March 31, 2004

I love engravings,

and so does the author of the beautiful Giornale Nuovo (link from Long story; short pier).

Femme Noir

On-line comic, via Plep.

Take a midnight stroll down the rain-slick streets of Port Nocturne, where the acrid scent of gunpowder hangs in the air like cheap perfume, where every dark alley comes to a dead end, and justice is ... blonde.

This woman is a real role model.

Tiptree Award, 2003

The winner of the James Tiptree, Jr., Award — "an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender" — for 2003 is Matt Ruff for Set This House In Order: A Romance Of Souls.

News from the FEMINISTSF listserv.

March 30, 2004

Rebus, continued

Just to conclude the crabby-assed — sorry, arsed — comments I made earlier about Ian Rankin's latest: I finished the book the next day, and while I (obviously) found it a page-turner, I was finally dissatisfied. Rankin's writing, this time around, lacks its usual subtlety. And all the pop-music references are getting tedious. Worse, he verges into sentiment with the heavy handed allustions to Rebus as a "knight in tarnished armour." And the ending is inexcusable. The ending of the average episode of Walker, Texas Ranger has more credibilty. If it turns out, as I suspect, that Rankin is leading up to some May-September grotesquerie between the frequently soused Rebus and the equally anti-social Siobhan — unless it ends almost as soon as it starts and ruins their working relationship forever — I may have to gouge my eyes out. So let's hope he has more sense.

The Little Professor commented on my earlier post, and mentioned that Rankin is winding up the series. I hadn't heard this, but Rebus must be nearing retirement age, surely.

If I haven't put you completely off, click the image for the amazon.ca link.

Since I'm on a Comics kick,

here is a link, via Bookslut, to a very slick site featuring Superman shilling for AmEx.

Why not Wonder Woman?

Some saint has digitalized and posted Action Comics No. 1 (June 1938).
(via Boing Boing.)

(Not very chivalrous, was he?)

March 29, 2004

Kids on the internet

Liz Lawley at mamamusings writes about negotiating between trust and safety when one's children use the internet. Tracy Kennedy at Netwoman and Fiona Romeo pick up the discussion. Romeo writes about

facilitating a type of parental involvement that leaves space for children's privacy. Much of our recent work has been directed towards learning where the boundaries lie: when does parental monitoring cross the line from being something that makes children feel looked-after and safe, to something that feels like having their pockets searched? This is a very difficult balance to strike, and I think we need to learn from some of the ways parents mediate their children’s contacts and communications in everyday – mostly offline – life.

This sounds commonsensical. Of course, many parents don't manage very well off-line, either. But is the internet substantially different from the rest of life? Do we need to invent new modes of parenting for new technologies? Is our job as parents qualitatively different from that of previous generations? I am inclined to think that it is, but not just because of something as relatively clear-cut as the internet, or more specifically, danger on the internet. Sure, that's part of it, along with globalization, global warming, advanced monopoly capitalism ... the twenty-first century, in fact. We have to find new ways of parenting in so many ways.

Addendum (1:44pm):

Here is a barely-there image of a drawing Harry G. Peter did for Wonder Woman comics: it depicts a little boy shaking his fist at a retreating man and saying, "Scared o'me, huh?" while Wonder Woman twirls her lasso in the background. It is meant to indicate my idealized protective relationship with my child. The question is, I suppose, what does the lasso represent? More than software.

March 28, 2004

Ian Rankin, A Question of Blood

Half-way through; started last night as a treat to myself after three days of migraine hell. (Yes, I know I have to mark your papers, students from 3621. And I will.) I've read all the Rebus series, and they're the only detective/mystery novels that I still read. The story this time around is prosaically topical — ex-SAS soldier goes psycho and shoots up a school — and the writing seems off. I mean, "Now, on the M74 south of Glasgow, [the windshield wipers] were flying to and fro like Roadrunner's legs in the cartoon" (125). Or, "Her eyes were the same colour as the clouds which had obscured Arthur's Seat earlier that morning" (130). And, there is too much explication, too much awkward filler. The book is part of a successful franchise, moving along on the accumulated steam of its predecessors, but there is not much here that would draw in new readers. Rankin is not that old, yet with this novel he — and Rebus — have grown curmudgeonly.

Boy, there is no reviewer so cranky as a betrayed reviewer.

March 27, 2004

Wonder women

Posted by George H. Williams: "From Catherine Rodriguez, who organized the SHARP panels at this year's ASECS, I learned that eighteenth-century authors Fanny Burney and Hannah More made appearances in Wonder Woman comics as 'wonder women of history.'"

I would LOVE to see those issues.

Cross-posted to writingwomen.

