Thursday Tune: Revolution

Because I am fed up with the war against women and this sort of thing, this is my mood.

BitchBuzz: Technology and Temperance + Jane Quiet

My column today springs from my annoyance with paternalistic colleagues who keep giving people the impression that academics are stuffy know-it-alls who pontificate from their position of privilege. I realise I can also be a bit unreasonable about it: on President's Day a colleague in the midst of his "technology: bad" talk (thank goodness there was also a "technology: good" talk by the fabulous Kim Middleton) made several references to The Matrix which made me want to break something.

The Matrix?! This is your idea of technology: a twelve year old film? Made when almost NONE of the tech things we're talking about existed as more than an idea? Academics who would never have the chutzpah to offer public opinions on other disciplines have no trouble at all pontificating about things in popular culture that they have at most heard of--they've certainly never participated. It irritates me. But enough bile--I have things to do:

Does Tech Actually Distract from Real Life?

By K.A. Laity

We could all use a little time away from technology, right?

Colleagues of mine forwarded a link on Facebook today to a piece by William Major at the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "Thoreau's Cellphone Experiment." In it Major tells of offering an extra credit project to his students: giving up their cell phones to him for five whole days, the better to reach a more "real" experience of life, unencumbered by the "distractions" of their palm-sized technology.

Setting aside the privileged and paternalistic tone of the piece for a moment and setting aside the dubiousness of Thoreau's withdrawal to the "wilderness" of Walden Pond (which did not keep him from frequent, almost daily visits to the village of Concord, or from getting female family members to feed him and do his laundry), the whole aim of this article misunderstands the role of technology in our lives...

Read the rest at BBHQ: http://tech.bitchbuzz.com/does-social-media-actually-distract-from-real.html#ixzz1Bai2nins

In more pleasant news JANE QUIET! Have you been reading the prologue? Do you like Elena's new style? What amazing color, eh? Tomorrow the big re-launch: Jane Quiet 2.0 -- yes, there will be prizes!

Leaving London

I knew it wasn't going to be easy leaving London, but I wasn't quite prepared for the way it did happen. It was meant to be simple: tube to Bank, DLR to London City Airport. My cheap flight took me from London to Amsterdam to NYC and then Albany. Not a day I was looking forward to by any means, but prices this summer were horrendous and my hopes to get the trip paid for by leading students didn't happen.

I'd never been to City Airport; I've been to Heathrow many times, Gatwick a few and even Stansted, though I've never actually flown out of it. The light rail went direct to the airport terminal, so it ought to have been easy. After waking up at four, afraid I'd miss my alarm at five, I rolled out and got ready. There was plenty of time and hardly anyone about so early. Smooth sailing on the tube and fortunately, steps down to get to the DLR. The train waiting was for Lewiston, but the next one went to the airport.

However, the train that was sitting there suddenly shut down and everybody got out. What? No DLR today, some kind of problem, the man said. So how to get to the airport? Back to London Bridge, change to the Jubilee line, go to Canning Town... and then what?! Argh, time for a taxi. I was fortunate to have help or I never would have got my one bag, full of six weeks of clothes and presents, up the many stairs. Panic setting in, but actually it didn't take too long for a cab to come along.

The fare ended up being over £20 (ouch) but I suppose it might have been more to Heathrow. City Airport is quite small, so I should be forgiven for thinking it might be easy to get through security quickly. Ha! In the end I had to take everything out of my carry on and my 'suspicious' items had to be scanned again -- yes, that dangerous tea towel and my jewelry case. Reassembling everything at least killed the time waiting in the lounge. The small jet was packed to capacity, at least a third of which was a Chinese tour group of Chinese almost all women.

We had begun our descent into Amsterdam and of course, the seat belt sign was on, but a few of the tour group decided to get up to use the toilets. Suddenly the plane rolled swiftly to the left and just as swiftly to the right. I'd never felt anything quite like that. The little Chinese women went flying. Fortunately no one got hurt. The pilot explained, once we were on the ground, that we had hit the wake of another flight. We should have cleared it easily, but the wind carried it up. Bizarre.

