16 Wednesday Jul 2008
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My friend and MHS colleague Jeremy recently pointed me toward this fun site on the ‘net that generates word clouds from quotations that you supply. For example, here is the text of Rosalind’s epilogue to As You Like It, likes 1-19, thrown into Wordle:
(click on the image to view larger)
Here is one Jeremy did with the Declaration of Independence, in honor of the 4th of July:
have fun wordling!
21 Friday Mar 2008
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It’s that point in the semester (I’m sure all students and former-students will identify) at which the end of term seems both impossibly far away and alarmingly at hand. Projects develop glitches. The panic-o-meters on everyone around you start to rise and your own barometer cranks it up in response. “Many college students stressed out, study finds”, the Boston Globe reported this week, in a classic “No duh! Don’t we know this already?” headline. What is always amazing to me is how normalized and individualized the state of being stressed out–physically and emotionally–is. We expect to spend our educational careers overworked and frazzled, and inability to get things done is always seen as a personal failure, not as a systemic problem of a social system that requires students to work part- and full-time as well as attending school in order to make ends meet.
Meanwhile, we haven’t entirely lost our sense of humor. Here’s a little something that’s been circulating on the internet for all my political-junkie friends out there. My friend and colleague Laura Cutter forwarded it to a bunch of us after our history class last night:
The George W Bush Presidential Library is now in the planning stages.
The Library will include:
- The Hurricane Katrina Room , which is still under construction.
- The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you can’t remember anything.
- The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don’t have to even show up.
- The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don’t let you in.
- The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don’t let you out.
- The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room (Which no one has been able to find).
- The Iraq War Room. After you complete your first tour, they make you to go back for second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth tours.
- The Dick Cheney Room, in the famous undisclosed location, complete with shooting gallery.
- Plans also include: The K-Street Project Gift Shop – Where you can buy (or just steal) an election.
- The Airport Men’s Room, where you can meet some of your favorite Republican Senators.
- Last, but not least, there will be an entire floor devoted to a 7/8-scale model of the President’s ego.
To highlight the President’s accomplishments, the museum will have an electron microscope to help you locate them. When asked, President Bush said that he didn’t care so much about the individual exhibits as long as his museum was better than his father’s
Happy Spring Equinox to you all and hope this finds you all well. I always enjoy your emails and calls and correspondence (I actually still receive letters by post from a number of you!) and will be in touch when I can.
06 Thursday Mar 2008
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Through a complex series of mental associations having to do with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, library student jokes about cross-referencing and the Super Tuesday election hoopla, I suddenly felt the urge to share my favorite political quotation of all time from Sara Vowell’s essay “The Nerd Voice,” written in the wake of the 2000 election (Gore v. Bush, in case anyone has forgotten):
I wish it were different. I wish we privileged knowledge in politicians, that the ones who know things didn’t have to hide it behind brown pants, and that the know-not-enoughs were laughed all the way to the Maine border on their first New Hampshire meet and greet. I wish that in order to secure his [or her!] party’s nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a short wave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Two Sleepy People,’ Johnny Cash’s ‘Five Feet High and Rising,’ and ‘You Got the Silver’ by the Rolling Stones. After all, the United States is the greatest country on the earth dealing with the most complicated problems in the history of the world—poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem. What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the secret service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer and one by one decrypt our woes.
[The Partly Cloudy Patriot, 116-117]
That is all.
26 Tuesday Feb 2008
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07 Thursday Feb 2008
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Today at the MHS I attending a brown-bag luncheon seminar with one of our current longterm fellows, Lisa Tetrault, who is researching the way that American feminist creation stories (particularly the centered on the Seneca Falls Convention) were created and contested in the late 19th century.
In the post-presentation discussion, we were talking about the current political implications of interpreting women’s and feminist history, when she happened to mention that an anti-choice group has purchased Susan B. Anthony’s birthplace in Adams, Massachusetts, and turned it into a house museum. Why? Apparently, Anthony–who was, indeed, against abortion in her own very different political and social context–has become a pro-life icon. Rochester, New York, the site of another of Anthony’s homes, is, Lisa tells me, peppered with anti-choice billboards targeting the women’s history pilgrims who travel to upstate New York to visit the site.
Susan B. Anthony’s birthday is February 15th. At the Susan B. Anthony house in Rochester, NY, guest speaker Susan Faludi, most recently the author of, The Terror Dream, an analysis of gender and the media post-9/11, will be featured at their annual celebration luncheon. The Birthplace of Susan B. Anthony asks us to ponder this question:
We’ve given up our bra burning and hating men, but how would Anthony and her colleagues react to one unpopular view, particularly among youth, that we support abortion on demand?
It’s easy to get pissy about advocates of anti-choice policies asserting their “ownership” of one of the historical icons of American feminist history–and believe me, I’m irritated. But the historian part of my brain is fascinated by this one local example of the very political struggle over who narrates history and what version of history gets told.
And I just have to repeat: Susan B. Anthony–Pro-life Icon? That’s frickin’ weird!
image from America’s Library.
30 Wednesday Jan 2008
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Classes start in earnest this week, so I can tell the next few days I’m going to be scrambling around getting used to the new schedule and so on. More to come on what I’m actually taking. I also have a backlog of more “serious” posts I want to write, including a couple of book reviews. I’ll try to get to them, slowly but surely, over the next few weeks. But meanwhile, in honor of returning to library school, here’s a bit of satire:
And here I thought my bibliomania was, well, kinda normal. Shows you what freakish circles I travel in!