Just saw "FEMILIAR,"

"a feminist textile/mixed media installation" by an artist named WhiteFeather, at the Saint John Arts Centre (show ends March 29). Interesting; an old-style feminist production, including two pieces which list menstrual blood — and one, uterine blood — among the fixins. But I liked it, unregenerate second-waver as I am¹, particularly the hair pie (what it says) and the matrimonial bedsheets, a triptych of sheets with embellished slashes in the centres which reminded me of nothing so much as the series of scenes in Salmon Rushdie's Shame (1983) in which the protagonist, a doctor, is introduced to his soon-to-be wife in a series of consultations, piece by piece through a hole in a sheet.²

It is a powerful show, that reveals the earthy, organic, and binding nature of the over-determined "feminine." Anyone who is able to catch it in the next two days is encouraged to do so.

Apparently there will be further information about WhiteFeather sometime next month, on the CBC Artspots site.

¹ I hadn't really thought of myself in this way until very recently, when taking part in an exchange at feministe about whether or not Germaine Greer is a disgrace to feminism. Part of me — a small part, inside — writhes and twists and wants to say, "Come on, guys, The Female Eunuch; cut her some slack." But I digress.

² It was not a successful marriage, in case you were wondering.

March 26, 2004

Picturing women

A link via Blog Sisters: Picturing Women, a site that "explores how women are figured, fashioned, turned into portraits, and told about in words and pictorial narrative."

Cross-posted to writingwomen.

Haven't had a Barbie post in awhile

so here is a cool site, The Distorted Barbie. Paintings, thoughtful commentary, and links. Mattel tried to shut them down in 1997, but the site is still up.

The Distorted Barbie is on detritus.net, "dedicated to recycled culture."

After two days of a wicked migraine

I noted this link on theme funerals, from Stephany Aulenback at Maud Newton, with much interest. I can't decide between the Aquarium (so peaceful) or the New Orleans Jazz Funeral (after all, I won't be able to hear it).

Looking good about now

jill/txt points towards grading software. That's right. Why should students be the only ones who can cheat?

March 25, 2004

Your kung fu is most impressive

Ping-pong. Go here. Really.

From jill/txt.

Noam Chomsky has started a blog

here.

Link from Crooked Timber.

Memory

Boing Boing links to a story about various technological "external memories," none quite as elegant as the idea of cyber-punk implants, but getting there. I was just going to note it, but then read this beautiful poem at Watermark, and the two seemed somehow to go together. Or not.

journals, notebooks, diaries, poems

laying the mind out
on a white sheet
sometimes in modest bedclothes

sometimes naked
flabby and flatulent
sometimes in a dark shroud

look at it there
pennies on the eyes
breasts nuzzling the armpits

waiting to be washed

I think that the technology will take awhile.

Talk about lapsed

To follow up on the story of the mouth-shaped urinals that caused such consternation earlier this month, Boing Boing links to a photo of nun-shaped urinals.

It has always struck me how often nuns become the stand-ins for people's general dissatisfaction with the Catholic church. Funny, that.

Just a matter of time

Just overheard an ad for a new medication for "erectile disfunction" (otherwise known as getting older) that managed to make that scary list of possible side effects read at the end into a recommendation: "While rare, if erections last longer than four hours, seek medical attention." Just so.

Now if they could just cure migraines. I was home in bed with my ice packs all day. Crap.

March 24, 2004

Darker Bury St Edmunds

Plep links to the Manor House Museum in Bury St Edmunds, home to a fine collection of interest to the student of horology (clocks, to the rest of us), as well as some stunning costumes and textiles. But Bury St Edmunds is also the site of Moyse's Hall Museum, where can be found macabre artifacts to do with the notorious Red Barn murders in 1827.

I am planning a trip this summer, and I know where I will go first.

Addendum (3/4/04): This is also categorized under the new category of "book art" because the museum holds a book bound in murderer William Corder's skin.

Breathe deeply

and then sneeze. Some pretty pictures of illustrated MSS and books at wood s lot: be sure to check out the memento mori.

March 23, 2004

You will be missed

The Invisible Adjunct just announced that she is winding up the blog; she is leaving academe. Words fail; we needed — we need — to hear what she, and all her commentators, had to say.

Honestly

Was just reading Clive Thompson's article, "The Honesty Virus," in The New York Times Magazine (21/3/04), available on-line here. He cites a study that indicates that people are more honest on-line than either in person or on the phone, because, as he blogged at collision detection, "we know that online, it's easy to get busted; our words are usually being saved and recorded. The online world is tough on liars, because machines don't forget." He does go on to mention the lack of inhibition many feel on-line, but the gist of his argument seems to be that we are only honest because we have to be. While the idea of the internet as "the unlikely conscience of the world" is intriguing, it is depressing to think that it may only be so because of fear of exposure. But surely all the pseudonymous bloggers, who if Thompson is correct could say what they like, shield their identities to enable honesty. I don't think I feel the impulse to reveal or be truthful because I may get busted later; I think it stems from the anonymity of the fingers on the keyboard. But that may just be a lack of forethought.

Back to normal

Zombies Push Jesus from Top of North American Box Office.

(Link from I Know What I Know.)

