Not having had much in the way of internet access during the past two days, I’m afraid I'm making this month’s 10th of Awesome post a bit late. (If nothing else, it's at least an improvement over my recent habit of not posting at all.) This time around I’d like to give a nod to the noble art of the picspam and one of its more talented and prolific practitioners, _omnivore_.¹

( Pretty pictures under the cut )

Happy birthday, spiderstars!

I dislike it when an author or other artist's admission that, "Yes, I actually do think the work I've put on display to the world is good" is taken as, "Why yes, I do masturbate to my own reflection, why do you ask?" There can be a pressure to be self-deprecating at all times, to disavow any kind of true pride or pleasure taken in what they've managed to produce, and it seems both ridiculous and a little unfair.

But that said, there are still some things that you probably don't get to say about your own work. Like, I don't know...

It is that tension between the Noel Coward veneer and the Pinteresque subtext that makes the play both funny and moving.

...that.

For someone two and a half years into her legal adulthood, I don't have the best track record when it comes to feeding myself. It's less that I don't know how to obtain food (I make a mean apple crumble and I at least know how to push the buttons on a microwave if nothing else) and more that I tend to find myself busy doing other things during the operating hours of places that sell or serve food, or unable to face the crowds that tend to form in said places, or sometimes honestly just forgetting that there was supposed to be a meal somewhere in that time period. A few times, it's gotten to the point where people have actually sent me money unasked-for just so they could guilt me into having to buy food with it.

And so, before she left me alone at the dorm for Thanksgiving break, spiderstars asked me to make a post every few days to let her know that I was still among the living. Since the one thing I fail at even more consistently than feeding myself is producing livejournal entries on time, it should come as no surprise to anyone that I'm posting my first status update about four hours before spiderstars could just stroll into the re-opened dorms and check my pulse for herself.

At any rate: I ate a minimum of two meals a day, every day, and sometimes even three. An encouraging number of them were not cooked in a microwave. I got a reasonable amount of sleep, albeit on a rather peculiar schedule. My latest bout of death-rattle even cleared up mid-week. So -- yes. I am, as it turns out, still alive. And in the spirit of making you all properly regret that, I have something to share.

I don't know the context of this clip. I don't know anything about the show it comes from, beyond the fact that it must involve Batman in some capacity. I don't know how many different people had to say, "Yes, this is a good idea" before it could air.

All I know is that there's nothing about it that I don't love.

Happy birthday, ereghel!

Since the past two weeks have been a bit soul-grinding, I've decided to focus this month's 10th of Awesome on things that make it a little bit harder to keep feeling sorry for myself.

( Something old, something new )

Happy belated birthday, aeirol!

A little bit ago, I stumbled across an article claiming that women make up a greater percentage of the horror film audience -- torture-porn-devotee subset included -- than men do. It's an Entertainment Weekly piece, so I don't know how much credibility their findings have. But accurate or not, I'm less struck by those findings themselves than by a certain common thread in the various potential explanations of those findings offered by the people EW interviewed. It's -- well, take a look at the following two excerpts:

''I grew up loving to scare and be scared,'' says Farmiga. ''It elicits this surge of adrenaline you don't get with any other genre. Maybe women are so drawn to it because we're more emotional creatures and it's such a visceral experience.''

And frankly, it should be noted that just as young male moviegoers seem addicted to seeing stuff blow up, young females in the audience have a predilection of their own: They like to cuddle. Horror movies give teen girls in particular an excuse to inch a little closer to their beloved, as Hollywood learned years ago when The Ring and The Grudge grossed $129 million and $110 million, respectively. ''Both movies were really scary and PG-13, which is the age of those early first dates,'' says Mandate Pictures president Nathan Kahane [...] ''Girls are driving the ideas for those early dates. There aren't that many social opportunities to be in the dark holding hands, and that's what the PG-13 horror film offers.''

It's just interesting to me that when presented with information that seems to deviate from traditional cultural conceptions about gender, people try to explain it by... appealing to traditional cultural conceptions about gender. And I don't mean that in a snarky way -- I genuinely do find it interesting. It's sort of the human brain's standard operating procedure when any model we want to hold onto gets threatened -- find a way to transform the incompatible new data into something not new at all, just the same old underlying thing manifesting itself differently. I've been aware of schema-preservation theories in the abstract for quite a while now, and it's always easy to catch yourself doing it if you're willing to self-monitor, but even knowing that this is the way people tend to work, it's somehow still always a little startling to me to see such a blatant example of it splashed right out on the surface like that. I don't know why I expect it to be less obvious, but I do.

