fast and far as my handicapable body would take me. I mean, they moved me to a more "accessible" building and, by gum, there were still friggin' stairs. I really don't know how it is that the ADA doesn't apply here. I really don't know how it is that a school committed to "social justice" isn't committed to making it possible for anyone to be physically able to go to school and/or work here.

On a related note, hats off to all the MBTA drivers who put the kneeler into action on the buses for me!

In Stitches

2010-04-16T17:29:00.003-04:00

The question:

Given the high proportion of cobblestone and brick sidewalks, why is that Boston is so big on running?

The motive for the question:

Last Sunday, I was running and was swinging around the corner where Cambridge Street and Broadway meet. It's a brick sidewalk, and I had the thought I always have--"OK, it's treacherously uneven here, let's be careful."

SPLAT!

(And skid.)

The Rest of the Story:

A nice old man and a college kid helped me up. College Kid led me to the Harvard museum that's on that corner and directed me to the ladies' room inside to get cleaned up. The security lady gave me a band-aid.

As I was mopping myself up, I saw this weird white thing in my knee. "What is that?," I asked myself. "Oh, my patella," was the response. I panicked a little and then stuck the (insufficient) band-aid on. And then I walked towards the Cambridge Hospital, half in doubt whether I should go. (Oh, the expense!)

I eventually got there. My knee didn't hurt much--the scrapes from the skid hurt more. So, I sat on a bench in front of the hospital and pondered the sight of my kneecap until I was convinced I should go in.

The nurse stuck some blood-absorbing gauze on me, once I got seated on a gurney. And then some more gauze. And then some more.

And then I got transferred to another room to talk to the PA, whom I begged not to take x-rays of me unless she was sure there was a fracture. (Oh, the expense!) A doctor came around to poke my knee, and said I should be fine.

And then the PA came and shot me up with lidocaine until the knee was numb. She poked around some more to make sure she didn't have to sew up the sack around the patella (nope, fine). And then she put 11 stitches in my knee. I watched. It was weird.

Then, the big problem. Despite my mother warning me time and time again to carry a cell phone with me when I run (she hurt herself running last year, sans phone and had a hard time getting home), I didn't bring it. So, I tried my best to remember my friends' emails and hoped someone would check so I could get a ride home.

Poor BFF got a terse email, something to the effect of "Your friend is in the hospital. Come get her IMMEDIATELY," that scared the crap out of her.

Eventually, she arrived in a cab and took me home.

The Recovery:

So, all this week I've been on the couch popping Motrin and watching daytime TV between naps.

I learned that:

-One of the CBS Early Show anchors strongly resembles an Ed Helms character in looks and in awkward jokes and comments.

-Tyra Banks is a big homophobe. She criticized a straight male gay porn star, not for being in porn, but for being in gay porn. I mean, if you're not objecting to the pornulation, what difference does it make (except for the 10 times more money you earn in gay porn)?

-Ellen Degeneres is starting to look like Skeletor, thanks to veganism.

-I never tire of the 11:00am hour of the Today Show, featuring Hoda Kotb and Kathy Lee Gifford. They're so drunk and crazy.

-There might be a "tearful transformation" clause in whatever contract you have to sign to be on "What Not to Wear." I'm just waiting for the make-over subject to look into the camera and say, "I'm going home and buying a new pair of Crocs, a kitty t-shirt, and 20 pairs of sweat pants. Fuck you, Stacy London." Not that I approve of Crocs.

But, yesterday, I had to take the ice pack off, put on some pants, and go to school . By the end of the day, my leg hurt like a bitch and I felt like I was going to spew the Thai food my friends fed me after class. After a long morning of sleep, I found that I can bend my knee a little more. But I still feel like I'm going to spew at any moment. And I'm tired of only having my cat for company. (Sorry, Unicorn. You are lovely, but you are not the best conversationalist.)

The Sum-Up:

Even though my friends tell me I'm a prime candidate for the BAMF* of the Year Award, even though I've desperately wanted to sit on the couch and watch daytime TV, even though I'm going to have a killer cred-giving scar, I'm pretty sure this blows.

A curse on cobblestone!

-----------------------

*Bad-Ass Mother Fucker

Raw Appeal

2010-04-05T13:20:00.004-04:00

For the past couple of weeks, I've been running like a madwoman. The winter, the dissertation, and medication-induced insatiable hunger have not been kind to my "girlish" figure. It's been both wonderful (hooray, springtime sunshine and runner's high!) and painful (boo, muscle cramps and spaghetti legs!).

So, last night BFF returned from her trip home to the WV (for what turned out to be a tragic Final Four game, not Easter). We celebrated by walking the three feet to Lord Hobo. I'd already eaten--I'd gone running that morning and had to quiet the stomach rumbles. I made myself a fine dinner of asparagus and prosciutto pasta, and was quite satisfied. But what should appear on the specials board, but steak tartare with raw yolk on top?

Thence came roaring from deep in the brain--EAT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My stomach even managed to make some empty gurgles, despite the full dinner.

So, I ordered it, along with a delicious bourbon cocktail. I determinedly ignored the pile of toast it was served with and practically face-planted into the pile of well-seasoned rawness like a starved animal.

This always happens when I'm a regular runner--the protein fiending is out of control. The euphoria of giving into the cravings is lovely, but I'm always slightly weirded out by how specific and overwhelming the somatic message is. Chemical machine-1, conscious will-0. (At least in the case of the steak--the 3 bourbon cocktails was all conscious will. So maybe the score is even.)

I'm not particularly wedded to the idea that the conscious mind is always in the driver's seat--I mean, a week or two I had a dream that one of my brothers handed me a Big Gulp, and the voice of my BF was heard faintly through the straw as I drank the soda. My subconscious takes some very strange turns, and I'm usually more amused than anything else. But that's all in my head. The uncanny thing is that my spaghetti legs seem to be telling my brain what to do... which is..... disconcerting.

I guess the moral is, "Suck it, Descartes"?

In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, I bring you Rebecca Saxe.

2010-03-24T13:49:00.008-04:00

I spend a lot of time—a lot of time—at my job trying to translate professors’ complicated and very specific research into language that a loaded donor with maybe not more than an undergraduate degree in science can understand. And, then, you know, I have to try to make someone’s invention of a new chiral ligand for transition metal-catalyzed reactions seem important and exciting enough for that potential donor to unload some of those dollars. This sort of research is important, and is at least exciting to a very limited group of very smart people out there in the world. But I am not one of those specific sorts of smart people. Fake it ‘till you make it. Or at least until the paycheck rolls in.

But then there are certain professors whose research curls my toes and makes me wish I had not gone and turned myself into a literary type.

Exhibit A: Rebecca Saxe, an assistant professor in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT.

Saxe researches the neurobiology of theory of mind, which is, simply put, how we humans figure out what someone else’s mental state is—what someone else wants, knows, and feels. This is Big Deal Dead Dude territory, originating with one of the Biggest Deal Dead Dudes of them all, Descartes.*

There are two basic ways to think about theory of mind:

(1) Simulation: When people try to figure out someone else’s mental state, they imagine themselves in the same situation and apply directly.

(2) Abstract Model: People carry around an abstract model of how minds work, and can make inferences about mental states they might never have been in. This is something like the model of the physical world we use. As in, I know if I shoved a piano off a high-rise, it would make a smashy mess, even though I have never done so or seen it happen, and am completely committed to keeping such an instrument whole, should I ever obtain one in the future. So likewise, with an abstract model of the mind, I can imagine how hard it must have been for some particular past students of mine to have three or more grandfathers die all in one semester, even though I only have two live ones.

Saxe approached the problem of which way is the right way as she generally does: by using fMRI to see which parts of a person’s brain lights up when he or she carries out a particular cognitive task. Plus, also, congenitally blind research subjects.

If the simulation model is correct, then someone who has never had visual input can’t reason about visual experiences in the same way as someone who is sighted, since the parts of the brain related to processing visual information has never been stimulated. So, if a blind person was trying to imagine the horror and deviant thrill of watching the above-mentioned piano go smash, a different part of the brain would have to light up than mine.

However, what Saxe found was that not only are blind people as good as sighted people in predicting responses to visual stimuli, but the used the same part of the brain to do it. This means that theory of mind isn’t so much connected to sensory experience as it is to higher-level cognitive functions. Theory of mind is totes in the abstract. So who knows whether we’re born with it or if it comes with some other kind of experience. (Maybe someone can get up some kind of Kantian experiment in this regard—can I get a what-what for a priori knowledge?)

So, at this point, I will explain why the work of this particular lady scientist tickles me so much:

1. If you know me at all, you know I like to see the ladies encroaching on Big Deal Dead Dude terrain.

2. And on a related note, I like to see the ladies at this Grand Bastion of Science be very, very successful. It hurts my heart that, though this place isn’t the most lady-free top-10 university around (I believe that honor belongs to Harvard), it’s not exactly lady scientist heaven.

3. Although Saxe can't bring direct evidence to bear on theory of mind, her experiments are just so nice and elegant.

4. What’s more, I am completely tickled that this high-falutin’ and abstract Enlightenment philosophy, constructed originally entirely by imagination and logic, has conjugated with for-reals laboratory research. It’s a Unified Theory of Everything nerd-gasm. It’s just friggin’ awesome.

---------------

*n.b. It’s also territory that is now inhabited by Simon Baron-Cohen, cousin to Sacha of Borat fame. That’s for the trivia-philes out there.

If I were a mathematician, I too would wear a tiara.

2010-03-19T12:15:00.003-04:00

Last year, I found about Ada Lovelace and about Ada Lovelace Day simultaneously: Ada Lovelace is (1) first programmer and a mathematician and (2) the daughter of Lord Byron (her mom thought teaching her math was the best way to ensure the daughter would be nothing like the father). I love, love, love the whole idea of Ada Lovelace. I'm fond of the smart ladies, especially one with a flair for style.

So, this year, I will try to actually participate in Ada Lovelace Day by posting a blog about a lady scientist on March 24. Please to stop by and participate in the science-y, feminist-y glory.

Double Entendre Fail

2010-03-10T10:37:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, in my freshman composition class, I asked them if they would like to do potluck snacks for peer review. Of course that delighted them--everyone is suffering from mid-semester doldrums and/or panic (including myself). I further asked them if there were any allergies where they couldn't be in the room with the food. One volunteered "tree nuts."

So, I said, "OK, let's make this simple: nothing with nuts is welcome in the room on Thursday."

And then I paused.

And then the lightbulb went off.

And then I giggled helplessly.

And then I paused again: only 3 of the 17 students were amused by my accidental double entendre.

My questions are as follows:

(1) Were they just so uncomfortable with my immature giggling that they were shocked, I say, shocked?

-or-

(2) Was I just an immature asstard to even think of the double entendre in the first place?

Either way, I am just not a professional sometimes....

Gonna put the "fun" in "funding."

2010-02-12T18:03:00.006-05:00

This morning, I opened my email, and what should be there, but an email from the dissertation year fellowship committee. All there was in the email was a pdf attachment of either my award or my rejection--who was to know.

So, click--

And all I could think as it was downloading, was "Oh, god, this is much too soon."

And----

Yes!

Abracadabra: I have full funding for my final year, tuition paid, a summer stipend, and a research discretionary fund!

I can not starve!

I can not work or teach!

I can finish next year!

I can go to archives--in mother effin England, yo!

I honestly don't know how this happened. I'm not worse than anybody else, but I'm not better. And I'm certainly not the most "together" person in my year and department.

But there it is.

The first thing I did was shake uncontrollably for a moment.

The second thing was to call/email/text anybody who'd care.

The third thing was to do a series of happy dances around the apartment.

The fourth thing was to remember my Craigie on Main gift certificate pinned to my fridge, waiting for just this occasion. (For use tomorrow.)

The last thing was to take a shower and go enjoy a day at the MFA and a sandwich at the Squealing Pig. BFF got weepy over the Spanish still lifes. I got weepy over the installation of a bunch of people singing the entire Madonna "Immaculate" collection album, full gusto.

Total FTW.

For a happier Valentine's Day:

2010-02-11T13:47:00.002-05:00

Maybe it's not too late to order in time for the big day.

Just imagine the possibilities.

Or, if you can't--there's always this.

Superbowl Surprise

2010-02-08T09:22:00.008-05:00

Last night, I enjoyed a pile of buffalo tofu, chips and dip, and vegan chili with a crew of ladies and a Superbowl. I'm not a big football fan (baseball is my schtick), and especially not of the pro sort. But, you know, there was a big underdog story, which I always love (Go Saints!), and there are those fabled spectacles of high budget commercials and cringe-worthy half-time shows.

Of course, watching the moribund The Who growl and holler their way through their catalog of teen-aged angst in the middle of a circle-jerk light show did not disappoint. But, as you may have noticed from the menu and the all-female guest list, I may not have been part of the audience disposed to enjoy the commercial hoopla.

Granted, I expected that most commercials would be aimed at the dudes, and was not surprised at the high rotation of Doritos, Bud Light, and Coca Cola commercials. Apparently, if you're not wallowing in a sea of piss-water booze, high fructose corn syrup, and cheese dust, you're not a real man. Not that I really know this first-hand: my life is a taco party. Moreover, my few male friends are sensitive types who eat hummus and drink craft beer--and thus whose masculinity is suspect, despite the 8%+ alcohol content. But you know, I do watch TV, and I have a slight glimmering of this knowledge about what regular dudes do.

I was also expecting a lot of boobage--lots and lots of objectification. It's a matter of course.

