May 01, 2005

Rewrite some banal instructions in the style of a famous writer

A gauzy Skein of Propylene --
That sways with slightest Breath --
This bag holds smocks -- and Bread and Milk
But -- in its folds -- lies Death.
It sways and puffs -- this Thistledown, Balloonlike in its joy --
Each tiny mouth a perfect fit -- This bag is not a toy.

-- Emily Dickinson

(Jim Roy Wilson, Washington)

(From So you want to start blogging, but you're shy... via Jerz's Literacy Weblog).

Maybe I'll try this after my grades are all in.

March 22, 2005

Fetish items

Mike Shea has a post about gel pens at moleskinerie, which links to his Rollerball and Fountain Pen Review.

Pica links the fall of Western civilization to the decline of the fountain pen.

"The Pen Fetish" by tots at ideotrope.

Steven Frank likens stationers to pornographers.

Glenn's Pen Page: "about pens, pen stores, companies and ink." (According to the list of Canadian stores, there is nothing east of Montreal. Can that be true?)

Posting on Not Proud: A Smorgasbord of Shame:

I love pens. I have a million and I want more. I collect them, and I'll never have enough. I have pens that either don't work or I don't like them, but I'm too greedy to throw them away. I want them all.

Tips for improving your handwriting.

A short online Calligraphy lesson.

February 28, 2005

And speaking of archival work

CatalogueAnnie has posted a useful link: Palaeography: reading old handwriting 1500 — 1800: a practical online tutorial."

Court of Chancery: extract from Alexander Selkirk's deposition to the Examiners' Office, dated 1712.

Here is one of a number of "practice documents" posted on the site. Hey, good luck, eh?

February 13, 2005

Thinking some more

about the interview with Edward P. Jones I listened to Friday. He talked about the importance of his mother in his life; he described her as someone who couldn't read or write, who had a hard life and worked hard. Eleanor Wachtel asked him what this woman would have thought of his novel, implying by her question, I think, that she might have found it alien. Jones answered literally: he said, well, it's out in a spoken-text version, so she would have been just fine. I thought that he was deftly deflecting the idea that his mother might not have understood or appreciated his work. And maybe he was. But the more I thought about it, the more I wonder if for him — a man who composed and carried around a novel in his head for a decade — that the "oral/print divide" is not quite so compelling, and that the black marks on the page don't have the same fetish-value as they do for many of us. Not sure where I'm going with this; he did, finally, write down his story and that is how he came to be interviewed by the CBC. I suppose one of the reasons I am so struck by this is because it serves as a refreshing antidote to the ritualistic obeisance that is generally paid to "writers' desks" — you've all seen the coffee-table books, calendars, and memes — writing implements and tools, writers' habits and superstitions. And I am speaking as someone with a moleskine tucked into her shoulder bag and a serious pen addiction. But I have rarely considered that these things might in fact be a detriment to productivity.

Addendum (14/2/05): Stephen Mitchelmore has a spookily pertinent post about using Moleskines at This Space (link from wood s lot).

January 29, 2005

Public/private

Everyone has seen the photos of stricken Americans at sorryeverybody.com (and there is a book out), as well as the responses at apologiesaccepted.com (my favourite is "It's okay. We're sorry for Arnold. — Austria"). Here is something more therapeutic, more anonymous: people draw or write their secrets on a postcard as part of a group art project originally mounted in a gallery, now online. Some of these are very affecting, in a cryptic, jesus-I-hope-they-don't-mean-what-I-think-they-do sort of way: "I love one of my children." "I liked myself better as a boy" (link from Liliputian Lilith, who links to me in the same post. Just so you know). It seems that the project is ongoing, so get out those 4×6 cards.

This reminds me of an episode of Northern Exposure, possibly the only one I ever saw, in which one of the characters writes down her regrets, past actions she can't let go of, etc. etc., makes them into little boats, and sets them adrift on a river. It has stuck in my memory. Though I always wondered whether or not anyone found the papers while they were out fishing.

