Six Things

Jeanne at Necromancy Never Pays just tagged me for this meme, and since I'm grateful to her for introducing me to her blog, I'm playing.

Here are the meme rules:
1. link to the person who tagged you
2. post the rules
3. write six things about yourself
4. tag six people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
5. Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their sites.
6. Let your tagger know when your entry is up.

Okay, so here are six things you wouldn't necessarily know about me from reading this blog.

1. My second toe is much longer than my first. My mother used to tell me it indicated noble birth, but I've always thought of it as a monkey-characteristic. It makes some shoes hard to wear, and probably has something to do with my preference for open-toed shoes.

2. I used to read mysteries a lot, but I can barely get through one anymore. I wrote my senior thesis on Dorothy L. Sayers, whose mystery novels were a kind of comfort food for me for many years. Since I've had children, though, I find myself unable to take pleasure in novels that require a death to get them moving. This is troubling on many levels.

3. I love finishing things--knitting projects, novels (reading them!), writing projects, furniture assembly, etc. This makes it hard for me to start things when I can't see an end in sight--anything from housecleaning to long writing or knitting projects. Short stuff, I'm your girl, any day of the week.

4. If there are truly two kinds of people, puzzle-people and plot-people, as Jeanne suggests, then I have multiple personality disorder. I love puzzles and word games (check my facebook profile if you don't believe me), and I also love heavily-plotted novels, which is why I got a PhD in Victorian literature. This combination of affinities is probably why I used to like mysteries so much (they are plot-and-puzzle books, aren't they?), and why I miss them at times.

5. This summer I'll make my second trip to France and I still will not see Paris. I think I'm saving it for a rainy day.

6. I've always sung alto but lately I find myself trying for the high notes, and even singing an occasional descant. What's up with that?

I'm supposed to tag six people, so here they are:

Caroline

Becca (do you even do memes, Becca?)

Jennifer

Magpie

Lilian (because now you have time for this kind of thing, right?)

Elrena

and anyone else who wants to play, of course!

The Cybils are coming

In this season of voting and awards shows, don't forget that the Cybils announcements are coming up on Thursday, Valentine's Day. You'll find some great gift ideas on the list!

quick update

I got my laptop back and all is well.

(But I'm vowing, yet again, to be more diligent about backing up...)

there's lots to say

about the Harry Potter books, and other things as well, but I've got a paper to write and enough else on my plate that I need to take a brief blog break. Back when I've made some progress--or when I'm so stuck that only thinking about something else will unstick me.

(Becca says people always post a lot right after they say they won't...we'll see. She's certainly been the exception to that rule.)

Missing out

I love libraries. I spent my childhood hanging out in them, and even had a paying job in the library in college. Then my first job out of college--first real job, anyway--was with a company that did library automation, back in the day before everyone had a pc on his/her desk and the internet was everywhere. In fact it was (believe it or not) before the internet. Anyway, libraries and I, we go way back.

The American Library Association annual conference is absolutely the place to be this weekend. All the cool kids are going to be there.* And how great is that?

I was going to be there, too. But, alas, not this time. Our car is acting up, and we have houseguests on the way, and we're just back from a trip, and it just can't happen this time. So the coolness will have to go on without me. Maybe another time.

*Note: I am sure many more cool kids will be there than those I linked to, but those are on my feedreader so I know about them.

copyright and fair use

What would I do without child_lit? This morning this gem came through the listserv; enjoy!

BEGIN AGAIN

I know, I'm supposed to be posting my thoughts on Knitting (the novel, not the craft) and I will, but not today.

For some years now I've had a mild preference for a particular restroom stall in my building. It began when some graffiti appeared: "Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. --William James"

OK, that's just some awesome graffiti. (And, yes, it's quite obvious to those of us in the building whose class she was taking at the time. Not mine.)

Then there was more. I tried to write them all down once, but I know I didn't get them all. There was "it's a wonder I can think @ all," which I quite liked, and "education is what remains when what was learned has been forgotten," which I believe was attributed to Twain on the stall wall, though google suggests maybe Einstein. There was also, "'College is an organized waste of time'--my dad," which amused me. There was a Leonard Cohen quotation on the door: "there is a crack, a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in" (attributed properly). There was, I think, something attributed to Will Durant. And, most recently, there was a line that seemed Dirty Harry-esque to me, but turns out to be from A Clockwork Orange: "what's it going to be then, eh?"

Well, you know where this is going. Over spring break the restroom was repainted, and the graffiti wiped out. I was sad about this, having neglected to write them all down.

But today, in sharpie, all caps:

BEGIN AGAIN

Umm, what??

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have expressed interest in Wuthering Heights have also ordered Thunderbolt P-47s Over Europe Deluxe Edition on DVD. For this reason, you might like to know that Thunderbolt P-47s Over Europe Deluxe Edition is now available on DVD.