But what I forgot was how oppressed the average dude is by the women in his life. It seemed like every other commercial lamented women's total domination of all aspects of dudely life. Poor dudes. For instance, this commercial below came on, starting out with a couple in a lingerie section. I really honestly thought the guy was going to be delighted to help his lady pick out a little lacy something for his benefit:

But I was wrong. Actually, it's a sign that dudes have NO SPINE and have lost ALL power to out-of-control ladies. I naively thought that the lingerie was largely for the dude anyhow, and he might as well have a say in which ridiculous confection of pink ruffles his lady will strap on for his happy fun-time. But really, you're just an emasculating bitch for dragging your dude into lady-designated space. I suppose you could do all the work of objectifying yourself--wouldn't want to cut into a dude's TV time with an outrageous demand for a glimmer of mutuality in your sex life.

I shouldn't be surprised that dudes are sadly oppressed by ladies who have a thought and a backbone--you know, because equality=total emasculation. But this just stuck in my craw. I'm plenty used to commercials featuring the harpy nag wife, but she's a harpy nag because she wants her partner's input on a sexy bra? Too effin much.

They should stick with commercials featuring Betty White.

Words Gone Wild

2010-02-03T12:28:00.005-05:00

So here is a list of words I'm removing from a research summary booklet for the Washington office of BRU. I wouldn't make anything of them, but for the frequent repetition and juxtaposition. You'll see how they are united.

Thrust
Stroke
Seminal
Vigorous
Virile
Robust
Driving
Fruitful
Fecund
Prolific
Potent
Probing
Exploit(ing)
Stimulate(ing)
Generative

At first, I was amused. Whoever wrote this thing in the first place has more than a Freudian slip going on--maybe more like a Freudian wardrobe. But now I'm just weary. I'm running out of alternatives and even the ability to spot these gems. Is it OK to use "Probing Violent Space" as a subtitle? Maybe.....

And surprisingly, I have to go about removing the unremitting use of passive tense. You'd think they'd go for the more "potent" active tense.

The password is "butter."

2009-12-01T12:51:00.004-05:00

Thanksgiving was so lovely. I was terrified at first, since the BFF's family was driving in from the WV for it, and in the couple of days before the big day, BFF contracted some form of flu that knocked her off her feet. I thought I might have to manage the cooking myself.

But the BFF recovered enough to share in the cooking. We produced:

A chicken massaged and basted in butter and herbs, with wine
Gorgonzola mashed potatoes (a touch of bacon fat is the secret)
Macaroni and cheese casserole (my special recipe)
Asparagus with balsamic reduction
Maple pear turnover
Chocolate cream cheese pie

The only thing that did not have butter in it was the asparagus. We believe in moderation.

There was one tragedy for the day: the turnover turned over too soon, right onto the kitchen floor. We were able to rescue a piece of it. It was delicious. (Mmmmm... linoleum tile...)

Despite the piles of sleep, pleasurable eating, and socializing I got over the long holiday, I am desperately tired. My back feels like a maze of knots. I've got this cyclops headache over my left eye. Etc. Etc. Whine. Whine. Etc. Whine.

I can see break coming (last day of classes is tomorrow, one long day of meetings the day after, and presto!), but even so, I'm not feeling it, altogether. Over break, I must finish my chapter, begin the next, write the syllabus for my new freshman comp class, and apply for fellowships (because, otherwise it's teaching hell to try to make ends meet). There will be a trip home somewhere in this, as well.

I can also see that I am losing motivation for this whole grad school endeavor. The only thing that circulates in my head these days is a loop of "I'm so tired, I'm so tired, I'm so tired." I'm not sure what to do about it either. I would rather take a nap and then lose myself in the cooking of things with butter. My chocolate pie is hard to achieve, but it never fails to please. No red ink or bitter tears in the making of it.

The Long Awaited Lord Hobo (All Hail!)

2009-11-20T09:26:00.003-05:00

Yes, yes, yes, no blogging on my part for ages and ages. After my last post, the phlegm won. I tried desperately to rest and get better, but that meant I was desperately behind in just about everything. That includes a due date for pages of my dissertation. Finally, this week, I banged them out and to celebrate, I went to the long-awaited opening of Lord Hobo.

BFF and I have been scoping this place out since they took down the B-Side sign (so sad!) and started to renovate the insides oh-so-slowly. But months and months trailed by, and no restaurant emerged. Finally, a friend of mine sent me an article about Lord Hobo and its Cambridge liquor license travails--and about it's opening this week. Apparently, BFF and I weren't the only ones long-awaiting--there were already long, long threads on Yelp and Foodler speculating about its opening date. There is even this site, which is now incorrect.

So it was unsurprising and yet heartbreaking when we walked up to the restaurant and discovered a line to get in. And then when you walked in, you had to wait for a table.

Not that having to wait for a table once we were in was so bad--Lord Hobo has one of the most impressive beer lists I've seen. For jeebus's sake, they even have Cantillon Geuze on tap! A beer-ophile friend of mine has been telling me about this beer for years now: it's a very special family brew, spontaneously fermented by whatever yeasties that inhabit their very elderly building. I'm all for controlled spoilage, but this particular beer seems to carry with it a whiff of danger. However, delicious. We sampled heavily before a table materialized.

Once at the table, cracked a bottle of Terrazas Reserve Malbec (Argentinian) open and ordered deviled eggs (3 kinds--avacado, chili, truffle oil) and truffle oil fries to get warmed up. We were perhaps a little heavy with the truffle flavor, but it's hard to restrain oneself in that regard. The eggs were very light and subtle (maybe too subtle for the likes of me), but the dips that came with the fries were umami-licious. Hard not to stick my head in the basket, trough-style.

I must confess, however, I had a snob-moment when ordering the wine. When asking for a recommendation, she asked me what I usually drink (good move), I answered "Zinfandel" (mmmmmm....), and she said I should choose the pinot because I'd like something so light (aaaarrrrrghh!). I know the zinfandel is the Rodney Dangerfield of wine on the east coast--no respect, no respect at all. But it is the mother effin opposite of a pinot. Pinot tastes delicate, like shady, damp places. Zinfandel is big and spicy, like the sun punched you in the face. Sigh. But, no actual harm was done, since the malbec was lovely and balanced. Which leads me to think that she could have recommended anything off the list and it would have been fine--it's hard to find a good malbec.

For the main event, the BFF ordered the lobster mac and cheese--on which I can make no comment. The extra sauce had been sipped out of the bowl, so I will assume it was good. I, on the other hand, blew $30 on the sirloin with marrow butter, gorgonzola whipped potatoes, watercress, and vin cotto. I have had dreams about having a slab of very rare beef (no steak tips, no cheapo cuts) for years now, but have not been able to persuade myself to pony up the cash required for such a thing. I've never had marrow before--I rather suspected I would be scraping it off after a bite or two. But no. I think I'm prepared to suck marrow out of the bone, should such an opportunity present itself to me. And gorgonzola will certainly be mixed into the mashed potatoes this Thursday for the Turkey Day feast.

My only complaints about the place are:

1. It is a total homing beacon for every hipster in a five mile radius. And they are prepared to make it a total meat market scene. The meat will be very, very lean, but meat nonetheless.

2. There are no shit beers on the menu. I see their point--they want to do everything up quality-like. But after 3 or 4 high alcohol content craft beers, sometimes a girl needs a little Champagne of Beers in her life. Schlitz. Narrangansett. Something that won't help her get acquainted with the floorboards.

3. Why oh why is it so effin close to my homestead?!??!? Temptation!

The Blob v. The Phlegm

2009-10-10T11:25:00.003-04:00

Despite my best efforts to feed myself well and get plenty of rest, the sniffles that began the week devolved into a full-blown cold... flu... something that completely knocked me off my feet and onto the couch. I spent yesterday alternating between sleeping like the dead and watching movies...

Movie #1: The Blob

I would never have chosen this in a million years, except that the free movies on the Comcast On-Demand are terribly shitulous. The majority are last year's teen horror flicks or rom-coms from the previous two decades. But that being said, it does star Steve McQueen, a canned-cherry-pie-filling monster, and heavy-handed metaphors about conformity, the Fuzz, and the misunderstood youth. What surprised me was the following: the opening of the film is rather groovy with its ironic theme song and mod design; the film actually qualifies as an independent film (but I guess many the B-movie does); the movie is wicked self-referential, with a horde of teens watching horror B-movies and then being attacked by the blob in the theater; the misunderstood youth hero (Steve McQueen) becomes the good father by the end of the movie, even with a holy-family like pose with his girl Jane and her little bro. So much for rebellion.

Movie #2: Mad Love (a.k.a. The Hands of Orlac)

Is it possible to have a crush on Peter Lorre and not be weird? The whole movie is a classic exercise in mad scientist villainy: Dr. Gogol has got the maniacal MWAHAHA laughter, the exotic assistant, the God complex, the perverse Freudian crush (she was an actress in a theater specializing in the macabre who played a woman who undergoes torture), and the weird sensualist energy that is requisite for the creepiest of classic villains. It's all a cliche, but I find it (and the villain) strangely compelling. I really don't know what's wrong with me.

Movie #3: Management

The first third of the movie is a romance that manages not to be a rom-com, the second third is a cross between a bro-mance and Say Anything (yes, there's a serenade outside a window), and the last third visits rom-com territory. I got the sense that the movie was trying to offer a corrective to many genres at once (offering alternatives to the grand romantic gestures of the rom-com, the fart joke-sexual escapade bro-mance, and the neat, implied big wedding/big house ending of the rom-con)--which means it feels a bit of a mash-up, stylistically and in terms of narrative. But the interventions are all ones I'm on board with. And the alternatives offered are very charming and funny--e.g. Steve Zahn woos Jennifer Anniston via a couple of bottles of wine he doesn't understand to be vilely bad and an awkward butt groping. Which turn out to be weird and sweet. And who knew Jennifer Anniston could actually act?

Movie #4: Religulous

So, I think Bill Maher is by nature an asshole, but an asshole with range. He is by turns a blow hard, a demigogue, a misogynist, and just a contrarian trouble-maker. But usually, despite all that, I think he's funny. But in this movie, he's just as big a dogmatist retard as anyone whom he attempts to criticize/make fun of/humiliate. He manages to invoke apocalypse (man-made) to make an argument against apocalyptic religious mindsets. Which I imagine he thinks is a cool intellectual pony trick, but which comes off as just hypocritical and assinine. And offenses of all offenses, he's not funny. He doesn't deserve the effort of my googling a picture for him.

The Culinary Fairy came to me last night and gave me deliciousness.

2009-10-05T09:25:00.008-04:00

Yesterday, BFF and I wandered into Craigie on Main, numero uno on my hot list of places I'd like to dine. We only intended to order a round of drinks and an appetizer since, as you may have noticed on the restaurant's website, 'tis a fancy-pants place and a bit pricey. When we walked in, the bar was packed full. We were asked, "Would you like to join us for a drink on the ramp?" Meaning, could we stand on the ramp leading from the front door to the bar sipping $10 cocktails, waiting desperately for a seat.

The answer, by gum, was "yes."

So, I ordered a St. Pierre (Rose vermouth, Niessen, tad of orange and other things my palate is too course to identify). BFF ordered a cucumber gimlet. They were the opposite sort of drinks--mine smokey and rich, hers light and fresh. Both supremely tasty.

We stood and stood and stood, slowly sipping, making jokes about our fine taste and thin wallets. And miracle of miracles, seats at the bar finally cleared out.

And BFF recognized the head bartender from her Dorchester days--a denizen of the storied Harp and Bard pub.

We sat down and ordered a set of terrines and a potato galette with salmon roe. Already too much. But first came out a little amuse bouches of cured ham and homemade mozzerella and a tiny bit of pate of mysterious but delightful origins smeared with caviar, compliments of the chef. I was tickled--I've never had food compliments of anyone. My bouche was amused.

And then came out our terrines and galette. I was unsure about the salmon roe, but it's kind of amazing the way they pop in your mouth and spread their salty goodness. And I've never had a terrine, exactly, before... at least not anything but a relatively inexpensive goose liver pate. But it was weird and wonderful. Julia Child calls them a "luxurious cold meatloaf." That doesn't seem to quite capture it... more like, "luxurious cold meat jam." But that doesn't sound so appetizing either.

And then there were more drinks. This time, a "Money Market" for me, with apple, Bols Genever, lemon, honey, and cardamom. I wish I had watched more closely when they made it--their bar is stocked with all manner of medicine dropper bottles. It appears that bartending there is more like being an apothecary than a booze mixer. At any rate, also delicious.

Once we had cleared our plates, new and unexpected food appeared: tea-infused (jasmine and rooibos) panna cotta, also compliments of the chef. Which were just small enough to avoid my stomach bursting into a million pieces. These tea-infused desserts have always inspired suspicion in me--they just seem so precious--as if the style of the thing was more important than the taste. But I must admit, it was indeed good. And it was nice to wrap up with something so delicate after the meat-and-potato-fest that had gone before.

So then we got the bill--another surprise. Last round of drinks were also complimentary. And when we said good-bye to the head bartender, BFF got a bear hug and an invitation to return for more treats. (Did I mention this restaurant is a very short walk from the apartment?) I never felt so important. I mean, BFF and I are nobodies... it's not like we can return and drop a load of dollars on a regular basis, or write reviews, or even bring in other people with loads of dollars to drop.... they never bring you complimentary anything when you're poor. Freebies are for the elite.

So, did I mention there are 6 and 10 course tasting menus available? Only $85 and $115, respectively.... sans booze....

Someday... (sigh)...

Stop using Jane Austen for the forces of evil!

2009-09-22T10:48:00.004-04:00

I don't know what to get angriest at in this here website called "Sense and Sexuality" funded by the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute:

-The little hearts strung on the rungs of a pink double helix. I don't have hearts in my DNA--just flowers and unicorn sparkles. It's totally misrepresentative.

