Just As Long As He Doesn't Cast Any Spells on Me

The Nerd talks in his sleep. Most of the time, if I hear him, it's because he's woken me up by talking and I don't really catch what he's said. Sometimes, however, I get a glimpse into his subconscious. Recently, what his subconscious is telling me is "Help, help! I'm playing too much Skyrim!"

Case in point: Last night, Nova was crying because he wanted to be let back up on the bed. Why the dog asks permission at night, when we're trying to sleep, and not any other time is beyond me, but whatever. His crying woke me up and even though he wants permission to come on the bed, he won't accept permission from me, so I have to wake the Nerd up so he can tell Nova it's okay.

Me: Josh? Josh.
Nerd: What?
Me: Who's crying?
Nerd: She's okay.*
Me: What? No, Nova wants up.
Nerd: Whitestone and the Imperials!

This is a followup to about a week and a half ago when I tried to nudge him awake and he said, "Spells." I asked him what he was talking about and he said in a very annoyed, exasperated voice, "SPELLS!" like I was the one who wasn't getting it.

*Note: Nova is a boy dog. Alice, the girl dog, was already on the bed and looking at me like I had three heads for being awake.

Book List 2011

1. Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
2. Mogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw
3. Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So: A Memoir by Mark Vonnegut, M.D.
4. The Giver by Lois Lowry (rr)
5. Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry
6. Messenger by Lois Lowry
7. Mao's Last Dancer by Li Cunxin
8. War Dances by Sherman Alexie
9. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (rr)
10. Brave Story by Miyuki Miyabe
11. My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
12. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
13. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
14. Room by Emma Donoghue
15. 300 by Frank Miller
16. Return to Labyrinth, Vol. 4 by Jake T. Forbes
17. The Hard Goodbye by Frank Miller
18. The Miracle of Castel di Sangro by Joe McGinnis
19. The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova
20. A Dame to Kill For by Frank Miller
21. Infidel by Ayaan Hisi Ali
22. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
23. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
24. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
25. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
26. The Big Fat Kill by Frank Miller
27. The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer & Betrayed by Bart D. Ehrman
28. The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
29. Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon
30. Hell and Back by Frank Miller
31. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
32. Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol
33. That Yellow Bastard by Frank Miller
34. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
35. Family Values by Frank Miller
36. Booze, Broads, & Bullets by Frank Miller
37. Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank
38. A Robert Silverberg Omnibus by Robert Silverberg
39. Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris
40. Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris
41. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
42. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser
43. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
44. Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb
45. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
46. The Dark Elf Trilogy by R.A. Salvatore
47. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1 by Alan Moore
48. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
49. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 2 by Alan Moore
50. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1910 by Alan Moore
51. Hellboy: House of the Living Dead by Mike Mignola

On The Help...

This post may be a case of what-the-fuck-do-I-know fueled by this cold I have appeared to have contracted at some point (probably on an airplane) this past weekend, so I apologize if what I say offends you in any way, shape or form.

I went to see The Help over the weekend because I had enjoyed the book (by Kathryn Stockett) quite a bit. For those of you who haven't heard of it, it's...well...to me, it's really two different stories. On one hand, it's the Bildungsroman of Skeeter Phelan, a white girl who feels pressured by the mores of her class to be something she's not--a ditzy society woman whose sole purpose is to get married and pop out babies. On the other hand, it's the story of black maids in Jackson, MS in the 1960s, just at the cusp of the Civil Rights Movement. The stories intersect at a point where Skeeter enlists the help of two black maids, Aibileen and Minny, to write a book (also titled The Help) about what it's like to be a black maid in Jackson, raising white children and still being treated as less than human even a hundred years after the Civil War.

But this isn't a review of the book or the movie. This is my reaction to other people's reactions because I wonder if, as a white, middle-class woman, I just don't get it or if other people are completely missing the point.