(OK, this makes a little bit of sense out of it. But only a little:
Filmed in Technicolor, Thunderbolt was the last of Major William Wyler's wartime directorial efforts on behalf of the US Army Air Corps. As in his previous WW2 documentaries, Wyler himself participated in the mission that he depicts herein on film... Adding poignancy to the film is the knowledge that several of the extremely young American participants, here shown smiling and waving at the camera, did not survive the battle. --Hal Erickson, New York Times)

Fear of Failure

I broke two boards in my tae kwon do test yesterday (green belt!): one with the palm of my hand, another with my elbow. I didn't expect to break them. I knew I could break one with a kick--my legs are pretty strong--but I didn't think my upper body strength could match that.

I also thought that, because I didn't think I could break a board, I wouldn't be able to. Self-fulfilling prophecy and all. But in fact it was easy; I broke each one on the first try.

I think the reason it worked had almost nothing to do with strength, and nothing at all to do with confidence. I broke them because I wasn't afraid of failing to break them.

I'm not afraid of failing at tae kwon do. This is a new experience for me. I like to do things well, and I mostly don't do stuff that I don't do well, or at least well enough for my standards (they are lower in many things--say, cleaning?--than others). I know what it is to fear failure, in other words. But I practice tae kwon do because it's fun, it's good exercise, and it's a way of doing something with Nick, and I don't worry a whole lot about being really good. The teacher is very kind, and he makes it easy not to worry about failing, too--although he corrects me (often!), he does so after praising me, after telling me what I did right. I messed up my patterns (memorized sequences of movements) in my test yesterday, adding extraneous moves to even the most basic one, stalling for a moment in both of the others--and he just had me do them again. Calmly, easily. And I did them fine the second time, and then I broke the boards. No sweat.

The flip side of my success yesterday is another experience, though. I've been grading papers this past week. I have good students this semester, for the most part: they have taken English classes before, they like to read, they contribute well to discussion. And many of their papers were really quite good. The ones that weren't, though, seemed to suffer not from an inability to read the poems, or to analyze them, but from a fear of getting something wrong. They were too cautious, too plodding, too slow; they said little that was right, for fear of saying something that was wrong. They spent four sentences where one would do, trying to "prove" an idea that was apparent at first glance. They made obvious (and, mostly, perfectly accurate) points, but didn't take any chances, go out on any limbs, to make more interesting claims, to push their arguments a little further.*

These aren't bad students, as I said. But their caution weakens their writing.

So, a paradox: I succeed by not fearing failure; they fail to succeed (by their terms--we're talking B- and C+ papers here, mostly) by fearing to fail. They wouldn't say they fear failure, of course, so much as they desire success. But the paradox is clear, at least to me: the desire to avoid failure prevents success. They need to be able to take a risk, to flirt with failure, in order to achieve.

How can I get them not to fear failure, though? Nothing's riding on my tae kwon do class, after all; if I don't progress, it's my problem and my problem alone. If they fail English (or even get a B, some of them), they stay in school longer, or don't get into grad school, or disappoint their parents, or don't get the job they want...etc. It's hard to convince them that it's worth taking a risk when they think the stakes are so high--and when, to be honest, they don't really know how to take those risks.

I've got my work cut out for me.



*One of the poems they could write about was Browning's "Andrea del Sarto," which is all about this. In class, almost no one got that the poem's subtitle--"called, the faultless painter"--represents a criticism, not a compliment. Andrea is good at what he does, but he doesn't try to do anything harder or more interesting; he knows that's not quite enough, but he's afraid to take risks, and that makes him "faultless" but not, as he recognizes, great. The essays about this poem were particularly weak, now that I think about it. Hmm.

Happy Birthday, Cat in the Hat

We're long past the Dr. Seuss years, but I think I can still recite several of his books from memory. We read them that often, and they're really that good.

And now, if you wish the Cat a happy birthday, Random House will send a free book to First Book, a literacy organization. Go do it!

introducing the book

(Thanks, Mom! And Judy!)

just because

The Neil Gaiman hair interview.

public and private losses

I'm thinking a little about how we memorialize public figures--and private losses--these days, having spent last week teaching Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H.. Ericka Lutz navigated that public/private divide beautifully in her column about her grandmother, Tillie Olsen (also memorialized as a more public figure on the LiteraryMama blog, by Marjorie Osterhout). Would Tennyson have used pictures, if he'd been writing for Hallam today? I think he might have blogged, publishing fragments of his mourning at a time, though perhaps not. [edited to add: or maybe a hypertext?] It took him 17 years to write In Memoriam; a young man when he died, Hallam would have been 40 by the time Tennyson published his elegy. Would it have had more impact in fragments, in pieces as they came out, or less? Did Tennyson share them along the way, getting comments from family and friends? The poem reads as if he did, as if he were responding to his critics when he incorporates their voices, like comments: "He loves to make parade of pain,/That with his piping he may gain/The praise that comes with constancy.'"

Tennyson lets the comments stand, but finally moves beyond private grief to public accountability and hope: "Ring out a slowly dying cause,/And ancient forms of party strife...Ring out false pride in place and blood,The civic slander and the spite;/Ring in the love of truth and right,/Ring in the common love of good."

We're not there yet, over 150 years later. But those words are just as good a memorial to Molly Ivins as any, I think.