May 9, 2008

What Literary Critics Actually Do

Filed under: Literature

Over on Letters from a Broad, there’s a discussion about individual tastes in literature, and how to think about things when personal tastes violate the received wisdom and authority of experts in literature--people with PhDs. The discussion really upset me, not because anyone said anything particularly insulting or offensive--on the contrary, many comments were quite astute--but because it made me confront, more forcefully than anything has for a long time, that most people don’t understand in the slightest what I do. They don’t understand academia in the humanities; they don’t understand the way literary scholars approach the study of literature; they don’t understand the way literature is taught or the rationale for it.

It’s not like this is necessarily anybody's fault; relatively few people get PhDs in English, so why should the rest of the world understand what it’s like to do that? The grueling hours involved in being a grad student and teaching freshman comp (which is the primary way graduate studies in English are funded), the sheer drudgery of grading paper after paper (many of which are heartbreakingly bad), aren’t the least bit glamorous, so you can’t blame people for not wanting to hear more about the whole business. And in order to get a PhD, you have to study something in such depth that sometimes you can’t even explain easily your specialty to grad students focusing on other periods or genres of literature.

Continue reading "What Literary Critics Actually Do"

Posted by Holly at 8:29 AM | Comments (5)

May 8, 2008

The Joy of Making Holes in Your Knitting

Filed under: Knitting

I wrote the other day that socks are not my choice for knitting. No, what I really like to knit is stuff with holes in it--in other words, lace. Here's the last project I finished before I started the socks:

That view shows it draped over a chair so you can see what it might look like when worn; here's a view that shows it spread out on a bed, so you can see how big it is:

I loved making this shawl--just LOVED it. I liked the lace, which is a basic leaf pattern I learned quite easily. I could have managed the body of the shawl on my own, but I knit it as part of a class so that I could learn to do the Vandyke border. That was tricky enough that I'm glad I had someone walk me through it, but once I understood it, it wasn't hard.

And I'm really pleased with and proud of how well it turned out. I think it's flat-out gorgeous.

I also discovered that I like shawls as garments. I have not worn shawls much before, but actually they're a great garment for someplace like Arizona: just enough coverage that your skin isn't cold, but not so heavy that you get overheated. And they're pretty. I wish I had realized sooner that I love shawls, but I intend to make up for lost time.

Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (5)

May 7, 2008

It's ALWAYS Her Fault

Filed under: Feminism

I can't even comment on this story about a man who faced no charges or prosecution for killing his wife's lover, while she was tried and convicted for involuntary manslaughter, so I'll let columnist Jacquielynn Floyd and blogger Melissa McEwan do it instead, and provide this link to background on the case.

I will only add, that if the jury in Texas were to decide the Johnny Vegas business, I'm sure they'd figure out a way to make it all the fault of the woman he had hauled on stage. Don't punish the man with the gun or the power; punish the woman. At all costs, punish the woman.

Posted by Holly at 9:05 AM | Comments (14)

May 6, 2008

Now I Can Say I've Done It

Filed under: Knitting

A million years ago, I mentioned that I wanted to learn to knit socks, just so I understood how to turn the heel. Well guess what: I spent three Mondays evenings getting instructions on sock knitting, and last week I finished my first sock and started my second. The completed sock looks like this:

The second currently looks like this:

I do like the yarn I got, though I had a hell of a time finding something I liked well enough to knit with. It's more subtle in its self-striping than some yarns, and it would have been fun to work with something more dramatic, but unfortunately the taste of the owners of my nearest yarn store doesn't match my own: they favor pale and bright colors while I like dark colors.

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Posted by Holly at 10:05 AM | Comments (3)

May 2, 2008

Hey, Don't You Know Sexual Assault Is FUNNY and FUN?

Filed under: Feminism

Good god. Some British "comedian" has apparently... I don't know what to say. Go here and read about some piece of shit with the stage name Johnny Vegas who got up on a London stage last week, announced that he had no material, and so decided to have some woman from the audience carried on stage so that he could sexually assault her. Mary O'Hara, a writer for the Guardian, saw the "performance" and wrote a blog entry about all the ways in which it "crossed a line." And of course people come along in the comments and defend Vegas, and explain why it WAS funny AND entertainment to see a young woman assaulted and humiliated in front of an entire audience.

And then there's the nightmarish story of Josef Friztl, the Austrian who kept his daughter Elisabeth in the cellar for 24 YEARS, during which he repeatedly raped, beat and brutalized her, and father seven children by her.

OK, one was intended to be an evening of "comedy" where what really mattered was that the man doing the assaulting got off on it, while the woman being assaulted did not, so that eventually the assaulter wanted to be hidden from public view (he asked that the curtain go down so no one could see the end of his "act"); one was intended to be a way of life where what really mattered was that the man doing the assaulting got off on it, while the woman being assaulted did not, so that eventually the assaulter wanted everything hidden from public view.

Anyone seeing the connection here?