And on what can be called a tangentially related note if you're feeling generous, Alexander the Great apparently had a mouthful of "unusually small, sharp, pointy teeth" (so sayeth Joseph Cummins). So considering the popularity of all things vampiric, I have to wonder: why hasn't anybody jumped on that crack-addled historical AU yet? Just bill it as half-Twilight/half-300. (The real reason Alexander wanted to meet Darius in battle: the lure of Darius' sweet, sweet freesia-scented blood.)

Perhaps in the future I should do some sort of 9th of Memefail prior to the 10th of Awesome, the better to increase the perceived spiffiness of the things being pimped. People will just be so sick of i) me spamming them with pointless memes and ii) my absurd response time to said pointless memes that almost anything else I post will look better in comparison.¹

In the meantime, here's my practice run:

Ask me my fannish Top Fives (top five episodes of a show, top five examples of a character type, etc.). Or other Top Fives -- music or food or whatever. I will answer them all in a new post.

(Estimated reply date October 2010.)

[1] Unless I decide to rec a list of particularly awesome memes.

I can't believe this has actually happened enough times to necessitate creating a tag for it.

S-sorry? I guess that's what I get for assuming that I'd be able to see if there was a light on under the door.

For this month's 10th of Awesome, I've decided to sidle onto the bandwagon and aim for some sort of coherent theme. And that theme is 'poets I have somewhat mixed feelings towards but still love enough to pimp.'

Status-wise, Stephen Crane can best be labeled as an obscure canonized author. The title of his one "enduring" novel, The Red Badge of Courage, is probably at least hazily familiar to most high school students, but it's not exactly held up as one of our greatest cultural treasures (and... it's not), and his poetry is rarely taught at all. Which is a pity, as I'm quite fond of it, or at least of about half of it.

Most of Crane's work is quite short -- his average range is about five to twenty lines -- and written in one of two basic styles. Half of the poems are very simple and economical --

I was in the darkness;
I could not see my words
Nor the wishes of my heart.
Then suddenly there was a great light --

"Let me into the darkness again."

-- while the other half are rather more lush, like this excerpt from "Each Small Gleam Was a Voice"

Each small gleam was a voice,
A lantern voice --
In little songs of carmine, violet, green, gold.
A chorus of colours came over the water;
The wondrous leaf-shadow no longer wavered,
No pines crooned on the hills,
The blue night was elsewhere a silence,
When the chorus of colours came over the water,
Little songs of carmine, violet, green, gold.

Small glowing pebbles
Thrown on the dark plane of evening...

But regardless of whether he's trying for a terse little punch or for imagery, Crane has a rather distinctive style that's a bit difficult to describe. The closest I've been able to come is to say that there's something a little... not clipped, and not exactly condensed either, but tight about the lines, as if they've been pushed through a small opening into a small space. There's also -- with a few exceptions -- a sort of rushed-reluctant quality, a man spilling out inner things he wants to keep inner and wants to share with equal desperation. But whatever name you want to put to the style, if you've read a Crane poem before, you'll know when you're reading another one.

Since he's been dead for over a century, Stephen Crane's work is in the public domain, and there are several more or less comprehensive collections of his poems available online. (This one is even alphabetized, although it does seem to be missing a few.) He has a handful of pet themes he keeps circling back to: love and more general forms of human connection, nature as source of pleasure, nature as source of menace (and at least one poem on nature as both), writing/attempts at accurate self-expression, your standard "the human condition mostly sucks"¹ fare, about 4000 attempts to sort through his feelings on God as popularly conceived vs. the god he wants to exist, social commentary (which usually inspires his weakest work), etc. Half of it's mediocre and half of it's marvelous, and while I rather doubt his style will work for all of you, I think he's at least worth a look.

The other poet I'm pimping tonight is considerably less obscure, at least in his country of origin. Gunnar Ekelöf is a very famous, very influential Swedish modernist, and while most of the poems of his that I've read so far have had at least some small element that kept me from completely loving the piece, there are almost always at least a few lines or phrases in every poem that I find incredibly beautiful or profound or both, no matter what my feelings are on the poem as a whole. It's a bitch and a half trying to find translations of his stuff online, but native Swedish-speaker isagel has posted a handful of (quite good) translations at her journal, which should give you an idea of what he's like.

[1] Since it's a bit difficult to tell: there are two separate links here.

So in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Rosencrantz is so stupid as to inspire pity in Act I, undergoes an exponential jump in intelligence in Act II (or at least for the first two thirds of Act II), and then drops right back down to concussed goldfish in Act III. It's like the Samuel Beckett rewrite of Flowers for Algernon.

...Verizon, did you really just air an advertisement telling us how much happier we'd be if we conducted all our social interactions over the phone rather than ever going to meet our friends and family in person?

