Plagiarism Bad, Allusion Pretty

We have sunshine today -- sunshine, and reasonably mild weather, and all the November 1st applications dropped off last night. (The office plants love the sunlight. They're all reblooming, to my mild surprise. I'd forgotten how easy it is to get plants to flower with a southern exposure.) So...I'm not especially in the mood to work. I'm going to give it a shot for another few hours, and if nothing happens, I'm going to do something wild and crazy like go run errands. Perhaps I'll pick up some Halloween candy just in case any trick-or-treaters stop by my apartment -- I mean, just because there are no kids in the building doesn't mean I shouldn't stock up on miniature Almond Joys and Reese's Cups, right? Right?

I didn't watch Smallville last night, but I saw about twenty previews for it during Angel, and I can't help wondering whether I'm the only person noticing parallels between the football-team episode and Buffy's third S1 episode, "The Witch." Team spirit gone awry, "cult" references, uncontrollable fire, revelation of an adult antagonist...I mean, heck, weren't the Sunnydale school colors red and yellow? Or am I making that up? Anyway, it looked sort of homage-like to me. Has the first Buffy/Smallville crossover fic hit the lists yet, I wonder? I dislike serious crossover fic, partially because I'm never a fan of both shows, but mostly because I don't see it working. For one thing, very few TV programs have such amazing internal mythology that it's worth trying to import it into another show. If you want to write a Buffy story with a powerful Whatsis of Foo or interesting characters, for God's sake, why not borrow them from earlier in the series or adapt them from a richer source of ideas? (Perhaps I'm a genre snob, but I feel that any given religious system probably has more to offer than any given sci-fi/fantasy series.) That said, I wouldn't necessarily mind a borrowing from another TV show or literary universe, but it needs to work equally well in both fandoms, and very few shows' mythologies match up well enough to avoid massive plot problems. Then there's the execution: are you writing for fans of Show A and need only explain details from Show B or vice versa? Are you only aiming at fans of both shows? Or are you trying to interest fans of either show in the other and therefore need to sell a heap o' exposition about both? Bear in mind that I, as a Buffyverse fan, do not know who Methos is (I know he's an important character in some Highlander thing or other, okay?) and, more to the point, have absolutely zero investment in him as a character. Hot sex scenes between characters from different shows do not fix this problem, by the way. If you really think you can write some kind of quasi-immortal being, or a transdimensional traveler with virtually infinite powers, as both a plausible plot device and an independently engaging character in the Buffyverse while working within the strictures of some other show into the bargain, more power to you. I just haven't seen it happening a lot.

For TV-related analysis by people who actually watch TV regularly, you might want to check out the latest issue of Bad Subjects. Current articles include "Britney Spears, Victorian Chastity, and Brand-Name Virginity" and tour de forces on The Dukes of Hazzard, ER, and Jennicam. Which I feel no urge whatsoever to provide a link to. (The Bad Subjects rec is courtesy of wood's lot, though.)

Primordial Misanthropy, or, How I Feel About The Angel Writing Team Right Now

Last night on Angel: some of the general premise was good (I like Anvilicious Demonic Metaphors). The execution was good, especially the Fred/Wesley/Gunn scenes. The actual plot and its implications...ai yi yi. (Spoilers follow.) We won't get into plot holes, such as why the Rich Important Political Family wouldn't've just left ol' Billy in solitary with Skip instead of bringing him back to wreak havoc and (more to the point) endanger their political ambitions, how the Congressman and his relatives have lived with Billy but avoided killing their womenfolk and being at least featured nonstop on CNN, why Billy really couldn't affect Angel (I mean, what part of human beings was he affecting, anyway?), what was the deal with Billy's earth grab at the end, and what happened to Billy's body after Lilah killed him (that may be the easiest one, but I dislike dangling plot threads). We will also try to pass over my increasing irritation that neither Cordelia nor Fred ever gets to kill anyone, while the male members of their team are routinely staking, slicing, and dicing, mostly because Angel keeps stopping his, er, wimmenfolk. (Hey, Dead Boy? It'd be a way more powerful feminist statement if you let them make their own decisions, especially since you're not the boss of them.) We will even ignore the heteronormativity of Billy's powers and the fact that Angel should've been tracking him down weeks ago, even if you grant that he wasn't entirely wrong to free Billy in the first place. (I see some wiggle room there.)

We -- fine, I -- will simply confine ourselves to observing that I refuse to believe that there's that level or type of "primordial misogyny" in all men. Take Wesley, the only person affected whom we saw in detail before and after. I'll grant you that Wesley has enough emotional baggage from his childhood alone to fill a DC-10, that anyone trained by the Watchers' Council probably absorbs a significant level of institutionalized misogyny, and that his whole history with Buffy and (especially) Faith couldn't've helped. I can imagine Wesley making some incredibly cutting and/or belittling remarks to the women around him in the event of demonic infection. I cannot imagine Wesley turning into some weird caricature of your Wife-Beating Asshole Stock Character ("two black eyes"? Oh, please), much less going after Fred with a big honkin' axe. And this despite a damn good acting job by all parties. I might've been okay with the premise that Billy simply caused inexplicable (yet heteronormative) domestic violence around him as part of his Wacky Demonic Powers, but if he's supposed to be bringing out something intrinsic in human men, there should be some differentiation in how they react. And...um...this brings us to the Big Problem. Their being that level of latent misogyny in all men? Not such a good idea for any of us, if you think it all the way through.