I read this post on Feministe about it and the first thing Jill says is

Haven’t read/seen it, won’t read/see it* and was generally squicked out by the whole premise of the book to begin with — let’s tell a story that is kinda-sorta about race but more about how these nice black ladies helped white women Find Their Voice, from the perspective of white women of course — but this statement from the Association of Black Women Historians is worth a read.

So...let me get this straight. She hasn't read the book, but she feels like she's qualified to judge the content anyway. That irks me on principle. How can people expect to be taken seriously about a topic if they haven't done the prime research? I mean, I dislike the whole Twilight opus, but at least I read the first two books...but I digress. I could write a whole post on my annoyance with people who hate on certain pieces of literature without actually reading them.

Back to my point: if you notice, there's a link up there to the statement from the Association of Black Women Historians up there, and that's really what's got me wondering if I'm being insensitive or if, perhaps, they're the ones who just don't get it.

They do have a few good points such as

Set in the South, the appropriate regional accent gives way to a child-like, over-exaggerated "black" dialect. In the film, for example, the primary character, Aibileen, reassures a young white child that, "You is smat, you is kind, you is important." In the book, black women refer to the Lord as the "Law," an irreverent depiction of black vernacular.

And...uh...I guess that's really the only statement that I 100% agree with. The white women in the book aren't given accents in the book even though the chances that they had them, living in Mississippi in the 1960s, is pretty high, and I was definitely uncomfortable with the way Aibileen talked to Mae Mobley (the "young white child" referenced), but the rest of the statement makes me feel like I read a completely different book and saw a completely different movie than the ABWH read and saw.

For example, this quote from the statement:

We do not recognize the black community described in The Help where most of the black male characters are depicted as drunkards, abusive, or absent. Such distorted images are misleading and do not represent the historical realities of black masculinity and manhood.

The story was about women and their relationships to each other. To call out that black men were specifically portrayed poorly feels like looking for a reason to be angry for the sake of being angry.

Even the white men played a very small role in the movie (though slightly larger in the book). The slight subplot about Skeeter's boyfriend was underdeveloped and almost could have been done away with completely without affecting the movie in the slightest, though I imagine some purist somewhere would have cried out in horror at the thought.

But the thing that bothered me the most was the statement that

Portraying the most dangerous racists in 1960s Mississippi as a group of attractive, well dressed, society women, while ignoring the reign of terror perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, limits racial injustice to individual acts of meanness.

I don't think that Stockett is suggesting to anyone that "the most dangerous racists" were the young society women in Jackson. She was, however, pointing out that racism can be hidden where you least expect it--even the women raised by the black maids hired by their families, whose major Junior League fundraiser is for the "Poor Starving Children of Africa" can draft a "Home Help Sanitation Initiaive" encouraging people to build separate bathrooms for "the help" (because they carry different diseases than us, of course).

That kind of racism is subtle, almost casual. It's the kind of racism that causes the same person who wrote the above Initiative to tell Skeeter, when she finds a copy of the Jim Crow laws in Skeeter's bag, to be careful because there are "real racists out there." It's the kind of racism that people don't think about--whether that's "the most dangerous racism" or not, I do not pretend know.

But maybe I am missing the ABWH's point, but I'm not sure I am. What it feels like instead is that the ABWH wanted a different book and a different movie. They wanted one that took into account all the facets of racism in Mississippi in the 1960s and wrote a completely historically accurate novel, but instead they got a slice--just a piece of a certain subset of people and the racism that existed (exists?) there, but instead of seeing an opportunity to get people interested in an unexplored part of what was going on during the Civil Rights Movement, they want to focus on the story that's less palatable to them: the "coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of her own."

Which, I think, is a little short-sighted.

Chaucer Must Be Rolling in His Grave

I noticed WordPad up on my desktop just as I was considering writing a blog post, so I clicked on it to begin one without really knowing what to write about and saw a comment that I had originally posted on fark.com. As it's one of my pet peeves, I shall share it with you.