-Or this statement: "Now we're fighting a horde of bugs, and the bugs are winning. It's no longer enough to communicate with your 'partners', get tested, and use condoms. In this century, if you wish to avoid genital infections, you need a different plan." So, does professional assface Miriam Grossman mean bacterial infections? Viral infections? Or plain old-fashioned crabs? Calling cause of infection 'bugs' reeks of the fourth grade playground. The "Serious Threatening Deadly" link (get it?), is a study of 18-21 year-olds. I can't imagine this would appeal to someone of that age group. I would have shat all over it as childish by 14. Or younger.

-Did you know I have a "trust hormone." Apparently, oxytocin will make me moon over a dude, but he will immediately forget my name. I would lay dollars to donuts I would forget names first. Actually, my adventures in Facebook proves it. I win. Gimme my dollars. Or donuts will do.

-Did you know there's nothing wrong with you if you feel "used" after sex. You know why? You were. Apparently, you didn't have any of your own motivations for having sex.

-And guess what? I need to get pumping babies out now because my fertility is a window that will close. Well, it's true, my days of fertility will come to a close. (And let's not talk about that whole tenure clock v. biological clock issue.) But I don't know precisely that you should be instilling that paranoia in an 18 year old. Good god! When I was 18, I was just barely able to keep myself in Eggos and flip flops, much less provide food and clothing to another human being. And then there was that whole maturity thing that I didn't have yet. Neat.

-And, oh, the blog--a veritable catalog of why this world is going to hell in a sexually liberated handbasket. Don't ask me why this blog entry is entitled "If Men Can Pee Standing Up, So Can I!"Apparently, sleeping around is like peeing upright--you need a penis to do it. Apparently, nobody at the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute has heard of the Whizzy. Or has ever peed at a gas station. It's amazing what ladies can do when they put their mind to it!

Jane would not approve. She expected the ladies to be smarter than this. And to have better taste.

Perhaps I will go distract myself by angering myself with this totally different kind of abuse of Jane Austen.

Or this one.

This Week in Kitteh

2009-09-12T19:36:00.000-04:00

I really hope this means that Unicorn is working on my dissertation.

Where are my fancy pants?

2009-09-05T09:23:00.003-04:00

Last night, I went to a bon voyage party to a friend who has been in town for the summer on a fellowship. Normally, she resides miles and miles away, graduate studenting at a fancy pants college (one of that special group of eight).

It was a lovely evening that included a prosciutto fig gorgonzola pizza. I met some of her coworkers, who were lovely. And her BF, who was also lovely. We even reminisced a little of days long gone by, when we were in college and drove these together for the university:

That would be a vintage London double deck from the 40s, shipped by boat to California. It's something like 40% wood--old-timey. Pre-select transmission--weird and difficult.

(Suffering a moment of nostalgia and pride.)

Anyway.

So, we were talking about our respective grad schools, and she asked me why I wasn't at an Ivy like she was. It was a compliment--she meant I was plenty smart enough to be at such a place. But, my, didn't it stick in my craw?!

My own university is fine--or was when I showed up. (We'll see how close it gets to going down as it circles the financial drain.) It's small and packed with research and grad students. Everybody's smart. More privilege walking around than you can shake a stick at. If we're not strictly fancy pants, we're nearly so.

The answer I gave her is absolutely true: (1) I came from ye old working class/lower middle class and I never imagined myself in such a rarified environment; (2) I couldn't afford anything better than CSU Hometown Podunk for the MA that was to help me switch from genetics to English and that lops the top off of reasonable ambitions for PhD programs; (3) everyone and his or her dog wants to be in English and there's piles and piles of competitors (she's an Egyptologist... it's a slightly different story). But mostly, it was the first reason--I didn't even bother applying.

Now, after many years in grad school, I've met enough gradretards from America's finest schools to know I could have still eaten many the grad student for seminar snack anywhere I happened to go--if I could have managed to get in. But that "if" is a big, big one (see reasons 2 and 3).

Actually, Reasons 1, 2, and 3 make me very, very angry about how this whole education thing is structured. Most Ivy grad students I meet are quite smart, but the not-so-rare Ivy gradretards make me red in the face. That could have been my spot, had I been willing to ask for it and someone been willing to give it to me. Or could have belonged to some other meritorious individual rising from the unwashed masses.

I'm 30 and still surprised that nothing's fair, I suppose.

But, I suppose it's fine as it has worked out for me. My self-confidence can barely stand up to the quasi-fancy-pantness of my own university. It might have imploded, had I gone somewhere Ivy... Or I could have been on my way to academic superstardom. Who the fuck knows?

But maybe someday, when I'm at some middling Uni, professoring, I could help some of the unwashed masses groom themselves for the elite... I could possibly unstick some of this resentment from my craw (wherever my craw is...)

Pate de Canard en Croute: Photo Journal

2009-08-31T08:45:00.019-04:00

BFF and I read an article in the Globe about someone being inspired to make the dish that appears at the end of Julie & Julia: the pate de canard en croute. Somehow, it ended up that we decided to make it, too.

We bought a duck. We bought a trussing needle and twine. We bought ground pork and ground veal. We couldn't find lard. And every time I showed up somewhere and asked, they gave me crazy face and turned me away lardless. But not at Savenor's. They had a friendly face. And lard. But of course, that's where Julia used to shop.

Day 1

That's right--this took more than one day to make. We started on Saturday. We were very enthusiastic about it.

I made pastry.

BFF made the pate. Cutting the onions was rather painful. Protective eyegear was necessary.

The result of her efforts was this meat paste.

Which looks unimpressive. But we cooked a little bit to test its flavoring. It turned out to be massively rich and delicious. Probably because it's veal and pork and lard.

And all this booze that went into it.

So, that was the easy part. Next up--deboning this duck:

Which was indeed very hard. And gross.

The worst part was the smell. After rooting around in a fatty fatty duck carcass for awhile, the corpse-ish smell soaked into our hands and, despite the constant handwashing, would not remove. However, the sense of accomplishment when finally pulling the ribcage and then the legs and then the wings out was like nothing else.

Next step would be sewing the effer up. Threading the needle was a welcome break from duck carcass.

But it was a short-lived break.

After stitching Frankenduck together, we rather clumsily trussed it up.

And then we stuck it in the fridge, called it a day, and ordered a pizza.

Unicorn was integral to our recovery.

Day 2

The majority of the next day was reserved for wrapping the duck up, baking it, and allowing it to cool before we cut open the top, pulled the log of meat out, unsnipped the trussing, and put it back in the pastry. I got up early, rolled out the dough, and wrapped the duck up. Please to notice the very cute heart and star decor.

The foil thing is an escape hatch for air--and as it turns out, gobs and gobs of meat fat. When we took it out of the oven, we tried to transfer it to a more attractive plate.

Since we prepared the whole thing on that platter, it was terribly surprising when the duck came out of the oven too large for plate. The pastry broke. Tragic. But we put the beast back on the unaesthetic cookie sheet and poked the pastry back together as best we could.

We served it with mashed potatoes, asparagus with balsamic reduction, and lots and lots of wine. A delicious salad of grape tomatoes, brocolini, and green beans and box of chocolate truffles also arrived with our guests. We ate. We drank. We made merry.

Frankly, however, it tasted like a fancy, dense meat loaf. It's good. But not fantastic. I doubt I will put myself through the trouble again. But I did come away with some inspiration. I no longer fear whole birds, as I once did. Having taken one to pieces top to toe, no fear can linger. I may someday make some other meat en croute that doesn't require a deboned duck. The pastry around meat part was a revelation. Also, more port ought to go in my meat.

Deals are made to be broken.

2009-08-27T11:02:00.005-04:00

I read Shakesville (see blog roll) religiously, if for no other reason than posts like this brave and thoughtful essay about "The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck" that got reprinted at the Guardian website. I say (with all my heart), read it--but in short, it is about negotiating structural misogyny in personal relationships with men, and the distrust it can generate in the places you least want it.

Why brave? For one, I have been wanting to link to her post since it was published on Aug. 14, but have been reluctant for the very reasons she identifies in the article. It's one thing to rail at an abstract patriarchy; it's another to talk about the very personal and painful ways it has affected your life. It makes a girl vulnerable.

Proof? Just scroll down through the comments at the Guardian. Summary: "How dare you be hurt by the damaging things done to you! Suck it up with a smile, whiningwhorebitchcunt--all the other ladies do." In other words, doods going apeshit testerical at the suggestion that a woman might not take kindly to contempt for women and might actually--gasp!--be hurt in very real ways by it. I suppose one of the privileges of being privileged is never having to be confronted with the ugliness you depend on (something that terrifies me when applying this to other parts of life, e.g. being white, being able to clamber my way up to the educated MC, living in an industrialized Western nation, etc.).

All I am really capable of saying about the article--Amen, sister!

Somebody has a case of the Mondays.

2009-08-24T13:05:00.007-04:00

Things undone this weekend:

Half-assedly written diss chapter languishing.

Fluffy mounds of kitty fur are collecting in the corners of the house. Perhaps they will spontaneously generate new kitties.

Month old chicken decomposing in a Ziploc container in the fridge. No edible food remains.

Conference panel, seemingly made for me, not applied for.

Clean laundry unceremoniously dumped on the floor; slowly becoming unclean.

Office trade at school undone; books and lame tchotchkes remain piled in wrong janitor's closet cum grad hole.

Things done:

Bar crawl beginning in Union Square, ending at the Cantab.

Two long walk/runs along the river. (Note to self: must douse face and body with sun- and bug-repelling chemicals before going outside next time.)

Half of Bill Buford's Heat; accompanied by food day dreams.

All of A. S. Byatt's Angels and Insects. Is about incest and taxonomy--does it count?

Half a painting of a Nelumbo nucifera.

10-ish episodes of season two of Madmen in a row; accompanied by three beers and three Jack and gins.

---

I think I accidentally took a vacation. I needed it. Could use more. Feel entirely guilty for not having been productive of anything but shitulous art, a bug bite addled sunburn, and two hangovers. Feel generalized, undirected resentment about feeling guilty for having treated a weekend like a weekend. Desperately want to finish my shitty painting, drink another Jack and gin, and go to bed.

Bad economy cutting into your entertainment budget? Three simples steps to free laffs.

2009-08-21T08:21:00.006-04:00

(1) Give incoming grad students several thousand dollars more than everyone else because the university would like to start attracting "quality" grad students.

(2) Pay for it by denying all the continuing graduate students their yearly raise.

(3) Watch as a crazed, non-quality fifth year eats the face of the weakest newbie while screaming "You can afford to give us our raises now, motha fuckas!"

----

I used to be on the welcome wagon every year. I used to bring cupcakes. I'm sure all the newbies will be smart, lovely people. But now, no cupcakes. I will probably begrudge them the least acknowledgment. And if they ever complain about money, I will take their face off. If I got paid what they're getting paid, I wouldn't have had to work. I would have been able to get shit done faster. And, possibly, sleep. I'm happy that they're increasing fellowships, because so far--stupid small and only livable with luck and great care.

But jeebus! To do this at the expense of other grad students? The administrators must have really been thinking hard about how to turn a very friendly department into a clusterfuck of bad feeling.

The alien insects are here to abduct me...

2009-08-16T09:47:00.004-04:00

Every August, my left coast self is completely frightened and creeped out when the cicadas get going. We don't have those insects back home--frogs and crickets provide the late summer soundtrack, at least in the evenings. And that's a pleasant sound.

Cicadas, on the other hand, make the exact sound used in the alien invasion movies made by the alien before it slithers up behind you and sucks your guts out with its tentacles or tapeworm-style mouth or something else equally disgusting.

I'm never going to get used to waking up to cicadas. I always forget until summer comes around again, and I'm having an early morning dream that involves my being chased by aliens that look and sound like bugs.

I really wouldn't mind moving back to the West coast someday, where nature doesn't scare the bejeebus out of me. (Why earthquakes and purple smog don't bother me and cicadas do, don't ask...)

Group project: souffle.

2009-08-12T09:09:00.003-04:00

The roomie and I were inspired to try something new. We settled on a souffle. They say souffles are hard. They are not.

They are also delicious.

I am so hungry...

2009-08-11T13:35:00.004-04:00

...I am looking at oil paintings of food and salivating. (See Ryan Studio link on blogroll.)

I cannot wait for the Peapod truck to come to my house tonight. Going to work without sandwiches is a tragedy.

I have a new spur to scholarly ambition.

2009-08-11T09:27:00.003-04:00

So, I am reading this here book because I wanted to find a scholar who reads Erasmus Darwin on his own terms, without all the condescension about his purportedly bad poetry. There are a lot of reasons why people think his poetry is bad:

-It might actually be bad. Occasionally, an image will strike me a supremely ridiculous, and sometimes his reliance on alliteration and fancy diction will even get on my nerves--and I have an extraordinarily high tolerance for these things. But, come on--even the grand poobah Romantics repeatedly march headlong into the absurd. Or what appears absurd to our cold and jaded modern sensibilities. But we always forgive them--turn ourselves into knots to show they aren't being sentimental.

-Which leads me to the next point (and McGann's). The Romantics and their predecessors were committed to earnesty: sensibility (as in, the deep-seated impulses of feeling) and sentimentality (a cultivated style of feeling--not the cheap Hallmark effusions that we now understand sentimentality to be). These were associated with ye olde French Rev. There was backlash. Sensibility/sentimentality got painted as crazy talk, mere artificiality, dangerous, etc. etc.--all the negative terms were thrown at it, and like overcooked spaghetti, most of it stuck. Romanticism was able to slip by. I'm going to be irresponsibly dismissive of a whole category of literature, but here goes: their disingenuous talk about their own authenticity and everyone else's fakery, and ambivalent (but ulitmately moderately conservative) stance saved them. Plus Wordsworth and the whole lot of them threw the sentimental poets under the bus in their critical writings, while retaining much of their philosophical and artistic approaches and material in their poetry. If Wordsworth was kinder to Darwin, when he wrote

To her fair works did nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower,
The periwinkle trail'd its wreathes;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes,

he wouldn't seem like such an ungrateful asshat. Because that's some straight-up sampling of the Botanic Garden. Of course he does a little something different with it, but shitting on someone to whom you are in debt is just a classic move to make, I guess. (I do enjoy Romantic poetry, but in their critical writings they do nothing but piss me off. As poets, they are lovely, but as people, they just seem like a bunch of self-serving dicks to me.)