Apparently, the Angel writers have derived their understanding of feminism from Princess Ida. For those unfamiliar with the lesser-known operatic works of Gilbert and Sullivan, you may wish to look here. However, Ida's basic ideals are summed up neatly by Lady Psyche, who happens to be Professor of Humanities at the women's college Ida has founded: "We are all taught, and, being taught, believe / That Man, sprung from an Ape, is Ape at heart." Or if you prefer it in song:

For anyone still unclear on the concept, yes, Princess Ida was a parody of contemporary (i.e., Victorian -- the opera opened in 1884) feminism, among other things, and yes, the ladies all eventually see the error of their ways and pair off with the male characters. It's rather disturbing if you think about it for too long. But it's not half as disturbing as the fact that we're apparently not yet past what even Gilbert and Sullivan thought was a risible theory of gender difference.

Fortunately, we still have something to look forward to: the clash of the Princess Ida school of pseudo-feminism with the reality of Angel's walking, blood-sucking, one-woman madonna/whore complex. (Think about it: Darla's supposed to be Good and Naturally Connected To The Earth and All That Crap because she's female, doubly so because she's preggers. Darla's also supposed to be Eeeeeeeeevil, because she wears red and has sex and kills people -- and because otherwise Angel wouldn't have enough to brood about. What's going to give?) I don't enjoy being at this level of bitterness about a show I generally have fun watching, though. Bleah.

With Reference to Xingu

Normally, my interest in Edith Wharton is best described as "glacial." I am not a great aficionado of novels in the first place -- that's not to say I don't read a lot of them, just that my favorite works of literature include relatively few novels as compared to entries from other genres. As novelists go, Edith Wharton is not a particular favorite of mine, for reasons of personal taste more than anything else -- well, a few stylistic things too, but I doubt you want to hear about them. I'm sure I could cultivate a taste for Wharton, with a little effort, but there's a whole world of things I'd rather read out there.

That said, I believe in accepting recommendations from trusted sources, and when Sarah insisted that there was a deeper message for fandom to be found in Wharton's "Xingu" -- especially when I took two seconds on Google and discovered that "Xingu" was a short story available in a very nice hypertext edition -- I decided to go for it. The story is, in brief, a fable about the dangers of claiming more cultural knowledge than you in fact possess. (No, Sarah, it isn't going to stop me from making Dark Phoenix jokes without having read a single X-Men comic, but it does motivate me to include the occasional disclaimer. ;) It's also really, really funny.

"The beautiful part of it," Laura Glyde murmured, "is surely just this--that no one can tell HOW 'The Wings of Death' ends. Osric Dane, overcome by the dread significance of her own meaning, has mercifully veiled it--perhaps even from herself--as Apelles, in representing the sacrifice of Iphigenia, veiled the face of Agamemnon."

"What's that? Is it poetry?" whispered Mrs. Leveret nervously to Mrs. Plinth, who, disdaining a definite reply, said coldly: "You should look it up. I always make it a point to look things up." Her tone added--"though I might easily have it done for me by the footman."

I think the people behind Ask Jeeves missed a golden marketing opportunity there. ;) Oh, this has also been a test of the quote-block; I haven't found a color for it I really love, so I thought I'd see if anyone has additional suggestions.

On Teaching

Have I mentioned lately that teaching is a blast? It's like skydiving. During your debut performance at the Met. For, in this case, two and a half hours straight. And I'm functioning on four hours of sleep, a blueberry muffin, and a nice large cup of strong black tea with milk. 'Scuse me while I bounce off the walls for a little bit. It's also kind of like God on the second day -- "look, I took this creation thing and improved on it. I rock!" (That's the loose translation.) I am perfectly convinced that God went into the third day operating on an adrenaline high. My plans are a little less extensive -- no appointments or meetings for the rest of the day, so I just have to go order some business cards, find something to eat (how it is that in a matter of one week, I've started elevating meal-skipping to an art again?), and catch the 4 o'clock train back home so I can get groceries and do laundry.