Famed throughout the Alpha Quadrent

The alert (or extremely bored) among my readers may have noted the new blurb from Qov added to the kudos for this site (only some of which are taken out of context) at the bottom of the sidebar. Qov has a Klingon-language blog called bo logh, and she commented on my daring posting of my Klingon haiku. I'm so glad she did; not only did she translate the poems into Klingon, but she translated them back into English (check out the comments to my original post). She then contacted me to tell me that she was writing an entry on the poems for her own blog, which she posted earlier today. (It is very disconcerting to see phrases such as "bo logh Ho'mo' Miriam Jones, «chongqu'!» maq 'ej loS bommeyDaj ngo' 'agh.") She thoughtfully sent me an English translation of her post, which I include below the fold.

This whole exchange has been fascinating. And in at least one case — I much prefer "writhing" to "rustling" in the first poem — the exercise has improved on the originals. I had always admired the dedication of those who learnt Klingon, but I now have a new level of appreciation of it as a language — albeit a synthetic one — with its own structures. (Here is a previous entry from Languagehat on the subject. In English.)

From Qov's email of 17 March, 2004:

Because Miriam Jones admires bo logh, she proclaims it "so cool" and displays her four old poems. While considering Klingon ideas, she uses English to compose the poems. If you count the sound groups in the song lines, there are five sound groups in the first line, seven sound groups in the second line and five sound groups again in the third line. If that system is followed, it's called Haiku. Customarily Haiku considers animals, vegetation or the forest world. This system was devised in Japan.

Miriam Jones seems slightly ashamed of her poems but I'm glad she dared to reveal them.

(targhs mating, in English)

As a Klingon would apparently like Miriam Jones poems, and as the task is easy, I translated them.

(targhs mating, in Klingon)

For Haiku, a whole world has to take form because of a few words. The next poem definitely succeeds. It made me laugh, too.

(mosquito netting, In English)

I hope my translation succeeds, too.

(mosquito netting, In Klingon)

Usually if someone admires Klingon, they are a scientist or a programmer. But as I started to read Miriam Jones journal I realized that she is an English teacher. She reads eighteenth century manuscripts. She didn't seem to be a technician. Perhaps she likes bo logh purely because she understands the task of learning a language? It's a rare situation. But suddenly I saw it. She reads Heinlein. She enjoys science stories and uses them for her lessons. She has a poet's spirit and a scientist's mind, too.

Addendum to this last: I was perusing Qov's site — though it's all Klingon to me — when I noticed the word "Mormon" sticking out like a smooth forehead. Followed the links, and sure enough, there are various people out there translating the Book of Mormon into Klingon. Not sure what Qov had to say about that, but file it under, "unexpected sub-groups in fandom."

Addendum (1:59pm): Found the Book of Mormon, the Tao Te Ching, and the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe, all in Klingon.

March 22, 2004

Motherhood

There was a thread at Crooked Timber a couple of days ago that picked up on a post from Laura at Apt. 11D about The Mommy Myth, by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, in which she wrote, "

One of the pressures (there are others) on the work of the previous generation of feminists comes from child experts, not Dr. Laura. Attachment parenting and Baby Mozart are pressuring women to leave the work force and forcing feminists to think up new solutions.

She doesn't have comments on her blog, but there were a number of interesting comments at Crooked Timber, most of them rejecting child experts and their books. As I said there, I would make a clear distinction between the attachment parenting advocated by the Sears, and Penelope Leach.

This is the second on-line conversation about child-rearing that I have backed away from. Defensiveness, in part, probably. But also, this is one of the few subjects that ... well, it's not academic.

Anyway, Jessa Crispin at Bookslut has a succinctly worded link to a Salon article about Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life by Daphne de Marneffe, apparently about, in part at least, the joys of staying at home and parenting. I haven't read it and likely won't, though I am intrigued by the title and would be more than interested in a meditation on maternal desire; perhaps I will have to write my own. But the shouldas, the oughtas, explicit or merely implied ...

It's a conspiracy.

Addendum (24/3/04): Jessa Crispin links to another article on Daphne de Marneffe, and then appeals to someone to "write a decent book about childlessness."

Owlet vocabulary

It's been so long since I've done any linguistics, and even if I could remember the notations I doubt I could reproduce them on this keyboard. But I can say that I am in awe of his Nibs' ability to introduce the most amazingly drawn-out diphthongs whenever he encounters a vowel. He loves vowels; he chews them and rolls them over his tongue; consonants are trickier, but he is game to try.

"a-mah-no" = "tomorrow"
"meeeew-zik kwaass" = "music class"
"Saad-yi" = "Sally"
"paaar-di" = "party"
"So fuuuuddy" = "That's funny"
"happy bird-ay" = "happy birthday" (also "candle"; "flame")
"Oowl-lix" = "Alex"

Addendum (23/3/04): How could I forget "Boom-ba" for "Grandpa"? And upon reflection, "happy bird-ay" is more "appy dird-day."