The Amsterdam airport is huge! If you want tulips, you can get them. I nearly missed my connecting flight because my phone didn't pick up the local time and I was an hour behind, strolling along thinking I had all the time in the world, until I saw the listing which said it was boarding now. Oops! The flight on the whole was good: KLM treats you a lot better than the American airlines, including the food and drinks. The flight back always seems endless, but we got a little surprise a couple hours before landing. There was turbulence off and on, nothing much, but all of the sudden there was a huge thump that sounded like we had hit something.

Guess what? As the pilot told us right away, we had hit the wake of another plane ("if you look out the window behind us you should be able to see..."). What're the odds? From the relative luxury of KLM I headed next to purgatory: terminal 2 at JFK, the one that's so run down they don't have a recording of all the things you need to do at security (yes, I had to go through passport control and customs and back through security), they have a guy repeating over and over and over the requirements. Fun!

Well, it could be worse.

A lot to get caught up on, but it's hard to keep from wishing I were back in England. Sigh.

BitchBuzz: Hate Facebook?

My latest column at BitchBuzz.com:

It's the end of the world as we know it! Where's Buffy?! She's averted several apocalypses (apocalypseé? apocalypso?) already. Cameron's behind this somehow, or Goldman-Sachs, I bet. Oh, wait -- it's only Zuckerberg?

For a minute there, I was worried.

Yes, as the guys at Wired have warned us, Facebook has you in its sights on the path toward world domination:

"Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed."

Yes, it's true: the forced public option is a bit of a bastard. Settle down, tea-baggers, we're not talking about that public option. But to hear some tech folk talk about it, you'd think we were. And yes, something "open and distributed" would be wonderful. Hop right on that, will you? On your own time, with your own funds and support, too, okay? Because I'm not paying for it. There's the rub, as someone once said. And until we do actually get some socialists in charge, we're stuck with the evils of capitalism...

As always, read the rest at BBHQ. I managed to work in a reference to both Buffy and EL Wisty, so I am pleased with myself. Loads of things to do and I am making my way through the (cough) hundreds of emails in my campus inbox and there are a few things that MUST be done before I go (like laundry, sob!). Yeesh -- back to it now.

As long as you're idling your time on the internet, go check out the video I made for The Women's League of Ale Drinkers: talking robots!

By the by: thanks Todd, for inadvertently setting me off on this column's idea by emailing me the Wired link just after I was watching an old Buffy episode and -- the rest is history as they say. This is what happens when you know a writer; we use everything! The world is our buffalo.

The Old Boys Club

We had a panel discussion on campus last night about negotiating the Catholic heritage of the institution, founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondolet as a college for women (who still make up the majority of the student body). Most of the audience last night, too, were women. The panel, however, was entirely made up of men. My department chair, Kate, was the first to bring this up at the end, which I applauded. But I was struck by the comment one of the panelists made that, "It's just part of a conversation we [a fellow panelist] have been having for years."

I used to think the "old boy's network" was insidious and deliberate. Some may be, but I learned over the years that largely they're just like that: friendships. At heart it's a good thing: you help out your friends, you work with your friends, you share with your friends. It's a natural enough impulse. That's the way that this kind of thing gets going, for example on Twitter where people like @Glinner and @serafinowicz and @edgarwright all help publicize each other not as a deliberate marketing ploy, but simply because they're pals.

The problem, of course, is that few men are friends with women in the same way. I think it's changing (I hope it is!) and there are always exceptions (I have a lot of male friends), but certainly in the past men were often not comfortable being friends with women because of the potential problem of sex (if he wanted it and she didn't, or he didn't and she did, etc.). In the past -- and in current films -- women existed only as sex and not as people (<-- feminism: the radical notion that women are people). I kind of hope that the very boring trend of "father" centered films is a last gasp of that mind set. Maybe we can move beyond the pervasiveness of the old boy network.

