And other random stuff

Books I've read so far this month: The Handmaid's Tale, To the Lighthouse, and I'm just one stationary bike ride away from finishing Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. I've also started Orlando. This reading, especially To the Lighthouse, has got me thinking a lot about the social and emotional labor women often engage in, as part of childrearing and general domestic duty -- the work Mrs. Ramsay does. I've got a lot to say about it, and that'll probably be the topic of my next post.

I loathe it when people confuse "loathe" and "loath," but I am loath to correct them when they commit the error, lest I embarrass them.

The other day I caught an episode of Hot off the Grill with Bobby Flay, and he was making Napoleons using slices of potato, goat cheese, and basil. He finished them with a basil vinaigrette. I decided to try it at home, using what I happened to have: grated mozzarella/provolone cheese, minced garlic, and bacon. They were delicious, and we had them with some drumsticks:

And, uh, some salad from a plastic bag, and cans of Fresca:

Tonight it's something slightly fancier, as I went to the farmer's market today. We're having drumsticks again, but this time with collard greens (cooked with a little bacon), sourdough wheat bread, and a dessert that may be great or terrible: pear pudding. For years, I've wanted to try making fruit puddings, and I'm starting with pears. I did two pears, peeled and sliced fairly thin, then some flour, milk, maple syrup, honey, and sugar (in the raw). I'm hoping that if I leave it in the oven long enough, that stuff will turn into something resembling caramel. Then we'll have that pear pudding with pound cake from the farmer's market. [UPDATE: That pudding needed some spice desperately, I'll tell you what! Cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg...I should have picked those up at the store.]

I don't think We Feel Fine has been publicized enough yet. I'm fascinated by the concept, and of course I thought instantly of Jenny's research. From their mission statement:

Since August 2005 [and I'm just now finding out about it?!], We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

They have a gallery of montages you can browse, with the "I feel" sentences matched with images that accompany the posts. My last post is even up there.

Whew! On Sunday, as scheduled, I turned in revisions of chapters 1, 2, and 3 of my dissertation to my adviser. Now on to work on revisions of chapters 4, 5, and the conclusion, which I'll turn in on July 6.

After getting this round of comments from my adviser*, another set of revisions of the whole dissertation, then submit it to the other readers on the committee, get their comments, do another set of revisions, then hopefully it'll be ready to defend.

So, while I know I'm not completely finished with it yet, it honestly is almost a polished, done deal, and I now feel qualified to say a little bit about the dissertation writing process. This past year I've been on a fellowship, and I can't say how much that helped. I'm certain I wouldn't have gotten this far without it.

Also, I have to admit that those books really do work. I had my doubts; I didn't think that anything would come out of all those freewriting sessions, but it does. Even just typing out some blockquotes you might want to use and rearranging them is something. That's what I did a lot: I put in quotations along with little placeholder notes to myself. Those were my zero drafts, basically strings of quotations followed by to-do lists ("Be sure to bring in Heilbrun; connect it to what Warnick says about ethos," "write definition of trackback," "summarize Lazere's argument here; show how it's relevant," etc.). It was a start, though, and that helped. And it's true what Anne Lamott says; no one ever has to see those drafts.

I also did lots of exercises related to my dissertation. For example, when I was having trouble figuring out how to work my responses from my interviews into my chapters, as an exercise, I decided to take all my questions and group them under headings that corresponded to my chapter topics. As another exercise, I did Toulmin schema of a lot of different claims I encountered in my research, both in the blog posts and the scholarly sources, like so:

Initial Enthymeme: Women aren't interested in politics; they're interested in babies, fashion and celebrity gossip.

Claim: Women aren't interested in politics

Reason: because they're interested in babies, fashion and celebrity gossip

Warrant: 1. Someone who is interested in babies, fashion, and celebrity gossip couldn't also be interested in politics; 2. {Politics} and {babies, fashion, and celebrity gossip} are mutually exclusive.

It was as though I was always jabbing my dissertation, saying, "Can you feel it when I do this?"

"Can you feel it when I do this?"

"Can you feel it when I do THIS?"

That's me on the left, by the way.

Public accountability helped, too, like that "Write/Exercise" block I had on my sidebar for a while. I'm going to bring that back soon, but right now I'm doing so much writing that it's hard to keep track of it. For now, I'll bring back just the exercise part. I joined Ladies' Workout Express a week or so ago, so I've been doing a lot of exercising as well. I also formed a dissertation writing group that met biweekly this past academic year. That, too, helped a lot, and I'd recommend it.

