A little childhood-book nostalgia on a rainy November afternoon

For those of you who grew up reading John Bellairs' eerie yet oddly cozy YA novels, in which young heroes and heroines face supernatural terrors amid the Victorian houses in their quiet Midwestern towns, I highly recommend Bellairsia, a fairly comprehensive Bellairs bibliography and biography site. I especially like the map portion of the site and the pages on towns and buildings that served as models for places in the books, like the octagon house that apparently was the original for the one in The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn. I was also charmed to discover that Bellairs went to my alma mater in the 1960s, and used to hang out at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap, one of the few bars still going in Hyde Park when I was a student.

Today is one of those rainy November Saturdays where the light starts fading at 3:30 in the afternoon, which brought Bellairs' novels (and the many hours I spent reading them as a kid) irresistibly to mind. I wonder whatever became of my copy of The Curse of the Blue Figurine?

The joy of titling

Ever since I first heard it used, I’ve loved the term “dark archive,” which means an archive that’s off-limits to the public. Like a lot of intriguing phrases I’ve come across, “dark archive” has a spot on my list of Titles I Intend to Use Someday if I Ever Write That Book of Poems.* I can imagine calling a poem or a poem sequence “Dark Archive”; I can also see it as the title of a creepy short story. (I blame the move to New England. Lately I’ve been wanting to write nothing but weird fiction.) A quick WorldCat search suggests that nobody else has used it yet; there’s no way to call dibs on a title, but I’d like to state for the record that I thought of it first. (Not that I’d stop any of you from using it.)

I’ve been keeping these lists of titles since my grad school days in Michigan. It probably springs from the same impulse that leads me to collect knitting stitch terminology and write down interesting misreadings. Is it weird to come up with titles long before there’s a story or a poem to go with them?

* Other potential titles: “Desire Lines” (taken by a bunch of writers already, alas); “Misery Poker“; “The Acme Home Planetarium Kit”; “The Wallet at Time’s Back“; “Sympathy Orchestra”; “A Note on the Type”; “Pete and Repeat”; “The Discovery of a World Unknown.”

Prop 8 and the country-club model of marriage

I've been debating whether to post anything about the passage of California's Proposition 8, the infamous "Hey, newly married gay couples? Guess what! We just revoked your legal spousal rights!" proposition. Much of what I want to say has been said elsewhere, and I'm starting to get tired of all political posts, all the time.

But I just realized something about all the pro-Prop 8 rhetoric about how the institution of marriage will somehow be devalued or reduced by letting same-sex couples in on it. The Prop 8 supporters' model of marriage is like an exclusive club. Membership in the club only means something if not everyone can get into it, and if we let Those People in, then the snob-appeal goes right out the window. It's marriage as the WASP country club, marriage as the Hetero Kids Only Treehouse (Everyone Else Stay Out!!!), marriage as the nightclub that only lets the A-listers past the velvet rope, marriage as the popular girls' table in the high school cafeteria, marriage as the gated community where everyone's afraid the property values will fall if, God forbid, someone undesirable moves in and paints their house lavender.

The exclusivity impulse is probably ineradicable from human nature. But there's no way it should ever be written into any state's constitution. A state is not a country club, marriage isn't a gated community, and a constitution is not the Heathers' croquet party. And we, as a country, need to grow the hell up. And that's all I have to say on the matter.

[Edited to add: See also Emily Lloyd's "How Could My Marriage Hurt Your Marriage?" and Keith Olbermann's magnificent appeal to everyone who voted for Prop 8: "This is about the human heart." Indeed, it is.]

The day after the election

I'm still stunned, and mostly speechless, about the election results.
For the first time in my life, the candidate I voted for won.*
Which is a good feeling, but it pales in comparison to the sense of
having helped make history. Tomorrow I'll get back to fretting about
the enormity of the job that President-Elect Obama (a phrase I'm
really, really happy be able to type) has ahead of him. Tomorrow or the
next day, maybe, I'll go back to being cynical about politics. Today?
Not so much.