Anyway, so the end result has been Romantics--yay!, sentimental poets--boo!, pretty much until this moment. So, after setting up the yay-boo landscape, McGann asks why it is that we don't take sentimental poetry seriously and are pretty comfortable about saying it's completely awful and worthless, even though a lot of people at the time thought exactly the opposite. But this is how he does it:

"Leaving aside the indiscriminate abuse--can it really be the case that all this writing comes out as shit?"

Besides the fact that McGann's style is witty and engaging, this is my total fucking fantasy: swear words! In scholarly writing!

Not only do I take a pure joy in the use of colorful language, but "this is shit" is what people mean when they are obliquely condesceding to Darwin. "This is shit" is not a valid assessment when it's just an unstated, uninspected, unsupported assumption, meant to boost the writer's stance as a creature of superior taste, judgment, and discrimination. (You know the old school-yard strategy of teasing the nerdy kid to recommend oneself to the cool kids? This is the literary version.) And putting it in the simple gutter vernacular reveals it to be as assinine as it in fact is.

But I don't think I will be allowed to swear for a while. Jerome McGann's reputation is just about as established as it's possible to be. I'm too young and insignificant. I can get older--but famouser will be harder.

Is it OK to gear your career goals towards the freedom to say dirty words?

Paul Child: My New Dream Lover

2009-08-10T10:57:00.012-04:00

Last Friday, the bestie and I queued up for the opening night of Julie & Julia. I was fully prepared to love the movie, since I love food, Julia Child, and Meryl Streep--probably in that order. Of course I loved the glamorous presentation of culinary delights (mmm... meat inside meat wrapped in pastry!). Of course I love Julia Child's big crazy.

But here's the thing that struck my fancy: Julia was an ambitious giantess--charming and smart, but certainly not the small, shapely, and daft milkshake that usually brings the boys to the yard. Apparently, she was maidenly for a VERY long time. I sympathize. I am not small. I want to go places. I don't hide what I know--not for bragging so much as the overflow of my nerdular excitement over obscure facts. If I'm not invisible because I'm large, doods will talk to me until they feel brave enough to hit on the hotter friend I am invariably with. Or, they will seem charmed until some point when they crestfallenly tell me, "Oh... you're smart." Even when I am seeing someone (as I am, presently), these niggling anxieties are the fly in my romantic ointment.

But, Julia had her Paul. In the movie at least, he was supportive of her need to find "something to doooooo" and of her talent, and was really, truly in love with and attracted to her. (I hear that from their letters, this seems to have been more or less the case.) And, from the pictures that the Google image search has dug up for me, they made a ridiculous couple to see--a giantly lady and a tiny man.

Which is only exaggerated in the movie:

So, I have to say I have found that it's not impossible to find someone who is OK with my being on an outsize scale and my not being an actual or pretend moron (all anxieties aside)--you know,who might even like me the way I am. But all the same, it's something new and wonderful to see it happen writ large (get it? tee hee!) on the movie screen: two odd birds delighted with each other and not all that bothered by their oddness. Julia looks all the larger for her foil--and it becomes something charming and lovely in the movie. Paul's no dummy, but Julia's talent is definitely the bigger deal--but it's not a marriage-threatening issue. The Julia plot makes me hopeful I could leave my anxieties aside permanently and be plagued with them no more.

However, in the Julie Powell storyline, her attention to her blog and her cooking makes her "self-centered" according to both her husband and the film. Her book is no grand masterpiece, but if you want to make something like that happen, you have to give it a lot of time. What is a girl supposed to do--blink it into existence, Bewitched-style? And I thought that was the point of Julia--she found something of her own to do. Why Julia is celebrated for achieving ownership and mastery and Julie is a self-absorbed bitch that has to be reeducated by her husband abandoning her is beyond me. The Julie plot, though more nuanced and grown-up than the usual chick flick narrative, leaves me with a whiff of that too-familiar sense of frustration and disappointment that chick flicks usually leave behind. Julie gets her happy ending by apologizing for her short-comings, saying that she didn't deserve her husband like Julia did. Maybe she did have some things to apologize for, but it's the wrong take-away message from Julia's story, at least as it is presented. In the movie, Julia doesn't apologize for being absorbed by her work, and more importantly Paul doesn't ask her to. Julie should have learned not to apologize for wanting to get a little bigger, to take up room, to get a little attention in addition to merely giving it. It wasn't just that Julia deserved her husband, but that Paul deserved Julia as well.

---

P.S. The following morning I watched The French Chef on PBS. I watched Julia make a real omelette and then I tried it--with success! I have never been more proud to fry an egg. And, not only does her way taste better, but it only takes a few seconds to dooooooo!

One small factor in why I am literary and not scientificary.

2009-08-06T10:53:00.007-04:00

So, yesterday at work I was watching a video lecture on research on schizophrenia. The science man was talking about this neato new technology that is able to induce gamma waves in rat brains. Gamma waves are electric signals in the brain that are associated with the coordinated firing of neurons so that all yer cognitive activity is coherent, rather than an unholy jumble, like what happens in schizophrenia.

The technology allows the scientist to either stimulate or suppress the waves in specific regions of the brain. Viruses install optically sensitive ion channels in the walls of the designated neurons, so when you shine a blue light on the cell (whoosh!) the positive ions rush in and the gamma waves start, and when you shine a yellow light (whoosh!) the negative ions rush in and the gamma waves stop. Very handy and smart. Now you can isolate just what these gamma waves do.

But at this point, I scratched my head dumbly and asked myself, "So, how do you shine a light on a nerve cell? Isn't there this skull thingy in the way?"

Oh naive me.

The next slide showed a rat with a hole cut into its skull with clear cement over the top.

"Now, this is a VERY humane technique," said the science man. Twice.

I'm not sure about that. I can't imagine a hole in one's head is ever convenient.

But I am no animal rights activist. I'm not for the pointless abuse of animals. But this experiment has a point--schizophrenia is pretty horrific in what it does to people and their families. And since cutting holes in peoples head defeats the point of helping them, rats are a better alternative. Besides, like many others, I will KILL KILL KILL a rat with no regard to its life or well-being should I find one in my home. (I am traumatized by a heinous rat infestation I had in college--I could hear them cavorting under my bed at night, they ate my bath towels, my hair products, and all my food no matter what container it was in or how high a shelf it was on, and there were rat nuggets EVERYWHERE. We poisoned one, used an old-fashioned spring mousetrap on a second, and I personally took care of a third. And I rejoiced all three times.) I have no right to advocate the tender treatment of rodents.

Still, the picture came up without much warning and the squeamishness punched me in the gut when I saw it.

This is why I chose the plant genetics internships, back in the day when I was an aspiring scientist. I've sliced a few tobacco plants up in my time, but they didn't complain. I'll maim or kill or rat, but chasing one down in the heat of domestic battle and applying fine surgical skill to put a permanent hole in a living head are two very different things. Science isn't clean or pretty all the time. It can't be, if you want to really get your fingers into how things work. I mean, you often have to literally get your fingers into it. I guess I just wimped out. I'm not intrepid enough for the scientific endeavor.

So, I've been reading this book by Jan Golinski about Science as a Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820. I only just started it, but in the introduction it talks about the view we have of science as a very public enterprise, both because it is supposed to serve our general well-being and because it's supposed to be a transparent kind of knowledge, based on empirical facts that everyone can understand. This would be the more attractive twin of that other view--big, scary, and secretive corporations staffed by evil Dr. Frankenstein-type scientists. But of course neither is quite right--there aren't that many people who are capable of understanding what scientists do (and fewer and fewer at that, thanks to our genius educational system), and though corporations are by nature self-interested, the people who work in them are another matter. You know, besides the fact that science does go on in other locations.

But, the obvious thing--science occurs in privacy. As Golinski points out, it may have to: you need a space that you can control as much as possible so your experiment is not fiddled with or interrupted, you need fancy equipment that ought not be touched by the rude, untutored masses, and so on. I get the daily demonstration of this on my walk to work every morning. There are so many tall, fancy buildings full of fancy labs. You often need an ID card just to walk in the front door, and if not, you got to make it past the receptionist. The elevator often requires the same ID. And I'm betting the labs often do. It's all under lock and key.

But especially in the biological sciences, it's a hairy proposition to unlock the door. People debate and holler about stem cells, but that is not what would have the visceral impact if they actually had a tolerably accurate picture of what happens in a lab. Stem cells aren't sentient, never belonged to anything that was, and certainly don't look it. And rats, for all their ick-factor, are sentient, in some way. Hell, they have memory, can learn, giggle (for effin reals, yo), and feel pain. If you prick them, do they not bleed? There are animal rights activists who have a lot to say about how we treat animals in labs, but they are generally seen as bona fide nut jobs (and often are--Exhibit A). But if you give a rat's ass about a rat, then they may have a point. And even then, when you start talking about cats or monkeys or other animals that are cute or human-like, my queasiness starts to feel like repugnance, depending on what's involved in the experiment. (I know it's completely illogical to have different feelings about a rat vs. a cat--but so it goes.) Everybody likes sausage (especially of the disease-curing and life-saving sort), but nobody wants to go on the sausage factory tour.

I was going to attempt some resolution to this quandary I've set up, but I honestly can't think of one. Maybe it's one of those trolley problems. Being outside the lab is like seeing the trolley coming down the track, flipping the switch, causing one dude to get smashed on one track, but saving 5 dudes working on the other track. Being in the lab--you're pushing the fat man off the bridge, stopping the trolley, thus saving the 5. Same outcome in terms of general good and general evil, but most people will flip the switch and almost nobody will give the fat man a tap. The only difference is the immediacy of the action.

Not that I'm actually pondering the state of matrimony...

2009-08-04T09:21:00.011-04:00

So, I just became a group member of "Erasmus Darwin--What an Interesting Guy!" on ye olde Facebook. I clicked the link to the Erasmus Darwin House, and lo and behold I found this here link to rental information for weddings at Erasmus's house. I immediately had two simultaneous thoughts:

(1) Who is geeky enough to want to get married at some dead scientist's house?

(2) Hrm. If one day I should ever tie the knot, that's where I should do it!

(1) + (2) --> I am a giant geek. But I haven't completely internalized that fact.

The garden very quaint and pretty though. And there are archives. Maybe I can manage to get my geeky mitts into them.

More Sink Cat

2009-08-03T19:01:00.005-04:00

She doesn't even care if you turn the water on. She kind of likes it.

If this isn't enough to satisfy all your cat-in-sink needs, go here.

The March of Science and its detours...

2009-08-03T10:57:00.005-04:00

This weekend, I had a horrifying allergic reaction to some unidentified substance that resulted in my being covered literally from head to toe in hives that multiplied until they just ran together into one body-sized megahive. I considered and rejected the possibility of going to a doctor--my student "insurance" doesn't cover much, and I decided $400 tests would hurt me more than the hives. (Let me put in my word here for real health care reform--I'm not missing any limbs or dying of cancer, but it would be nice not to have to consider whether I'll make rent when the least kind of health problem pops up.) So, I stayed in bed and popped anti-histamines until the hive shrunk enough for me not to want to rip my skin off.

I didn't have the heart for real work, so I just read a couple of history of botany books meant for the masses (if there are indeed masses of people wanting to know about botany).

The first was Flower Hunters, by Mary and John Gribbin. It had the familiar cast of characters (Linnaeus, Joseph Banks, Joseph Dalton Hooker) and some I wasn't so familiar with (including Marianne North, a respected flower painter who managed to do some real travelling). Because it's about botanizing expeditions, I knew it would have to deal with the British imperial project. I was curious how the authors would deal with the ugly side of that. Turns out, the botanists were all tough, intrepid heroes. And the people who lived in the various places in South America, Africa, India, and Nepal who clearly saw that these botanical expeditions were part and parcel of British rule and didn't much want to cooperate were just unreasonable villains standing in the way of scientific progress and the great men who were leading the way. Occasionally, the reader is invited to laugh along with the botanist who puts one over on the silly native or at the stupidity or savagery of their customs. Neat. Women botanists who helped the various great men were patronizingly called "interesting in their own right," and then not much attended to, except if they were pretty or rich or married to some other great man. (Except for Marianne North. Somehow she got mentioned as "interesting in her own right," too. Jeebus. I hope so, since you've got a whole chapter on her.) Double neat. And then to add insult to injury, the whole book read like a mediocre senior thesis, replete with awkward transitions, rampant cliches, and unexplained assumptions. Dude, how can you pass over a sea captain locking up a botanist in his cabin and letting all his plants die as "that's just the way things go"? I think they were aiming for "folksy" and accessible, but they just came off as careless and trite. I suppose it makes botany seem a lot more adventurous, but aren't pirates, kidnappers, and high-risk exploits enough--do you really need the "imperialism is peachy" line to make it even better? And I think most people who would bother with a book about botany are sophisticated enough for the "these people did some good things, but there were some flaws and negative consequences" approach.