26 Saturday Jan 2008
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As a follow up on Blog for Choice day . . .
I posted this (in a slightly different form) on a comments thread over at feministing yesterday, and thought perhaps some of you would be interested in it as well. Another reader wrote:
It wasn’t until I read Back Rooms : Stories from the Illegal Abortion Era that I truly understood the importance of being pro-choice. We have to share those horrific, graphic, terrifying stories and images with kids, because the pro-life movement has some pretty ghastly images that work in scaring kids into a pro-life stance. Why don’t we use the same tactics? Do we not want to stoop to their level?
I wrote in response:
Part of the success of the movement to legalize abortion in the mid-20th c. came from the fact that women were able to deploy those images . . . and many more people in that era (just after the advent of the pill, remember) had personal stories about women in their family who had attempted home- or back-alley abortions and been damaged or disfigured.
Since abortion has been legalized, the number of unsafe abortions has (thankfully) dropped significantly . . . though of course not been eliminated. But I think it’s more invisible than it used to be to those in the decision-making positions. White, middle-class women with money aren’t flying to Cuba for back-alley abortions, they’re able to drive to the next state to the clinic of their choice.
. . .I’m not necessarily for using the shock tactics of the anti-choice movement, since they often involve using misleading images and false information. But I do think we can do a better job of highlighting the bodily risks to women–and the impact on their families–if the country continues to strengthen anti-choice policies.
Here’s an amazing audio documentary that was honorable mention at the Third Coast Audio Festival this year:
BEST DOCUMENTARY: HONORABLE MENTION
The Search for Edna Lavilla (Australia)
by Sharon Davis and Eurydice Aroney with sound engineer
Russell StapletonIn 1942 Edna Lavilla Haynes died from a backyard abortion. After her death Edna was never mentioned again. More than sixty years later Edna’s granddaughter looks for clues – a search that leads through police files and government records and down Sydney’s back alleys of the 1940’s, where one in four pregnancies ended in abortion and sometimes death.
The Search for Edna Lavilla first aired on ABC Radio National’s Radio Eye.
It can be found online at this website, currently sixth story from the top and it’s about fifty minutes long. Really amazing stuff.
12 Saturday Jan 2008
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So I still haven’t decided whom I would rather see win the Democratic Primary (since Michigan’s primary is so FUBAR-ed, it’s not really a question of who I actually ended up marking on my absentee ballot), but there’ve been some great on-line pieces regarding how Hillary Clinton did in the New Hampshire primary and the media’s reaction to it that I thought I would round up and post here for any of you who are interested (hi Lyn!).
Feminist activist Gloria Steinam wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that provoked a lot of blog discussion about the intersections of race, gender and age in the primaries. “What worries me,” she writes, “is that [Barack Obama] is seen as unifying by his race while [Hillary Clinton] is seen as divisive by her sex.”
Rebecca Traister of Salon.com wrote a powerful piece on the sexism directed toward the Clinton campaign and why it matters–whether or not you’re a Clinton supporter. Her conclusion?: “Here’s a message from the women of New Hampshire, and me, to Hillary Clinton’s exuberant media antagonists: You have no power here.”
And lest you think it’s only the women who have anything to say about the anti-Clinton hysteria, Jon Stewart has this observation: “I’m glad no one here ever sees me get a flu shot.”
Plus, I can’t shake the echo of this blog post by a father whose daughter asked him who the first woman president was. While I would not vote for a woman simply because she was a woman (I had zero interest in Elizabeth Dole’s candidacy), in a field where most of the Democratic front-runners seem basically acceptable, what weight should I give the chance to vote into office the first woman president–if only so the answer to this question won’t have to be “well, there hasn’t been one yet”?
I’m particularly troubled by the way “women voters” (who of course are a singular entity, ha ha) are being painted as wishy-washy, fickle (read: “hormonal”) girls who are reacting emotionally (read: “for shallow, irrational reasons”) to the sexism of the media and Clinton’s political opponents. The “women are voting for Hillary Clinton” post-NH storyline–regardless of whether it is true or not–has turned into another story about how reactive and emotional we women are, rather than a story about how legitimate our reaction against misogynist vitriol is, in the polls and elsewhere! The hatred directed toward Clinton as a woman is a stark reminder of the way all of us are still judged on the basis of our sex and gender. To respond to such hatred with anger, sadness, and activism is not irrational.
09 Wednesday Jan 2008
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It really pisses me off when people moan and groan about the state of American education vis a vis the rest of the world without questioning what kind of educational system we’re comparing ourselves to. This satirical news story from The Onion takes it to a whole new level.
Report: American Schools Trail Behind World In Aptitude Of Child Soldiers
02 Sunday Dec 2007
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My friend Hanna passed along this deadly website to me this morning, and I have already used it for many valuable minutes of procrastination. It’s one of those play-a-game-to-defeat-world-hunger sites, and the particular gimmick is that you get to guess what words mean! If you are as excited about this as I am, then I know why we are friends. If not, we can still be friends (I don’t mind).
Today, I learned the meaning of the following wonderful words:
scofflaw = repeat offender
paraph = flourish after signature
supernal = celestialviviparous = producing live offspring
saponaceous = soapy
fruticose = shrubby
sibylline = propheticsuspire = sigh
dipsomania = alcoholism
roily = turbid
Hanna also suggests that you enliven the game by trying to remember why you know the meaning of certain words. Why, for example, did I know that “abaca” is a word for “manila hemp”?
The semester’s almost over!
*footle = waste time
the feminist librarian 