I want two things to happen next. First, I want the culture wars to
end, or at least peter out and fade into insignificance. The stupid divisive rhetoric about
who's a "real American" and who's a "traitor" or a "terrorist" or a
"socialist" or an "atheist" (hello, Elizabeth Dole!) needs to stop.** We
need to stop using people's worst fears and prejudices, the coldest and darkest corners of their psyches,
just to drum up a vote. (And, while I'm dreaming, we need to stop
demonizing educated people, and scientists, and people who can speak in coherent sentences. It would
be nice to live in a country where politics didn't constantly give me
flashbacks to being the unpopular nerdy kid in seventh grade. Also, I'd like a pony.)

The crazy thing is, I actually think that can happen. Maybe not all of it, or all at
once, but I think it can happen. I think yesterday was a pretty big
demonstration that there are things people value more than fear and
hatred and divisiveness.***

And, second, I want the "responsibility" Obama called for in his
speech to be more than a buzzword. I want to feel like there's more
that I can do for my country than going shopping. I want the effort to
dig ourselves out of the various messes we're in to be a collaborative
one, and if it turns out we need some kind of 21st century WPA to fix
things, well, sign me up. I'm feeling optimistic about the future for
the first time in yonks. Long may it last.

* I was old enough to vote in 1996, but that year I was wrapped up
in Personal Life Stuff and too apathetic to vote. I know: bad citizen!
I blame youth and stupidity, and the fact that Clinton looked likely to
coast to victory anyway.

** It amuses me that, in the estimation of people who fling around
phrases like "real American," I'm a fake American. I mean, I was born
in the city where
they signed the Declaration of Independence, the home of the
Liberty Bell and Ben Franklin and Betsy Ross and the first American
flag, for crying out loud. And I grew up not far from where Francis Scott Key wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner." I am
not some kind of traitor because I'm a city dweller, or because I vote
for Democrats, or because I've spent the majority of my life on the
east coast. I'm an American too. It shouldn't matter who we vote for
or where we live or who we love or what deity we believe (or don't
believe) in. That's the point, and for once in my adult life, I'm
actually hopeful that people get it.

*** Though the perennial popularity of homophobic ballot
initiatives is as depressing as ever. I mean, I didn't expect Arkansas
to become a bastion of sanity overnight. But California? What the hell
happened to you? I used to think better of you, California.

Election night special

I was awake at six this morning and at my polling place by just after seven. I'd been anticipating long lines, but things were only starting to get busy at that hour, and I was in and out in about ten minutes. (But apparently, something like 43% of eligible voters in New London had voted by 1:00, and various coworkers mentioned high turnouts at their own polling places in adjacent towns.) It was fun watching people walk past the reference desk wearing "I Voted" stickers this morning; I had a hard time concentrating on much of anything, but, fortunately, I spent a big chunk of my workday away from my desk and doing other things besides obsessively tracking election news. I just got home, and am planning to spend the evening making dinner and then alternately watching the returns and following the election thread at Making Light.

By the way, I think the #votereport project at Twitter is a fantastic idea, especially the map of people's reports. Way to visualize the data, even if it did crash for part of the day as a gazillion people checked out what was going on at their polling places. And it was fun to add my own data point to the mass, even though my own voting experience was so smooth and uneventful as to be anticlimactic.

Now to fortify myself for the evening. Catch you all tomorrow, or maybe late tonight, depending on how the returns go.

And finally, if any of you are in need of a rest from tonight's coverage, have some breaking news from Monty Python: the Silly Party has taken Luton!

Verbal drag

[It's not just NaNoWriMo this month, it's also NaBloPoMo. While I suspect I won't manage to post something here every day, I do feel the urge to stretch my writing muscles a bit. Amazing what a bit of peer pressure can do. So here's a quick post, part of my effort to write more.]

I just came across the GenderAnalyzer, a site that, when given the URL of any blog, will predict the gender of the blog author. (I'm not sure how it would react to multi-author blogs. Must experiment.) According to the GenderAnalyzer's front page, the analysis is done by "a text
classifier hosted over at uClassify.com
… trained on 2000 blogs written by men and women." I promptly plugged in this blog's URL, and got the reply "We think http://householdopera.typepad.com/ is written by a man." I've got two X chromosomes that say otherwise!

