Near future occupations...

My fall courses, as described on the GWU English website:

Romantic Childhood and Victorian Children's Literature --- Judith Plotz

"Not only is childhood one of the leading preoccupations of 19th-century British culture, but both juvenilia and children’s literature are two brilliantly opening fields for 21st-century researchers. This seminar will trace the connections between romantic constructions of childhood (there are several, interestingly classed and gendered) and the brilliant body of children’s literature that emerges in the latter part of the 19th century.

Some key figures: Rousseau, Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, the Coleridge family (STC, Hartley, Sara), Lewis Carroll, Ewing, Dickens, Kipling, Nesbit. We’ll also examine the juvenilia of Hartley Coleridge,Marjorie Fleming, Jane Austen, the Brontes. We’ll frame our study with the help of critics and theorists including Alexander & McMaster, Kincaid, Myers, Richardson. Rose. The course will culminate in a mini-conference. Students will be expected to produce papers suitable for major conference presentation."

Constructions of Ethnicity and Identity: RENAISSANCE ORIENTATIONS --- Gil Harris

"This graduate seminar takes as its point of departure Sara Ahmed's recent book, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, in order to think through a cluster of related preoccupations with the "orient" (spanning North Africa, Turkey, and Persia to India, China and Indonesia) in English Renaissance writing. The orient was a shifting compass point in relation to which England in particular, and Europe in general, repeatedly (dis)oriented itself in space and time. How may these processes of (dis)orientation shed light on long-standing conceptions of the orient and its objects? We will pay particular attention to medieval and Renaissance travel writing about the orient (from Mandeville to Coryate, Herbert, and Heylyn) and Renaissance "oriental" drama (from Preston's Cambyses and Marlowe's Tamburlaine to The Adventures of the Three English Gentlemen and Fletcher's The Island Princess). We will also consider other theoretical texts on the orient and its objects, including Said's Orientalism, Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, and Gunder Frank's Re-Orient"

---

I will also be taking advantage of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (MEMSI). The first seminar is:

"Messianic Time and the Untimely"

Three papers will be pre-circulated. On September 17, we will have short presentations followed by open discussion. The presenters are:

1. Kathleen Biddick, "Dead Neighbor Archives and Messianic Time"
2. Julia Lupton, "Paul Shakespeare: Exegetical Exercises"
3. Jonathan Gil Harris, ""The Untimely Mammet of Verona"


And am not abandoning my JD Robb article either, so I will be a busy girl in the next month or so. I don't imagine that it will taper off after that, but for now this is the plan.

Misc. Minutiae

An update...

• Classes start at GWU on 1 Sept.
• I interviewed at the GWU Writing Center for a tutor position... I should know by next Thursday if I will be working there.
• Still not all the way unpacked... have I mentioned how much I hate moving chaos?
• Working on an article on JD Robb.
• Thinking about article(s) that might arise from my thesis.
• Speaking of my thesis - it is defended, approved, and submitted... now just waiting on the format check and I will post a link.
• Public transportation is not fun when motion sickness precludes reading and abnormally small ears preclude comfortable headphones.
  
• I am struggling with how to describe myself professionally - my interests and writing spans a wide range of time periods and genres, tenuously held together by some relation to food and/or the domestic arts.
  
• My sisters finally have job prospects... after a long and stressful summer of searching. No guarantees yet, though.
• For your viewing pleasure, I have updated my various avatar pictures, behold:
  

Nota Bene: I like lists - especially lists with bullets. That is all.

Cooking Kosher Cajun

Prep.

Spice.

Bagel.

Bite?

Happy Birthday, Shelley!!

"Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle —
Why not I with thine?"

Moving, moving, moved!!!

So, we blitz packed up the house the week of the 6th - with a quick trip to Pinedale to get the furniture we had stored there...

On our last night in Laramie, after loading the truck, no one wanted to cook... we invaded McAlister’s 20 minutes before they closed, they were really nice about it – I hope that it was not because they touched our food.


We were going to leave at 4am on the 14th, but as our plans had changed and we no longer needed to get to Champagne, IL by a reasonable hour we decided that sleeping more than 3 hours before driving all day was probably a good idea…

So we slept in, left late, and ended up driving most of the next night. We stopped at a hotel in Peoria, IL around 6am and slept away the morning, left mid-afternoon and drove through the night again. Because we have an awesome real estate agent, our keys and lease were waiting for us at our new house the next morning…

We unloaded the truck, ended up at Denny’s – because you don’t go to Denny’s, you end up there – and crashed out. Linus’ flight left at the butt crack of dawn, so after that sad task, we all went back to bed.