If you try this, use soluable ink.

Writing has often been cathartic for me. Which is why I should do it more, I suppose. Though it is also a wee bit cathartic to read other people's secrets, and not just the ones that hit close to home.

January 01, 2005

New Year's haiku

Sharon asks for "positive haiku" with which to start the year, offers hers, and links to two others'. Here's mine:

Voice flutes from below,
shutting out the wind. I think:
He'll be four this year.

November 21, 2004

Plagiarism and Art

A couple of days ago the other Miriam linked to "Something Borrowed," a thoughtful essay by Malcolm Gladwell on plagiarism, the recycling and rewriting of ideas, and the use of sources in art. I particularly liked his distinction "between borrowing that is transformative and borrowing that is merely derivative." This seems essential to any evaluation of particular instances. Gladwell offers a reasoned and balanced argument, critical of knee-jerk defences of "intellectual property," spot on in its analysis of cultural production always occurring within a context — no virgin births — and yet respectful too of the feelings of those who have "real emotional value" invested in particular sets of words. The article centres on charges of plagiarism levelled against playwright Bryony Lavery and her play Frozen, but Gladwell's examples from popular music are particularly illustrative.

June 26, 2004

Bloggers elsewhere

Maud Newton has a story in Swink that gets under the skin.

Liz Lawley writes about the problems, and the possibilities, of blog research.

Nalo Hopkinson notes a review of her edited anthology So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy. I will order this for the UNBSJ library. And check out all her other books.

Update (28/6/04):

This isn't literally "elsewhere," but here is a short piece by the Rake (via Tingle Alley).

June 04, 2004

Eliza Haywood

I'm working on an entry about Eliza Haywood for an encyclopedia of erotic literature.

I love Haywood. I even named my desktop computer after her, and greater love hath no woman. Her career spanned four decades, from the vogue of amatory fiction in the 1720s, of which she was a pioneer, to the novels of education of the 1740s and 50s. Some critics have described this trajectory in terms of repentance or conversion, but I prefer the argument that she was particularly adept at gauging the literary marketplace.

And, as you can see from the portrait, she was a major babe.

Some Haywood links:

A resuscitated reputation: the case of Eliza Haywood, Andrew Ball, Oxford English Dictionary.

Eliza Haywood's Feigning Femmes Fatale: Desirous and Deceptive Women in Fantomina, Love in Excess, and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (PDF), Emily Kathryn Booth (MA thesis, English, East Tennessee State University, 2001).

The Fortunate Foundlings, Being the Genuine History of Colonel M — — Rs, And His Sister, Eliza Haywood (e-text).

Catherine Ingrassia's page: bibliography and chronology.

"Texts, Lies and the Marketplace: Eliza Haywood and the Literary Marketplace at Mid-Century": Catherine Ingrassi.

"The Language of Feminised Sexuality: gendered voice in Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess and Fantomina" (PDF), Tiffany Potter, Women's Writing 10.1 (2003).

"The Debt to Pleasure: Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess and women's fiction of the 1720s" (PDF), Sarah Prescott, Women's Writing 7.3 (2000).

Selected Bibliography: Jessica Smith and Paula Backscheider.

The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood, George Frisbie Whicher (1915).

The textual architecture of Eliza Haywood's Adventures of Eovaai, Earla A. Wilputte, Essays in Literature (March 22, 1995).

May 26, 2004

A pencil poem

in keeping with a recent theme:

Dolor
Theodore Roethke

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

Part of an extended post on Roethke at wood s lot.

I like Roethke. His "My Papa's Waltz" is unforgettable (and highly teachable).

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

May 21, 2004

Attention graphophiles

I saw this some time ago but lost the link, so was delighted to see it again: Danny Gregory reviews, and draws, a bunch of pens for drawing. I wish he would do the same with pens for writing. (His site, Everyday Matters, is a feast.) (From le blaugue à beleg, via Boing Boing).