But even if they're not deliberate or insidious, the effects are. I often tell people about my moment at a meeting of the Joint Committee on the Status of Women at the Harvard Medical and Dental Schools, seated at a conference table in Countway Library when our chair asked, "How can we make the atmosphere more welcoming to women?" I looked around the dark paneled room, where we were surrounded by oil paintings of the old patriarchs of the medical school and I just laughed.

What starts as friendship often ends in compromise: as a writer I'm thinking of anthologies filled with stories from drinking buddies even if they're not particularly good. I also think of Comedy Central, where the old boy network reigns supreme, even with very untalented people -- girls are okay if they're pretty. It's difficult to dismantle the system, because it springs from a good thing, friendship. But dismantle it, we must.

C'mon -- let's all be friends!

Where are my Minions?

After a week of being ill and getting next to nothing done, I am feeling the pinch. So much email has piled up in my inbox that I feel quite harried and I've taken the extraordinary measure of not giving my students any homework this week so far (awful, I know). It is days like this that make me wonder why I try to do so much, but then again, I know why. Because when I'm not ill, my head is so full of ideas that I can hardly keep my skull from popping open. They all want to get out and be real, like little Pinocchios.

The ideas are wonderful: it's the tedious things that get me frustrated. All those things that could be done by somebody who is not me -- typing, filing, mailing, sorting. If I had more money, I would pay someone else to do those tasks. My most recent payment for my writing, however, won't buy much more than lunch. Thus I remain minion-free -- and all the ideas that might bring me a better royalty payments have to wait until the more pressing but less inspiring tasks are done.

On the plus side, one editor called my work "dazzling" this week and another made reference to my "fan base" (!), so there are some (intangible, unpaid) benefits. After reading Chris Anderson's Free, I'm still contemplating the impact of the abundance of free content on the web and how it's turning the publishing world upside down. It's going to take some time for it to all shake out. Exciting times we live in -- full of confusion and frustration, sure, but also brand new opportunities.

My Symptoms

All right, the latter is not a symptom so much as what I heard as I woke up about every half hour through the night unable to breathe. There are at least two squirrels in the attic who show not the slightest interest in the trap.

I would be in bed, but I need toilet paper, tissues, cold medicine and to mail a bunch of comic books (yay!). The piece at Coilhouse has brought us some new interest, as perhaps has the latest wardrobe for Jane :-)

When I return, more British comedy and weepy films. Why don't I have more Garbo?

The Thing about Vampires

Teaching is all about planning + improvisation. You have to plan well and provide a structure, but it's also important to roll with the vagaries of the unexpected. Today was a case for this kind of flexibility. After talking about the ambiguity that signaled the 1980s shift in horror films, we were all primed to see John Carpenter's 1982 movie The Thing. It's a heady mix of gender politics and claustrophobic masculinity and rather good monster effects for its time.

However, the disc refused to play in the dvd player or in the computer. We even tried one of the students' laptops. No go. Argh. So much for my carefully orchestrated preamble. Fortunately, I do bring a handful of other films to show brief clips from to illustrate various points (we had already watched the opening minutes of the stylish vamp classic The Hunger with Bauhaus, Deneuve, Bowie and Ann Magnuson). The students suggested watching that film instead (in part because of our now running joke about David Bowie) but it's a video transfer and stutters a lot, so I decided to go with Near Dark, which is an entertaining film with some interesting developments, but not quite on track with our trajectory.

I suppose it's just as well as we were giving short shrift to vamps over all (on the whole I'm not a big fan of vampire films) but it irks, of course. But that's the teaching life. We had a good discussion and they'll surely have more to post on-line tonight, so I ought to be sanguine.

On Not Watching the Oscars

I thought of a lot of blah blah blah I could write, but the truth is actually quite simple. The Oscars have nothing to say to me because the mainstream Hollywood industry has nothing to say to me. I'm a woman over forty: where are my peers? Apart from Meryl Streep, whose consistently stellar abilities are taken for granted while people go into paroxysms of praise for male actors who take on any kind of variety in roles, older women have mostly been turning to television because film-makers are allergic to wrinkles on female bodies. In men, it's character -- of course (they're so distinguished). Hollywood prefers women skinny, young and stupid.