Something coherent may appear here later, or it may not. Don't everybody complain all at once. ;)

Deadlines and Darla

Along with the freezing rain -- or perhaps it's sleet; I come from a part of the country where we prefer not to be clear on these distinctions -- I'm suffering from the Attack of the Killer Friday Deadlines. I'm finally starting to see Dissertation Chapter One take on final shape; I've got over thirty pages of a thirty-five page chapter written, but only fifteen or so of them are properly revised, and my brain keeps scampering off in new and not necessarily productive directions. Unfortunately, it's Friday afternoon, so now I have to wrench myself away and start planning tomorrow morning's class, which deals with entirely different subject matter. I wonder if I have the nerve to promise my advisor this chapter next week? That'd get it done, all right -- and I did want to get it out of the way by the end of the month. Besides, I now have the ridiculous-but-surprisingly-effective motivation of wanting to update that list over on your right. Perhaps I should just create a whole "Dissertation Watch" section...y'know, for all those nonexistent people who care about my work. Or maybe I should steal Julen's idea and put up my grocery list, which would probably be more interesting. Right now I need milk, cheese, sour cream, canned pumpkin, some celery, possibly a chunk of beef if I want to make that lentil soup with the barbecue sauce, and whatever additional produce looks good. Oh, and avocados. And...wait, this is almost as unexciting as the epic saga of Chapter One.

The extremely tiny portion of my brain devoted to fanfic thoughts has apparently decided that Friday is Darla Day, because now I want to write about Darla's trip from Honduras to L.A. I'm thinking she could have some fun with flashbacks, preferably flashbacks that don't involve scary Angelus-hair. Unfortunately, most of the places involved have names that make English speakers giggle. Also, I'm not really much of a fiction writer. But perhaps. If I have time. Later.

Buffyverse Metaphysics, Narrative Style

The temperature is dropping like a rock today, and the winds are gusting up to 40 mph. Unfortunately, that means that my eleventh-floor office is playing the soundtrack to Wuthering Heights. I'm about fifteen minutes from digging out my headphones and cueing up the CDs I normally only listen to after most of my co-workers are gone. And speaking of co-workers, my officemate's out with some sort of flu bug, so maybe I shouldn't even bother with the headphones.

Hilarity for the easily entertained and overly literate: Salon's latest quiz tests whether you can identify quotes as being from the Bible, the Qu'ran, or Mein Kampf. This is more difficult than it looks. (Link courtesy of Holy Weblog!)

Kate's periodic musings on Buffy Meets The Secret History (Donna Tartt, not Procopius), combined with today's brief investigation into second-century Phrygian worship of the Magna Mater (there was a relevant dissertation-related reason, honest!), is putting me in the mood to think about how Buffyverse theology ought to operate. (How it does operate is another question altogether, but not quite as much fun.) I don't think there's any single pantheon controlling things; I think the Buffyverse operates on religious principles remarkably similar to those of the not-quite-late-antique world. The second century, let's say -- Hellenism just beginning to decline. The Roman world is as safe as it's ever going to be, and most right-thinking people agree that the Empire will last forever in one form or another. (Turns out they were right, but not in the way they expected.)

Every city and every region has its gods; so does every nation (that's gens in Latin, ethnos in Greek); so do most professions; so do most stages of life. Every time the Empire expands, they discover new gods, and fads in worship come and go. You can stick with your native/natal deities, or you can find some you like better -- as long as you don't bother anyone else or screw with the tourist trade to the local shrines, and as long as you'll swear by the Imperial genius in a crunch, nobody worries too much about anyone else's worshipping habits. Some gods are more demanding than others, of course, and if you really want power, you have to give something up. You may wind up going with a mystery religion -- you usually have to spend awhile praying and/or fasting and/or participating in your god's mysteries. Sometimes, there's some really nasty stuff involved in those rituals: drugs, scarification, sometimes self-castration or human sacrifice. Think that's too crude? You may wind up becoming a philosopher instead -- more fasting, lots of traveling, but even though you think there's only one Supreme Being, that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of sub-Supreme Beings you'll want to watch out for, and their various mysteries have significances that most of their worshippers don't understand but that you might. At any rate, you'll find that there are priests and priestesses all over the place, some of them more serious about it than others. There are plenty of burial cults you can buy your way into; if you don't have the right kind of family connections, you need someone to look out for you once you die. It's not that you don't have preferences and reverences, you understand; it's not that you can switch gods on a whim, or at least, it's probably not a good idea to do so. It's just that you know all the other gods have power, too, and most of them don't mind if you call on different ones for different situations. Sarpedon meets Cybele meets Demeter meets Baal meets Dionysius meets Isis. Pray to whomever attracts you; do whatever works. Watch out for the consequences.

The Jews are an exception, a legal one, but they're less popular since their Temple was destroyed, their city razed, and the ruins sown with salt. More consequences. It seems clear that their God hasn't worked out too well, but apparently it's happened before. These days the Jews mostly live in the big cities with everyone else and don't interfere with the worship of other gods. Even that weirdo who claimed to be the Jewish Anointed One -- no, the one after Theudas and before Bar Kokhba, Yeshua or something, the one who got crucified under Tiberius -- they say his name worked against demons whether or not you bought the whole story. Yeshua's followers, the Christians, are even stranger than the Jews; some of them march right up to the nearest magistrate on purpose and proclaim their religion so they can get themselves killed. Some of them are Jews and some aren't; there seem to be half a dozen types of them, and they argue among themselves about which books to use and when the world's going to end. Mostly, though, they also live with everyone else, ducking and covering every thirty years or so when a new Emperor decides to celebrate his accession by killing their leaders in the big cities. The Jews and Christians use little everyday spells and amulets just like everyone else, that's for sure.