Second day of Spring

Here are some shots taken from our back porch on March 21, the second day of Spring, looking south,

and north.

I'm afraid I'm with Joseph Duemer on this one.

Addendum (8:32pm): From Plep: how to build a snowman.

March 21, 2004

Passages

Two links from an interesting blog I stumbled across called consumptive.org: "art, photography, and the uncanny":

18/3/04: photographs of recycled paper. Much more exciting than it sounds. (Scroll down to bottom of page.)

27/2/04: Time lapse photography: a woman aging 69 years, smiling throughout.

Gendered comments

So far, no comments on Netwoman's post about comments and gender. Under what circumstances ought one to delete a comment? Are comments from men treated differently from comments by women?

Addendum (22/3/04): feministe picks up the thread and describes how an overtly feminist site can become a lightening rod.

Detritus

A new category.

And here are three new links:

Photos of those hokey church signs that make you wince — such as "God is at the end of your rope" — via Long story; short pier;

and two photographers' sites: Modern Ruins by Philip Buehler, and Robert Wogan's documentation of the industrial past, both via Plep.

March 20, 2004

Heart of Darkness

wood s lot links to In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885–1960. Students of English 1200: here is some context for our reading last week, and next week as well.

Our house is a very very very fine house

From Boing Boing: a link to a new "shelter" (why does that term irk?)¹ magazine, Atomic Ranch, dedicated to "modest postwar houses," modernist architecture and decor, "real people, real houses."² Our (very fine) house was built in 1961. We moved here from a Victorian town house three and a half years ago and have not yet effected the full transition into the twentieth century. Perhaps Atomic Ranch will goad us to finally replace that claw-footed bookcase?

¹ I suppose it is designed to include all sorts of homes, from houses to apartments to lofts to condos to cottages, but since "shelter" implies a very basic animal need, and also includes tenements, cardboard cartons, and the basement at the Sally Ann, its use by luxury magazines (including magazines for "real people, real houses") is particularly grating. I don't know what to suggest as an alternative, because I also dislike "home" in this context (see following).

² They actually use the word "home," but since the discussion is about the material, "house" seems more appropriate. "Home," as in, "you have a lovely home," has always struck me as pretentious and somehow Victorian. Presumptuous and prescriptive. Sententious. And have I said that it bothers me? Home is where the heart is; what can a casual visitor presume to know about another's home? The house, of course, is sitting there for all to see.

March 19, 2004

Followup on urinals

Rather than just complaining in her blog, like me, Ms. Lauren at feministe actually contacted Virgin Airlines, whose order for the urinals put them in the news in the first place, and received a response which she posted earlier today. Virgin was shocked — shocked! — that their plans, overseen by two female designers, apparently, caused such a furor.

Sigh.

March 18, 2004

Literary links

Maud Newton links to John Leary's very funny "The Seven Basic Plots."

More on education in Georgia (see previous entry): an attempt to ban Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Good gravy, these three would be so far down my list... Link from MoorishGirl.

Ted Barlow at Crooked Timber links to "the homepage of the imaginary horror writer Garth Marenghi." Many gems like, "In total, he has written countless blood-curdling novels." Here is a quote from one of them, Slicer:

In a hazy cloud of blood-dumb pain, McGregor felt the blade work its way forwards, through the knot of his adam's apple and on towards the base of the chin. Then, slowly, it began to turn skywards. Och, no, he thought before the end, not ma brain... not ma brain... anything but ma brain...please don't slice ma brain... no, no... not the brain...och, no...

[The spousal unit is reading over my shoulder. "Good writing," is his comment. Of course, he is a sociologist.]

So, be sure to check out Garth Marenghi, a "writer at the peak of his own particular capabilities."

A late St. Paddy's Day offering

an Irish Folkore and Literature Quiz to which I am only linking because I scored 10/10 (after some inspired guesswork. Who is Darby O'Gill, anyway?).

Thanks to Maud Newton for the link.

Men of conscience are asked to hold it

Saw this on Boing Boing listed under "Funky-cool pissoires." The only problem Xeni Jardin notes is a copyright issue: apparently some forward-thinker already patented "the mouth-shaped urinal."

For a little more analysis, check out feministe and Trish Wilson.

And here's a link to the story on Fashion Wire Daily.

Update (23/3/04): Boing Boing is unrepentent.

Drains

A short while ago I posted on blogs which focus on found or industrial objects. Further to the topic, flaschenpost comments on a recent international upsurge in the theft of manhole covers and drains. Can you imagine stealing this,

this,

or this,

only to melt them down?

[In a comment to my short list of sites, Watermark suggests Heavy Little Objects as a fascinating addition.]

March 16, 2004

Where's Eve Sedgewick?

Via Boing Boing: Social theorist Lego kits. (But what are those creepy little hands for?)