I'll vote with my feet.

Will it matter? Nah. They'll still get their coveted demographic of 18-25 males -- who will assume that that's what women are like (and presumably trust that all women go off on some kind of Logan's Run death trip after 30). Hey, there was a young man on one internet list I was on today arguing that women went into prostitution because they "liked sex". It's all about the 'pimps and 'hos', you know.

P.S. I tried to find an article on Older Women in Film I had read before at the Guardian and it came up blank. Fitting, eh?

Yes, I'm Back

...but I won't be giving a London recap until we get back from Robert's, where we're heading for Thanksgiving today, because of COURSE he only has dial up (OMG!). Yes, pictures, yes, fun, yes, friends -- much to tell. I will add because I have to get it off my chest:

FILTHY PHILLY!

Eww, eww! Stay away from Terminal F if you can. They had the most disgusting restrooms I have ever seen in a major airport. It was absolutely revolting -- and not just one, because I tried a couple. Ick. Awful. I have to shower now. I may write a letter to the Times about it (not that it will do any good...).

Stephen Fry in America

My hopes that Fry's visit to all 50 states for his documentary on this country would lead to 1) his no longer doing that quite terrible "Ammurrican" accent (leave it to your former partner, whose accent is superb) and 2) not portraying the nation as a circus of freaks, seem to be dashed by the teaser video at The Guardian. Despite his recognition that the vast expanses of the country assure a broad palette of differences, he sums up Americans as "very positive" but needing "a lot of encouragement" and the video highlights woodsy hunters in plaid, smearing themselves with deer dung, and colorful pagans in wild costumes at Samhain. Yep, Americans are wacky.

I had hoped that someone with Fry's intelligence would resist playing to the stereotypes, but who'd want to see a series on the States that suggests Americans differ as much from each other as they do from people in other countries? Apparently no one on BBC1. Sigh -- maybe the show will be better than the trailer, but I don't hold out much hope.

Living Down to Expectations

I give up: my students in the Gender and Medieval Literature class have let me know that the fight to gain equal rights for women has utterly failed. Life today is apparently much like that of Anglo-Saxon England (although with better plumbing). Men, they tell me, are still expected to be brave and strong like Beowulf and the other warriors. You don't want a guy falling apart in an emergency, one told me, a woman can fall apart. Yeah, another agreed, if you go to a scary movie, you want to be able to hide on his shoulder when you're scared. Yes, as a horror film veteran, I rolled my eyes.

But I have to admit it feels like all the efforts of second and third wave feminists have been for naught. Given the virulent sexism of the political coverage for the last 18 months or so (brilliantly skewered by two of the funniest women working now, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler) even by supposedly "liberal" commentators like Jon Stewart and Keith Olberman, it kind of makes a gal lose all hope.

Teaching the Zemeckis Beowulf film in my upper division course rubs salt in that wound, too. I do still find it shocking that 21st century filmmakers have even less regard for women than the 11th century monks who wrote down the original text. The monks at least thought women had some purpose other than as sexual objects for men, could even seen women as powerful leaders. At least a couple of students in that class were appalled by the film, but it's small comfort when I have creative writing students writing about their future wedding day as "the best day of my life" -- yeah, and it's all downhill after that?

Is it really such a radical notion today that women are people, too? Not defined by biology? Not just not-men? I guess so.

The Latest

Oooh, lookit the purty colors! Yes, the continuing saga of my ankle -- how very dull. Well, according to the receptionist in the doctor's office, I have a heel spur.

Huh?

Well, yes, that makes sense and certainly explains the extensive bruising (not) as well as the persistent swelling (no, my leg is really not that fat normally). In any case, I have to call at exactly 8am tomorrow to get an appointment with the orthopedic doc. With luck I'll get in tomorrow -- if, that is, I can also get a copy of the x-rays to bring with me. The imaging place, however, says they cannot provide copies sooner than 24 hours after a request (made at about 4.30 this afternoon when my doctor finally called). It will be interesting to see what happens (by "interesting" of course, I mean painful, tedious and vexing).