Saturday we decided to check out the main farmer’s market in Alexandria. It was raining so we didn’t stay long. The farmer’s market runs from 5.30 – 10 am so we left early and got home around 8.30… and went back to bed.

Only to be awakened to a loud crashing noise at 9.15. Our new house is situated in the cross of a T intersection. Some guy had passed the car stopped at the intersection and accelerated right into our driveway – into my sister’s Blazer in fact…



He then proceeded to get out of his car and run down the street bleeding – a real hit and run… Our neighbors saw everything and called 911 – nota bene: there are some fine firemen in Alexandria, VA – We got 3 fire trucks, an ambulance, and 4 cop cars... the cops then proceeded to catch the guy, tow off his car and all the other good stuff cops do…

The Blazer was totaled - bent axle amongst other damage. We were all ok, though.

So,1800 miles, tons of boxes and drama, and 2 weeks later...


We still have a lot of unpacking and organizing to do, but we are settling in nicely!

Check it out!

Ok, so I added a new sidebar feature of authors whom I read with regularity - it is an eclectic mix, weighing in heavily on the romance but also including food and natural history. I will continue to add to it as I find more websites and start sorting my library as I unpack.

These are all fantastic authors, some brilliant, some brilliantly funny, some both, some just fun. Right now I am especially liking Victoria Dahl, whose novella The Wicked West was a fabulous short break from thesis revisions this past week. She may have saved my sanity...

Recommend, please...

Now that the thesis if mostly done (keep your fingers crossed for the defense), I am looking for summer reading suggestions. As most of you probably know, I have a voratious and insatiable narrative greed and summer break is the one time I can indulge it unchecked by most other resopnsiblities. And I read really quickly, so I go through books at an astonishing rate...

So, what I am looking for...

In the romance vein: Historical and straight contemporary, by which I mean not paranormal or romantic suspense, not the orientation of the protagonists - as I am a bit burned out on those subgenres... I have my must reads, but I have noticed recently that my scope is rather narrow and I am looking to expand. The voracious narrative greed means I tear through my favourites, even with re-reading. Also, I would not be adverse to expanding in the BDSM direction, as I have heard good things in that direction. But I need names...

In the fantasy vein: I am talking fantasy here, not sci fi. I am cool with magic, but the machines have to be pretty damn cool for me to read about them, as my relationship with the machines in my life is rather love/hate - I think this is also because, as a rule, I read for character over plot and fantasy does that better than sci fi. Anyway...

In the foodie vein: Anything that is good - I read cookbooks like novels, and I love food memoir as well, so really, anything that is good. I am always looking for new ideas in the kitchen...

In the Classics vein: I am planning on revisiting my favorite Jane Austin titles, but over the course of my MA I realized just how much classic literature I had skimmed - or skipped altogether - as an undergrad. So, what are your favorites?

What else would you recommend? I would be happy to venture outside these paths, if the narrative pay-off is there...

A note on formats: I am down with ebooks, though I won't have a reader until the financial shock of moving across the country wears off. I am not so good with delayed gratification, but needs must. But I will get to them, so don't let format be a limiting factor.

Please share - a desperate reader needs to know!

um, yeah, that's why I am a snob...

"Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd." - Edith Sitwell, English biographer, critic, novelist, & poet (1887 - 1964)

Finally, I know - my genius makes me above the opinions of the crowd.
=)

A peek at the thesis, unpolished...

an excerpt:

The section on plum pudding also demonstrates well the ways in which Mrs. Beeton’s text conveys both imperial codes and pragmatic domestic practice using traditional methods of female discourse. The instructional aspects extend far beyond the preparation of the food. Passages on currants, grape varieties, raisins, brandy and citron are interspersed between the recipes, providing a view of the state of commerce, both throughout the Empire and at home. These insertions also indicate the rising middle class audience the Book served.
When talking about currants, Beeton informs her readers, “When gathered and dried by the sun and air, on mats, they are conveyed to magazines, heaped together, and left to cake, until ready for shipping. They are then dug out by iron crowbars, trodden into casks, and exported.” This information is seemingly disconnected from running a Victorian middle class home. However, the facts surrounding this process demonstrate the commerce-based nature of the empire. A thrifty and economical housewife knows where her food comes from and how it is produce, so she can get the best deals when it comes time for her to purchase what is needed for the household she runs. Knowing that “the fertile vale of “Zante the woody” produces about 9,000,000 lbs. of currants annually,” arms the purchaser with a view of the market that she must enter in order to provide the socially acceptable table required by her class. The fact that “we could not make a plum pudding without the currant” requires certain knowledge of the housewife, what currants are and how and where to purchase them, in addition to how to incorporate them into a domestic practice. What seems to be learning without purpose is in fact driven by the economic factors of middle class living in the British Empire.