The big questions

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber asks academics to comment on why they started (or haven't started) blogs. The conversation is getting interesting, and will be worth following. In the comments, Ghost of a Flea (not his real name) asks about bloggers who use pseudonyms: "Is blogging an onanistic shame? Or are academics worried their politics, taste, television viewing habits and so forth could adversely influence a tenure committee?" And a followup question: conversely, are some of us wilfully ignoring those realities?

Why didn't we think of that?

This from the redoubtable Maud Newton:

Yesterday [former academic] Paul Cavanagh won the U.K.'s Lit Idol contest — a sort of American Idol for writers — and will be represented by the Curtis Brown literary agency in negotiations for a publishing contract. The first chapter of his manuscript is available online.

Newton also links to a.k.a., a site listing "over 11,500 author pseudonyms, aliases, nicknames, working names, legal names, pen names, maiden names, and more." SF writers are well-represented on the list of writers with ten or more pseudonyms.

Jonathan Swift, ahead of his time

Mirabilis links to an article in the Globe and Mail which begins, "In February 1708, Jonathan Swift assumed one identity in order to effectively assassinate another." It goes on to describe how Swift effectively skewered the career of "astrologer and rascal" John Partridge. (The bulk of the article is about contemporary identity theft, which needn't concern us. The important thing to remember is that anything interesting was invented in the eighteenth century.)

March 15, 2004

Collections

I have been marking various sites for some time now, that showcase collections of found or prosaic objects. The visual equivalent of found poetry; a testament to the compulsion to collect; a determination to find beauty in the everyday; a documentation of the post-industrial landscape. The list is now just long enough to indicate some type of zeitgeist, though I'm sure I'll add to it. Sorry that I have not noted who led me to most of these:

Rob Banham: Lettering on wheelie bins
Drainspotting [check the links page for a long list of fellow travellers]
Megan Hicks: The Newton Ground Level Gallery
Itchy Robot: Found Typography
mapsproject (via long story; short pier)
Pictures of Fire Hydrants

Passion blooper reel

Okay, I swore I would not write about John Travolta's Mel Gibson's Battlefield Earth Passion because I have no intention of seeing it, and fair's fair. But, ran across this and had to link.

Academic conferences

Here is a great post (and comments) at Invisible Adjunct which cites Michael Bérubé on common conference irritations — including the everpopular "I actually address this question in the longer version of this paper" — and tells of one cheeky person who charged participants $150 (US!) to attend a "conference" in his apartment living room "in a run down corner of Elmhurst, Queens."

And another quiz

this time from the BBC, about first lines. I merely did well. Via Bookslut.

The Red Planet; publishing as quest; Heinlein

Via Maud Newton: Kim Stanley Robinson discusses the appeal of Mars, in the NYTimes,

and Viggo Mortensen publishes avant-garde books at Perceval Press. The name, according to Mortensen, is a reference to

Parsifal, the knight of the Arthurian legend who found the Castle of the Grail and saved the Fisher King.

On his way to achieve knighthood at King Arthur's Court, he and his knights choose to find their own paths. "If there was a trail," says Mortensen, "they wouldn't take it. They had to make their own ways. I wanted to provide that opportunity for artists."

Robert Heinlein's first novel, For Us, The Living, "lost and found," is now published "with terrible cover art," according to Jessa Crispin at Bookslut.

Two c18th links

from Plep:

1. Eighteenth-Century European dress at the Metropolitan Museum in NY. Lovely photographs and commentary that makes the palms itch to stroke some silk.

2. The Poems of Ossian, the hugely successful literary forgery by James Macpherson, published in 1773 as a translation of an ancient Celtic poem cycle.

March 14, 2004

Gender and blogging

A post from Laura over at Apt. 11D on whether or not it's true that women don't write political blogs, and how can we define politics. Laura links to "The Blogosphere: Boys 'n' Their Toys," an article by Brian Montopoli that provides some history of the development of the blogosphere from its "origins in the male-dominated tech world." The article quotes an estimate that only 4% of political blogs are written by women, but I tend to think, along with Laura, that this indicates a very narrow definition of "political."

LotR forever

This just in from Kieran Healy: there is to be a LotR musical. Write to Crooked Timber with your suggestions for songs. My offering: Frodo to Gollum: "I don't know how to club him."

SF in the OED

Continuing in the tradition so lovingly described by Simon Winchester in The Professor and the Madman and The Meaning of Everything, the OED has called for volunteers to help amass citations for sf terms. Here is the website for the project, and here is an interesting graph indicating the dates of the origins of sf terms: notice the bump in critical terminology in the 1980s and 90s. Fandom came into its own in the 1950s and has stayed influential.

Jesse Sheidlower in the OED Newsletter writes that sf is an excellent candidate for this sort of web-based initiantive because,

The vocabulary is largely self-contained; SF terms tend to occur in SF and nowhere else, while, say, political language can be found anywhere and everywhere. The fans are particularly committed, often have linguistic interests, and are computer literate.