Adding to the irritation, I found out that my essay on Gilliam's Tideland has been bounced from the anthology it was accepted for last year. So it goes.

X-Rays, Crutches and Painkillers

Taking bets now before the x-rays come back: is it only a sprain? torn ligaments? or an actual break? Judge the evidence for yourself, including early Sunday:



and today, bruising now visible as the swelling fades, those along the side of the joint made the doctor tsk at me (he's already written a prescription for a cast just in case):



Time to put my feet up...

Rothko

My love she speaks like silence,
Without ideals or violence,
She doesn't have to say she's faithful,
Yet she's true, like ice, like fire.

-- Bob Dylan, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit"

There's a story I posted on Facebook from The Guardian about the Rothko Chapel, an oasis of magnificence in the middle of Houston. Typically (for a British journalist), Jonathan Jones gives in without much of a struggle to the stereotype of Americans as crazy religious fanatics -- was there no one in the chapel who came to see the art? I bet there was, but why spoil a perfectly simple cliché? That's the whole point of visiting on a Sunday, too, I'm sure.

It's a remarkable sight, nonetheless. A colleague's memorial was held there just before we moved back north. I found it impossible to listen to what people were saying because my eyes were mesmerized by the paintings. It's a much more sombre setting than the Rothko room at the Tate Modern, but there's a similar sense of complete immersion in the colors. When in London, I always manage to make a visit or two to the room. I wrote a flash fiction story sitting in front of those rich rubious paintings about someone who has a complete breakdown in the very same spot. While some people seem to equate Rothko's work (and self-selected death) with depression, I actually saw the character's obsession with the paintings as a last ditch attempt at survival, finding some peace in their restorative silence. Rothko may put despair on the canvas, but recognizing and sharing that feeling brings comfort.

There's a big exhibition of Rothko's work coming to the Tate Mod; an excuse to get to London before February 1st.

No Fun

Gene has just departed with the G4 in hand, leaving behind his old WinBook as my rescue dog. I gave him two pennies for the ferryman, but it could be possible that the Mac doctors will be able to save her (although I have visions of them gathered around, staring with awe, "You still use this old machine?! What is it? 2003?").

This laptop works -- I can ask no more.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

There's nothing quite like being all set for a week of writing in a great situation: a beautiful house in a gorgeous location -- and it comes with a cat (isn't Hamilton cute?). But then out of the blue -- because we're speaking about my dependable Powerbook G4 -- a massive crash occurs. We're talking code in black and white on the screen, funny noises, and an absurd look of horror on my face (or so I imagine). It took a while to get the computer to shut off. It took even longer for it to come back on. I tried to do a few things to help it recover, but mostly I crossed my fingers and hoped. On the plus side, I lost a few sentences at most of what I was writing. And yes, backed up to the external HD before I left, backing up regularly to the virtual drive and the jumpdrive is right here, too.
So far this morning, everything seems fine, apart from a persistent whir that I don't think was there before, but at this point I could be imagining it, too. Yet I am smiling (see, I submit photographic proof -- sorry for the poor quality, but I only have the PDA cam with me). Maybe it's because I woke up to mist-shrouded trees (and wow, bed head!), or maybe it's because I'm drinking from a gigantic lemony yellow smiley face mug (though it's tempting to add a Watchmen touch), but most likely it's because I still have days to relax and write (okay, maybe with a pen and paper) and that's good. Before the meltdown, I had written a good deal which had been surprisingly effortless -- well, for me, which means rather than plonking down the odd word every few minutes, I was actually typing along as fast as my fingers could go (admittedly, not very fast). I started writing (on paper) as soon as I got up today and even had some ideas for a story that has languished for months in limbo after a promising opening paragraph.

So, cross your fingers for me. With luck, it will all be fine.