There's also a poll on the site asking users about the accuracy of the results. So far, of the 2500 or so people who've replied, about 56% say it was correct. So it's slightly better than flipping a coin, but not by much. Then again, the Gender Genie told me the same thing about my blog, and I once took the Spark Gender Test and was told I'm "definitely a man." Apparently, I'm in drag on the interwebs without even trying, which, for me, is a pleasing thought. (Can you tell I also score in the "Gender Outlaw" range on Kate Bornstein's Gender Aptitude Test?)

Fellow bloggers, care to comment on your results?

Current awareness needs to get more…current.

Now that faculty outreach and collection development for English and American literature are officially part of my job description, I've been making an effort to stay more up-to-date with the field. I'm scanning a much bigger field than I used to when I was a grad student in English, though, and I have fewer hours in the day to scan it in. Gone are the days when I could spend hours combing through the MLA Bibliography to find everything ever written in my sub-sub-specialty. Instead, I'm using as many shorcuts as possible. I've got RSS feeds to notify me when new journal issues come out, and when new books in relevant subject areas are published. I read blogs. I skim tables of contents and keep a running file of topics that scholars are currently working on. The start of a new semester reminds me to look over the course list for the English department and see if there are areas where I need to think about developing the collection. And so on.

I've also realized that I've come to expect certain tools to be available as part of my current awareness repertoire, and to work well. It strikes me as odd when journals don't have RSS feeds for new issues. I roll my eyes at databases that only offer email alerts, because come on, it's the 21st century—who needs more email when there are other tools that work better? I'm surprised at any online scholarly resource that expects me to bookmark it and check back frequently for updates. It's not like the technology to simplify the current awareness process is new, after all. Or obscure. Or hard to implement.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided it would be useful to have the University of Pennsylvania Calls for Papers mailing list on my radar again, after being unsubscribed for at least the last four years. But it's no longer even a mailing list; it's now a web-only archive. Without anything resembling an RSS feed. I tried to kluge together a homemade RSS feed, using first Page2RSS and then Feedity, but with no luck. The CFP announcements are divided up among separate pages for different fields, so one would have to set up individual feeds for each page (and get lots of redundant results, because they cross-post a lot of the multidisciplinary calls for papers). I futzed around with Yahoo! Pipes for a while, trying to combine multiple feeds and de-duplicate the repeated announcements. But something about the way the CFP pages are set up confuses both Page2RSS and Feedity such that they can't tell which announcements are new. At which point I gave up because it was becoming too much of a time-sink even for me.

So, basically, there's no way to monitor the Calls for Papers archive except by revisiting the site, page by page, whenever I manage to remember to do so. As the kids today say: EPIC FAIL.

Not long after I abandoned Project Roll My Own CFP Feed, I learned from a friend on Twitter that there won't be any internet access at all at the upcoming MLA convention. Which, in this day and age, is even more of an epic fail. I'm thinking, not at all for the first time, that the humanities badly need an influx of hackers, programmers, and tinkerers.*

* The nice thing about my current career path is that I can say this kind of thing and people nod in agreement and suggest nifty solutions I hadn't heard of before, instead of looking at me askance like they're wondering why I care so much about this newfangled interweb contraption.

Halloween link roundup

Michael Chabon on genre fiction and thought experiments

I've just started reading Maps & Legends, Michael Chabon's collection of essays on reading and writing. Not only does he write about Philip Pullman, M.R. James, and Ben Katchor—any and all of which topics would have predisposed me to like the book—but he also won me over completely with the introductory essay, which introduces a defense of the literary merits of genre fiction with the following paragraphs:

Imagine that, sometime about 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe every kind of novel but the nurse romance from the canon of the future. Not merely from the critical canon, but from the store racks and library shelves as well. Nobody could be paid, published, lionized, or cherished among the gods of literature for writing any kind of fiction other than nurse romances. Now, because of my faith and pride in the diverse and rigorous brilliance of American writers of the last half century, I do believe that from this bizarre decision, in this theoretical America, a dozen or more authentic masterpieces would have emerged. Thomas Pynchon's Blitz Nurse, for example, and Cynthia Ozick's Ruth Puttermesser, R.N. One imagines, however, that this particular genre—that any genre, even one far less circumscribed in its elements and possibilities than the nurse romance—would have paled somewhat by now. In that oddly diminished world, somebody, somewhere, is laying down his copy of Dr. Kavalier & Nurse Clay with a weary sigh.