I would be interested to see if, and how often, sf terms have migrated into general use. I'm thinking of the influence of sf on technology, and would imagine a parallel dynamic in words themselves? For example, "morph," which Mark Lieberman notes has been traced to Mark Bourne's story "Being Human" (1993), is in wider use now.

Story from Language Log via Languagehat.

March 13, 2004

This is too wonderful

I have a migraine and have to get up early to prepare for Jinker boy's third third birthday party tomorrow (he's already had one at his aunt's in NY and one at his babysitter's), but I had to post this: Johnny Depp is playing the Earl of Rochester in The Libertine, a film currently shooting in the UK. Heads up, all you former students of 3204 who developed a soft spot for the Earl.

Thanks to Invisible Adjunct for the link.

I sent them a cheque right away

Via mirabilis, the invaluable Confuse a Cat service. For other people's cats; mine has no need for it.

Shakespeare Lite

Chuck wouldn't use the phrase "dumbing down," but I will. And no, it's certainly not the students who are dumb...

Here is a link to a story about translations of Shakespeare into contemporary English being used in Georgia.

Tut, I am in their bosoms, and I know wherefore they do it.
Julius Caesar (V.i)
 
I know how they think, and I understand why they're doing this.
Same scene, "No Fear Shakespeare" translation.

And you too, Brutus?
 

Jargon redux

Via Tom Runnacles at Crooked Timber, Buzzword Bingo!, for those days when you just can't leverage your way to the bleeding edge and visualize that synergistic paradigm. (Though put your hands up if you found a word or two that you have been known to use, upon occasion, yourself...)

A few links from the comments section:

The Web Economy Bullshit Generator
The gobbledygook generator
Colloquium Bingo at The Lounge

File under "this is so cool!"

A recent post at languagehat points to two blogs in Klingon, bo logh and jIqel's Journal.

Perhaps I should post some of the Klingon haiku I wrote (in English, I'm afraid) back in my slasher days. Perhaps after I get tenure. Or lose my job, whichever comes first. Of course, coming out as the worst sort of geek could speed that latter process.

Oh, what the hell!

The targs are mating,
I hear them rustling nearby
in the autumn leaves.

The suns burn my back
as I bury my enemy;
He shouldn't have laughed.

The springtime landscape
reminds me of your body:
I want to plow it.

Under mosquito netting
we lay, exhausted. My love,
don't eat the insects.

Corporatizing the academy

A sobering series of posts, beginning here, at I Know What I Know, about an ugly scandal at the University of Southern Mississippi. What at first seemed like an arbitrary act of authoritarianism, now seems to be part of a concerted policy to undermine the humanist underpinnings of the university system.

Gender and voice

Here, via feministe, is an intriguing post from PinkDreamPoppies at Alas, a Blog, about the gendering of written language: the ways in which we gender it, as readers; the ways in which it is shaped by the gender of the writer. Pop quiz: What gender is PinkDreamPoppies? If you answered, "female," why, you'd be wrong. The post also mentions that gender-in-writing test that I mentioned sometime ago; a number of other women also report being identified as male. Be sure to read the comments, too.

March 12, 2004

Hi, Hir, Hirs, Hirself

An interesting conversation begun at long story; short pier and picked up at languagehat and Tenser, said the Tensor about non-gender-specific pronouns (or the need for them. Or not) in English. Various references to the pioneering work of sf writers in addressing the issue, such as Iain M. Banks, Ursula LeGuin, and Samuel Delany. Like many of the commentators, I have become quite comfortable with "they," as in, "Everyone should bring their texts to class" rather than "his or her books," but while this usage is more and more accepted, it is not yet universal, despite its extensive pedigree back to the fourteenth century. One of the commentators at languagehat points to a fascinating site called Jane Austen and other famous authors violate what everyone learned in their English class which has a useful section on the singular "they"/"their"/"them"/"themselves" construction. And who dare argue with Shakespeare

There's not a man I meet but doth salute me,
As if I were their well-acquainted friend.
(Comedy of Errors IV.3)

or the King James Bible?¹

Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. (Philippians 2:3)

¹ Almost half finished Adam Nicolson's God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. Very readable, though subtlety is sometimes sacrificed for the sake of the narrative. A little before my period, though, so I am not the best judge.

13/3/04: typo corrected. Sorry, languagehat.

March 11, 2004

Whew! This could never happen here

Birmingham University has become embroiled in a controversy because of plans to ban personal websites on university servers. Story from Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber.

Borders

From wood s lot: some very funny bumper stickers. My favs:

Bush in '04: A Thousand Pints of Lite

Bush/Cheney '04: Because FREEDOM can't suppress itself

Bush/Cheney '04: Don't switch horsemen mid-apocalypse

Bush/Cheney '04: Hey, look over there!

And, two articles on "Euro-lish."