Minus One Sofa

Consumatum est: well, the big furniture that required a truck, anyway (we still have lots of boxes, cough cough, hint hint). We decided the sofa did not have a place in our new third floor lifestyle (fortunately, we decided this on the first set of stairs). I wanted to chuck it off the back of the truck, but Gene insisted we not do that. So if you need a sofa, come and get it. We're going to get a futon again, which will double as a guest bed (hint hint).

Dead tired, achey, body covered with a galaxy of new bruises (the ones on my left thigh form Ursa Minor!), so we're getting Kipper and the minimum of necessities and heading back to the new place. Tomorrow I have a retreat (yay! woodsy goodness) and then a party at Mahar's. Much better than moving furniture. Wow, one day of physical labor and I'm done in. I'm so lazy!

Boxing Day

Just taking a break from the numbing process. Today we need to box up everything that's sitting on furniture large enough to have to be moved on the truck that we rented for tomorrow. Time to turn off the brain in order to avoid thinking about a) how much stuff we still have, b) how hard it will be to drag it up to the third floor, and c) how it will not all fit anyway. Yes, yes, we brought it on ourselves. No one should pity us. Just reporting the facts, ma'am. And doing a good impression of a Romero extra.

Tomorrow will be the deciding day: what doesn't fit (furniture-wise), has to go... somewhere. Not in the aerie. Shelves that don't fit mean books that won't fit either. I just don't know. I don't think I can fit too many more books in my office. But we're not going to live with boxes like now; I've had enough of that.

Save the date: Saturday June 28th -- I think by then everything that's going there will have to be situated. Sangria in the afternoon, chips and salsa and the unveiling of the new digs. It's small, but there are the stairs for overflow. Kipper will just hide under the bed anyway.

Yard sale at the old place the day after... everything must go.

What Fresh Hell?

What could make the process of moving less pleasant? 90+ F degree weather (that's 30+ C) and humidity -- what is this, Houston?! Let's not forget thunderstorms, too. We moved some lighter stuff yesterday: musical instruments and dvds. Our new stove is in, though not the new fridge and our landlord was busy painting some of the chipped and peeled areas. Despite the climb to our third floor walk up, we found it cooler up there in our new aerie than in our squat house, so that portends well for that unimaginable time in the future when the move is done. The sparrows were hopping along the roof looking in at us with frank curiosity ("hey, new neighbors!"). I still don't know how it will be done, but somehow it will have to be.

Want to read about one of the plays I saw in London? The Guardian has a review up of Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy. Billington's right about the opening squashing the first speech, but it was quite a cornucopia of sights that had the audience riveted (even up amongst the gods where I was sitting). Kinnear clearly enjoyed himself thoroughly in the role(s, I suppose I ought to add). There was a weird inconsistency in register throughout, playing the gothic for humor, but how else to combine Caravaggio and camp? Gleeful mayhem all around. Kinnear's also going to be in the new Bond film, so more folks will see him soon (his dad would be proud).

Here's a review of the Midsummer Night's Dream we saw at the Globe. It's a bit harsh, but it does touch on my main problem: if Puck isn't magic, it doesn't come off. The rest of the cast worked well -- certainly the students saw it more like this review, but for me Michael Jibson might have made a better Bottom than Puck (although Paul Hunter did just fine in that role while eerily reminiscent physically of Chris Elliott). Puck should be fluid, androgynous, quicksilver and dangerous. Jibson looked far too mundane, weary even at times, and yes, irrationally, I thought his head too round. Sue me. I would have liked to have seen Adam Burton, who played Mustardseed, try the role. You expect the regals (Tom Mannion and Siobhan Redmond) to be great -- they were -- but too often the four lovers are little more than mooning cyphers. Not so here: Boot and Brandon made Demetrius and Lysander wildly passionate lovers, ready to erupt violently at the least provocation, and Nixon and Rogers brought a powerful physicality to the traditionally demure young women which matched them well. It was fun -- how can it not be? -- but I wanted a better Puck. Dean Lennox Kelly was good in the recent BBC version: you might recognize him as a saucy Shakespeare in one of the first Martha Jones episodes of Doctor Who.