Posts at moleskinerie on pen addiction and how we love notebooks.

The Vintage Pens Website.

On Pens at anti-mega. Thought to ponder: "I don't trust designers who do not have either a notebook or a pen fetish."

Just what the doctor ordered: Phil Agre's Commentaries on Cheap Pens.

History of Pens & Writing Instruments (including the helpful "How do they get lead in a wooden pencil?")

How Ballpoint Pens Work.

Cutting Quill Pens from Feathers.

Michael Harrington's beaded ballpoint pens.

"The personalized journal cries out for pen to match": "sprucing up a batch of bland Bics."

Bill's Pens: "a site dedicated to the joy of pen collecting."

Links to vintage advertisements with great slogans like, "Parker Ink makes millions think"

Pentrace: all things pen.

Pens for lie detectors or medical instruments?

Consumer alert: Gel Pens Recalled by Colorbök because "the end caps can shoot off with great force, posing a risk of eye and facial injuries."

Needles & Pens zine and clothing shop.

Pens & Needles: political cartoons.

The Seinfeld space pen episode.

Fisher Original NASA Astronaut Pens.

And finally, in the interest of full disclosure, a haiku I published in 1988 when I was still practically a child. Well, not practically. But theoretically.¹

Sensuous pen strokes;

nib sinks into soft paper —

my name in your flesh.

¹ Catalyst: 3rd erotica collection. 17 (1988): 22.

Update (12:54): I have been agonizing over that haiku since I posted it; I really hate the word "sensuous" there. If I were to rewrite it I would use a short phrase, like "Several curled" or "Line of curved."

Update (10:10): "Set of curved."

May 15, 2004

"Coated"

Okay, here's something I found awhile back and tucked away: 5ive-Minute Stories. The idea is to write for five minutes about whatever comes to mind upon reading the word of the week. Might help to get the old creative juices flowing for the myriad writing projects of the summer.

This week's word is "coated," and here is my bit:

The frying pan was coated with Teflon, but it was flaking off. Hope it's not carcinogenic, she thought, as she made yet another cheese sandwich for her monovore son. Sometimes it was peanut butter; sometimes he seemed to eat nothing for days but Cheerios. Right now he was in the middle of a cheese sandwich kick. She supposed that it would all pan out, in the end. Nutritionally, she meant: all the vitamins and minerals would all balance, over time. Whether it was healthy psychologically, what it meant for his future as a maker and consumer of food, a person who would one day order his own meals in diners and restaurants, she could not guess. Perhaps he would develop all manner of phobias; perhaps he already had them now but had too few words to indicate. Some kind of blue-eyed cross between Monk on TV and Norman Bates. She turned the sandwich.

May 09, 2004

A boy and his Mac

Why I Take Good Care Of My Macintosh Computer by Gary Snyder

[Found, amid a myriad other wonderful things, at wood s lot. Originally from Paul D. Kilbot, where you can hear Snyder read the poem.]

Because it broods under it's hood like a perched falcon

Because it jumps like a skittish horse

and sometimes throws me

Because it is pokey when cold

Because plastic is a sad, strong material

that is charming to rodents

Because it is flighty

Because my mind flies into it through my fingers

Because it leaps forward and backward

is an endless sniffer and searcher,

Because its keys click like hail on a rock

& it winks when it goes out,

& puts word-heaps in hoards for me, dozens of pockets of

gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods

strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts;

And I lose them and find them,

Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly layed out

and then highlighted, & vanished in a flash at

"delete" so it teaches

of impermanence and pain;

& because my computer and me are both brief

in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates,

Because I have let it move in with me

right inside the tent

And it goes with me out every morning

We fill up our baskets, get back home,

Feel rich, relax, I throw it a scrap and it hums.

Gary Snyder was a favourite of Richard Papenhausen, a colleague at UNBSJ who recently died of cancer. Richard really liked the Beats.

