This post at Laurie's combined with my penchant for 80s young adult fiction got me thinking...what with all the vintage-mania going on, t-shirts with images of Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield like this:

Because you were probably wondering what it is I do when I piddle around the apartment.

Cooking: Lately I've been into steaming vegetables; usually I sauté them, but then I remembered I have a steaming basket and thought, oh yeah, there's another way to cook vegetables. Last night I steamed spinach and cherry tomatoes, then doused them with some balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Yum. Then tonight I steamed some broccoli to accompany my pork chops. Also, I've discovered that a banana covered in provençal fig jam is a delicious snack; I think I'll have one while I watch The Apprentice.

Knitting: I'm working on five projects right now, including a baby blanket in primary colors, a cushion in hot pink acrylic/wool blend yarn, K2 P2 rib, an forest green oven mitt which I'll be felting, a red and orange merino wool Windy City scarf with matching hat, and a purse I'm quite excited about. I was trying to figure out what to do with that ballet yarn, and then the other day I was going through my sock drawer getting rid of those threadbare-at-the-heels socks. Remember those trenchcoat-length cardigan sweaters that were in style a few years ago? The sash from one of those was in the drawer, and I was going to throw it away but thought, wait, I could probably use this thing in a knitting project. I think it looks nice with the ballet yarn:

So it's going to be the purse strap.

Via Crooked Timber, an article in today's Guardian about academic blogging: It's basically an explication of the academic blogging phenomenon, but Jim McClellan also addresses the concern of some academics that others might steal their ideas. :evil: :P Sorry, I tend to get a little flippant in the face of this postulate because Torill and Jill debunked it years ago:

The current reward system depends on certain formulas of academic
publishing that encourage exclusivity and the fear of being robbed of
thoughts and ideas. Since the real currency in the trade of academia is
originality of thought and imaginative development of theories, there is
more to lose than to gain in exposing your own ideas too early. The
danger of having thoughts, ideas or questions copied before they have
been published is not just a matter of some petty game between jealous
professors with too little time on their hands, it's a very real matter of
being robbed of the currency which measures academic success.

From this point of view a weblog that reveals the thoughts, arguments
and questions of the scholar continuously during the process of
research and long before academically accepted publication in print
seems like a waste of perfectly good imagination and theory development, an invitation to having your ideas looted. On the other hand,
published and archived in the World Wide Web, the same ideas and
thoughts are in fact published and as such better protected than if they were
for instance given away over a cup of coffee, randomly at a conference.

Into the Blogosphere gets a mention, which I'm happy about; we (the editors) were interviewed for this story a while back, but McClellan didn't end up using any of the interview. He took the story in a different direction, and that's cool, I'm not complaining. I do want to try to find the interview, which is floating around on my hard drive or one of my flash drives somewhere, and post it here for those who might be interested.

The folks over at BROG (Blog Research on Genre) have a new essay out that I've been meaning to post about for a few days now called "Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis 'From the Bottom Up.'" The abstract:

The "blogosphere" has been claimed to be a densely interconnected
conversation, with bloggers linking to other
bloggers, referring to them in their entries, and posting
comments on each other's blogs. Most such characterizations
have privileged a subset of popular blogs, known as
the 'A-list.' This study empirically investigates the extent
to which, and in what patterns, blogs are interconnected,
taking as its point of departure randomly-selected blogs.
Quantitative social network analysis, visualization of link
patterns, and qualitative analysis of references and
comments in pairs of reciprocally-linked blogs show that
A-list blogs are overrepresented and central in the
network, although other groupings of blogs are more
densely interconnected. At the same time, a majority of
blogs link sparsely or not at all to other blogs in the sample,
suggesting that the blogosphere is partially interconnected
and sporadically conversational.

And research questions:

1) How interlinked is the blogosphere from the perspective
of a random blog?

1a) Which blogs are central?

1b) Which blogs are more interconnected? Are
there cliques?

1c) Is the blogosphere a "small world"?

2) Do other types of "conversation" take place between
linked blogs, and if so, to what extent?

To put it another way (if I understand them correctly) could any random blog on Blogger (nice that they've turned the whole system into one big blog ring instead of putting those ads at the top) potentially lead to this blog right here, given many degrees of separation, of course? Worth a look.