In case you wondered, there's a Hellmouth -- the Greek-speakers would say a neckyomanteion -- for every region as well. Mostly, pilgrims come there to listen to the oracles who are situated at each entrance. One of the most famous in Italy is Lake Avernus, between Cuma and Puteoli, where Aeneas traveled to speak with his father. There are entrances to hell in the caves along the River Styx, in Lebadeia, and at Lake Acherousia, near Ephyra, where Odysseus had his chat with Tiresias. There are also Hellmouths at the temples of Poseidon in Taenaron, Hermione in Argolis, Kyme in Italy, and Herakleia in Pontos -- and that's just for a start. If you want to learn the future without going to a Hellmouth, there are dozens of methods of divination, too -- birds, entrails, lightning, lots, stars, numbers, mirrors, dice, frogs, flowers, afterbirths, salt, laurel, loaves of barley bread, etc. Every region has its preferred method; every region has its oracles, and its oracular books, and its shrines to gods who might or might not give you the time of day. There are always alternatives. And there are always consequences.

What is vampirism if not a burial cult? What is the Council of Watchers if not a philosophical sect? How else do we account for all the prophecies? Y'know, this almost makes me feel better about Willow's profligate use of every deity that the Buffy writing team can dream up. Almost, I said. Little Miss Shortcut To Power is, at the very least, incredibly overdue for some of those consequences.

Designing Woman

Hmmmm. If Reblogger doesn't get back online soon, I may have to switch to BlogBack, and while I don't care too deeply either way, I think Reblogger deserves some allegiance due to its priority. Well, I doubt people are clamoring to comment on this journal right now, so it can wait another few days.

My workday so far has been occupied by the massive timesuck known as Coding A (Very Simple, Really) Class Website for the class I'm currently teaching. Sadly, I cannot link to the website here for fear of spoiling my ever-so-thinly-disguised secret identity, but suffice it to say that the most complicated design elements it uses are tables and some very basic cascading stylesheets. I like to write my own code (or cannibalize other people's code, but only if I have a reasonable understanding of what's going on in it); I use Notepad and a nice little freeware FTP program to build my sites. I typically use Netscape 4.7 as my "validator," especially given that there's nothing in this project that should cause serious cross-platform problems (except, of course, that episode where I kept forgetting to close a certain tag). It's all really, really low-tech, which fits neatly with both my programming abilities and my design philosophy.

That said, I wish I had some kind of design talent. I can put together reasonably nifty color schemes, but I can't do interesting layouts or "looks" -- really, I can't. I occasionally borrow them from other people, changing font and color at will, but I can't seem to generate them on my own. I suppose that's an artistic skill I lack. It's just frustrating, because my professional website could use a good redesign -- it looks indefinably dated, and I'm bored with it -- but I can't really figure out where to start.

Meanwhile, we're having thunderstorms outside and I'm trying to decide whether I should just send all my job-application materials via Federal Express, given the anthrax-related mail delays which seem to be spreading across the country. Honest Doubt, the latest Amanda Cross murder mystery, proved very disappointing -- not enough entertaining academic satire, an easy-to-guess (and wildly implausible) plot, a narrator whose quirks annoyed me, and an inadequately disguised series of Social Messages. Bleah. I'll just go re-read Cross's Poetic Justice, which may well be the best academic murder mystery of the twentieth century, and one of the best novels of academic manners. (Dorothy Sayers's Gaudy Night, which observant readers of this journal may recall as one of my favorite novels, isn't a murder mystery.)

Tidying Up

Back in the office, thank goodness. My ergonomic desk chair and laptop with built-in wristrest welcomed me, I cleared up a few minor administrative problems (note to self: when mail is going wonky, send bills in well ahead of time), my hair is still happy, and I got a gratuitous invite to review a book I'd wanted a copy of anyway for a well-respected journal in my field. So, all in all, not a bad day so far, even if we're in for yet another spell of clouds and rainshowers and perhaps snow by the end of the week.

Last night's Angel episode was cute, with some really good bits. Pacing problems in the first half, but oh well. I definitely like Fred, which was presumably a major goal of the episode, and I think we can all agree that the trailer was the funniest thing in a long time. Also, I'm so glad that there was acknowledgement of how extended-family-less the Angel Investigations team is, and how that's not entirely a good thing, and how not all people over 30 are either uncool or undead. And...looky, actual fallout from "That Old Gang of Mine," if not precisely in the obvious direction. Definitely an improvement over "Carpe Noctem." (In the interest of not boring my readers to death, I won't embark on a philological analysis of this week's weapon and demon names on Angel, except to reiterate that Latin is not an esoteric language. Jeez, people, I already proved that you can surf the Web for a minute and get transliterated Sumerian!) The angst-ridden among you should be looking forward to next week, though.