April 30, 2004

The Wife's Lament

Update (3/5/04): Liliputian Lilith is collecting links to blogged poems.

Here is my contribution to Poem on Your Blog Day, on this, the last day of Poetry Month.

The Wife's Lament

(translated from the Anglo-Saxon by Brian Kim Stefans)

I will speak my plight’s tale, care-

wretched, about myself. I can say: what

woes I’ve borne growing up, present

and past, were all less than now. I have

won, for my exile-paths, just pain.

First, my lord left: over deep seas, far

from people, and I’ve grieved each

morning, where, earth-wide, he could

be. Then I left: voyaging sought service

– sad exile – for my woeful desires!

My lord’s kin schemed secretly: that

they’d estrange us, keep us most apart,

across the earth-kingdom, and my heart

suffered. My lord bade me: take

dwelling here. I had few friends in

this land, no devoted comrades – so I

feel as if lost! I had found a man full fit

to me, though unfortunate, spiritually

fraught – a feigning mind, blissvisaged,

but planning a crime! Full

oft we vowed we’d never part, not till

death alone, nothing else; but that is

changed, our friendship – is now, as if

it never were. I must hear, far and near,

contempt for my loved. My man

bade me live by the grove’s wood,

beneath the oak tree, in an earth-cave.

This cave is old – I am all oppressed –

the valleys dim, mountains steep – a

bitter home! tangled with vines –

an arid dwelling! The cruelty hits often

– my lord’s absence! On earth there are

lovers, living in love, they share the

same bed, meanwhile... I go alone each

dawn, by the oak and earth-cave,

where I sit, summerlong days. There, I

might weep my exile-paths, its many

woes, because an anxious mind won’t

rest, nor this sorrow, which wrests from

me this life. A young man must be

stern, hard-of-heart, stand blissful,

opposing breast-cares and his sorrows’

legions. All world-joy should wake

from himself, for wide and far, in

foreign folk-lands, my friend sits

under a hard slope, frosted by storms,

silenced for a friend, water bordering

his sad-hall! My friend suffers sorrow;

he know too oft his home was joyful.

Woe to those who live longing all

for a loved one.

I offer this poem today because it has haunted me since I first read it. In translation, of course; to help keep that in mind, links to other translations are included below. Each one is a different poem. We don't know who the author was, though many assume it was a woman.

Want more?

In the original Old Saxon with links to modern translations

Modern English translation by Louis J. Rodrigues

Modern English translation by Richard Hamer

Another translation

Audio recording read by Rosamund Allen.

Audio recording read by Mary Blockley (scroll down).

The Husband's Message [said to be a response].

For those who are really interested: Cumulative bibliography: The Wife’s Lament

April 18, 2004

I know who the murderer is, Kevin blogged.

Results of the 2004 Lyttle Lytton Contest are in. For anyone who is wondering, the "Lyttle Lytton" is Adam Cadre's response to the increasingly long entries to the official Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

Via Long story; short pier. And read the post.

April 08, 2004

"Domestic blogs"

Laura at Apt. 11D writes about to Brayden King's recent post in praise of what he calls "domestic blogs" (less cutesy and more inclusive than "mommy blogs," I'll admit).

King links to a recent Times article, "The New Family Album: More parents are using online blogs to share photos, memories, gripes and advice with friends — and strangers." The article, while generally upbeat, has some exceptionable language:¹

Mommy blogs often take navel gazing to new and uninhibited depths, recording every aspect of parenthood, from the pregnancy blood test through the umbilical-cord clipping to the latest triumph in toilet training — complete with photographs, video clips and message boards.

"Navel gazing"??!!? Well, perhaps, but not at one's own navel. The article goes on,

Nobody tracks the number of family-oriented blogs, and estimates of the blogging universe range from 300,000 to 3 million sites, but by all indications, baby blogs are becoming more common. According to an October 2002 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, parents are more likely to be online than nonparents, and 53% of online parents say the Internet has improved the way they connect with family; 61% say it has boosted relations with friends. At Lycos, which is host to two blog sites, moms are regarded as the future. "The new blogging world skews female," explains Michael Sikillian, marketing manager for Lycos Web Publishing. "One day," he predicts, "every family will have a blog. Instead of putting drawings up on the refrigerator, you'll scan them into your computer and upload."