Farker #1: I have returned.
Farker #2: From wherefor?
Farker #1: That means why, so I take it you don't want me here? ;)
Farker #2: Nope. Just garbled Olde English. :D

Asdfjkl;

I'm not expecting everyone to be an expert on the evolution of the English language, however, there are a few things...like, it took me a lot of self-control to not respond to the original "wherefor" comment with "that means 'why,' not 'where,'" but I didn't because that's one of those things I couldn't keep straight for the longest time. But I take umbrage with the fact that people assume "because I don't understand it" that "it must be Old English."

This was my response:

Shakespeare wrote in modern English.

Old English (Beowulf):

HWÆT, WE GAR-DEna in geardagum,
þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!
oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas, syððanærest wearð
feasceaft funden; he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum weorðmyndum þah,
oð þæt him æghwylc ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan; þæt wæs god cyning!
Ðæm eafera wæs æfter cenned
geong in geardum, þone God sende
folce to frofre; fyrenðearfe ongeat,
þe hie ær drugon aldorlease
lange hwile; him þæs Liffrea,
wuldres Wealdend woroldare forgeaf,
Beowulf wæs breme --- blæd wide sprang---
Scyldes eafera Scedelandum in.
Swa sceal geong guma gode gewyrcean,
fromum feohgiftumon fæder bearme,

Middle English (Canterbury Tales):

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open yë,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
(And palmers for to seken straunge strondes)
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
15And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.

/pedantic Ama is pedantic

-----

And I would have gone into more detail except that it's Fark and no one really goes to Fark to be edjumacated.

Book Review or Self Criticism: You Decide

Every now and then, I wonder why I'm in grad school--mostly on rainy afternoons such as this one where I'd rather be wrapped up watching a movie than reading a chapter in my textbook entitled "Data Communications" which seeks to answer questions such as "What is a computer network?" and "What is the purpose of a firewall?"

It is with this in mind that I had the following conversation with John:

John: So...it's some ancient form of google.
Me: i guess.
John: Aw. I was hoping to get a librarian reaction. :-P
Me: fine. *smolders in library rage*
John: Oh noes! *returns books on time*
Me: which i totally did NOT do.
John: Worst. Librarian. Ever.

But that leads me to thinking...why didn't I return my last library book on time? It was Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and I waited for about a month on the waiting list to get, but only made it to page 345 in the two weeks I had it. It was technically due on Sunday, but I didn't return it until Monday to squeeze out those last few pages before giving it back.

This is very unlike me.

Usually, I get a book and I devour it or, at the very least, keep thinking about it when I'm not reading it. For instance, Midnight's Children was just so...so...so viscous that I couldn't read it straight through for very long. It was like a stream of consciousness stream of maple syrup leaking into my head and I needed to take a break to let everything coalesce into actual ideas.

Not so much with Freedom. I'd get bored, put it down, and forget about it. The only thing that got me to pick it up again was the fact that it was a library book, so I had a due date by which I had to read it. It doesn't strike me as particularly well written (not that it's poorly written) nor was the story particularly compelling (not that it's outright boring). It's just a little on the meh side of the spectrum.

I'm wondering if it's the same problem I had with The Road in that I just didn't care about the characters or like Eat Pray Love where I wasn't in the right point of my life to fully appreciate what's going on.

However, what's specifically worrisome to me about the whole thing is that this is supposed to be one of those wonderful books that everyone reads and gets on Oprah's list and that I just don't get it. That I am somehow defective despite my spending four years learning how to appreciate Literature-with-a-capital-L.

And if that is true, what the high holy heck am I doing in grad school in the first place? HOLY INTERNAL CRISIS, BATMAN.

All I know for sure is that once I'm reading these thrilling chapters of my text ("How does encryption work?" Really?), I'm going to settle down with The Hard Goodbye and wash away the bleh taste of Freedom and not worry about it for a while.