Good music always helps...

We are having some unexpected snow here this morning. It shouldn't amount to much, but the very fact that A) no one saw it coming and B) it is sticking is enough to get people excited, nervous, or both. I don't like it, as you can imagine. But here's one (small) comfort--I am not the only one with some minor PTSD from last year's historic snowfalls. Of the four students I've talked to so far, three are also not happy campers. This isn't normal--college students LOVE snow, especially during finals. Thanks to the Snowpocalypse, we are a damaged population here.

But, as I mentioned in my subject heading, music helps. I've got a Christmas mix going on my iPod which includes my current favorite holiday (non-religious) tune, which you can find here. Other favorites include this one and this one. I am going to stop myself here, though, as no one like a big old list of links...

Anyway, back to work I go. Happy grading to my academia-living friends!

Two quick thoughts...

1) I know I should probably think this product is a bad idea, but all I can think is that it would be lovely to have some for my hot cocoa. Especially if we have another winter like last one. (Seriously--I think I have post-traumatic stress disorder from last winter...)

2) At the risk of being political in this space, I can't stop myself here. Remember when John McCain seemed to have integrity? What happened to this guy? This is as good an excuse as any to link to one of the most brilliant things the Daily Show has done lately: the "It's Gets Worse" video they made for McCain. 

"We need more vampire slayers--just not more Buffy"

You must give this article a read. The comments, too. It's pretty great.

I am surprised that the author (and the comment-leavers) haven't mentioned Veronica Mars, which was, I thought, a great heir to the Buffy tradition.

Yeah, I still miss Veronica Mars. Bad.

"Perhaps the World Ends Here"

Seems like a good post-Thanksgiving poem...(complete with some lovely post-colonial/Native-American goodness.)

"Perhaps the World Ends Here"

by Joy Harjo

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

Two quick TV notes...

1) Entire Walking Dead Writing Staff Fired. I really like this show, but yeah, lots of times, the writing (in terms of dialogue especially) is awful. It's just strange that there might be no writing staff next season. Yikes.

2) I really need someone to be watching Dexter this season so we can talk about it at length. This last episode has completely gotten under my skin.

That is all...back to work I go!

Still an awful idea...

I've blogged about this before, but a new Buffy movie without Joss is an awful idea.

"The Envoy"

"The Envoy"

Jane Hirschfield

 

One day in that room, a small rat.   

Two days later, a snake.

Who, seeing me enter,

whipped the long stripe of his   

body under the bed,

then curled like a docile house-pet.

I don’t know how either came or left.   

Later, the flashlight found nothing.

For a year I watched

as something—terror? happiness? grief?—

entered and then left my body.

Not knowing how it came in,   

Not knowing how it went out.

It hung where words could not reach it.   

It slept where light could not go.

Its scent was neither snake nor rat,   

neither sensualist nor ascetic.

There are openings in our lives   

of which we know nothing.

Through them

the belled herds travel at will,

long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

"My bad side is as bad as my pleasant side is pleasant."

This poor guy. Dude, I've been there.

Pause

This is the first Saturday in months that I haven't had to get up early or be somewhere. I slept in a bit (although that's harder to do these days--my automatic wake-up time has gotten much earlier in the past few years), ran an errand or two, and then headed to my office on campus to get some work done. But then, since there's a big football game today and a ton of other stuff going on, I couldn't find a parking spot. (That never happens.) I thought, "Okay, I guess I'll go home." So here I am, sitting at home on a Saturday, watching some TV, reading a bit (for fun!), and just relaxing. Gotta say, it feels good. I have some work to get to later--grading, more reading, a small research/writing project to get started on--and I will, but for now, it's quite nice to hit the pause button. I need to remind myself that that's what weekends are for.

An hour of TV bliss...

So I'm not an Oprah fanatic, but I am so glad I remembered to DVR today's episode, featuring the cast of The Sound of Music. (I blogged about the episode when it was first announced.) It was the perfect way to unwind after a long day. Now I want to watch the whole movie. No time, though. I'll have to settle for listening to the soundtrack tomorrow.