I've spent most of my workdays this summer processing new books, and while the library will occasionally receive older texts, about 90% of the material I've handled this year was published within the last decade, and about 70-80% of it was published in either 2008 or 2009. I know that no law library in the world actually collects every legal document or piece of commentary that's produced each year, and as I don't work full-time I'm not even seeing all of what this library does collect, but I do like to think that I'm getting at least some idea of what the major concerns or trends in current legal scholarship are. (Though since East Asian law is one of Gallagher's major areas of specialization, the library seems to be interested in collecting those documents in their original languages rather than in translation, and actually being able to read the title and back cover of a book has proved to be a surprisingly crucial partial of determining its subject, there are obviously some, ah, further limitations. So, more accurately, I think I'm getting some idea of what the major concerns/trends in North American legal scholarship are.)

Anyway, what interests me is that, alongside the smaller sub-trends of books on issues in environmental and technological law (said trends have been going on steadily for several years now, as one would sort of have to expect they would), this year's in-vogue topic seems to be the difficulties involved in trying to create pan-cultural approaches to law.

Also -- and this isn't a trend, it's just something I thought was neat -- I found what seems to be a new series, in which each book is a collection of essays discussing different aspects of modern law in relation to a particular philosopher's teachings. So far I've only processed two volumes (one on Hegel and one on Nitchy Nietzsche), but I'm sure there must be others.

As pretty much everyone on my flist already knows, the ever-lovely stormantia proposed that the 10th of every month be dedicated to pimping something awesome. So far, every other 10th of Awesome participant I've seen has recommended something you can look at for free without leaving your house, so naturally, the thing I've decided to pimp first cannot be easily accessed on the internet and will cost you several small fortunes if you decide you want to own rather than rent it.

( I think I'll put some pee jokes in my great tragedy. )

( This dance is dedicated to all of the rabbits who died in the hands of incompetent magicians. )

I finally obtained speakers! Now my laptop can actually play music at a volume detectable by the human ear! This is the first time in years I've been able to listen to "Arabian Dance" without huddling five inches away from my computer screen. Rock me, Pyotr Ilyich, rock me like a hurricane.

In more meaningful good news, I had my semi-annual retinal exam a couple of weeks ago and the scar tissue is still stable. This makes it almost two years since I last needed a shot of Avastin, so I'm feeling pretty good about my chances of having a relapse anytime soon. Of course now that I've said that I'm sure my other retina will hemorrhage or both of them will spontaneously detach later tonight.

I've been back at the law library as of last Friday, though I'm not working as much as I have in previous summers. I don't have a stable schedule so much as I'm just filling in gaps when the student workers who were already there earlier this year either can't or don't want to work. This past week was the break between the spring and summer quarters at the UW, and the week before that was finals, so only one of the regular student workers was coming in. I took the days she didn't, which wound up being Monday-Wednesday-Friday. I appreciated the staggered day on/day off schedule, because when I work at the UW I have to get up at 4:15 a.m., and while I'm fine working individual days on three hours of sleep, the cumulative effect of doing that multiple days in a row in past summers has been rather unpleasant. When I was first sorting out my schedule with the library we settled on me working Mondays and Wednesdays regularly for the rest of the summer, with days added on or taken off on a week-by-week basis depending on the other students' schedules, but it's seeming more and more likely that that's going to be scaled back to Wednesday as the only regular day. I'm fine with that, since I'm not desperate for money and I'd still be making a little under $300 a month. Also, once again, waking up at 4:15 once a week is always preferable to waking up at 4:15 more than once a week.

The one off-note is that my cat hasn't been eating most of her food lately. Considering how greedy she usually is, it's a bit alarming. But she doesn't seem listless or as if she's in pain, and she keeps pestering me for more food despite having plenty in her dish. Maybe she's just tired of what she's got?

Snagged this meme from both eibheall and aeirol: you shout 'WORDS!' at me, then I reply with five words that I think are related to you somehow. You then have to post those words and an explanation of why I might have said them about you.

( eibheall's words )

( aeirol's words )

( ereghel’s words )

( spiderstar’s words )

Happy birthday, eibheall!

So, I was reading back through my Brit Lit notes to prepare for my final, and every so often I would stumble across a direct quote from Dr. Davis. And when I reached his description of Rochester as "cuddlier than Heathcliff," I suddenly realized that almost all of the quotes I'd taken from him had a unifying theme: they would all be fantastic lines to put in a personal ad.

I don't know that anyone would actually want to respond to this ad, but I for one would certainly cut it out of the paper and frame it.

So is there a female-specific equivalent for the term cock-blocking?