Displaying the most recent of 742 posts written by

Amanda

The hell? Or rather, The horror! The horror!

All the cool kids are doing this, but I have to say, I’m rather surprised to find out: What Classic Movie Are You?

Yet another career possibility

I’ve been thinking that perhaps I should try looking for work in book indexing. Not just because I take pleasure in a well-indexed book and greatly enjoyed the threads on indexing last fall at Crooked Timber and languagehat; it also seems like the kind of work I would find congenial. Via the American Society of […]

Still on this knitting thing…

…and experimenting with TypePad’s image-posting feature: This is a swatch of a pattern called "Eccentric Zigzag" or "Scroll Lace," which I think I’m going to use for a shawl, or at least for a few sections of a shawl. Except it’ll be in a much finer yarn, and purple. And, as a followup to the […]

Knitting epiphany

Via frizzyLogic: Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s theory of geek knitting makes complete and utter sense to me. Not because I’m a math geek — I’m not, though I love the idea that people have designed Möbius scarves, or perhaps that’s my inner Lacanian talking — but because I’m a poetry geek. Knitting has a formal logic […]

In which I pretend to be an advice columnist

Today Salon.com‘s advice section features a letter from "Panicked Prospective Ph.D. Candidate", who is applying to a raft of Ph.D. programs but has become paralyzed with anxiety. Writes PPPh.D.C: "I don’t know if I can handle being rejected by every single school I have chosen — not that I would go off the deep end […]

Curiosity of the day

In not one but two of Midwestern University’s libraries, someone has written a quotation from Shakespeare’s Richard II (Act 5, Scene 5) — "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me" — on carrel walls. Is it the work of a single obsessed Shakespearean? Several undergraduates who all took the same survey course? A […]

Personal anthology: Poems about wells

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a favorite poem, hasn’t it? Let’s rectify that. Personal Helicon As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. One, in a brickyard, with […]

Mmm. Clove oranges.

Found via the main Typepad page: i was just really very hungry., a food blog I think I’ll be reading regularly. Handrolled sushi! Ochazuke (which I’ve never tasted but now feel compelled to try making)! Things to do with oranges in winter! Capsule reviews of food books! And gorgeous design, to boot. Now I’m hungry. […]

Three things that are making me happy right now

1. I’ve just finished drafting my personal statements for my application for the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship in Scholarly Information Resources. Go me. (Is anyone else out there applying? Please, let there not be countless hundreds of applicants. Please, let them like my application.) 2. I didn’t go to this year’s MLA convention, and after reading […]

Alternative career possibility #253: Personal-ad proofreader

Raymond Shapiro has worked for the NYRB since its inception, and for years proofread the personals. He estimates that from the 1960s to the ’80s he read 30,000 of them, in his own publication and elsewhere, and collated 400 or so into a book, Lonely in Baltimore. He says that back then, people were fascinated […]