I caught a little bit of last week's Buffy over the weekend, but it just made me sad and confirmed my suspicion that I don't even want to watch the musical episode. Giles...is reasonably perceptive and decent, which is welcome. But in order to get him off the show, they're going to have to screw up his character, too. I'm not interested in watching the last character I basically like on that show become intolerable and then disappear, so I'll settle for occasionally skimming the MBTV recaps and watching my videotape library of seasons 1-3. Incidentally, watching several seasons of Buffy at the same time has confirmed my total bafflement with Buffy/Giles 'shippers; from somewhere around late S1 forward, their relationship is clearly hovering close to parental (in a good way, people) and totally lacks romantic subtext. In the wacky world of fanfic, I realize, any romantic pairing is possible, and perhaps almost any romantic pairing can be made convincing by an extremely talented author...but, still.

Back in the world outside the Midwest, things aren't so good. We're still dropping bombs on Afghanistan, I think -- the Pakistanis want us to stop in time for Ramadan, which gives us a few weeks yet, and does Afghanistan have any buildings left? People are dying of inhalation anthrax in D.C., and since almost everyone I know in D.C. (still a surprisingly large number, given how long it's been since I lived there) works in either government or media, I'm kind of tense. I'm not sure that our government is precisely doing the right thing, and I know a lot of the rhetoric makes me sick. But...I'm going to keep talking about silly TV shows, mostly, and finishing my dissertation, because I can't do anything else right now, and continuing my mostly-normal American lifestyle seems to be the most fitting gesture. We now return you to your regular blathering.

Bonding With Darla

As per the usual Friday afternoon routine, class prep is happening -- gradually, but it's happening. The dissertation chapter is stalled, not because I don't know what comes next, but because I feel overwhelmingly disinclined to sit down and write any more. I think I shall have to take a day or two off without coming into the office. (Yes, yes, I know, but do you realize I don't have an Internet connection at home?)

On Friday afternoons, my thought patterns become ever more whimsical and weird, especially when I'm trying not to talk about my class. (Warning: the following musing contains plot spoilers for the first two episodes of Angel S3.) Just recently, someone over on MBTV offered a simile that involved "Darla at a Lamaze class" as the point of comparison, and I realized that I found that image oddly...inspiring. I mean, I've heard lots and lots of pregnancy/birth stories from my friends and acquaintances, and what appalls me the most about all of them is that there is always a moment when the Medical Establishment ignores the wishes of the woman giving birth because she is, after all, giving birth and therefore irrational or, uh, something. (The perpetuation of this stereotype is one of my least favorite things about the Angel S1 episode "Expecting" -- but at least there it's a demonic influence!) Now, perhaps I'm missing something here, but the Medical Establishment is being hired to perform a service. They have not been given permission to ignore their patient's wishes, especially if their patient is conscious and able to communicate perfectly well. I'd like to think that my generation would change this paradigm -- we were born into a feminist era! We can choose female doctors! We can control our own reproductive rights! We can, as the Barbie commercial said in my youth, do anything! -- but it's not changing fast enough to suit my not-terribly-immediate reproductive plans.

I'm not a physician, and I fail to see why this makes me a lesser person. I possess training and knowledge in my own field easily on a par with theirs, and I'm a damn good researcher who has occasionally worked as a medical transcriptionist and science writer. (Plus, I read Latin fluently, which puts me several steps up on most doctors I know when it comes to terminology.) I've selected physicians as advisors rather than supervisors throughout my (mercifully negligible) medical history to date, and I refuse to believe that getting pregnant and/or giving birth will change the way I interact with medical professionals. Being in periodic pain (I have a very high pain threshhold, by the way) does not render me incompetent to make decisions about my own medical treatment. So...I'm a little apprehensive about having children, because I am darn tootin' well planning to be in control throughout the process, and the cards seem stacked against this. Barring unexpected complications, I'm thinking birthing center rather than hospital, and if I have to have a homebirth, well, we'll look into that (although far too many homebirth narratives online feature details such as "I prayed to Jesus to stop my hemorrhaging," which is nice and all, but give me some newfangled human aid to go with it).