I like the idea of the blogging world "skewing female," though I would question the absolute correlation implied here between "female" and "domestic/family/baby." There are certainly lots of men who blog blog blog about their children, and many, many more women who blog about something else entirely. I would hope that the blogging world "skews" female—though skewing implies going off-course, when any right-thinking person can see that what is meant is moving on-course—because more and more women feel blogging holds something for them.

All of which brings me to the question of the categorization of this blog. I think scribblingwoman is pretty mixed. It's written by an academic with wide interests and a pre-schooler. It's not a "domestic blog," or a book blog, or an sf blog, and it's not always an academic blog. Every now and then I think of putting divisions in my blogroll, but just as I can't categorize this blog, I don't want to diminish others. Certainly some blogs are extremely focused, but many are not. King writes,

I prefer to think that although blogs may offer distinct kinds of content, domestic blogs can be just as intelligently-written and analytically precise as any other kind of blog. For a good example see Laura at Apt. 11D.

I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, I started to read Apt. 11D when I found it listed somewhere as an academic blog, and I know that many others position it in that way.

I think I will stick to my alphabetized blogroll.

Why do we have to keep reinventing the wheel, anyway? Has everyone forgotten Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, in which the protagonist kept differently coloured notebooks about the various aspects of her life? Disintegration ensued, until she realized what was happening and reintegrated her life, symbolized by her decision to use one notebook. (It's a very long novel so I'm sure I'm leaving something out. But you see my point. And without the trouble and expense of analysis.)

Anyway, the very name of this blog evokes the dismissal of early women writers as dilettantes, ignorant of learned and literary culture, dragging down the noble profession of "author" by their inclusion of the personal, the domestic, and the trivial. So you see, I have a mission.

¹ Dawn Friedman, who blogs at This Woman's Work and who was interviewed for the Times article, offers a quick correction to the way her remarks are reported.

Update (8/2/05): Well, I knucked under and introduced categories into my blogroll. But I agonized over it, I really did.

April 07, 2004

Gabriela Mistral

(1889-1957)

This via the always-interesting wood s lot: Ursula LeGuin translated a selection of the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, the only Latin American woman to have won the Nobel Prize for literature (in 1945). Mark Woods posts the following poem, one of several of which LeGuin includes both versions on her site, and I have reproduced it here because, well, it's been my reality too, for the last three years:

Song of Death

Old Woman Census-taker,
Death the Trickster,
when you’re going along,
don’t you meet my baby.

Sniffing at newborns,
smelling for the milk,
find salt, find cornmeal,
don’t find my milk.

Anti-Mother of the world,
People-Collector --
on the beaches and byways,
don’t meet that child.

The name he was baptized,
that flower he grows with,
forget it, Rememberer.
Lose it, Death.

Let wind and salt and sand
drive you crazy, mix you up
so you can’t tell
East from West,

or mother from child,
like fish in the sea.
And on the day, at the hour,
find only me.

from Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, Trans. Ursula LeGuin (2003)

March 25, 2004

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.

March 23, 2004

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 13, 2004

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.

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 09, 2004

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.

February 27, 2004

Citations

There is a persuasive post over at Keywords about the potential in electronic technologies for redefining how we cite and manage information. After a number of suggestions about the potential of various technologies, Kerim laments,

I would love to see academics making more use of technology like those mentioned above, but I don't see how they can afford to when academic promotion is so tightly linked to the commercial publishing world with its inflated costs and outmoded technology.

Here here. Though I am certain that it is only a matter of time; enough people are happily embracing these technologies already, despite the constrictions of tenure and promotion.