My dissertation approach, then, has consisted of:

1. Breaking writing down into small modules of around a couple of pages each
2. Doing planning drafts that were, literally, blockquotes and to-do lists
3. Implementing the Getting Things Done system and thinking of each chapter as a project. Then I'd write down every single little thing I could think of do related to that chapter -- David Allen calls them "next action" steps. They'd be tasks as small as "request such-and-such a book from interlibrary loan." I just tried to capture every single task.
4. Doing thought exercises: If one occurred to me, I did it.
5. Taking a seminar the Women's Studies department at UMN offers called "Feminist Research and Writing" which is basically a writing/project management practicum. If your university has something like this, TAKE IT. I wrote several drafts of my dissertation prospectus in a timely manner because I was getting graded on it.
6. Forming a dissertation writing group and attending meetings (we did things in the same draft workshop format as the Feminist Research and Writing class). Oh, and I had absolutely no compunction about giving them those ugly planning drafts to read.
7. Revising ambitions and goals. I've cut lots of whole sections and ideas from chapters, simply because it would take too much time to develop them and connect them to what I'm already doing (plus, including everything I think of would distract from the unity I'm striving for). I'm keeping these in a list for future projects instead. A dissertation is a generative process; that's part of the point. Just because certain interesting connections might occur to me doesn't mean they all have to be documented in the dissertation. Simply pick some ideas and go with them; don't even try to cover everything.
8. Reading other people's dissertations -- not the award winners, but people who finished and passed.
9. Oh, and I know this might not be possible for everyone, but if you're just starting your PhD program, I'd recommend deciding on a dissertation topic immediately (a broad area, at least -- back in 2002, mine was just "gender and blogging," and I could have done a lot of different things with that) and funneling seminar papers and comprehensive exam essays toward the dissertation.

* I've already gotten her comments on the first three chapters, and they're encouraging! Not too much left to do now.

I'm interested in reading the posts that will come out of this first-ever Feminist SF Carnival. Here's the call for posts (Via Lis Riba):

Even today, some fandoms seem to have a “No Girls Allowed” sign. Created by men and for men, and populated with men who don’t realize that women also dream of telepathic communication, traveling to the stars, dragon-slaying and x-ray vision, it can get stifling for a female fan. Often a search for positive female portrayals is answered by “This is not for you, so go read Harlequinn romance,” “CENSORSHIP!! She’s crying for CENSORSHIP!!” “I know at least two women who like [simpering, annoying female stereotype “character”]” or even “If you are actually a woman, online its hard to tell.”

(At least, that’s how it seems in superhero fandom.)

But there are female-friendly stories out there. There are female-friendly sites and communities. There are female-friendly fans out there. And yes, there are even feminists out there! Which brings us here.

The Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans periodically collects posts from the hazy side-reality where feminist social consciousness meets the outer limits of the imagination. This is to draw attention to lesser known bloggers, to bring individuals of like-minded (or at least, understanding) interests together, and to foster the growth of feminist fan communities.

The first edition will be on Written World (a comics weblog, so posts from other sci-fi/fantasy fandoms will be welcome and necessary) on July 2, 2006.

Deadline for submissions is June 29th, 2006. Since this is the first edition, we’ll be considering posts during late May 2006 and all of June 2006. After that it will go back to the deadline of the previous carnival. Please email the hostess at ragnellthefoul AT hotmail DOT com or use the submission form.

Some Basic Guidelines:

• All Weblog Postings on Science Fiction and Fantasy works in all media (books, comic books, television, film, roleplaying tabletop games and video games) written from a Feminist Perspective are eligible.
• Fan fiction written from a Feminist Perspective is eligible.
• Posts about fan fiction written from a Feminist Perspective are eligible.
• Posts about conventions and fan gatherings of a Feminist nature are eligible.
• Posts about conventions and fan gatherings written from a Feminist Perspective are eligible.
• Posts about any science fiction or fantasy fandom written from a Feminist Perspective are eligible.
• Posts linking to news and announcements are eligible, so long as they pertain specifically to the Feminist Sci-Fi Fantasy community.
• Considerations about science fiction/fantasy news from a Feminist Perspective are eligible.
• Analysis of non-Feminist works from a Feminist Perspective are eligible.
• Rants about any of the above written from a Feminist Perspective are eligible.
• Posts which spell “Space” using 3 A’s and two exclamation points and are written from a Feminist Perspective are eligible.
• Posts about Green-Skinned Amazons (from Outer Spaaace!) with more than two breasts that are not written from a Feminist Perspective will not be eligible (and if they aren’t damned funny,* will be reproduced for mockery).
• Posts about Getting Your Girlfriend into [specific type of fandom] had also better be damned funny. If written from a Feminist Perspective (even tongue-in-cheek), they will be eligible.

*Sexist and/or homophobic does not equal damned funny, nor does it constitute anything approaching a Feminist Perspective.

Any questions may be directed to Ragnell the Foul — ragnellthefoul AT hotmail DOT com

I'm not as involved in fan communities as I'd like to be, but it seems clear from this call and a few other things I've read that they're called the fanboisie for a reason. Maybe I'll contribute a brief annotated bibliography of feminist SF scholarship that's published online.

UPDATE: See Jonathan's post for a more accurate representation of the ceremony.

