Feeling Honored

Oh my! I just found out I am quoted on the Scholars' website. I don't think there is any higher honor that I could feel at this moment.

"...it wasn't until exploring the "rise and fall" of English in my graduate school department that I realized how vital an education I received at Scholars'. Scholars' overall approach to the Text and Traditions program is actually amazing. My experience in T and T was one that placed emphasis on all disciplines and did not curtail any particular agenda. Likewise, by dividing class into lecture and seminar, having a Fulbright Scholar in T and T to cover art in the Ancient World, and a push for intense research in the final sections of the class, T and T truly did prepare me for graduate school and my goal in exploring textuality as it is conceived in the 20th century. The unique system of voting on classes and controlling the variety of electives that one takes is almost unheard of in other institutions. To be able to tell a professor that you are interested in the connection between psychoanalysis and 20th century feminist fiction and see both a classroom and intensive academic research and theoretical training come out of it is something that none of my graduate classmates are able to claim that they have experienced. Scholars' is great place, a sacred place for the communion between mind and knowledge and between experience and thought. Without my time at Scholars' I would not have been prepared for graduate school. Without Scholars' I would not have been prepared for life."

M. Griffin

University of Tulsa
Master's Candidate

I don't think words could express how extremely proud I am in this moment. Those of you that were there will remember the day I broke down crying when a certain director-who-shall-remain-nameless told me that this director would prefer for me not to participate in the Scholars' Day functions. I promptly attempted to embarrass Scholars' by wearing my pajamas for a mock T and T class. Well, I guess the joke was on me because no one really noticed.

I am happy to see what has been going on with Scholars'. It is so good that Davina has been hired because having a stable director is really beneficial for the college. It's also great that programs are expanding, funding is being put in somewhat decent places, and people seem to be staying in Scholars' rather than transferring out. (Retention was a huge problem the years I was there. My class started in the 50s and ended up with 12.) I may have had problems with certain administrations both past and present, but I really do stand by what I said above and by so much more. Scholars' truly was this magical place for me, and I hope to return in an official capacity one day.

Tagging, But Not the Kind You Think

One of my grad school friends tagged me on her blog, Nothing Elegant. I hardly ever see her anymore so I figured I would do this as a way of playing catch-up with her. I decided not to delete a question.



Step 1: respond and rework—answer the questions on your own blog, replace one question that you dislike with a question of your own invention, add one more question of your own. Step 2: tag—eight other un-tagged people.



1) What are you wearing right now? Long johns, boxers, black pants, undershirt, t-shirt, flannel button-up.



2) What's the last thing I read/ are currentlyreading? Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and Genre by John Frow. I am about to start A Room with a View by E. M. Forster and Beloved by Toni Morrison.



3) Do you nap a lot? Of course, I am grad school. I just told a co-worker that I slept from 3-10 to Tuesday. Quite random. But that might not qualify as a nap. I do usually nap at least twice a week though.



4) Who was the last person you hugged? My dear friend Beamish. And maybe hugged through my words, my boss Hall.



5) What's your current obsession/addiction? TV, as usual. Expect a blog entry in the coming weeks on my new found show, Upstairs, Downstairs.



6) What was the last thing you said out loud? "Yeah. No. I don't think so." (My boss just told me I should text this guy to see about a date for Valentine's Day.)



7) What websites do you always visit when you go online? E-mail, EW.com, tvguide.com, abc. com/cw.com (to catch up on missed shows), Current Sauce webpage (my undergrad newspaper), NY Times Book section, facebook...



8) What was the last item you bought? A subway sandwich.



9) What is your most challenging goal? To get healthier and lose weight.



10) If you could have a house totally paid for, fully furnished- anywhere in the world, where would it be? Southwest or Northeast England.



11) Favorite Vacation spot? D. C., New Orleans, or London.



12) Say something to the person who tagged you: T, I feel like we never see each other. I totally planned on getting together for lunch last semester, but I just never got around to it. I kinda got swamped towards the end because the paper for Laird's Directed Study was due the week after the break, and then, things just got out of hand. I would like to know how things are going with you though. Maybe soon karma will bring us together--kinda like this post.



13) Name one thing you just can't resist no matter how bad it is for you: food.



14) You are on the Oregon Trail. How are things going? I am probably not doing to well since I am not that fond of camping, and I've also never played that game in school.