March 10, 2004

Last of the reading week posts

5/3/04/9:44pm

Playgrounds of NYC

In partial fulfillment of my promise:

Here is the Jinker boy in Union Square playground while Mummy and Daddy are spelling each other off to make book-buying runs to nearby Barnes and Noble:

Here he is in Juniper Park in Queens:

Here he is in one of those oversized hamster runs, where he was taken as a birthday treat by his aunt and uncle. He loved it, of course; we could only extract him with the promise of cake and presents waiting at home and even then he howled like a monkey:

And here is a shot on the promenade at Brooklyn Heights,

(me, Jinker boy, our friends Jeremy and Danielle) on the way to the playground,

just before a downpour.

6/3/04/12:10am

This going without web access, cold turkey, is rough! I could make more of an effort to get some access, I suppose, but time is tight. We'll be out tomorrow; perhaps I can finagle an hour at an internet cafe from Joe, in exchange for ... what? Being so wonderful to all his family? Yeah, that's it! For being so wonderful!

[Never did, of course. But then, wasn't all that wonderful.]

March 9, 2004

There can only be one. No, wait...

Which Colossal Death Robot Are You?

Born in 1963 [um, yeah, '63, that's right, '63], you are possibly the original colossal death robot, being one of the patriarchs of the current crop, and definitely an advocate of old-skool enemy-bashing. Why use a clumsy particle weapon when you can create supernovas just by flexing your arms? Your one minor weakness is that you are entirely dominated by some kid with a remote contol — still, don't let it get you down. You can sink a nuclear submarine with jazz music.

Thanks to weez for the link. Weez, who also claims to be Gigantor. We will have to settle this. In Tokyo, at dawn.

Catching up

I have some serious blog reading to do over the next couple of days. How could I have been at the centre — sorry, "center" — of the universe and have been so out of touch? No blog reading or writing, no academy awards. And they sounded so good, too. Here, via la gringa (whose neighbourhood I passed through, though I missed the fire — hiya!), is some cogent Oscar commentary from Matt Haber's dog.

On a less worldly note, la gringa directs us to the Heavenly Hunks calendar".

Adam Roberts' Salt

5/3/04/9:41pm

Awhile ago I posted about Adam Roberts' novel Stone. I have finally gotten around to reading another, Salt (2000), his first novel.

These would be wonderful texts to teach: subtle, yet with clear meaning that can be unpacked. The protagonist in Stone is a sociopath in a future where crime and mental illness are rare enough to be practically non-existent. In Salt, Roberts examines war. Several groups of colonists travel to a desert planet, one of which, the Alsists, is anarchic and another of which, the Senaarians, is a capitalist military patriarchy. These two groups are in conflict before they even reach their destination, and the aggression escalates in a way reminiscent of nothing so much as Swift's Big-endians and Little-endians, though there is no Gulliver to separate their warring fleets. The narrative is almost evenly split between two characters, Petja, a technician from among the anarchists who rotates into diplomatic duty at a crucial juncture, and Barlei, the Captain and later President of the Senaarians. Even when describing things as apparently uncontroversial as the differing technologies with which each group deals with the chlorine in the atmosphere, neither side can be civil:

[Barlei:] We would take a person, and sedate them, and under surgical conditions we would remove much of their sinuses and fill the space with a carefully grown filter .... [masks] were symbolic of our incapacity; they squashed against our faces ... Of course, the Alsists mocked our new technology .... Their propaganda satirized us: whenever the visuals were set in Senaar the people always had runny noses ... (41–42)

[Petja:] Our solution to the chlorine problem was a mini-mask. (43)

Initially, Petja seems infinitely more reasonable while Barlei is insufferable: a self-justifying, murderous prig. He unwittingly betrays himself and his beloved Senaar with every word, as when he disingenuously pretends not to understand economics while justifying Senaarian reliance on underpaid immigrant labour. He exemplifies, with his barely suppressed passion for his lieutenant, "the young, the beautiful, jean-Pierre" (221), the homoeroticism implicit in all–male institutions. Don't ask, don't tell even yourself. His description of aerial warfare is classic:

And so you press home the inevitability of the situation: that is one definition of war I suppose. You pull up toward the rear of one of the enemy, the acceleration weighing you against the back of your pilot's seat; and you fell the beautiful click as the weapons fix themselves, and the spiritual roar of them firing. Twin spires of light reaching through the darkness towards the blot of darkness, hidden in darkness, that is the enemy. Perhaps you close your eyes in prayer.

And there is light. And a tumbling of wreckage, falling to the endless levels of Salt below. (198)

The delicate balance between the elevated discourse of hysterical militarism, and sexual double-entendre, is masterful.

Barai would seem to be a straw man, but while he never becomes any more sympathetic (although he does become pathetic when jean-Pierre is killed in combat), Petja also looses the reader's sympathy, even before he discovers his enthusiasm for killing in the Alsist resistance. At one significant juncture he demonstrates an utter inability to empathize with others, and while this could be mistaken for a critique of solipsism in anarchists, his own people frequently disdain him for his "rigidist" tendencies. Anarchism, then, is not at fault, though it is, finally, unable to withstand the concerted onslaught of military capitalism. Petja is, however, more interesting, if less amusing than his counterpart: his language is concise yet poetic, and his descriptions of the stark salt landscape are sublime in an inhuman, disassociated way.