Today I bought a toning band and some ankle weights, because, you know, it's not like I have enough exercise equipment or anything. I'd been playing around with the band for a little while, doing thigh abductors and other moves, and I eventually held it like this. All of a sudden I was overcome with the desire to shoot a bow and arrow. I used to go to a month-long summer camp when I was a child, and that's where I was first introduced to archery (how I loved that place...I have to go back there someday and just walk around and take it all in). I fell in love with it and have enjoyed it ever since, when I've had the opportunity to do it. I wonder if there are any places here in the Twin Cities where I could practice archery without the expectation that I'll become all hardcore about it, hunting animals and entering competitions and such?

UPDATE: Here I am in my cabin at Camp DeSoto; this was taken my second summer there. I'll bet I had just left archery class, which explains the grin:

The girls were organized into tribes, and each tribe wore t-shirts in specific colors: green for Chickasaw, blue for Creek, and red for Cherokee. I, obviously, was a Cherokee.

What book(s) would you write if you weren't so busy doing your scholarship, teaching, and the 150 million other things you have to do every day? Here's one I've been turning over in my mind for about three years now. Maybe someone else will write it; I hope so. This requires some background, so bear with me.

In a couple of weeks, I will be thirty years old. :O I grew up in the 70s and 80s and, because I have excellent parents who read to me for as long as I wanted them to, every single day, running their index fingers along the words as they spoke them,

(not like that LeapFrog "magic wand" that the kids can use to point to a word and hear a recorded voice speak it -- every time I see those LeapPads in the toy aisles of Target or Wal-Mart, I get depressed...it doesn't compare to the intellectual stimulation of having a human being point to the word and say it to the child. I know it's so hard to find the time to read to children as much as both parents and children want, and I don't intend to make any parents feel bad; I only want to point out that I was very lucky to have enormous amounts of time -- and money, what with all the book clubs my parents joined: it seemed that every day, new books arrived in the mail -- invested in my development)

I learned to read before I turned three. After that, my parents had to pull the books out of my hands when they wanted me to pay attention to some non-book-related thing. "Stop reading and eat," they'd scold. I far preferred books to toys, and I read everything. Now, when I bring up childhood reading experiences with women my age, we talk about characters in those 70s and 80s books, like Nancy Drew, Bess, George, Elizabeth Wakefield, Jessica Wakefield, Lila Fowler, Enid Rollins, Bruce Patman, Todd Wilkins, Ramona Quimby, Beezus Quimby, Laura Ingalls Wilder and her sisters Mary and Carrie, Caitlin Ryan, the Girls of Canby Hall, Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace of A Wrinkle in Time, Ned of Jelly Belly, Tony of Then Again, Maybe I Won't, Linda Fischer of Blubber, and Margaret of Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, as though they were old friends. We felt these characters, knew them intimately. They inspired us. We looked at how they handled the situations we found ourselves in, listened to their interpretations of such experiences as first kisses, menarche, getting bullied or standing there doing nothing when someone we liked was getting bullied because we were too afraid to take up for our friend, and we knew we weren't alone in our self-doubt and awkwardness. When I say "we," of course, I mean white, middle-class girls; it speaks volumes that the only book I remember reading about a working-class African-American family was Striped Ice Cream.

I'd love to interview a bunch of women of all races and classes, to record their memories of these characters and what kinds of effects (constructive? alienating?) they had on these women, and then write a book about to what extent and how these books have shaped femininity in my generation.

Via What It Is Today, a mosaic of the soldiers who have been killed in Iraq. I might bring it into class when we talk about visual arguments. It's a provocative image, raising such obvious questions as: Is it too simplistic? Is it exploitative? Is it ethical to use all of these soldiers' faces? Many of them were likely earnest supporters of the war. What questions at issue and arguments does it raise about why we're at war?

Edited to move image to the "read more" area.

Any ideas on what I can do with this yarn? It's all merino wool except the two skeins on the right, which are ballet yarn. I've earmarked the red merino wool (I have more of it than what's pictured here) for a scarf and hat set...for myself! I never knit anything for myself, but that's all about to change. This isn't my whole stash of yarn, by the way; I have much more. :) Right now, I'm working on three projects: a baby blanket, the red hat/scarf set, and my first-ever felting project, a big oven mitt, made out of forest green wool yarn.