15) If you woke up tomorrow and were a boy, what is the first thing you would do and why? I wouldn't really freak out because I'm a boy already. Hehe.



16) Name one thing you can not live with out: I'm not sure. I would like to be sarcastic and say something like oxygen. I've been thinking a lot about this though, and I kinda think that I could probably renounce quite a bit of things.



17) Has a celebrity's haircut ever influence you on your own hairstyle? Maybe, but not one that would be worth noting, I'm sure.



18) What is your favorite characteristic or quality about yourself [not appearance-related]: ??? Um, I think I can be quite clever. I like to make people laugh. But I also like to have great conversations, too. So, I would lean more towards my speaking skills.



19) What brought you to blogland? I've always been a very unsuccessful journal writer. Blogging just sort of interests me. You can be/write what you want. And I thought it would be an interesting way to act out Laminations of my own. Byatt is my favorite author. (I kind of envision Frederica working for the Huffington Post if she were a real person.)



20) New Question: What attracts you most to another person? Their intellect and usually their appearance.



21) New Question II: If you had to choose between a goose who laid golden eggs for Easter or fizzy lifting drink, what would you choose? The goose. (I want it now!)

Queen Anne's Lace

I just finished reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson for Dr. Taylor's class that meets in like two hours. Throughout the book, the narrator, Ruth, mentions walking through the town and seeing this particular flower, Queen Anne's Lace. I am not all that hip as to what certain flowers look like, but I do remember this particular name because of a reading in my Survey of American Lit II reading. We covered William Carlos Williams that semester, and I distinctly remember reading this poem and want to talk about it. We never got around to thought because every liked the one about ice cream and we had to cover the "13 ways of looking at a blackbird" a poem by Stevens that we had read that day.
QUEEN ANNE'S LACE
Her body is not so white as

anemone petals nor so smooth--

so remote a thing. It is a field

of wild carrot taking

the field by force; the grass
does not raise above it.

Here is no question of whiteness,

white as can be, with a purple mole

at the center of each flower.

Each flower is a hand's span

of her whiteness. Wherever

his hand has lain there is

a tiny purple blemish. Each part

is a blossom under his touch

to which the fibres of her being

stem one by one, each to its end,

until the whole field is a

white desire, empty, a single stem,

a cluster, flower by flower,

a pious wish to whiteness gone over--

or nothing.

--
Flowers and sex. I found this incredibly awesome quote about the poem, "Williams shows us how the stem splits into a cluster of stems radiating upward, each supporting a white flowerette which, edging the others, composes the flower's lacy head. When Williams personifies the plant, his rhetoric carefully preserves its unique structure. The sun becomes an ardent male who creates a lover for himself touch by touch [...]" (from "Some Versions of Modernist Pastoral: Williams and the Precisionists." Contemporary Literature 21:3 (1980), 383-406.) My notes certainly reflect this pull of reading the poetry sexually. I annotated lines: "he touches and creates" and the label "sexual" remains above the poem. But there is also some sort of tint in the poem upon rereading of contamination and destruction from "his" touch as well. What is this purple blemish but a bruise that man creates when he touches flowers, alters their shape.

Flowers seem to attract sex poetry, or is it the other way around? By that way, is it me or is this blog becoming like a flower poem blog. Haha. Well maybe this is be the last one for a while. Although, Lawrence's poem, "Snap Dragon" is pretty awesome, and I am sure my boss would get a great big kick out of a blog about the saxifrage. Oh! Mighty Saxifrage!

Old Notes

I was going through some old notes for Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook when I came across this recycled phrase on my notepad that never found its way into my paper: “Why can’t we say something like this—we are people, because of the accident of how we were situated in history, who were so powerfully part—but only in our imaginations, and that’s the point—with the great dream, that now we have to admit that the great dream has faded and the truth is something else—that we’ll never be any use” (51). This line comes from Anna who is debating with Molly over issues such as gender equality and the fall of the Communist Party in the late 1950s. The book, of course, deals heavily with these issues, and yet, so many of its queries and commentary on 1950s British society could apply to so many other countries and times. How effective is a philosophy like socialism when it counteracts its positive impact by its very underpinnings and workings? This is something Anna has to come to terms with throughout novel as she evaluates how effective her work has been for the CP.