From the minimalist map at the front of the book, surely a comment on the rococo excesses of Tolkien and his imitators, to the actual numbers of combatants, scale is foregrounded. These are small communities, with small populations, and yet they waste themselves in war. It is a compact book, economically divided between the two narrators. It is about a bare desert world with only two significant bodies of water. Form follows function.

Both Petja and Barei discuss "purity," though for Petja it is, at least initially, a stern, political standard of self-sufficient behaviour, while for Barjei it is tied to jingoism, nationalism, and a military ideal as exemplified by the manly, blushing jean-Pierre. Petja, too, comes to regard his time fighting and killing as somehow pure, only to be "diminished" and "greyed" by social contact (218). Both sides also come to similar conclusions about war, despite their disparate ways of framing it: Barai says,

This war has been the savour in our meat. Without it, life would have been the dull round of planting and reaping, of giving in marriage and giving birth, of growing and dying." (220)

[Petja:] Textualising these memories has had one curious effect. I have recalled the time before we made war. It has made me realise how war becomes a simple way of living, how it seems to provide all that a human needs as material and spiritual membrane, wrapped tightly around them, It is the reason to go on living; it is what to do, how to do it; it is how to arrange the priorities; it is the end of the day and the beginning of wisdom; it is the left hand and the right hand.

So for one character, war is a way to be with other men, while to the other is becomes the centrepiece of an arid philosophy. Not that they would seem to disagree. Roberts gives the last words, significantly, to a female character. And then, he undercuts even that.

This might be an effective novel for my gender and sf course: there are two societies with two very different sets of roles and expectations for women; there is the whole jean-Pierre hagiography (I see him in a static shot by Leni Riefenstahl, with the camera below him looking up, the light behind him); there is sexual violence ... for a novel with few women characters, it would be remarkably useful in the course.

Roberts on Roberts:

It seems to me, then, that Salt is a novel about depression, about a psychological state that finds its correlative in the bleak landscape of the world, about a killing division of affective commitment. But I could be wrong about that.

I think I'm on safer ground when I mention the political and ideological issues that the book rehearses; questions of political affiliation, of the negotiations between cultural and personal difference, of the relationship to (patriarchal) authority and of the limits of control. That the book is also a self-conscious exercise in intertextuality is, I hope, equally clear: it draws on Herbert's Dune and on Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed as well as Vladimir Nabokov's Bend Sinister and the poetry of Robert Browning. I hope, in saying this, that I am only saying what is obvious from the novel itself. It remains the bleakest of my books, but I continue to find an austere and strangely uplifting beauty in certain aspects of bleakness, so I say this with no suggestion of apology.

No apology needed. A compelling book, and recognized as such by its nomination for the Arthur C. Clarke award.

Non-posts for the past ten days

Thurs. Mar.4/2:36pm

Report: The PowerBook G4

I love the way the keyboard feels: crisp and light, cool to the touch. Metallic keyboards are the way to go. I also love that it is an expanded keyboard. And the backlighting is a sleek, high tech version of glow-in-the-dark bugs stuck to the ceiling: I love it.

Nice big screen. Speakers better than last PowerBook. And it's so fast: none of those horrible straining sounds.

One quibble: when I first went to open it I was confused; the apple on the lid is upsidedown. Then I realised: the logo is no longer for me; it is a public message. On some level this disconcerts. It seems so ... so ... self-promoting.

My Mac, c'est moi.

Haiku for NYC

Fetal buds amidst
grey leaves, organic exhaust,
debris. Breathe deeply.

5:44pm

Sleeping

I used to be a particular sleeper. Needed my own Obusforme pillow. Couldn't sleep if any lights were on, and never travelled without my sleep mask (a friend called them my "Reuben Kincaid goggles"). Even light from outside coming in a window or under a door. I had to cover up the light from clock radios with a sock or towel. Also, I never travelled without ear-plugs, and even wore them at home when there was too much snoring. And, I had to be on my own side of the bed, no matter where the bed. If I ended up on the other side, I could not sleep until I poked and prodded my way back to where I belonged.

All that has changed. I now often go to sleep with two people snoring; I go to sleep with lights on, and sometimes even on the wrong side of the bed. I'm not sure whether to congratulate myself on this newfound flexibility, or see it as a symptom of ongoing exhaustion.

5/3/04/9:47pm

For someone who spills his drinks and foods with stunning regularity, the Jinker Boy is very fastidious about not wearing damp or stained clothing.

And, are three year olds capable of sarcasm? I reprimanded his nibs for making a mess and he ran about saying, "Big mess! Make a big mess!" in a tone that I can only describe as mocking.