Posted by Holly at 8:29 AM | Comments (19)

April 26, 2008

The Jane Austen Survey

Filed under: Austen

My life lately has been Austen-tastic. That's one of the things I want to blog about if I ever get a couple of hours in a row when I can concentrate.... Anyway, as I've mentioned before, I'm not only a Janeite but a lifelong member of the Jane Austen Society of North America, though I've never yet attended one of the conferences. I hope that will change in 2009; the focus of that conference is on siblings in Austen's work, a topic I wrote a pretty decent paper on as an undergrad.

A full exploration of the Austen-tastic-ness of my life will have to wait until I've got time to write about it properly, but in the meantime I'd like to invite any Janeites who read my blog to take the Austen survey. The point of the survey is to gather information about the sorts of people who are Austen fans (my guess is they're pretty damn diverse); the results will be presented in a breakout session at the 2008 JASNA Annual General Meeting, in a presentation entitled "Anatomy of a Janeite."

Survey participants need to have read all six of the finished novels. If you have, please complete this survey.

Posted by Holly at 4:44 PM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2008

Please Consider the Environment Before Printing This Email

Filed under: Environment

I just got an email from some university staff person who has to send messages to some huge list. I almost didn't read it, but then thought, "What the hell; I can skim it in 15 seconds, and it might be relevant to some aspect of my life." The actual content of the email wasn't anything I need to know, but her signature caught me: it read, "Please consider the environment before printing this email."

I have friends and colleagues who print out all their email. It makes me crazy. It's such a waste--of paper, of toner, of energy, of space, of everything. I realize there are times when you have to print out an email, but 99 times out of 100, you don't.

One of the reasons I still like and use the email organizer Eudora is that it lets you have all sorts of signatures and choose a different one each time you send an email. On my old desktop I had something like 30 signatures. On my laptop I've only entered ten, one being my home address, another being my work address, a third being the url for my blog, and the rest being quotes I like, including this favorite, something US Grant wrote shortly before he died:

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Posted by Holly at 9:38 AM | Comments (3)

April 23, 2008

Some Stuff From Yesterday

Filed under: Politics, Business and Economics

First of all, I'm bummed that Obama didn't win the Pennsylvania Primaries, but the despair I feel about the future of my country is currently more diffuse than the anxiety I feel about certain other topics, so I won't dwell on it. The one thing I liked about yesterday's election was the "I Voted" sticker I got after voting. Sometimes they're really lame but this one was cool: it was big and square and had this parchment colored background, with a picture of the flag and the script of "We the People" from the preamble to the constitution. OK, it's not really all that important, but these days I'm grateful for small pleasures.

Next, did you know that you can ship live birds through the mail? I didn't, until I went to the post office yesterday and a guy was doing just that. If you scroll down on the PO's special handling page, you'll find instructions on how to do it. You can also send bees.

Finally, something else I learned at the post office yesterday: did you know that postage rates are going up again? A first-class letter will soon cost 42 cents. (I just noticed that there is no cents character on my keyboard.) So rush out and buy as many of those "forever" stamps as you can afford, though at least some of the new $.42 stamps are cool: there are some featuring the face of Martha Gellhorn, whom I totally dig and admire--her essay collection The Face of War is pretty damn amazing.

Posted by Holly at 10:30 AM | Comments (3)

April 22, 2008

Watering the Planet on Earth Day

Filed under: Environment

In recognition of Earth Day (I started to write, "In celebration of Earth Day," but it doesn't seem right to "celebrate" Earth Day when we're doing such a shitty job of caring for the planet), I'm providing links to a website where you can check your water footprint, which I learned about thanks to this news story.

No one with a brain will be surprised to be told that the US has the largest water footprint in the world--we use more of all the other resources in the world, so why should water be any different? But what makes me crazy is the amount of water we waste in the most careless and irresponsible of ways.

For instance, the movie Michael Clayton is a case in point. Now, I loved this movie; I thought it was just about perfect in terms of its storytelling, and although I wondered for the first 90 minutes why Tilda Swinton won an Oscar for her performance given how little screen time she had, in the last 15 minutes I totally figured it out. But I was really annoyed at all the water just left running in this movie.

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Posted by Holly at 11:17 AM | Comments (2)

April 18, 2008

I Hate April Fool's Day, But I Love Deadlines

Filed under: Utter Miscellany

First of all, I hate April Fool's Day. As far as I'm concerned, it's the single worst ritual of spring, and the one we really need to get rid of. Easter might have become irrelevant, Daylight Saving Time might be a great unnecessary, contrived annoyance, but April Fool's Day is irrelevant, unnecessary AND annoying.

I'm sure someone is saying, "What a killjoy you are, Holly! April Fool's Day is about JOKES! Don't you have a sense of humor?" But April Fool's Day is about practical jokes, about jokes that depend on trickery and deceit. They are jokes of which someone is the butt. The jokes are only funny if someone falls for them. I prefer other types of jokes.

And OK, this year, I fell for the first joke I came across: I admit I was horrified when I read that Al Gore had announced he'd run for president on an independent ticket. "Oh no," I thought. "Not another divided election...." And then I happened to glance at the date. So I didn't even cock an eyebrow when I heard that Philip Morris would cease all tobacco production and begin growing organic peanuts instead.

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Posted by Holly at 9:35 AM | Comments (2)