Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

Two fewer pages say ‘Coming soon …’ over on my academic website. Criticism of any egregious errors is appreciated.

At this rate, I should be done by some time in the spring semester.

Sydney

As I recall, Sydney is supposed to be the one provoking the public, whereas I was supposed to keep you posted on the goings-on of our house.  Resuming that role, we’re going to be traveling to Rhode Island tomorrow to see two of my college friends married.  I’m really excited.  For one thing, they’re the first of my set of friends to get married (thus far all of the weddings we’ve been to have been on Sydney’s side), so what with the wedding tomorrow and Heidi’s wedding coming up, I feel like we’re all growing up and moving on into new territory.  Secondly, it will be the first Jewish wedding I’ve ever been to, so I teased the bride and groom that I’ll be wanting a translator and guide.  Unfortunately, I can’t apply any of my language skills to deciphering Hebrew, and even Sydney, my usual source of help, will be just as clueless.  Greek?  Latin?  Romance language?  Germanic language?  With any of those we might get along just fine, but I’m afraid Hebrew might be beyond our collective powers.  Lastly, before I forget, both bride and groom were part of my political debate group in college, so I expect there to be something of a mini-reunion at the wedding as well.

I remember going to a Catholic wedding when I was very small; the only memory that I carry away from it is that people did a lot of standing up and sitting down, like one big wave of humanity with which Mom and I were on constant guard to keep up.  Let’s see if I get any interesting impressions from this one.

Monday is apparently not a holiday for Cornell faculty and students, so we’ll be doing some serious early-morning driving to get back in town so that Sydney and I can teach.  I realize that I have lots of holiday time the rest of the year, but not having one on Monday will put some serious pressure on us to book it home!

Erin

Here’s a NYTimes article about the increase in sex and violence in the films shown on flights:

My two favorite quotations:

“Parents have to be responsible for the actions of their kids — whether they shouldn’t look at the screen or look away.” Riiiiiiiiight. Does he realize how stupid that sounds? Has he ever seen a child? And does he realize how cramped the seating is? Those of us wanting to do something besides watch the movie have to bring our own earphones to drown out those around us, and sit curled up so that flashes of light don’t distract us every .0005 seconds.

“If we take all the good things out, there’s not going to be a lot left to play.” Well, there you have it, folks.

You know, it’s funny: I grew up in a house with lots of action-filled “guy” movies, much like the ones mentioned in the article, but I think there’s no question that the airlines are being shady. While we can all argue about what adults should or should not be seeing in movies (or whether we should be seeing movies at all), it should be pretty clear what kids should not be seeing. If there’s a kid within 10 miles of me I get extremely uncomfortable with modern media of all sorts: msn.com, movies, advertisements, television, or music. It’s amazing how they turn on your radar for inappropriateness. Which is one reason I’m wondering whether we can have utterly permissive rules for adults without much of that trickling down to our kids. Yeah, yeah, you just wait ’til I have my own: I’ll become even more fierce about stuff like that. But I’ve fielded too many questions from little ones about inappropriate things that they see in public, where I can’t protect them and surround them with kid-only things, and I work on a college campus where it’s clear that young people are going to do their best to grow up as fast as possible. If that’s the case, couldn’t we make growing up something that brings them into a good world, rather than one in which they can get drunk, get laid, and pay taxes?

Erin

I’ve been working pretty hard recently to compile a reading list in preparation for my exams in the spring.  I’ve emailed my advisor various versions of lists and spent quite a bit of time pouring over journals to see what works pop up repeatedly as influential pieces in my field.  Basically, I asked one of my professors to let me do an annotated bibliography for one section of my exam, so that I could just spend a lot of time reading and educating myself about the “Modernism” that is my area of specialty.  Thankfully, he agreed to my plan, and last night he sent me an email saying he liked my list.  I did a little victory dance in my living room, much to Sydney’s bemusement and the cat’s alarm.  So nice to have things coming together!
But now that I’m looking at it in daylight, that’s a looooot of work that I’ve just cut out for myself.  As usual, I added everything that looked interesting, and now I’m thinking that maybe it should be a life list, rather than a fall and spring reading list.  Ah, well, I still think it was a step forward!

Erin

Sometimes I wonder why I buy so many books.  I have just compiled a reading list for one of the three parts of my big exam in the spring, and I’m now trying to figure out how many/which books I’ll buy and which I’ll get from the library.  Here’s one reason why I do buy books: when I check the library catalog, some or all of the copies say, “Charged: Due–Indefinite.”  “Indefinite” is enough to send me running to find used copies online . . .

I am, however, absolutely thrilled to have a list drawn up.  I’m also making headway in another section of the exam, as I settle in with two extremely fat Virginia Woolf biographies.  One of them was written in a courtly Cambridge style that I could just read all day!

Erin

This morning on our way to school, we had to stop while 24 wild turkeys ambled across the road. Wouldn’t that be a great excuse for being late?

Closed windows, air conditioning, lengthy and funny introductions, a short story in front of us; much better.

Erin

P.S. When I explain to people that Sydney and I attend graduate school in the same school, same building, in departments that are on the same floor, they usually laugh.  Well, the joke gets better: Sydney just got assigned to an office right across the hall from mine!  Although we each share offices with something like 6-10 other people, the offices apparently have air conditioning, so we’re veeeeery happy on this hot and muggy August day.

My friend Heidi is having to pull off a wedding next May with the bridal party scattered all over the world.  As a result, she asked us to send in our measurements, and then she would send us a dress.  Sounds great, eh?  Yeah, I thought so, too.  There was something strange about this that kept nagging me, however. Finally, I realized that I haven’t heard talk about women’s measurements except for stories about the time of the World Wars, when guys would talk about getting a girl with ideal hourglass measurements and the chest-waist-hips numbers for movie stars were public knowledge (or, at least, a fictional account of them).  Now we get our dresses with meaningless numbers like “10” (even better, a “4” in one store, a “12” in another, and “S/M” in yet another) and don’t have any idea what our numbers would be if we had clothing sewn for us.  So, standing at a seamstress the other day, with yellow tape measure all over the place, I felt vintage 🙂

Erin

Teaching my first day held a few surprises.

I’m teaching in a beautiful room that reminds me of Yale: lots of windows, nice light, old-fashioned metalwork around the windowframes.  But the builders should have thought a bit more about location.  With all the windows open on a hot day, I was reluctant to close them and stuff us in for 50 minutes.  But I had to talk over the occasional roar of a truck/van/bus making it up the grade on the road that runs along the side of the building (yes, this building looks out on a well-trafficked campus road).  My throat, which has kept me coughing the last three weeks, was holding out pretty well until someone decided to mow the lawn around my room about 15 minutes before the end of class.  It would have taken all the rest of the time to close the windows (they’re little, and there are lots of them), so I just had to fight it and hope that the women of my class had wonderful focusing powers.  I was actually longing for my old teaching room: thick walls and no windows . . .

Erin

Sydney and I stopped by the garden this afternoon with the intent of looting the place.  We hauled away tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, zinnias, and a few other things, but more importantly we also hauled in 125 ears of corn.  And it’s not just any corn–it’s really, really, really good corn.  It tastes amazingly sweet and flavorful right off the cob, but, as we were surprised to discover last year, it also tastes really great after it’s been in the freezer for half a year.  If there were one place where I could tell Sydney’s gardening improved the flavors in our kitchen, corn would be it.

Feeling quite satisfied with the labour behind us and a year of sweet corn to look forward to.

Erin