The other book, The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord, I haven't finished yet, but I already like it better. For one, it expects a lot more out of the reader--i.e. doesn't patronize the reader by assuming he or she can only be spoken to via aphorism and lame metaphors. It's not like early botany is difficult for a modern reader to grasp--this isn't high physics or chemistry. For another, it tells a story of advances balanced by repeated failure--decent ideas being smothered by burned libraries, religious fundamentalism, accidents of translation, and the vagaries of personal lives, only to be picked up at new places and times. Its first botanist, Theophrastus (coming out of the Peripatetic School), asks some very smart questions about plants, but they don't get a lot of traction because they literally get buried by the family that inherits his books. Like, in the ground. They might have been dug up and sent to the library at Alexandria, but that, of course, is burnt up. Copies turn up in the middle east, sparking an interest in botany--but not being able to draw plants with realism compounds problems with translation into Arabic. So who knows which plant anyone is talking about? Meanwhile, Europeans are drawing copies of copies of copies of copies--and not bothering to look at actual plants or ask any questions. And that's about where I am. I'm sure a light will spring soon in this narrative--the Renaissance is nigh.

Perhaps the book bites off much more than it can chew--2,000 years of botanic history. But the story it tells about simultaneous fragility and resilience of knowledge seems to be a worthwhile one. It's rather depressing how fast a good idea can be squashed when it doesn't jive with the prevailing political/religious agenda. Not to mention how much traction a bad idea can get just by dint of repetition. I don't know--I always like a book that leaves room for both pride and humility about what we do and can know.

Botanic Bliss

2009-07-30T13:15:00.007-04:00

I had no idea this was still a way botany was taught.

The blurb on Powell's says it's an exciting new way to learn botany, but it's not new at all. In the Victorian era, there were similar books that promised you that you would learn to be a better colorist and a better floral enthusiast (by then, "botanists" were gentlemen, "enthusiasts" were ladies) all at once.

But mostly, the point to this post that I want it badly.

I will probably break down and buy it myself. I do wish my birthday and Christmas were spread out a little. I could use a little cheer in the summer. In the form of geeky coloring books.

One day, I will kick Jehuda in the junk.

2009-07-29T12:40:00.006-04:00

Look, everybody knows Brandeis is financially in the crapper. It's hard not to hear the cha-ching when you know $350 mill worth of Warhols and whatnot is sitting in the Rose Art Gallery and your pockets are turning up lint and lint alone. But being a relatively new university, it depends on its donors like nobody's business. Don't eff with them. Don't get yourself in a position where the very person your museum is named for wants to sue your linty pants off. Don't act like you like to antagonize your donors. At least fake a little regret at wanting to sell off people's legacies. Fire that "PR" firm you hired solely to enable your dysfunctional assholery and get a real one that gets you to behave like a human effin' being.

In the words of HubArts blogger Joel Brown:

Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz and his administration have come across as tone deaf, arrogant and not particularly believable throughout this process. Winning seems to be everything now, and if that means insulting the families who gave millions to create the museum and its collection, so be it. (Oblivious??) The Reinharz team comes off like Monty Burns, and they've done everything but set loose the hounds, although, come to think of it, there was that outside PR firm they hired in the spring - and Reilly.

Where she'll stop, nobody knows.

2009-07-28T09:26:00.007-04:00

It never fails to surprise me when a new mode of feeling shitulous about my grad student self pops up. It ought not--grad school is designed to make you feel bad. There's all the evaluation that is necessarily built into the process--the kind that comes on the back of the paper you wrote, in conferences, in letters, on forms. And then there's the undesigned, but apparently inevitable kind that arrives via the hairy eyeball rolling in your direction, snide comment made to your face, backhanded compliment, overheard gossip. People hereabouts are trained up to have an opinion--it's inevitable they have an opinion about you. It's not always good, regardless what of what a truly angelic yet witty and attractive genius you really are.

In my first year--my first semester--I can't even say that the shitulous feelings came from anything structural or otherwise. There was the pure and generalized panic of being in a new and completely unknown place, not knowing much about anything or anyone. Of course this was reinforced by regularly-made mistakes of blind ignorance, but even had I performed perfectly I still would have practically shat myself every time anyone asked me to do anything.

After that simmered down, there was the low-level hum of self-doubt in the background with which I was generally functional. I would have my little (or giant) breakdowns, all attached, semi-logically, to various tasks and contexts: the paper on the topic I was uncomfortable with, starting on a new class to teach or TA, having to persuade and/or defend myself against department douchetards of various sorts, field exam, diss prospectus... and so on and so on. Mostly, I would do well enough; occasionally I would not do so well. But generally I would have to leave off the weeping and gnashing of teeth quickly--I can't TCB and emotionally self-lacerate simultaneously and be very efficient about either. Multitasking has its limits.

But now I'm ABD. No more course work, the gatekeeping tasks (language exams, field exams, etc.) have all been completed, teaching is beginning to feel a little old hat. All I have to do is sit, research, read, write. There's no structure, I don't have to deal with anyone if I don't want to. There is nothing to pin my failures of self-confidence on. There's just me, a lot of time, and a lot of overthinking.

And so, I just cycle through all the levels, willy nilly. One day, I'm the shit--I'm absorbing knowledge, I'm getting stuff done, I'm having brilliant ideas, I'm going the distance, I'm going for speed. Another day, I am shit. On an effin stick. My writing sucks, my ideas are superficial and lame, and dog help me if I will do a lick of work. On another day yet, I find the golden mean--I feel like I've got a few weaknesses, but I'm smart enough and I'll get somewhere, eventually. I even work better in this stage, since I'm both self-critical and game to keep going anyway. I try to hang on to this healthy medium--but wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Around I go again!

Short of taking drugs, I'm not sure what to do to keep ye old ferris wheel of self-confidence perched somewhere between flights o' fancy and the abyss o' despair. Suggestions?

In which I begin to understand where "The March of Science" comes from.

2009-07-27T09:10:00.012-04:00

I am embarrassed to admit this, but I made a boo-boo on my earlier rounds of research: somehow typing in erasmus darwin six months ago did not return as many results in the search engines as "erasmus darwin" about a week ago. (Who knew that quotation marks were so vital to the workings of whatever algorithm runs the MLA Bilbliography? Why didn't it ever make a difference before?--Up until now, I've always found more or less every article critics referenced on my topics, plus or minus a very few...) So after bitterly lambasting my own carelessness and having a shitfit when I saw the titles might step on my poor diss's toes, I've embarked on a reading-fest.

Turns out I didn't have much to worry about. Some of it was excellent scholarship on similar--but not the same--topics, and turned out to be, of course, very helpful. Others--holymothereffingchrist! Jeebuschrist on a whig history cracker! With presentism-flavored Cheese Whiz!

Now, the whole history of science thing is new to me. I've clambered my way into a sort of proficiency about Erasmus Darwin and the state of botanical affairs in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but my knowledge of the history of science as a discipline is fledgling. I'm only just now learning the different approaches and investments. So it was kind of a head-scratcher when I started to turn up (1) straight-up hagiographies of Erasmus, (2) articles in which the main point was to prove how his science was wrong or limited compared with modern science (no deeper analysis of scientific thought or culture than--OMG, he was so wrong!), and (3) judgments of Erasmus for not being feminist enough, environmentally conscious enough, or whatever enough for modern liberal political standards.

I don't understand the point of any of those things.

(1) Yes, he was a most awesome dude. He was a good doctor, dreamed up a million inventions and let his friends take the whole credit for them, wrote crazy-ass poems full of earnesty and kink, supported his gentleman and lady intellectual friends emotionally and professionally, etc. etc. etc. But his biography has been written a million times in a million different ways. That job is done. And I don't know benefit kissing dead ass gets a person, except to enshrine yet further the "pantheon of individual achievement." And given that quote comes from a BRU speech two months ago, the pantheon is about as enshrined as it will ever be. That job is more than done.

(2) I know! It's so amazing how wrong he was! Next, let's blame medieval folk for not knowing about penicillin during the Black Death. And then we'll laugh at Newton for not also coming up with a theory of relativity! And then we'll pat ourselves on the back for being so damned enlightened, we just can't stand ourselves!

(3) Now that everybody is so equal, and now that everybody understands so perfectly how we are effing up the environment, I can see how it would be hard to understand where Darwin is coming from. I mean, we have come so far, and it such a dark ages back then. But you could at least try not set yourself up as the Inquistion.

Of course, literary criticism is subject to the same problems of judging history with modern eyes and knitting up progressive narratives, but I'm used to seeing such things happen much more subtly. It's just so bald in the history of science. I don't know whether I'm glad for it or not. My lazy half is grateful that it's one less real argument that I have to consider, incorporate, or criticize. If people would rather stroke themselves or the great dudes of history, more power to them. My go-getter half is disappointed at the lost opportunity for making a substantive point. So often, they would seem to be heading in that direction with all their interesting tidbits and rare docs--something new and insightful and exciting seemed to be coming, and I would be all nerdily excited and hopeful. And then they'd jump the shark with a "How cool is this?" or "How dare he?" sort of argument. And then I would be sad. What sort of argument could even be made against a paper like that, other than a Snot Stew sort? He's not cool? Why wouldn't he dare? Those are arguments to be had in a bar over drinks--not on paper.

One down, eight to go....

2009-07-24T09:36:00.004-04:00

Last night the bff helped me cross one restaurant off my list--Hungry Mother. I pass it on my way to BRU every morning and look longingly at the menu posted in the window. The food is traditional southern with French technique--i.e. comfort food with higher quality ingredients and the ginormous piles of fat incorporated in much more refined (sneakier) ways.

First of all--I wish my house looked like the inside of that restaurant. I would deeply love a fancy wall sconce with overturned tumblers over the bulbs. Or silver-painted lightbulbs on the walls with giant gilt frames around them. Sort of Southern "shabby chic," but without the pink calico and--you know--clever.

Second--I'm pretty sure that I will be taking advantage of the late night bar menu in the future. It's only around the corner, they have a ton of cocktails, and when you scoop into the little $4 cup of cheese and ham grits, the top cracks like a creme brulee.

As for the rest: I tried beef tongue for the first time (in canape form). The preparation seemed lovely, but there's a fundamental texture issue with tongue that I don't think I'll ever get used to--even though it came in the form of sliver-thin slices with a ton of tasty gravy. The kumquat and goat cheese salad was perfect. The French vegetable gnocchi (not vegetarian--there's prosciutto in there) was subtly spiced and may have been the only gnocchi I've ever had that wasn't at all rubbery/gummy. The catfish convinced me that more things in this world should come corn-breaded--though I think it was rich enough to do without the Andouille sausage in the red rice on the side. (Though it pains me to say nay to sausage.) I had been staring at the menu all day and had selected the buttermilk cake with lemon cream and creme fraiche for dessert before I ever arrived, but I just wasn't capable of consuming more. Ah well... an excuse to return!

Reflections on Assholery

2009-07-20T09:46:00.004-04:00

So, my bff/roomie and I decided to throw a big party in which we all pretend to be much more culturally adept than we are. We wore black, we only listened to vinyl, we had a haiku-writing contest. I made portonics (port + tonic = potently potable portmanteau) and basil chocolate cupcakes (because basil and chocolate is the dessert flavor combo amongst the gourmands these days). People brought a ton of wine and cheese and pastries. They dressed up. They mingled and drank too much. The best haiku writers were awarded "Understand Modern Art Instantly" breath spray and fake tattoos. People had fun.

The was only one fly in the ointment--let's call him "Bobert." Bobert showed up wearing shorts with his tie. He talked endlessly and inflatedly about his being a writer. He argued that "portonic" was not a portmanteau, but a neologism. (He was not conciliated when I pointed out that portmanteaus are a subset of neologisms, so we were both right.) He argued that Foucault was neither a philosopher nor a historian, but a trope. He offered readings of my bff/roomie's paintings--to my bff/roomie. Just about every conversation I had that evening included the question "Who is that guy?"

I didn't have anything to tell them. I didn't know.

But then I remembered.

Almost exactly a year ago, I was at a party. I came early because I was responsible for the cake and needed to frost and decorate it. Bobert was there. I offered up, "My, it's hot today," since no one was really making any conversation. He then attempted to prove I did not in fact feel hot, because the ambient temperature was the same as body temperature. I said a lot of other polite banalities hoping to land on a uncontroversial topic. There were none. Everything I said was completely mistaken and stupid, according to Bobert. I was getting red in the face. So, I tinkered around on the piano hoping to avoid having to speak until my friends showed up. And then he said that my piano teacher must be rolling over in her grave because my tempo was all wrong.

I think my response was something like, "First of all, my piano teacher is alive and well, and second, YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE!"

"No, I'm not."

"YES--YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE!!!"

And I grabbed my shit and left in a big prissy huff, called the dude whose offer of a date I dutifully turned down for my friend's party, and managed to eventually simmer down. (Things went well on that date--I ought to be grateful to Bobert.)

But, meanwhile, the party heated up. From the reports I heard, every single guest at the party managed to call Bobert an asshole to his face. I know many of these people--they are the considerate, peacable type, most of them. Some of them unflappable, I thought. But they got flapped.

After my own party wound down (one of my friends had to offer Bobert a ride to get him to leave--every other guest had gone or was heading out the door, and he was intent on carrying on), my bff and I reflected on Bobert's unfailing talent for making himself unwelcome. The bff much more admirably than I scrounged up some pity--he seemed to be trying to be awesome and likable, but just had no idea how to do it. It really is tragic--to want it so bad and fail utterly. I recognize all this. And yet I am unmoved. Can't help but wonder if that makes me an asshole, too....

This week in kittehs

2009-07-13T09:20:00.005-04:00

I have a new room mate. Her name is Unicorn. She is obese and has six toes.

My difference engine contemplated the mathematical sublime. It jammed up.

2009-07-09T13:49:00.007-04:00

Thanks to the publicity of Ada Lovelace Day, I have a new obsession. For those of you who don't know, Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron (the Romantic poet, y'know). Her mother didn't want her to turn out anything like dear old dad (incestuous, moody man-ho), so she immersed her in math and sciences. She turned out quite the mathematician. Eventually, Ada ran into Charles Babbage, who invented something like the computer way back in the 19th century day. Ada invented something like programming.