One of my graduate instructors at York U once brought a file-box of index cards to our class. It was one of countless boxes she used while writing her doctoral dissertation on a group of Southern American poets — their correspondence included — in the days before Xeroxing. She visited various depositories and copied everything by hand. And this was not a short project; it was so substantial that it went into double volumes and her institution instituted a rule, which still apparently bears her name, limiting the length of dissertations. We all looked askance; our own students will no doubt be doing the same. They already do; I can make them roll their eyes or stare incredulously when I wax nostalgic about the Brother portable electric typewriter that saw me through my undergraduate degree (and well into my Master's), or carbon paper, or other quaint arcana.

February 21, 2004

Aspiring writers

You could do a lot worse than to read Making Light, Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog. She has a new post on getting an agent, and her earlier post about rejection letters is a classic. Also see her entry on how one writer got their MS out of the slush pile.

February 09, 2004

Haiku for the masses

And here, thanks to moleskinerie, are two haiku generators, one for valentine's and one for the other 364 days of the year. Here is my randomly generated haiku:

tiredly decadent
hags rusting moonlight bloats, tame
bluebird defecates

Oddly enough, it suits my mood.

Notebooks and nipples

There is yet another evocative post at wood s lot, a paen to pen and paper in these digital times. Specifically, a paen to the Moleskine notebook, including links to a beautiful blog called moleskinerie, and Witold Riedel's Moleskine sketches from the NYC subway. My palms are itching.

Oh, and the nipples? There are some follow-up links about nipplegate.

February 08, 2004

What if LotR had been written by Jane Austen?

Here is a hilarious site, via Austen-tatious, where are gathered various spoofs of LotR channelled through the likes of Coleridge ("In Khazad-dûm did evil fall / And stately Aragorn despair"), the Beowulf poet ("A great shadow descended / Horrific winged creature with wicked rider"), John Donne ("Goe and catch a falling Ring / Get with child the Elven Queen,"), Robert Burns ("Wee timid, hungry, half-grown hobbit, / Living in hole like ony rabbit,"), John Keats ("O what can ail thee, Frodo lad, / Alone and palely loitering?"), and scads of others. Here is a taste:

e. e. cummings
by Hunter Green

precious) downward
my) the heat rises
O) the mountain rises

like a mouth the earth
swallows
greedily

a finger without its hand
a body without its soul
an evil without its power

bright sun on us both)
remembering(
bobbing forth and back)
my birthday(
he was greedy like the earth)
one life begins(
one life ends)
river like a mouth, cold, hot
ring like a mouth, devouring
consumed i must consume

(Sméagol?)

the ring (O
and the body (my
are consumed (precious

Helen Fielding was mentioned twice, much to my delighted surprise, but of course it wasn't Helen, sister of Henry, but that other Helen Fielding.

Most of the writers who are pastiched here are male, which I suppose is hardly surprising. Some of our students are (were?) thinking of putting on a public debate to discuss the proposition that the LotR is a misogynist text. Hope it goes forward.

February 03, 2004

No poetry at the White House

Here, via thinking with my fingers, is a link to "The White House has disinvited the poets" by Julia Alvarez, written after Laura Bush withdrew an invitation to poets involved in the antiwar movement. It is rather sweet about the First Lady, "married to a scarier fellow" than any poet.

A sadder companion to an earlier post about the lack of poetry in Washington.

January 07, 2004

George Bush, poet laureate

Not!

Neil Gaimon contemplates the coverup that would be necessary if Dubya were indeed a poet.

January 06, 2004

Poetic aspirations, yet lazy?

Not to worry: introducing the Dylan Thomas random poem generator from the BBC (via mirabilis):

My poem almost makes sense:

The dying leaves of the daybreak
The greenleaved horses in flesh,
Sleeping by the harshly playful sea
For dreamt statues live
With no more fishwives than the pretender

August 01, 2003

Some of the people some of the time

My colleague David Creelman said that he had read my blog and felt inspired to work on a review he has coming up. Ha! What a pathetic role model I am: I spent the day blogging instead of working on Eliza Haywood.