I like this quote a lot though, even though it never found its way into my paper. I guess one reason why was because this quote didn't really impact the second-wave feminist reading of the text that I was going for. However, I think one reason I copied it out was because I was reading this novel during the election season last year. I always think about my own reason for existence and the effective-ness my life has had on people around me. And it seems that at least in this renunciation made by Anna to Molly that they both have to admit their own redundancy, something that people struggle with all that time I think. How much of our life is accident or chance and how much "written"/fated? And is that what truly distinguishes humans from so many other species and even intra-species--that we are nothing more than accidents who think more of themselves. Just some thoughts to ponder...

Movie of the Month: Revolutionary Road

Please let this be fair warning, but if you didn't see Revolutionary Road, you may not want to read the rest of this blog entry. There is a part of me that does not want to share any of this information with someone who hasn't seen the film and there is this other part of me that feels like I need to be like a newsie on the street corner begging people to see this film. Needless to say, if you haven't seen this great movie yet, you need to. In fact, you need to go as soon as possible because I don't know how much longer it will be at the theatres, and you should see it before the Oscars so that you might have a good vantage in judging it in comparison to other films. Also, as just a side note, I think I might start this new "Movie of the Month" entry post. So, Revolutionary Road will be my selection for the month of January, consider this post two days late.

The films stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as Frank and April Wheeler, two people disillusioned and maybe reillusioned by 1950s American culture. Plot-wise, the film follows Frank to his city job where he feels like nothing but a machine in a cog, while April remains at home in the suburbs as nothing more than a copy of those around her. Both are jaded by their intellectual understanding of what it means to fit in. One of the lines in the movie suggests that once thought they were above it all, but as April soon realizes, they are not above anything--that they are nothing but copies/machines, things that they hated before moving to suburbia. Of course, the film contains a number of other sub characters, but perhaps the one worth mentioning would be Frank and April's realtor's son, a former mathematics PhD who has been previously committed in a mental home/insane asylum. While seemingly "abnormal," this character, whose names escapes me, acts as the Shakespearean "fool" who contains all of the knowledge, who attempts to inform the Wheelers of the full impact of their decisions, and in fact, seems to be the only one that can understand them and their lives.

Non-plot wise, what I found interesting was the film's indictment/assessment/evaluation of American suburbia. I was able to do a minimal bit of research about the film and the book in which the film is based off of. The film seems to take on not only problems about life outside of the city, but also issues of gender, sanity, economics, sexuality, and parenthood. What does it mean to have children? What causes someone to fall out of love? How much danger is involved in having an abortion? Why do men's desires take precedence over women's in relationships? All interesting questions. All questions tackled with in the film.

Now, the little bit about the film that I truly want to talk about is the ending, which, of course, I know have to give a spoiler warning about. [So don't read on if you don't want to know what happens.] The "climax" of the film seems to be when April gives herself an abortion, post-12 weeks, which the film has repeatedly claimed is dangerous to do after 12 weeks. When April does give herself an abortion, she walks downstairs and stands in the open window way--what we see is Revolutionary Road, we see the street they live on, the world they inhabit. She stands there as if claiming, "Look at what you have done to me. Look what you made me do." As she remains there, the camera shows blood spots on her dress and a pool of blood forming below her. As the point, the viewer sort of realizes that things aren't going all that well. She runs to the phone, calls for help....next thing, Frank is in the hospital telling his neighbor that she waited to long to get to the hospital. I think this is the crux of the film, and for me, something I really want to debate with people. Is she just giving herself an abortion because that is what she wants to do, or is she committing suicide? There are so many signs that suggest the latter. Perhaps that was the only way out of escaping suburbia.

For me the scene echoed a number of instances in Byatt's Babel Tower when Daniel gets calls at the hotline from mothers who abandoned their children, wandering about England and wondering if it was the right thing to do. They were so illusioned as to what life was supposed to be like, what women's roles where supposed to be. This film just made me think about this more and more. Is the only way to escape something is complete abandonment? But it also made me re-evaluate my own desires and my own wants/needs. This is a question that I have continually asked myself, again and again, and I am sure it is a question that I will continue to grapple with more and more in the coming years as I mature into adulthood.

Go out and see Revolutionary Road. Hopefully you will think it is a great film! And if you enjoy it, hopefully you also cried because of how sad it was.