So, today I ran into this comic book style history of Babbage and it warmed the cockles of my heart that Ada is there, presented as a lot more witty and level-headed (and maybe a bit more visionary) than Babbage. And it's on the BBC site... maybe someone will read it... maybe someone will care... maybe a girl will do math and think it's awesome sauce.

As for me, my radar is permanently on the alert for weird 18th and 19th visions of future technology. For example, the other day I ran into Erasmus Darwin's idea for a steam car and submarine in The Economy of Vegetation. And then of course there's the early 19th C. The Mummy! by Jane Loudon: it's got neon, rubber air mattresses, space travel, telegraphs, robots, air conditioning, and women in pants, to name a few things. And I don't know why these things amuse me so much. But every time I spot one when I'm reading, I practically jump out of my seat.

I think I'm going to have to go steam punk. Even though it won't be the same, as anachronism and prescience are not the same thing.

Bah!

Nine Places I'd Like to Dine

2009-07-07T12:43:00.003-04:00

In no particular order:

1. Craigie on Main

2. Hungry Mother

3. Oleanna

4. Tupelo

5. The Red House

6. Muqueca

7. Highland Kitchen

8. Benatti

9. Four Burgers

What? We are not evolved to be douches?!?!?

2009-06-29T09:49:00.007-04:00

So, last week at BRU, I was looking through professor's research for some big annual report about our big, important doings. I ran across an article (published in that grand old journal, Nature, even) that came up with the "surprising" findings that cooperation among yeast cells is an evolutionary advantage, not a burden. Of course, I was annoyed. I would have rationalized the annoyance away if they hadn't termed the opposite of "cooperators" (yeast that secrete enzymes that break down complex sugars) as "cheaters" (yeast that merely absorb the simple sugars that diffuse away from the cooperators). Seems like there's a human story being told somewhere in the background--these yeast seem to have independent wills and maybe even ethics. Seems like the presumption that evolutionary fitness = rabid individualism.

Which, of course, is always annoying. Cooperation is the air humans breathe. It's diffused so widely, I don't think we can even see it too well--a forest/trees sort of perception problem. We can't even make a sandwich without cooperation. In my case: there's the Peapod guy who delivered the fixings to me, internet services that connected us, the baker, the wheat grower, the trucking company, the chicken farmer, the chicken processing plant, the cheese maker, the dairy farmer, etc. etc. etc. It doesn't seem farfetched that helpful arrangements can be reached for different organisms. And if we're going to anthropomorphize, we of all creatures shouldn't be surprised that organisms benefit from a little tit for tat.

The most annoying form these evolutionary presumptions of inherited douchebaggery take is the "we are the way we are because of when we were cavemen" game. The conclusions are usually things like "men are programmed to be capitalist warriors," "men like curvy Barbie ladies," "women like rich old men." Which, when you step outside of Western culture for a second, none of these things hold universal. And it's easy to play the "when we were cavemen" game and come up with entirely different stories. For instance: I'm a cavemom, you're a cavemom. With baby in tow, I can pick one pound of food. Without lugging a fussy, heavy, pooping baby around, I can pick three. So, I say, "Hey Cavemom, why don't you watch my baby, and I will bring us back more food than both of us can bring back if we were independent operators. We'll split the booty in half." Score, cooperation as evolutionary fitness. See--it's as easy to come up with a rational sounding, but unprovable theory about "the way we were" that doesn't give the green light to "selfish genes," bonking your cavehottie on the head and dragging her away, or any other kind of chestbeating scenario that endorses the inqualites or general interpersonal nastiness of the status quo. I don't see why my theory holds less water than any other. There's just no proof, no warrant from the flimsy "evidence" to make the claims that they claim or I claim.

Which is why this Newsweek article tickled both my feminist and my scientist souls. The gist of it is evolutionary psychology (the cavehottie bonking E. O. Wilson brand of evolutionary navelgazing) is being challenged by behavioral ecology (which generally purports that the human brain in mainly evolved to be flexible and adaptive to situations--choices are not preprogrammed so much as directed by maximizing benefits in diverse contexts). Behavioral ecologists believe as much as evolutionary psychologists that our brains are as formed by evolution as any other organ (duh!), but are suspicious of universalizing stories that don't seem to explain how human behavior differs so widely across time, space, and communities. They look across cultures. They verify behaviors quantitatively. They check for cultural codes that direct behavior. They say "it depends." That's a gravy boat of awesome sauce to me.

The best part is, the evolutionary psychologists don't seem to be keeping up with the latest genetic evidence. Unsurprisingly, there are flurries of adaptive mutations when there are big shifts in human culture (e.g. when we learned to farm, when we started living in towns and cities, etc.). There are genes as fresh as 50,000 or even 10,000 years old. Meaning, evolutionarily important stuff has happened since the cave and we're still changing to fit our environment: those "when we were cavemen" genes are not necessarily more determinative for any given trait than "when we were early agriculturalists" genes. And either gene might be less determinative than "when humans are in x situation in y place at z time."

Hooray for nuance!

Eureka!

2009-06-25T23:54:00.009-04:00

I need to find novels with two characteristics: (1) written in the 1820s (though I will settle for the teens or 30s) and (2) has botany in it.

The second one is not so hard--but the first... apparently, the only novelists still being read from the 1820s are Walter Scott and Mary Shelley. (Had no idea Scott was churning out one or two novels every year for the whole decade until I had to start looking... he was a machine, yo.)

BUT

Just now, I figured out that the Frances Jacson I saw on some long list of novels published in the 1820s was indeed the sister of Maria Jacson, famous botany writer. So, I thought I'd check around teh Internets, and stumbled onto the Chawton House Library site. Lo and behold, I now have two novels downloaded onto this here computer, both liberally peppered over with botanic references. AND--the name of one is Things by Their Right Name... couldn't be more suggestive of taxonomy. It might as well be called Hey You! Use This in Your Diss!

The Difference

2009-06-25T13:53:00.002-04:00

Here is something new (for me):

I totally like writing. I totally want to write. I will turn down invitations and turn off the TV and put my butt in a chair somewhere and forget what time it is (so long as there is coffee in my cup and food in my belly, that is).

It's never happened before. It was always a topic that was a compromise between my interests and someone else's, I had a deadline that made my heart twist in my chest, or I had nine other things pulling at my brain in nine or more directions.

But now: I get to work on my own idiosyncratic, made-to-suit floral freakshow, the deadline is a year or two off (too far away for my may-fly sense of time to grasp), and all I have to think about is getting to BRU to work on time and which cafe to park my ass in so I can write about flowers and ladies.

I'm trying to mark the wondrous phenomenon and savor it to the last drop. Summer will end and I'll have to add the teaching to the mix again, with all its begging/whining emails, office hours, conferencing, grading, planning, and other general time suckage. (I really do like teaching, but it sure puts a kink or two in the dayplanner...) Though I have to work, this is as close to being a gentlewoman scholar as I'm ever going to get. Unless, that is, I start laying down the dollars and picking the numbers.

It's like that time I fed the liver and onions to the dog, but had to suffer "second" helpings of the meal I must have loved, I ate it so fast.

2009-06-10T12:50:00.016-04:00

I have been toiling away at The Critique of Pure Reason in a reading group for quite a while now. Somehow, one of my unfavorite profs got invited to the group.

The unfavoriteness?--There's the short supply of personal or professional decency. There's also some quibbles with personal hygiene and etiquette. But, in this particular setting, the unfavoriteness derives from his hogging the conversation almost entirely for himself. He pontificates and appears to bask in the glow of his own wisdom and eloquence. Or maybe in the perceived glow of our admiration. (Triple emphasis on "perceived.") Or maybe our comparative ignorance. It's probably this last option. In the words of one of the other grad students in the group: "It's as if a grown-up took over a basketball game from some second-graders and expected someone to high-five him for winning." I'm all for instruction (especially for Kant!), but I'm never going to learn to shoot if I don't get the ball. At least I have the pleasure of seeing him left hanging in the high-five department.

Now that the semester is over, I moved for a change of locale from classroom to cheapo wine bar. I was thrilled to learn that Professor Unfavorite couldn't attend because the late hour and locale is kid-unfriendly, and he has spawn to look after. We had one such meeting, and it was pleasant and productive. And then he told one of the junior faculty he'd host us at his home. I acknowledge: it resembles politeness or kindness or some such virtue (or would have been if he bothered to send out an invite more than a day before, without having been prompted by someone else sending out alternate plans in exasperation). But neither I nor the above mentioned grad student were willing to go. I'm too low on the totem pole to find someone gloating over my relative retardation piquant. And I'm more wary than curious about entering the den of the beast. So we conspired and sent our excuses.

And now? The whole thing is delayed a week, just for us.

Mmmm... eat it up!

That's Not My Name!

2009-06-09T14:16:00.006-04:00

While the Dean's assistant is away, I've been assigned the role of playing secretary. So, rather than sitting in my little back office with my earphones plugged into NPR, I've been on the phone and email with all the other calendar jockeys. Of course, no one gets my name right--that's nothing new. I answer to "Brenda" pretty well. I will even respond to "Bendetta." ("B is for Bendetta" will be my first major motion picture screenplay, I think.) But this time around, there are some doozies:

Bernda
Bandit (!)
Bendit
Banner
Benna
Benad
Bandta
Berda
Breda

Question: I can see why "Brenda," since it's the closest normal name to "Bendta," but otherwise, where does that extra R come from?

Aspiring World-Dominators Take Note:

2009-02-25T09:22:00.006-05:00

Sometimes, when transcribing tenure case notes at Big Research Uni or some such thing, I run across tidbits that shall help me with my secret plans to take over the world.

(Why some evil genius or league of evil geniuses at BRU has not already done so, I don't know. It seems like they have the technology. Of course, as previously pointed out by my partner in crime... uh... college room mate, the most effective way to take over the world would be to do so without anyone noticing and be pulling the global strings from the shadows. Seeing as the best defense is to remove the need to defend. So maybe it's already happened.)

Today, the tidbit is quantum cryptography. The short explanation is that it uses quantum physics not only to encode communication, but to alert the users to the presence of a third party trying to listen in. Since it only is involved in the distribution of an encryption key, you can use any communication channel to transmit messages. Which is convenient.

I don't watch a million spy or superhero movies, so I may be wrong about this, but why the absence of quantum cryptography? At least the theory (if not the actual application) has been around since the 80s--so there's been plenty of time for it to make its way into writerly brains. And it sounds cool, which is the important thing for the technobabble. But then again, it would certainly make the bad guys harder to track, and thus foil--and the going cliche is that the good-guy techno-wizard can crack any code at any time from any computer (regardless of computing capability and type of encryption). Because good is so good that foiling evil couldn't possibly be that hard, right? So comforting.

Schoolhouse Rock Meets Foucault

2009-02-09T09:37:00.002-05:00

While on the hunt for an internet cheat sheet for the History of Sexuality for my poor freshwomen (they have no idea what monster I'm about to unleash on them!), I found this mildly amusing bit on YouTube:

Is most amusing that, somehow, a dancing Elmo was thought appropriate.

Obama Woos G.O.P. With Attention, and Cookies

2009-02-04T13:11:00.004-05:00

I know I should be critical of the power of oatmeal raisin cookies to correct bipartisan politics in Washington. (See NYTimes article.) But I'm not. I secretly believe in the possibility of baking my way through all personal and professional issues. Nobody wants to argue when they're stuffed with sugary goodness.

For example, this recipe used to get people to take horrendous early-morning shifts from me when I was driving buses at UCD:

Chocolate Chip Cookie Cheesecake Squares

INGREDIENTS:
3 8oz packages of softened creamcheese

3 eggs

¾ cup sugar

1 tsp. vanilla extract

Cookie dough, according to instructions on back of Nestle's chips

INSTRUCTIONS:
Preheat oven to 350°F. In a large bowl, beat together cream cheese, eggs, sugar, and vanilla until well mixed. Set aside. Press half of cookie dough into the bottom of a greased 13x9" baking dish. Spoon cream cheese batter over dough. Use rest of cookie dough for the top.

Perhaps they could use a pan of these instead of cash for bribing on the hill. My chocolate cream cheese pie is good for hefty bribing situations.

I also find red velvet cupcakes good for getting self-important people to consider your existence. And lemon cake for getting people to stick around when they don't want to.

And let's not underestimate the power of sandwiches...

Big Worries

2009-01-30T10:08:00.002-05:00

So earlier this week, the shit hit the fan at Brandeis in the front page of the Boston Globe. If you didn't follow the link to the article, it says that Brandeis is liquidating the holdings of the Rose Art Gallery. There's about $350 million of art in there, with the de Koonings, Warhols, Lichtensteins, and Jasper Johns and I don't even know what all that have been donated to the university.

So that was all anyone was talking about this week at school. Of course. That is, until the big "don't worry your pretty heads" meeting for grad students last night. So the story is that the hit to the endowment and donors (jail is the safest place for you, Bernie Madoff!!!!) was big enough so that even if the economy started improving tomorrow we would still be unsustainable. And since they will have run through the reserves next year, they need the cash from the sale of the art to restructure the university and tide us over until the restructuring takes effect. Programs are getting cut, the overall size of the graduate program is being reduced, the size of the faculty is getting reduced, and they're going to reach further down the crap pile of undergrad applications to increase enrollment. And, most pertinent to me, dissertation year fellowships are drying up and so are teaching opportunities for sixth years. (Who knows?--maybe I can achieve the impossible feat of finishing in five... though there will be no jobs out there for me anyway.) And they wouldn't even admit to it, even though it was pretty clearly the case.

But to top off this crapcake, every time we expressed concern about how the university itself was changing as an institution, they told us it doesn't matter to us because we'd get our fellowships and our degrees and why would we care what happened to, say, university staff, or undergrads, or anyone or anything else? Is bad enough we all feel and are helpless as far as what's happening to the university--that's expected: we're grad students. But it's rather insulting to have your investment in the institution dismissed as irrelevant. Is no wonder they can't keep it together, public relations-wise.