Sex, Sex, Sex... Yay!

Mary Roach has written a book called Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex and here she talks about 10 things you didn’t know about orgasm:

Rainy Day Rissotto

Like much of what I do in the kitchen, these measurements are approximate as I generally am of the dump and pour method. This is as close as I can recreate.

1/4 c butter
1/4 c olive oil
2 Tbsp Chopped garlic
2 sundried tomato garlic spread
3 c rice
1/4 c rice wine vinegar
1.7 Litre veggie bullion
.5 Litre boiling water
2 tsp. cream cheese
1/3 c sour cream

melt the fat. sauté the garlic & spread. saute the rice. add vinegar. cook down. add enough liquid to cover rice. boil down. repeat until rice is soft, but not mushy. add the cream cheese and sour cream towards the end of cooking.

I am not a big fan of sun-dried tomatoes, but when they are not the only flavour, they are ok. For this dish i really liked it. It was pretty tangy, so probably a better side dish than main meal.

Little Miss Picky Pants said, "It's ok." - for those not familiar, that is a ringing endorsement.
His Sinfulness thought, "It is very good, and I garnished it with sun-dried tomato bits." - he likes sun-dried tomatoes much better than I do.
Teh Doctor, who was stranded "The texture was fantastic. Definitely firm creamy. The sour cream flavour lingers a little too long. And I went a little over board with the garnishing." - he also was excited by the sun-dried tomatoes.

Work-out of the non-mental variety...

I realize that I need to exercise, and that it would in fact probably greatly reduce my stress levels, which in turn would reduce my headaches... however, stress has also sapped any minor motivation I might have had... this is a vicious cycle!

On a related note, there is an end in sight for my thesis.

The use of animal byproducts

Warning: This post is heavy on the philosophizing and includes hot button topics of death, Christianity and veganism. If this is not your thing you may want to steer clear. Also, it is long.

This is a topic that has been much debated amongst various members of the flock - with strong proponents on both sides of the issue. The arguments range from corporate greed to health to evolution to personal pleasure. That is not what I want to talk about today. Today I want to talk about death.


Vegans are, with the possible exception of Christians, people who are more afraid of death than any other group I have encountered. This maybe because many of then were raised in a culture where the shadow of Christianity's fear of death has created a culture of youth that is unable to even talk about death. I don't know why it is, but most of the vegans I know, and know of, equate all death with cruelty and label all death as bad. There is a definite value judgement being placed on the ending of a life. In my experience value judgements are made out of two places - sometimes, they come from great joy; but, much more frequently, they arise out of fear. Now if you do not subscribe to a world-view where there is something after this life - be it heaven, reincarnation, or whatever - this fear makes sense. However, these same people are also frequently deeply spiritual people. I have to admit, this baffles me.

I understand, and even agree with, many of the arguments made about quality of life, health benefits, awareness and all of that, right up until they get to the point where death equals cruelty. That is where they loose me. None of the world-views that the vegans I know support this conclusion. Christians are only concerned with the life-after-death of humans, and it is supposed to be better than here. Buddhists believe in a cycle of reincarnation to end suffering - this one comes the closest to making sense to me, as your choices in this life effect your next incarnation, but death is a release into either the next incarnation or to enlightenment; it is the end of suffering. The Neo-Pagans I know come down on varying degrees between a summerlands-type heaven and a cycle of reincarnation, and the same issue that what comes next is something to look forward to applies to them.

So, if all these world-views see death as a good (or at least not bad) thing, why are vegans so opposed to it? Here we get to the value of life, which ones are more important and deserved to be preserved and which ones don't matter. It is argued by ethicists that the line sentience.The sentience line is usually drawn at the vertebrate/invertebrate line by science. But that is not the line that vegans take - otherwise lobster would be fine. And so would honey. So what is the line that makes some life ok to consume for sustenance and pleasure and other life, cruel. And who gets to decide where to step outside the cycle of life and death. Nothing lives except by the death of something else.