July 16, 2003

Brief hiatus

I'm taking a short break from my own work to do a final proof/edit of an article that my partner has had accepted to a journal of intellectual history, about Daniel Bell and David Reisman. Perhaps I've just been at it for too long, but I'm actually starting to find all this social theory interesting.

July 11, 2003

two down...

Just sent off the second of four reviews that I have due, of Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy, edited by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser (Greenwood Press). I'll put it up on my web page after it's been out for awhile (if they still accept it, that is; it's pretty late.)

The summer is slipping through my fingers. I had hoped to clear up the small projects I had pending by the end of May, or mid-June at the latest. And here I am, still plugging away. And it's not as though I havn't been busy, because I have. The difference is Alex (my 28 months old son). It is almost impossible to do any work when I'm not actually in my office; having him has certainly brought home to me—and to Joe (Alex's father; my partner)—just how many hours a week we actually used to work B.A. (before Alex). That's the thing about academic work: to a large extent it consists of things you would likely be doing anyway, in one form or another, and so you tend to lose track. Certainly reading and writing, though I suppose, in a perfect world, there would be fewer committees and less marking.

I can work myself up into a state of anxiety about all the tasks I need to do, but the fact is that having Alex has changed my centre of gravity. Other things tend to shrink into the distance. Today he had a late nap and when he got up he was crying, inconsolable. He insisted that I hold him, but he wouldn't let me sit down; I had to stand and rock him. We offered him different foods and drinks, but he rejected them. We finally realised that he was so hungry that he couldn't eat; he had a very small lunch, and then played, and then had a long nap. Once we got some banana bread into him—his favourite—he calmed down and was able to snack on some different foods. I didn't think about my "To Do" list from the time he woke from his nap, to fifteen minutes ago, when he went to bed.

Then, of course, there are the times when I am dying to get away to my laptop. But then once I am here, I am often too tired to be productive.

My mother always said to have them young so you have more energy (she was 35 when she had me), but I think that the trade-off is patience. Joe and I are very patient with Alex. Some might call it "lax," but that's just semantics.

July 02, 2003

Here are the two entries of my abortive blogger blog

Tuesday, July 01, 2003: An inauspicious beginning to this blog 

Have posted nothing for June. Spent the time tinkering with my web site instead, and still am not happy with it.

Have not continued to read Ryman's Was; got sidetracked by Roy Porter's Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world, which is proving very helpful in my thinking about English 3204: c18th Prose and Poetry, which I have taught for a couple of years now but am in the process of revamping. He is such a deft, persuasive writer, and Enlightenment is just the kind of intellectual history of the period to provide a useful context for students. I will not ask them to read the whole book, of course, or we would never get to the literary texts. But I plan to reproduce some passages in their kit (through CanCopy of course; all legal and aboveboard).

See Porter's obituary in The Guardian (March 5, 2002).

Monday, May 19, 2003: Reading Ryman 

I've just started reading Geoff Ryman's Was. I've had it on my shelf for awhile but have been reluctant to read it; my friend Glenn told me some time ago that he found it a difficult novel to read. Ryman is coming to a sf conference in Guelph that I was thinking of going to—won't be, but that's by the by—so I decided to finally read it. Glenn was right; it is very difficult. I can't seem to read more than a few chapters at a time; not my usual practice. The novel, as far as I can tell—I'm not very far into it—is a layering of the story of an ill man in the 1980s (probably AIDS) with a retelling of the story of Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz. It is the latter strain that is discomfiting; Dorothy is an unloved orphan, foisted onto her harsh Aunt and taciturn uncle in the ironically named Manhattan, Kansas. The kicker, for me, is that Auntie Em is cruel to Toto. So, small doses.

Here is an interesting article by Steffen Hantke: "There's no place like home": Geoff Ryman's Was and Turner's Myth of National Childhood."