Winter Woes

So, it is official. I have literally not left my apartment or showered since Sunday night so about 60ish hours, give or take. This winter weather has got me all. Well, technically, I feel like I haven't really done much of anything since last Thursday. Besides a meeting I had on Friday, and an awful attempt at jogging with Hall on Saturday and viewing Big Love on Sunday at J's, I haven't done anything of much consequence, as I told a friend of mine over the phone. I guess I never realized how important getting out of your apartment can be. Besides all of that complaining, I have been rather productive. I read The Real Charlotte by Sommerville and Ross (it is like a fin-de-siecle Jane Austen novel), Dusty Answers by Rosamund Lehmann, and The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble. The latter two were for thesis research, and I found them slightly less than entertaining. I really plan on giving Drabble another chance. I plan on reading The Needle's Eye sometime soon for thesis research, as well as a book by Iris Murdoch and one by Muriel Spark.

I have also been feeling very, very nostalgic lately. I know I told a couple of you this, but they recently tore down my old dorm, Boozman Hall. It brought up a bunch of memories, and I have been haunting the alumni page on Facebook and such. I posted some photos and wrote a little snippet about my time there. My mom and I have dreams of me returning to teach there one day and settling on the lake. It was just such a good place for me. I really loved my time there. All of this winter weather has me thinking about how much I would have loved to have been in my old house, snowed in for three days, enjoying time with my old roommates. It is kinda lonely living alone, and I guess it stands out so much more for me now that I haven't been out and have no one to spend those weird times together. Like that last hour right before you go to sleep or the early morning stumble from the bathroom to the kitchen. No one to gripe with between classes and no one sneaking into my room for a late night talk.

I can't even really bring myself to finish this post, nor do I even know why I am posting something like this. I haven't really posted something this personal before. I guess I was just feeling like sharing.

Heterosexist Volkswagens?

I was watching TV the other day (big surprise, I know) and one of the commercials grabbed my attention because Robert Gant from Queer as Folk was in this new Volkswagen commercial. I tried to find a copy of it but was unable to. The ad is quite clever and features him and a girl riding in a car, with Gant saying something clever like, "I think we are in a car commercial." Basically, what is implied in the ad is that Gant and this female are a couple. This kinda bothered me (personally) a little bit because Gant is an out and proud homosexual actor. Now, I don't think this means that he should only play gay roles, but when you pair this with the infamous Brooke Shields's Routan commercials, I was struck by this trend of heterosexism in the Volkswagen commercials.



Now, if you watch the Routan documentary in its entirety, you do see two women together handling a baby. Does this mean that they are a couple? Well, two women with a baby is striking different from the male-female couples that are seen holding a newborn and shopping at the car lot. Besides this one potential lesbian couple, every couple featured that is producing children for this Routan is a heterosexual couple. I was just struck by the absences of gay parents in this ad. I thought that we, as a society, were growing up, but I guess not everyone is okay with same-sex parenting. And by the way, why are people more willing to accept a lesbian couple having children but not a gay male couple having children. Just some food for thought. (Thanks, YouTube, for the video.)

Gloire de Dijon

I thought a long time ago, "I hate roses." I was never really a big fan of them, and of course, through my study of symbolism, several friends and I used to laugh about how giving roses to someone was like giving someone sex organs. It was funny when I first thought about it, but since then, I have just sort of not liked roses because they seemed to be so overdone, everywhere and meaningless. "A rose is a rose is a rose." And yet, with all of my reading of Yeats and Lawrence this past week, I have discovered that I may like one rather specific rose, the gloire de dijon.I was reading this poem by Lawrence entitled "Gloire de Dijon." I realized that he was talking about a flower, but I did not know what find. Early, having looked up images of honeysuckle and snap-dragons, I decided to go ahead and find out more information about this particular flower, which is from the rose family. It would seem that I can now say that I like roses, at least this particular one. I think its combination of pink and orange is very pretty.

Here is Lawrence's poem:

"GLOIRE DE DIJON"

When she rises in the morning
I linger to watch her;
She spread the bath-cloth underneath the window
And the sunbeams catch her
Glistening white on the shoulders,
While down her sides the mellow
Golden shadow glows as
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts
Sway like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.

She drips herself with water, and her shoulders
Glisten as silver, they crumple up
Like wet and falling roses, and I listen
For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals.
In the window full of sunlight
Concentrates her golden shadow
Fold on fold, until it glows as
Mellow as the glory roses.