Now would probably be a good time to state that there are several points which vegans make that I completely agree with. That the quality of life of the animals we (omnivores) eat should be improved. And the giant corporate factory farms and animal testing do nothing to contribute to an improvement - or the ienvironment, or the health of developed nations. And that by making uninformed food choices which support these businesses, you perpetuate animal cruelty. I also think that it is important to consider all the consequences of your choices - especially food choices.

But by focusing on the death, I think that much is missed in the beautiful, natural cycles of the present.

OMG, WANT!!1!

So, recently I was helping a friend determine the best ebook reader for her to buy, as she will be spending a year in China and books are heavy and take up space. Like me, the thought of a year without many easily accessed books was completely intolerable. So the solution was clearly an ebook reader. I was helping her for two reasons - (1)several of the blogs I read have talked a lot about different types of readers and (2)due to the space issue my insatiable book habit creates, I am going to get a reader in the fall, when I once again have funding. (n.b. moving is expensive!!)

We were not liking the Kindle, due to outrageous pricing, no external storage, and the general suckitude of #Amazonfail and their recent attempts to monopolize publishing in a not cool way. With all that in mind, we had decided to go the Sony route. Not only does Sony not suck, they have the deal with Google where you get 500,000 free books. Yay! Free! Books! Turns out however, that Sony is not compatible with Macs - both of us have a Mac. We love our Macs. We will not ever buy PCs again, unless they somehow manage to be as cool as Macs. Or the Devil starts ice-skating on his driveway.

So, no Sony. There was much with the sad face.

But Kindle still sucks.

Our phone conversation got cut off, and while I was waiting for her to call me back so we could figure out what to do, I read my daily blog posts. Turns out Smart Bitches post was on an ebook conference. Turns out there is a European company called Bookeen. Turns out they have a reader called Cybook. And it's compatible. With everything.

Turns out I WANT it.

I am a big fan of "The Nietzsche Family Circus" and in light of all the paper grading I and many of my friends and acquaintances have done recently I thought this one was particularly apropos...

So... I love Foamy...

Watch this!!! (NSFW)

=)

perspective...

Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy. ~ Albert Einstein


I needed that perspective right now... when I am completely overwhelmed with everything...

Yay! Camera!

I got a camera! Well, I already had a camera, but now I have a better camera, a camera with which take beautiful pictures of food... or teapots... or anything I want, really. I know that this is not the best demonstration of its powers, but I was too excited to not put up something...

As to when you will get a post of more substance, all I can say is after thesis, grading and moving... but now I will have pretty pictures to go with the posts that I will eventually be posting... so, Yay!

What is it about the Eastern Europeans?

"Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in the times of greatest distress." Milan Kundera, Czech Writer

"To remain aware of the weight of fact without yielding to the temptation to become only a reporter is one of the most difficult puzzles confronting a practitioner of poetry." Czeslaw Milosz, Polish Writer

What is it about the Eastern Europeans?

The Literary Quote of the Day made me think of Poetics last spring and Czeslaw Milosz - his poetry embodies this sense of beauty in times of distress. In fact, the way I ended up describing it in my notes resonates with both of these quotes: In moments of dissolution, the specific and the general meet - intimacy and ephemera.

I am not sure that it expresses the resonance, but there ya go - that's what happens when a non-linear thinker gets to blog...

This lead me to reflect on the beauty of Eastern European writer's works, both poetry and prose. They are so heart-wrenchingly fabulous and frequently they spring from great tragedy and hardship. They are in no way a specialty of mine, but I am blown away whenever I encounter them (I realize the gross generalization I am making here)...

I wonder what it is about the human condition that inspires the creation beauty from pain?

Romance, New Orleans, and PCA

I love, love, love, me some New Orleans - I always thought I would from all I have read about it, but now I can say from personal experience that it is true - I love New Orleans. Part of this incredibly favorable first impression may be the people I shared a goodly portion of the past week with - the Popular Romance section of the PCA conference. This group is so warm and welcoming and supportive - they are just plain nice! And snarky... oh, the snark. Those who know me know what a requirement that is for a good time to be had by all. Some of them I already "knew" from online, and others it was a huge pleasure for me to meet them for the first time. I came away from the conference with a new/re-affirmed confidence in my work as a scholar and with tons of ideas for future projects.

Now I just have to catch up in the rest of my life...