Instead of "the novel" and "the nurse romance," try this little thought experiment with "jazz" and "the bossanova," or with "cinema" and "fish-out-of-water comedies." Now go ahead and try it with "short fiction" and "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story."

Suddenly you find yourself sitting right back in your very own universe.

(Michael Chabon, Maps & Legends [San Francisco: McSweeney's Books, 2008], 17-18)

As one who grew deeply weary of that type of short story years ago and never un-wearied of it, I say: amen, brother. Much of the fiction I've most enjoyed in recent years has been "genre" fiction of one type or other, often as remote from the contemporary quotidian short story as I can find. There's more to this essay, and to the book (including an essay on Sherlock Holmes that ends with the tantalizing claim that all literature "from the Aeneid onwards" is fan fiction), but that was the part that I had to quote.

TV recommendation: Slings & Arrows

Last year, a colleague who shares many of my tastes in TV and movies (and who reads this blog; hi, Anne!) asked me if I'd ever heard of a Canadian TV series called Slings & Arrows. I hadn't, but now that I have a Netflix subscription, I've finally gotten around to watching it, and it's rapidly become one of my favorite shows of all time. I'm already sad that it only lasted three seasons, and once I get to the end of Season 3, there'll be no more of it left.

The show is set in the small Canadian town of New Burbage, home of a theater festival modeled on the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. As the first episode opens, artistic director Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette, one of several Stratford Festival veterans in the cast) is directing his umpteenth Midsummer Night's Dream. He's long past the high point of his directorial career: a Hamlet starring promising young actor Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross, who's amazing), who had a nervous breakdown in mid-performance. Disappointed and sozzled after opening night of the Dream, Oliver passes out in the street, where he's hit by a meat truck bearing the motto "Canada's Best Hams." Geoffrey, restored to dubious sanity and running a flat-broke, defiantly noncommercial theater company in Toronto, gets called back to New Burbage for Oliver's funeral. In short order, he's roped into becoming interim artistic director. Oliver promptly returns as a ghost that only Geoffrey can see. History threatens to repeat itself when Geoffrey takes over the festival's production of Hamlet.

There are mad scenes. There are backstage romantic rivalries. There are duels, albeit with stage swords. There's Oliver's ghost, popping up to offer acerbic and unhelpful advice to Geoffrey, and Oliver's skull, which he bequeaths to the festival as a stage prop. There are more Shakespeare allusions than can be counted. There are two aging character actors who provide commentary a la Statler and Waldorf. There's an Ophelia-style suicide attempt that doesn't work because the river in question is only knee-deep. There's a comic villain, a smiling American Lady Macbeth, in the form of an executive from the festival's major corporate sponsor. And there are play-within-a-play moments that remind one alternately of just how disastrous live theater can be, and just how marvelous it is when it works.

When I was a teenager, my dad used to take me to Stratford during the summers when we visited my Canadian grandmother. Slings & Arrows gets the vibe of the place perfectly: an uneasy tension between the need to make enough money to keep the whole thing going (with attendant big-box-office productions, gift shops, and Bardolatrous kitsch) and a deep commitment to doing classical theater really well. The show comes down firmly on the side of not selling out, but the business managers and administrators are still sympathetic (if ridiculous) figures. The writers never lose sight of the contexts—grant funding, corporate sponsorship, obligatory visits from the Minister of Culture—in which plays are produced. There's a terrific scene where Geoffrey, charged with conducting some sort of corporate "leadership seminar" for local businesspeople, decides to just have them explore some text, and walks an accountant through a surprisingly creditable "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow." But there's also a running sight gag involving the festival gift shop with its Shakespeare dolls and inflatable Edvard Munch screams.

And now I'm midway through Season 2, in which Geoffrey takes on Macbeth, amid much superstitious dread. Colm Feore (another actor I first saw in a bunch of productions at Stratford) has turned up as a hilariously creepy marketing genius. And I'm having a hard time not watching each DVD all in one go. In short: if you're at all interested in Shakespeare, theater people, underrated Canadian TV, or utterly brilliant writing, I can't recommend this show highly enough.