Oh, and here's what I'm doing about the name thing: nothing. Today the guy at the court house said, "Okay, so when you get your marriage license, you're going to need to take it to the DMV and to the Social Security office." Confused, I said, "What?" He said, "Well, to change your name." Too much trouble! I hadn't planned on changing it anyway. My position on the issue is that I'm not going to change my name, and of course I prefer that everyone say "Clancy Ratliff" for the sake of accuracy, but if family members end up addressing cards to "Jonathan and Clancy Goodwin" or the like, it's no big deal.

Another installment of "Bullets of Random Crap"!

• I am now in the midst of a breakneck, home-stretch dissertation-finishing schedule. I give revisions of chapters 1, 2, and 3 to my adviser on Sunday the 18th, and then revisions of 4, 5, and the conclusion on July 5. Chapters 1 and 3 needed the most work, by far, out of anything in the dissertation, so I'm eager to send those out. Then my adviser gives me comments, and I revise the whole thing and send it to the other members of the committee on July 16. I guess then we go from there, but I'm hoping to defend sometime in August. Please wish me luck.
• I demoted that quiz post off the front page of my blog. I couldn't stand being reminded of that awful song.
• I used de.lirio.us for a long time for my social bookmarking, as it was the open source alternative to del.icio.us. But now they've moved everything over to Simpy, so I guess I'm using that now. I haven't seen any evidence that Simpy is open source, though, and if it isn't, I'm just going to go ahead and use del.icio.us.
• I might have some big news in a week or so. I'll announce it here if it ends up working out.
• As soon as my dissertation is done, I'm going to take my blog in a new direction (while not leaving behind any of the old directions, mind you). For a long time, I've been interested in the environmental issues, but I haven't written about it. Not many bloggers do, from what I've noticed. The only one I can think of who consistently addresses environmental politics is Emily at Strangechord. I'm going to add a new category for environmental issues and start posting about those often.

The other day, I heard "Black Coffee in Bed" by Squeeze on the radio, and ever since, I've been thinking about this compilation tape I used to listen to over and over again in college. I googled the song, as well as one other song I remember from the tape -- "Mirror in the Bathroom" by The English Beat -- and this blessed soul has created a discography of New Wave compilations. I was then able to identify my lovely tape:

Alterno-Daze: Origin Of The Species

1. Joe Jackson, Is She Really Going Out With Him?
2. Squeeze, Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)
3. Devo, Whip It
4. Ramones, Sheena Is A Punk Rocker
5. David Bowie, Love You Till Tuesday 1/2#
6. Madness, One Step Beyond
7. Marianne Faithfull, Broken English
8. The Beat, Mirror In The Bathroom
9. The Velvet Underground & Nico, I'm Waiting For The Man
10. The Troggs, Wild Thing
11. The Tubes, Don't Touch Me There
12. The Jam, Going Underground

I think I might have to buy it today. [Edited to add: D'oh! "Black Coffee in Bed" is not on that CD. It's on volume 2 -- Alterno-Daze: Survival Of The Fittest, which I also owned.]

Okay, not so bad, right? Well, there's another. Before retirement, my dad used to own a wholesale grocery business. They mostly sold to convenience stores, so they sold cigarettes in addition to groceries. As a result, tobacco distributors were always giving him tons of free stuff: t-shirts, duffel bags, and compilation tapes. I had a Newport "Alive with Pleasure!" tank top, a red satin Swisher Sweets jacket, and: remember Bucks Cigarettes? At the time, I had a Bucks t-shirt that said, "Buck the system," which I thought was cool.

Anyway, one of my favorite compilation tapes ever was Benson & Hedges Spotlights the 70s. Deep down, I knew it was a terrible tape, so I never listened to it when any of my friends were around, but when I was alone, I played it on a loop. I don't remember all the songs that were on it, but here are a few, just to give you an idea:

He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother -- The Hollies
Time in a Bottle -- Jim Croce
American Pie -- Don McLean
You've Made Me So Very Happy -- Blood, Sweat, & Tears
Listen to the Music -- Doobie Brothers

Edited to add another one I loved: Never Mind the Mainstream: The Best of MTV's 120 Minutes:

1. Orange Crush - R.E.M.
2. This Is Not A Love Song - Public Image Ltd.
3. Do You Remember Rock'N'Roll? - Ramones
4. Burning House Of Love - x
5. Stigmata - Ministry
6. Everyday Is Like Sunday - Morrissey
7. Head On - The Jesus And Mary Chain
8. The Killing Moon - Echo And The Bunnymen
9. Love Will Tear Us Apart - Joy Division
10. The Perfect Kiss - New Order
11. Personal Jesus - Depeche Mode
12. Birthday - The Sugarcubes
13. Could You Be The One? - Husker Du
14. We Care A Lot - Faith No More
15. Gone Daddy Gone - Violent Femmes
16. Eardrum Buzz - Wired