I keep telling myself it could be worse--but I also worry that it will be...

Welcome to my floral freakshow!

2009-01-21T14:27:00.006-05:00

I have not blogged for awhile, but at least I can say I am on the verge of a draft for a prospectus for my very weird dissertation on incest, kinship, and botany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I really don't know how to explain it briefly yet. I only just came up with it and I haven't practiced giving the abstract-length version of it. Suffice it to say that botany was a cavalcade of family ideology back in the day, and I will be joining said cavalcade.

It's really sinking in for me how much of a freak show my dissertation will be. Linnaeus was the previous inclination of Georgia O'Keefe, seeing vulva and penis in the flowers. Erasmus Darwin (my birthday homey! Go December 12!) wrote a long-ass poem about all the kinky little stories one could dream up about lady-pistils and gentleman-stamens. And then there's this odd little image from Robert Thornton's Temple of Flora: that would be cupid inspiring the plants with love.

The weirdest part is that fancy little bird-of-paradise plant was named after Queen Charlotte (strelizia reginae)--I wonder whether that's a compliment or an insult to her affections for George III?

But then again, I love freakshows. And I love flowers with Georgia O'Keefe issues. I can't stop painting them. And I love being a feminist harpy attacking the family. These are the things I do when I'm left to my own devices. Which is good, because the dissertation will all that I will be doing, regardless of my devices.

I do wish it were less idiosyncratic and more profound. I've always wanted to be profound, and have a profound tenure track job at a profound university. Oh well... I wonder what universities value freak shows?

Oh, dreams...

2009-01-07T11:16:00.007-05:00

This lovely picture of Petrolia, California is where I am in my head. It's spring here, with lupines in the foreground and mountains in the background everywhere you look. And there is only sunshine. There is no snow, no rain, no freezing rain, no hail, no sidewalks sheeted in invisible and treacherous ice or impassable gutters full of melted and refreezing snow. My hair certainly didn't freeze this morning and my feet are dry. Also, I have just woken up from a refreshing nap where I dreamed of cupcakes and unicorns, and I won't spend the day yawning over administrative work only to follow it up with several hours of reading. Instead, I will pass leisurely through Lucky Magazine, maybe read the "Index" and "Findings" out of Harper's, and maybe follow that up with another nap. And a glorious supper.

Maybe all my friends will be at supper, also having napped while dreaming of unicorns and cupcakes. Thus, everybody will be as rested, happy, and cheerful as I in fact am. We will drink expensive booze after eating and watch the stars come out. Then I will retire to bed without turning the alarm on and sleep until noon. It will be swell.

The Holiday Wrap-Up

2009-01-05T09:55:00.002-05:00

-Flew into SFO on the 18th, luggage laden with grading and library books. Didn't do a damn thing on the plane. Concentrating too hard on not having a post-semester stress spaz. Unfortunately, US Airways has removed the very last of the "luxuries." Not only do you have to pay for a cup of water, but now there aren't even horribly boring movies to help whittle away the minutes. Flight attendant said "the A/V equipment was too heavy--we removed it all for fuel efficiency." Although, I may be too optimistic about this being the "last" deprivation. Maybe there will be pay-toilets in the future. Or maybe they will just take them out altogether--another use for those pint size Ziplocs you take through security, I guess.

-Met my mom in the airport. We dropped our crap at a moderately priced S. San Francisco hotel and went shoe shopping until it was time to meet my "um, friend" for dinner in the Mission District. (I guess I can't call him my "um, friend" anymore if he's met my mom, can I?) Turns out we went to a place that was already on my list from some NY Times article about cocktail revival restaurants. I tried the absinthe. I hated it. But the food was good and everybody got along swimmingly.

-Spent the following day wandering about Hayes Valley ($50 baby sweaters, $300 shoes I'd die to wear, fussy little home furnishing shops with a million knick knacks I don't need but want with birds on them) and then the de Young. The museum itself outshone the permanent collections (as so many new museums often do), but there was a special exhibit of Maya Lin topographical sculptures. I got to go "into the map"!!! Also, it was remarkable how balmy and sunny it was that day, complete with palms and blooming flowers. (Why did I leave such a paradise for an iced-over hell-hole?--WHY?!?!?!)

-Once home, grade, grade, grade; read, read, read. Mom went to work all day, and I stayed in my PJs and watched the 4th hour of the Today Show whilst I researched. Did you know there was a 4th hour? Did you know it's hosted by Kathy Lee Gifford. Did you know she's hilariously insane?

-Christmas Day: There were all the traditional food (yum!) and some of my brothers came through with girlfriends and little childrens in tow. My tiny children are cute for about an hour! And then...

-After a couple more days of desperate writing and researching, I give up and decide to actually spend time with the people I paid for a big plane ticket to come see. I make food, I drink wine, I go out to lunch, I see people. Twas glorious.

-And then onto Amtrak. I might have had the best nap I've ever had in my whole entire life, lulled to sleep by the gentle rocking, peace and quiet, and sunny, golden views rolling by my window. I woke up just as the tracks begin to front the bay--something the way the sun filtered through the light fog made everything lavender and aqua. It was so pretty that all the children zoned out to their iPods on the other side of the train were desperately trying to get a decent pic on their cell phones. I grumbled because it was all a big tease--no more lovely vistas for me once I got home. And then the plane, with all its crowdedness and lateness, hoorah.

-New Year's: Shuffled through the deep snow to Dorchester, to spend the eve with Sarah, Drew, Drew's sister, and Drew's sister's fiance. Sarah made pork chops. And then there was champagne and beer. And more champagne and beer (and exotic cheese) at Mark's downstairs, with a host of middle-aged yet impeccably preserved queens. I managed to get into the clicheed "literature doesn't count as a valid subject of study" argument with Drew's sister's fiance, and even managed to flounce out in a tipsy huff. It was not embarrassing or avoidable at all.

-And now, drum roll please, I am just recovering from massive sickness contracted soon after New Year's. Is like clockwork--go to California, return, get sick. Every time. I went to bed early on Friday, only to wake up late the next afternoon huddled next to my wide open window, sweating profusely from some kind of mega-fever. Having already missed a deadline, I figured it was time to suck it up and go to the MIT library, where I sweated and shook my way through the stacks. However, the librarian took pity on my state and gave me extended borrowing privileges. Score!

Feeling Blue?

2008-12-16T09:07:00.003-05:00

This is Bolu, Turkey. I'm tempted to paint it. I've got that aqua color in a tube, and it always calls my name.

Kind of adorable in its weird Victorian regimentation.

2008-12-15T10:29:00.004-05:00

I guess this is a repetitive post. I could be talking about my fabulous 30th birthday party last Friday, or my weekend spent reading in bed. But this is what's on my mind:

[The following is from Francis Darwin's reminiscences of his father. It summarizes a typical day in Darwin's middle and later years, when he had developed a rigid routine that seldom changed, even when there were visitors in the house.]

7 a.m.	Rose and took a short walk.
7:45 a.m.	Breakfast alone
8–9:30 a.m.	Worked in his study; he considered this his best working time.
9:30–10:30 a.m.	Went to drawing-room and read his letters, followed by reading aloud of family letters.
10:30 a.m.– 12 or 12:15 p.m.	Returned to study, which period he considered the end of his working day.
12 noon	Walk, starting with visit to greenhouse, then round the sandwalk, the number of times depending on his health, usually alone or with a dog.
12:45 p.m.	Lunch with whole family, which was his main meal of the day. After lunch read The Times and answered his letters.
3 p.m.	Rested in his bedroom on the sofa and smoked a cigarette, listened to a novel or other light literature read by ED [Emma Darwin, his wife].
4 p.m.	Walked, usually round sandwalk, sometimes farther afield and sometimes in company.
4:30–5:30 p.m.	Worked in study, clearing up matters of the day.
6 p.m.	Rested again in bedroom with ED reading aloud.
7.30 p.m.	Light high tea while the family dined. In late years never stayed in the dining room with the men, but retired to the drawing-room with the ladies. If no guests were present, he played two games of backgammon with ED, usually followed by reading to himself, then ED played the piano, followed by reading aloud.
10 p.m.	Left the drawing-room and usually in bed by 10:30, but slept badly.

Even when guests were present, half an hour of conversation at a time was all that he could stand, because it exhausted him.

(From the Daily Routines blog... see previous post.)

She's always been nervous about becoming nervous...

2008-12-10T09:38:00.005-05:00

I fortuitously ran across a blog about writers' daily routines, right in the midst of my new-found grad-studently angst about organizing my life to have regular space and time to research, think, and write my way into my dissertation prospectus. In my last visit with my advisor, I was advised to read this dissertation self-help book, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, that has made the rounds through the department. Not that it actually suggests that it's possible to write a dissertation in a daily quarter-hour--it's much more self-helpy than that: instead, it tells you all the ways in which you can be anxious about writing (and thus find ways to avoid it), and all the smushy, feely self-supportive ways you can get over it.

It's probably good I've read it, because I've been blindly avoidant. But I'm not at the stage quite yet that I'm ready to solve my problems (though I'm working, working, working anyway). Instead, I'm just consciously avoidant. I now know that I'm anxious about writing, don't want to write, and will find all kinds of reasons (like endless reading and researching) not to do it. Even though I know there's no way in hell I'll come up with anything worth reading unless I start writing. And I should probably do it daily, just to get into the habit. Which of course, will require some serious life-reorganization to fit it in with the teaching, working, and (screw you all who think otherwise) my sanity/soul-saving social life.

So, this blog I found:

Granted, I found hyper-motivated asstards like Thomas Friedman annoying:

"Honestly, I still can't wait to get my pants on in the morning," Friedman said. He wakes early, then exercises on a stationary bike, and if he has a column in the paper that day he'll read it through online two or three times, asking himself, "Did I get it right?"

But, there were others.

Like, Toni Morrison, who assures me it's not weird I need to write things out longhand rather than type seemingly un-material words into a computer.

Or Truman Capote who needs to think lying down. And has to be "sipping or puffing" something the whole way along.

Or Kingsley Amis who can't tear himself away from the newspaper because he's "staving off the dreadful time I have to go to the typewriter." And worse, he says:

And the agreement I have with myself is that I can stop whenever I like and go and shave and so on. In practice, it’s not till about one or one-fifteen that I do that—I usually try and time it with some music on the radio. Then I emerge, and nicotine and alcohol are produced. I work on until about two or two-fifteen, have lunch, then if there’s urgency about, I have to write in the afternoon, which I really hate doing—I really dislike afternoons, whatever’s happening. But then the agreement is that it doesn’t matter how little gets done in the afternoon. And later on, with luck, a cup of tea turns up, and then it’s only a question of drinking more cups of tea until the bar opens at six o’clock and one can get into second gear. I go on until about eight-thirty and I always hate stopping. It’s not a question of being carried away by one’s creative afflatus, but saying, “Oh dear, next time I do this I shall be feeling tense again.”

This is precisely my writing routine. It's not working for me.

But best of all is Gertrude Stein, who is has "always been nervous about becoming nervous." Which is precisely my problem: meta-anxiety. It's gotten to the point where I worry myself that I worry about writing.

Her solution was to take baths in a giant bathtub (sigh...) and then drive about the country side, looking at cows with Alice B. Toklas. Which I wish this was the solution for me, too. But I don't have a bathtub worth bathing in and I don't have a car (not that I know where the cows are around here if I had one). And I don't have an Alice B. Toklas available to me.

So, I imagine I will have to do something much less grand, like clean my room, organize my piles of books and notes, make a better space for writing, and then sit in it every day at an appointed time.

Gross.

Don't you know?--Aristocrats have always been incestuous.

2008-12-03T10:28:00.009-05:00

I love it when I can make some tenuous claim why my arcane dissertation subject (incest! politics! science!) has some marginal kind of relevance to present-day issues. Granted, the science vertex of this unholy triad is dropped out, but nonetheless, watch Glen Greenwald from Salon discredit (rightly, probably) the increasing nepotism of our beloved U.S. Congress by calling the appointments of politician's children to seats "incestous":

But this fixation on parent-child, sibling and spousal succession for elected office is particularly problematic. It's certainly true that one can find, in individual cases, instances of self-sufficiency and merit even among those benefiting from nepotism and family names. But the fact that it is now so commonplace -- almost presumptively expected -- for political power to be passed along to close family members is quite anti-democratic. The number of families possessing some sort of aristocratic-like claim to elected office is clearly increasing. By definition, that diminishes the role of merit and the need for democratic persuasion in how elected leaders are chosen. And this dynamic, in turn, fuels how insular, incestuous, unaccountable and bloated with entitlement the Beltway culture is.

Way to play it 16th century Greenwald! Even down the commonly associated images of disease, monstrosity, and degeneration: "bloated," and later, he says all this "breeds a merit-deprived aristocratic culture, " and then he wraps it up with the Versaille-on-the-Potomic's "bloated, decadent insularity." I could almost pull this from any Renaissance or Restoration drama or 18th century political tract.

I don't know about you, but I have some doubts about the equivalence of nepotism and incest--not unless sexual favors are required to get the job, in addition to a blood connection. Maybe it's just that people have been tossing about the incest insult for so long, it's got a little worn out, but I don't know... seems like there's a good enough case for a breech of principles here without representing them as degenerate, moral monsters. Greedy and self-interested, yes; outside the pale of human culture, no. So much for rational discourse.

Or maybe he's hoping to gear us up for the new (French) Revolution. I mean come on--"Versaille on the Potomac"? the "bloated, decadent insularity" of the aristocracy?--it very nearly inspires me to slap on my liberty cap, grab the nearest pike, pitchfork, or torch, and start demanding that heads roll.