Wait, you wanted to know what this has to do with Darla in a Lamaze class? Well, it's simple: Darla, much as her character annoyed me last season, is now a vampire who Doesn't Take Any Shit From Anyone. (She does seem to have an inexplicable weakness for Angel, but I'm hoping she's over it by now -- months of evening sickness will do that to a woman.) And...she's pregnant. I'm sure the Angel writers will do something awful to her character if/when she finally gives birth, but for now let me enjoy this juxtaposition. Darla in a birthing class wouldn't watch films that don't interest her, she wouldn't allow herself to be condescended to, she wouldn't really give a damn whether or not she had a partner (I'd much prefer to, but it shouldn't be required; if Darla brought anyone, it'd be Dru), and she wouldn't be intimidated by everyone else's demands that she breastfeed/bottlefeed/discipline the child/provide attachment parenting/buy cloth diapers/use disposables/et-fricking-cetera. She'd also kill anyone who tried to make her sign forms before receiving treatment or refused to let her eat anything but ice chips during labor. I could get to like this -- within reason. If at some point in the far distant future I get pregnant, as I hope to, I will not be mincing around Latin America drinking tequila with a blood chaser or locating isolated Honduran shamans with mysterious fluency in English. I will, however, not be taking any shit. If this requires me to spend time fantasizing that I could rip an obsetrician's throat out at any moment I pleased...well, it'd probably be less harmful to my (hypothetical) baby than if I went around with all that unexpressed rage festering inside me, right?

Since I'm not having a baby before tomorrow's class, it's just possible I should finish up this lecture I'm giving tomorrow.

Elephant's Eye

Ohhhhhhh what a beautiful morning...this is probably a damaging admission, but I actually hum that on my way into the office sometimes, especially if I'm the first person here and there's, y'know, a bright golden haze on the meadow (or at least the campus). Especially if I'm looking forward to spending a few quiet minutes in the break room basking in the sunlight coming from the windows, eating my brown-sugar Pop-Tart, drinking my Red Zinger, and dog-earing pages in the program book for an upcoming Major Professional Conference. (Hi, my name is Naomi, and I'm a humanities geek. You knew that, right?) No obvious typos in the listing for my session -- whew. Most Overused Word: "boundaries." First Runner-Up: "diaspora."

Job-searching scariness aside, I enjoy conferences, which is an even rarer thing in academia than enjoying the company of other people. MPC#2, as I shall call the conference in question, doesn't have that many truly goofy topics, but I imagine that some of my readers might be entertained by "'The Vaccination Vampire': Blood, Boundaries, and the Victorian Body" and the entire session on "Queer Comics, Queer Histories." (This, of course, features the obligatory paper on the lesbocentrism of "Wonder Womyn," but my favorite paper title is "James Bond(age): Harry Chess (the Man from A.U.N.T.I.E.) and Durable Masculinities." Would someone like to tell me who or what Harry Chess is?) Let me emphasize that of the three MPCs I attend annually, this is by far the most sober. Honest. Have I mentioned this week how much I love this line of work?

In totally non-academic news, the miniature rosebushes I rescued from our office party last month seem to be happy; once the roses went, I deadheaded them and was rewarded with a flush of new growth. I'm less sure about the kalanchoe from the same party -- it's just kind of hanging out on the windowsill, but it looks healthy enough, and this office gets too much daily light for it to reflower. I should really bring more of my houseplants into the office, because it's much easier to remember to tend to plants I'm staring at all day than to water the ones I see for a few minutes in the morning and at night. Every time I reach that conclusion, though, I start thinking about how I should really repot the African violets and the Norfolk pine first, move the rosemary to someplace with more sunlight, divvy up the aloe colony so I can give baby aloes to all the people I promised, and do something about the non-hanging hanging basket with all the philodendron. (It used to be hanging in the kitchen in my old apartment. The kitchen in my old apartment had windows. I am never again moving anyplace with carpet or a partially blocked northern exposure.) Perhaps after I've moved all the dishes out of the sink, I should go ahead and do some repotting this weekend; I always get potting mix all over the place, but I'm overdue on mopping the kitchen floor anyway. Or perhaps I should just find myself a nearby garden.

I may post more later, but for now I need to get back to work.

Allusions and Illusions

I love the Web. This is one of those days when I'm reminded of how much fun it is to play with code, how easy it is to locate a book at any library in the world within five minutes, how wonderful it is that I can access The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature at will. (And not only do they have names and translations online; they also have transliterated texts. Makes me want to sit down and write a fic with my favorite pairing -- Wesley/Exposition Fairy -- just to take advantage of that.) Also, the Single Greatest Web-Related Application Ever: online baby pictures. I am keeping up with the growth and hair development of babies in New York City, D.C., and Chicago, as well as points significantly south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Several of said babies have dimples. All together now: awwwwwww.

Also, the sun's shining, and my work is coming along -- slowly, but there. I've got a fanfic idea that isn't going away, but I can't quite figure out how to get it started, or how several key plot points should turn, and it involves a big, swirly hole as a plot device. Big, swirly holes have been a bad idea since...let me think...original Star Trek? Certainly, the Pylea arc wouldn't leave anyone especially anxious to see them on Angel again, even if there's now a canonical explanation for some of how they work. This idea also involves a couple of OCs, which are equally suspicious on principle. I suspect I should leave well enough alone and simply go read some nice books about demons.