"For My Dog, Who Listens to All My Poems"

I am finally making progress on my SAMLA paper. I'm already thinking of one of the final steps before any conference: the multiple practice readings I'll perform for my always-captive-at-home audience, Bing and Wes. For as long as I've been going to conferences, this has been my ritual: a at least few days before the conference, I'll print out a copy of the paper, set the timer on the microwave, plop down on the kitchen floor and start reading. The oddness of this situation--I don't normally sit on the kitchen floor (and I don't know why I originally picked this location), and I don't often talk uninterrupted for 15-20 minutes to an invisible audience--always draws Bing and Wesley to the scene. They watch, pretty darn captivated, sometimes meowing at me as if to say, "Are you talking to us? 'Cause we're right here..."

So I am reminded of this poem by Cathy Smith Bowers, which Andrew Sullivan recently linked to on his blog.

How entranced, each time, she sits there,
her eyes, I swear,
filling with tears
at her master's

inimitable brilliance. It's
clear to me what's
bounding through her
head: The greatest,

yet, of all the generations!
My husband says
she's just waiting
for her rations.

Bing and Wes aren't quite this earnest (well, Wesley might be while Bing might just indeed be "waiting for his rations"), but God bless 'em, they really do seem to listen with something that looks a heck of a lot like interest and (sometimes) appreciation. Yes, I know that's not really what's going on, but it's awfully nice to imagine that it might be. 

Yeah, that's not a word...

I'm up in my office at 4:30 on a Sunday, after already having quite a busy day. I should be on my way home, but I thought, "Let me just send out that last email...that one that has to go to the whole department." So I wrote it, proofread it, made some brief changes, and was just about to hit send when I thought, "Hmmm, better make that subject heading a bit clearer. Let me add, 'Please announce to your students.'"

Should have done a bit more proofreading. "Accounce," one of the words I actually added, isn't a word at all, and spell-check doesn't check subject headings (why not, I wonder?). So there it is--flying towards the in-box of every English colleague on campus, with a glaring typo in the very first word.

Lovely. Just lovely. The moral of the story? Just go home.

True story...

As I work on  my SAMLA paper, these words seem so very appropriate:

“To participate in the critical discourse on Hawthorne is to step into a fast-rushing stream, crowded with fishermen of varying orientations, all in hot pursuit of a specimen that, no matter how many times it is caught, always ends up back in the water. Thus the sport of Hawthorne criticism has its pleasures and short-lived rewards, but perhaps the most characteristic aspect of the catch has not been its flesh, but its slipperiness, the accompanying sense that the canonical ‘big one’ always gets away. Textually well-supported arguments, often diametrically opposed--we might want to call them studied and elaborate fish stories--are advanced with great regularity, but only seem to incite further discourse. The famously ambiguous Hawthorne has maintained his claim on critical attention by just this capacity of his work to sustain widely disparate readings.”

Seriously. Sometimes I feel like my head is going to explode. 

Citation:

Onderdonk, Todd. “The Marble Mother: Hawthorne’s Iconographies of the Feminine.” Studies in American Fiction 31.1 (2003): 73-100. MLA International Bibliography. Web 26 April 2010.

So long, Freddy!

My dad emailed me yesterday to let me know that "Freddy Sez," a fixture at Yankee Stadium, has died. Sad news, indeed. Once he let my mom bang his pot with his spoon. (That sounds way dirtier than it should.) Anyway, it's been a year of big losses for the Yanks: Bob Sheppard, the Boss, and now Freddy. Here's hoping the boys in pinstripes can pull themselves together and get back into this series with Texas, as #28 would be a great tribute to these guys.

TV Girl Power...

Two links that made me happy today, as I slogged through midterm grading:

1) It's the 25th anniversary of She-Ra. I still have my action figures in my parents' attic (who freely intermingled with my brother's He-Man figures). She-Ra rocked. She also inspired some of my earliest feminist thoughts, including this question: "How come He-Man can appear in 'very special' episodes of She-Ra, but she doesn't get to cross over to his show?" Seriously.

2) It's the 10th anniversary of the first episode of Gilmore Girls. I will admit that I didn't start watching this show until about the third season (and then frantically caught up one summer as I was dissertating), but what a show! I miss it still.