Hrm... I've always wanted to be part of the revolutionary mob.

I must be old if park benches seem appealing.

2008-12-01T09:18:00.004-05:00

Under the circumstances, this seems like the most ideal place in the world (specifically, this is Lake Zug in Switzerland). I would like to be here, with a book. Not a book for school. Just a book.

And this is because I, once again, am tired. Yes, the guests came. Yes, the turkey went fine (as did the macaroni and cheese, the mashed potatoes, the pie). Yes, everybody drank too much. Yes, they left. And yes, I'm back just where I started from--exhausted, with a large pile of work I can't figure out how to do quickly enough.

Attack of the Turkey

2008-11-24T09:03:00.003-05:00

So besides being terribly, terribly nervous that I will neither complete my grading nor my small piece of my dissertation on time this week (Tuesday is the due date for both), I have an enormous turkey sitting in my refrigerator that shall have to be cooked for a crowd on Thursday. It is a frightening thing to me. Whatever cooking skills I have, they really do not include meat preparation. And it isn't like most people just make a turkey whenever and thus hone their bird-roasting skills. You are supposed to cook giant birds--even your first giant bird, such as this one--for a giant crowd of people with holiday-heightened expectations. I've got turkey performance anxiety, in addition to regular, everyday grad school anxiety.

Not that I'm really complaining. I'm actually thrilled that I will be gathering about 10 of my favorite people in my home for Thanksgiving, and as far as the pie, potatoes, and mac and cheese I plan to make, I'm confident that they'll think my culinary productions are yummy. But it would be such a blow to my Martha-ego (which would be like an alter-ego, only color-coordinated) to serve a dry-as-dust turkey--or, dare I say it, some awful still-half-frozen disaster that becomes some funny story until time and times have done.

I will just have to make sure there is plenty of booze available, so that they will not care if the turkey fails.

All Relative(s) (Warning, kind of creepy and a big downer of a post...)

2008-11-20T15:13:00.007-05:00

I am taking the whole "hot, tired, mess" thing to new levels--neurotic, paranoid levels, even.

Last night was the umpteenth night in a row of reading scholarly articles about incest into the late, late hours for my prospectus, and it finally happened: when I went to bed (at 1:30am...), I had dreams all night about incest. I had been remarking my good fortune in getting off scott-free from reading-influenced dreams. It nearly always happens. When I read Mary Shelley's The Last Man, I kept having dreams about plague-induced apocalypses. On one of my long journeys through Clarissa, I kept dreaming about designing my own coffin. Don't ask what I dreamed about when I was reading The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. But until last night, nada about incest.

But, good lord, did my subconscious make up for it with a vengeance! In one dream, I found out I was related to everyone I have ever known (I couldn't say how), and they kept gathering around me until it was quite the mob, and I got trampled. In another, even more disturbing dream, I discovered, in a byzantine, very 18th-century fashion that included abandoned children, secret affairs, and kidnapping, that my "um, friend" was my brother. And, just to add insult to injury, that was not the reason he wanted to break up with me. And when I woke up, my first thought wasn't "ew, gross!: violated incest prohibition," but "what if he does want to break up with me?" And I obsessed about that all morning, despite my having no tangible reason to do so.

The paranoia really is becoming a problem. Right now, I'm pretty sure nobody likes me, everyone is out to get me, that everything I say is offensive (it might be...), and I do nothing well. It seems like, every time I've gone the days and days of getting no sleep, every insecurity I've ever felt since the dawn of consciousness isn't sleeping either.

Normally, I would contend with at least the nightmares by stuffing my brain full of fluff--Project Runway, The Daily Show, hours and hours of VH1 reality programming, etc. etc.--so that there's only innocuous piddly crap to make dreams out of. (Why more disturbing products don't issue from a heap of Rock of Love or The Pick-Up Artist or Hogan Knows Best, I don't know. But so it is.) But my usual strategy is not an option: I must continue to wade through a stinking pile of taboo and abjection so I can get a summary of the critical field to my advisor on time. But I'm holding out the hope that if I get tired enough, I'll sleep too much like the dead to remember any dreams at all.

Amsterdam isn't just for stoners.

2008-11-19T10:26:00.006-05:00

I'm at work, staring at this lovely canal scene from Amsterdam whilst I hand-fold the stack of brochures I designed for some prize for teachers at MIT. It's not bad work--not stressful or difficult. Certainly less stressful than the much bigger stack of journal articles to read and papers to grade that I've been carrying around. (Can't I just z-fold them all and dump them in the campus mail, like the brochures? Surely, that would count as doing the work, somehow?) And the designing part was sorta fun. But I am a hot, sleep-deprived, mess. I can't go home and nap, like I want and should. So instead, I'm having a travel fantasy about twilight strolls and cafes and a nice hotel with room service (big square pillows, giant bath tubs, and breakfast carried in on a tray after a big, long sleep... ).

It will never happen, will it?

The Importance of Being Earnest

2008-11-16T11:07:00.012-05:00

I am struggling with my new-found sense of political earnesty.

A couple of days ago, I was visiting one of my fave blogs--The Ryan Studio--which features a new painting everyday. I am generally amused because it features many the comfort food item, like a PB&J sandwich or, my personal form of crack, the cake donut with pink frosting and rainbow sprinkles. (I don't know why the pink frosting-rainbow sprinkle combo is so important--it just is, dammit! Pink-and-rainbow is my favorite flavor!) I used to have a size 24 ass built out of such donuts--I could never have just one. So, I have banned myself from them. But I can at least take delight in a painting of one without the side effect of becoming massive.

But, then I saw this entry of an Obama logo cut out and taped to a wall. Normally, my attraction to the paintings is sort of the detached/removed aesthetic enjoyment of an object meant for actual material enjoyment. (Sooooo decadent... is almost like intellectual debauchery!) It is almost like my usual ironic enjoyment of all cultural items and many real items, in which I can have my donut (the safe distance) and eat it too (the pleasure of the object). But the humble little painting of a humble little political act (and maybe an actual realization of all those showy campaign abstractions of hope and belief and whatever) was touching. And I am so not used to being touched. My heart is tiny and black and cold, I tell you!

So, I sent the link to a friend whose belief in Obama I was sure was earnest, hoping for an earnest response. Instead, I got this:

friend: what is it?

me: is from a daily painting blog--is painting of obama logo.

friend: it's a great logo

i just didn't know if you were going to tell me that it was made out of crushed fetus eyelids or what?

me: no

is exactly what it seems

friend: ......coming from you

that's odd

me: i guess so

friend: odder almost than the odd things you send

Now, I am perfectly aware that my constant irony is purposefully distancing, meant to protect my not actually small, cold, and black heart. But I have to admit I was troubled: my obsession with all the strange and ridiculous things I can dress in heartless wit/irony for the amusement of my friends means that my lame attempts at earnesty are most likely to be misunderstood.

And maybe I do have real feelings?

???

And maybe I would like to communicate them to other people?

And maybe I would like them to be understood in the spirit in which they are offered?

?????

It is all very perplexing to me.

So maybe I should practice earnesty. I shall begin with this modern version of the fireside chat.

I know it's cheesy, but I have been waiting for some leader to tell us all that we need to get a "new spirit of service and sacrifice" and "to not only look after ourselves, but each other." I am always bemoaning how we have apparently lost the value of civic responsibility in favor of some selfish creed of "independence" and "free market values"--but that really means every self-centered asshole can careen about on their ideological high-horse, terrorizing, pillaging, and destroying everyone and everything else in his or her own service. And do it in the name of God and Country. Yeeeeehaw! I have found it hard not to match that sort of hypocrisy with a load of bitter, bitter soul-shrivelling cynicsm.

But underneath that cynicism is some kind of desire for an ideal society based on old-fashioned values of hard work, service, and community?

I don't know what to do with that. Maybe I should start eating donuts again, so to speak.

Travelling by Wikipedia: Scenic Science

2008-11-12T08:48:00.004-05:00

In honor of having made my first attempt to describe my dissertation project last night (you know, that crazy thing in which I attempt to connect representations of incest in eighteenth and nineteenth century literature to natural sciences discourses), we will not travel far at all today: merely to the Le Grande Gallerie de L'Evolution at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.

A note about said description: I don't know if it is worthy of any such honors. I'm not sure if it makes any sense. I do fine when I say how representations of incest and natural sciences sometimes do the same work to figure familial and social relations, but when I attempt to say why, everything falls apart. It's a friggin mess and it makes me want to cry.

Travelling by Wikipedia: First Stop, Paris

2008-11-10T16:07:00.012-05:00

So, everyday that I go to work at MIT, I go to the Wikipedia Commons and change my desktop wallpaper to a new and fabulous destination in the world to which I cannot afford to go.

It's the best I can do under the conditions of graduate poverty and soaring plane fare.

Today, I needed glamour, so I chose "Le Grand Palais depuis le pont Alexandre III." (The link will always lead you to the big, wallpaper-appropriate pic.)

Enjoy!

Never!

2008-11-08T23:02:00.004-05:00

Before the conference folks walked down the hill to the gallery for the last talk of the day, I decided to check out the surrealism exhibit. What the hell?--it was a recreation of a Marcel Duchamp dealio, and he always amuses.

Nick was in there, too, shuffling around in the fake dead leaves strewn around on the floor.

I tried looking around at the paintings. But I had disdained the flashlights at the door we were supposed to use. What a stupid fucking idea. And my eyes wouldn't focus on anything. No sleep--just making sandwiches and salad and cheesecake for 40 or so until 2:30am, running platters and coffee and water and tablecloths from building to building, rearranging and cleaning since 6:30 in the morning. And this following a week of arranging meetings for MIT, grading, and getting the conference finances all in order.

"So everything is going well I hear?" I was too busy to actually have gone to anything at this conference I'd helped organize.

"Yup."

"Cool."

"So maybe next year I do one thing. Like I bring the a/v equipment. But I'm never doing this again."

"Yup. I'll bring cheesecake or something. Never...... never, never, never again."

Fist bump.

"Never, never, never, never....."

Not that I mean to really complain. The conference went well. Even Professor Gilmore came and declared to the office ladies that the conference didn't suck this time (a grand compliment, coming from him). And all the grad students echoed his sentiment. But last night, by the end of the plenary talk, I was shaking from fatigue. Erin took me back to her house, where I had a glass of wine and I fell asleep watching Supernatural. And then woke up at 1pm the next morning feeling hungover. And somehow I need to pull off a fat list of shit to research before I see my advisor in 3 days. Which I am completely incapable of even thinking about.

One day I'm going to learn to put my schoolwork ahead of other people's crap... one day... one day...

I can't put my makeup on--

2008-11-05T07:35:00.002-05:00

I'm watching the news this morning and all the people with their happy Obama tears. I can't stop sniffling long enough to drink my coffee and put my mascara on. Dammit! Why can't I stay home and just absorb the news? I have hated turning on the news for 8 solid years.

I'm going to have to go to work uncaffeinated and with crybaby eyes....

b(oston)s(cholar)

This is amazing.

I have made a deposit.

Graphic Observations, Part 2

Graphic Observations, Part 1

I am *very* serious.

I'm the Doctor!

This Blog is Still on Hold...

This Blog is On Hold

One for the serious complaint log.

One for the silly complaint log....

10 things I'd rather be doing than sitting in this Starbuck's, not dissertating:

Tantric Chocolate

Something for your head....

The Land of Cleve: An Illustrated Tale

Good advice, indeed:

Some Ultimately Irrelevant Reasons Why I WIll Never Write "An Indelible Portrait of Our Times"

What I Learned This Week in the World of Sex, Dating, and Romance

Violet Crush

This movie was... not alright.

I don't just paint kitty cats, just so you know...

I've got friends at the Oasis.

Two birthdays, two cat portraits:

Why I am drinking this afternoon:

Cure for the Summertime Blues

Time goes by so slowly...

Two things that frustrated me last night:

This Week in Kitteh

WV Travelogue (parenthetical)

Ugh. The internets bit me.

Everything's a little queer tonight.

This Week in Kitteh

It's a mystery.

Tattoo Ideas

Holy pornulation, Batman!

I want feminist laser vision!

Hooray for Mellons!, or the Magic of Not Having to Teach

Accessible, my foot.

In Stitches

Raw Appeal

In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, I bring you Rebecca Saxe.

If I were a mathematician, I too would wear a tiara.

Double Entendre Fail

Gonna put the "fun" in "funding."

For a happier Valentine's Day:

Superbowl Surprise

Words Gone Wild

The password is "butter."

The Long Awaited Lord Hobo (All Hail!)

The Blob v. The Phlegm

The Culinary Fairy came to me last night and gave me deliciousness.

Stop using Jane Austen for the forces of evil!

This Week in Kitteh

Where are my fancy pants?

Pate de Canard en Croute: Photo Journal

Deals are made to be broken.

Somebody has a case of the Mondays.

Bad economy cutting into your entertainment budget? Three simples steps to free laffs.

The alien insects are here to abduct me...

Group project: souffle.

I am so hungry...

I have a new spur to scholarly ambition.

Paul Child: My New Dream Lover

One small factor in why I am literary and not scientificary.

Not that I'm actually pondering the state of matrimony...

More Sink Cat

The March of Science and its detours...

Botanic Bliss

One day, I will kick Jehuda in the junk.

Where she'll stop, nobody knows.

In which I begin to understand where "The March of Science" comes from.

One down, eight to go....

Reflections on Assholery

This week in kittehs

My difference engine contemplated the mathematical sublime. It jammed up.

Nine Places I'd Like to Dine

What? We are not evolved to be douches?!?!?

Eureka!

The Difference

It's like that time I fed the liver and onions to the dog, but had to suffer "second" helpings of the meal I must have loved, I ate it so fast.

I am very serious.