Demons interest me, especially the extent to which demons have always been signifiers, projections, or illusions. This isn't necessarily an insight which requires a Freudian subconscious. The third-century Life of Antony, probably authored by Athanasius of Alexandria, contains a lengthy passage in which Antony tells his audience that they need not fear demons. After all, Antony points, out, demons lack physical bodies with which to harm the righteous and can only issue threats or produce illusions. "The demons, however, unable to effect anything, play parts as if they were on stage, changing their forms and striking fear in children by the illusion of the hordes and their shapes." Now, the demons of the Buffyverse are complicated by other analogies, but consider the possibility that the Angel episode "That Old Gang of Mine" can be usefully viewed as an exercise in what happens when you take the existence of demons just a little too...materially.

Just a thought.

Carping

Y'know, it'd be nice if it didn't rain for one whole day. I can feel my will to live -- well, okay, my will to live without regular infusions of chocolate -- diminishing. Perhaps I should just go down and get some more M&Ms.

Last night's Angel (rather vague spoilers ahead) didn't hold my interest especially well, but it also didn't irritate me profoundly, apart from the massive non-issue made of how Angel's demon should've reacted to another soul being in there. (In fairness, the shooting script had an additional subplot which allowed for some actual character-building for Angel. Nice to know the Deliberate Wackiness won out.) The Angel/Fred googliness had to be dealt with sooner or later, and I will be thrilled if this is the last we see of it. Apart from Angel, I like Fred -- we're nowhere near adoration yet, and I wish she'd get saner faster, but I enjoy watching the other characters react to her. Gavin Park, on the other hand, fails to thrill me; his putative boss Lilah (why has nobody pointed that out? She's head of Special Projects now, right?) needs to be smarter, less vulnerable, and more consistent. I mean, I'm all for multifaceted evil characters, but this is the woman just two weeks ago finally figured out that Angel's a cinch to manipulate through his friends, and whose whose most memorable line (to me, at least) came in last season's "Reprise": "I heard Henderson actually pulled her firstborn out of company daycare to offer it up to -- brown-noser. My mother was right. I should have had children." Finally, Smallville has skyrocketed into the category of Shows I Will Never Watch Because I'm So Sick Of The Incessant Previews.

Now, on to the nitpicking, and here I wish Angel had a few people on staff with really good liberal arts training, because half the "intellectual" or "esoteric" references made on the show bug me. There's very little literature in Sumerian to begin with, but even if we envision a secret demonological work, it'd surely have been translated by now (at least into German), and Sumerian literature was simply not written by people with names like "Fassad." Also, if Wesley's that much of an original-language fiend (and I prefer to believe that he is), he wouldn't be calling said work by an English title. Would it have killed them to look up a plausible phrase in, say, Avestan or Old Persian? Secondly, since when do "Algurian" incantations consist of three words of high-school Latin and one word of gibberish? Look up a language if you want to make your academic audience happy, make up a language if you must, but don't borrow three-quarters of your words from a mainstream language and expect to throw everyone off. Finally, how many people do you know who actually like all four of Dostoevsky, Joyce, Goethe, and Fitzgerald? (I'm talking about Fred, not Angel. I don't know why everyone thinks Angel is supposed to have been so deep; getting drunk with Baudelaire and reading Sartre a century later doesn't exactly offer proof of sustained intellectual activity. Why wouldn't he like Charlton Heston movies? He liked Bonanza, for heaven's sake.) It's possible that I'm being overly analytical, though; if we cleverly deduce from that "handsome man" scene we've seen in the previouslies every dratted week since that Fred is a romantic, I'm willing to give her "The Dead," The Great Gatsby and/or Tender is the Night, and -- with some reservations -- Faust. I'm not getting The Brothers Karamazov, though. Perhaps it's just that Fred thinks those are the sorts of books Angel ought to be reading -- y'know, broody and Obviously Great Literature.

I also watched the best part of Buffy S1 last night (I, um, kind of forgot to label tapes, so I needed to figure out what was where). First-season Buffy 'n' Angel are cute together -- not thrilling, certainly not deep, but not as dull as some people have claimed. Willow's performance in "I Robot, You Jane" made me briefly forget how much I now dislike her character. And quite apart from the sad underuse of Giles in the last few seasons, didn't Joss and company realize how entertaining it was to watch him interact with adults like Jenny Calendar or even Principal Snyder (or Joyce, and I don't mean in the "Band Candy" sense)? Didn't they realize how absurd it was to have this self-enclosed world of teenagers become even more self-enclosed this past season? I mean, if I wanted to watch Dawson's Creek or Felicity, that's what I'd be doing.

And if I wanted to get back to my dissertation, I'd...well, finish this entry.