Lawrence's poem is part of his collection, Look! We Have Come Through!, which was written during his early affair with Frieda and their trip to the continent prior to World War I. It is also part of a larger rose sequence of poems, which may offer more contexts if you are interested in reading more.

Lawrence, D. H. "Gloire de Dijon." Complete Poems. New York: Penguin Books, 1971. 217.

What will we be known as? Or using office hours productively!

I just had one of the most fascinating conversations about postmodern theory with the most unlikely of people--my favorite librarian who specializes in government and military history. I stopped by to inquire about getting my old summer job again. Then, one thing led to another, I was already late for my office hours, and I decided to stay and continue talking to her about this most interesting topic we arrived at. After the witty banter and catch-up, she sort of posed this odd question that took me a while to answer: "In the future what age will the 20th century be known as?" I was kinda stuck on the answer. She continued with some great speculation and started to explain her reasoning. She mentioned how in all the centuries before use there were some many adjectives and qualifiers to describe the time: Augustan, Victorian, Renaissance, Neolithic Era, etc. And then she got to the point of mentioning the reason, which was she never understood why we ("English majors") came up with postmodernism. Why not just have a new word altogether. Of course, I then got onto my spiel about Grand Narratives, explained some stuff about capitol letters and lower case letters. Ultimately, she stumped me yet again with semantics that I had not really put together.

"It would seem that every age or time period were modern if you in it in the present moment so using modernism as a designations seems strange."

Of course, I started to draw on some pop culture references and mention words like technological age or post-industrial as a good qualifier. And yet, at the same time were seemed not necessarily to really be talking time periods but rather about the concept of experience. (One of my newly discovered favorite imaginative and intellectual wandering topics.) She posed a rather great question that made us both laugh, "How do I know my desk is in my office if I am not in there?" I immediately thought of Toy Story having just mentioned it was one of the few VHSs that I have left. And yet it so true. And all this ultimately got me to think about last night's Contemporary American Lit course and our discussion of Adrienne Rich's "Diving Into the Wreck."

I was so completely ready to call the book of myths patriarchy. Patriarchy is fueled off of adventure and exploration; it is how a man is made. And patriarchy is where the name of woman does not exist. For the name of woman cannot exist in patriarchy, for in patriarchy man creates the name of woman. Man names. Woman is named. I was working up this great speech that I left undelivered for class about how the book of myths feature women merely as props for male fantasies and how myths are romantic and adventurous and, yet, woman becomes nothing more than a prop or creation of man within them. And how, of course, Rich would want to associate myth with patriarchy because she wants to unmask the myths that patriarchy has, have, and will continue to perpetuate within society.

That is why the experience of Rich and the experience of reading her poetry is so interesting and fascinating. Of course, everything will be modern for someone in the present moment, just how every person can only see through there own eyes and there own experiences. Azar Nafisi said that it is when we accept difference and attempt to embody difference--to immerse ourselves in the lives of the Other--do we truly appreciate and understand our own culture. We know ourselves much more than we let on, and it is only through an understanding of others--walking in someone else's shoes--that we can truly learn or experience something unique.

Writing / Blog Discovery

I found this really awesome blog that I wanted to share with everyone. It is called "The One-Minute Writer." (http://oneminutewriter.blogspot.com/2009/01/todays-writing-prompt-time.html) I thought it was quite serendipitous that today's entry was "Teach: What information would you like to teach to others?"

Here is my 60 second writing:

I think it is interesting that the one thing that Beamish wished for was world peace. How can you teach world peace? It seems that so many people like to teach hatred and live by fear that to teach others to love one another. And yet, as I write that last sentence, I already know examples that contradict that and know people who want to love and to create love. To change the world and teach others to live not in fear but rather in

--

So that was about how far I got with just 60 seconds. This blog seems like a really great thing for those of us that do teach writing to use as an activity in class. To get students to think about writing. I can already see from what I wrote that I did not even necessarily write about my ideas. But the restriction of just having 60 seconds to write makes me want to write more. Perhaps five is more reasonable, but I have always found that with the free-writing exercise things go too far astray.

I hope others enjoy this blog and maybe even use it.

Also, I think it would be cool to know how some of you would answer this questions, too? What would you want to teach others? I immediately wrote about what Beamish wished for, but I guess I wouldn't even really want to teach people that. It is was just what was on my mine. I guess what I would teach is a motto I drilled into my 3 year old cousin several years ago, "Difference is good."