Pyrrhic Victory

It has been...a day. A day during which you should all be very grateful that I did not post in here, because the results would not have been pretty. Suffice it to say that after a mere six hours of calling, emailing, faxing, and quite possibly promising to bear someone's children (my blood sugar was low at that point, and the details are hazy), all my letters of reference for academic jobs are in, and I've arranged for the appropriate combinations of letters to be sent out to all the places to which I've already applied. The Internet company storing the letters was very, very helpful, above and beyond the call of duty. The people at Unspecified University's career service were reasonably helpful. Some of the professors I'd asked to write letters were helpful; others were not. Murphy's Law functioned more or less the way it usually does. Fortunately, I prevailed, thanks to extra-strength Tylenol, peanut M&Ms, and my talent for charming people over the phone.

I would call up my mother and thank her for any genetic or environmental contributions to that last -- my mother works in development and strategic planning, and she can get pretty much anything over the phone, including free airline tickets -- but when she called me this morning about something else and I mentioned the letter crisis in passing, she reassured me that I could "be the president of anything [I] wanted." Well, yes, Mom, and I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I've kind of put a chunk of my 20s into this career path, so I'd like to see it out, okay? You see, Mom has finally realized that medical school is not an option for me, but she hasn't given up hope on law school. I, on the other hand, have finally realized that my mother is not going to be happy with my career until I'm president of a college, or preferably a university system. I kind of like that as a goal, but since it'll take awhile, I haven't given up hope on getting her a puppy which she can train from the ground up. Grandkids would also work, but a puppy doesn't require me to date.

So, anyway, the letters. Heaven knows what some of them said about me, but I've already sent them out to half a dozen institutions, so here's hoping they're positive. In my field, it's considered preferable to designate your letters as confidential before they're written -- the theory is that the letters will be more honest that way. I'm not sure I'm convinced of that; journalists don't write less "honestly" than journallers, do they? If anything, I think this journal is less honest insofar as it's confidential; I can edit my remarks, edit my personality, avoid mentioning things I'd rather not, say whatever I feel like about people or institutions provided that I don't name them explicitly, and generally avoid getting called on it. Is that honest? Perhaps I'm just ethically deficient, because I'm not getting what the huge advantage to that sort of "honesty" really is. However, I went with prevailing custom on my letters -- so I'm not even sticking to my ethically deficient principles. Drat.

It's becoming increasingly clear that my brain is fried and that the best thing for me to do would be to go home, possibly stopping off for groceries on the way, and watch the new Angel. At least I managed to make a dent in the laundry last night. Now, if I could just get back to working on my dissertation tomorrow....

Fandom Versus Organized Education

What in the name of all that's holy is up with American education?

No, this isn't one of those "our children can't find Australia on a map and think Jefferson refers to a '70s-era sitcom" rants. We have poorly paid, poorly trained, barely evaluated, undervalued, overworked teachers in our public schools. Textbooks take decades to catch up to scholarship and still revolve around the doings and sayings of people presented in such a way that most kids couldn't care less. Education classes are overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) equal parts trendy crap and pablum. This is probably not news to any of you. What follows, however, is the rant that comes from reading one too many journals in which intelligent people bemoan the fact that Buffy fandom is more stimulating than organized education. (If you think this is aimed just at you, you're wrong; there are four or five names coming to mind offhand.)

Part of it is the school. In education, as in most other walks of life, you get pretty much what you pay for, or what you can talk someone else into paying for. Money -- the school's, that is -- allows for better libraries, classrooms, teachers, administrators, health insurance for all concerned, on-campus coffee shops, etc., etc. So there are bad schools, average schools, good schools, and excellent schools, and although there can be variations within different academic programs and more nebulous criteria for some types of prestige, how good a school is will usually have a lot to do with how big its endowment is. How good a school is for you will usually have a lot to do with how good the school is, although you shouldn't ignore issues of personality, "fit," convenience, etc.

Part of it is the student. The average American high-school graduate has embarrassingly subpar abilities in basic reading, writing, and reasoning skills; also, s/he has often been exposed to years of pathetic teaching already and has low or no expectations beyond making the right grades and getting the simulated sheepskin. The better schools will generally try to select students above average -- unless, of course, they have special talents, such as athletic ability in a big-ticket sport, descent from alumni, or a knack for cheating on standardized tests. (Well, that last was definitely the kicker for several college acquaintances of mine; they went into detail about how they'd managed it after drinking heavily one night during our plush study-abroad program. Kind of educational, really -- for me, I mean, not them. I believe they mostly got hangovers the next morning and jobs in finance after graduation.) The problem is that above-average students are usually bored silly, not as well-educated as they think they are, and accustomed to coasting through classes. Still, it amazes me that colleges aimed at this sort of student can sometimes fail to stimulate them.

Part of it is the teacher. The average professor at these schools has precious little training in pedagogy and may even have little teaching experience when s/he starts -- plus, s/he is evaluated for advancement in ways that minimize teaching. If teaching does play a role in professional advancement in academia, it's usually a look at student evaluations, to which studies show that you get good responses by grading easy and speaking dramatically. On the other hand, professors at prestigious schools are expected to excel in research and to be an active participant in scholarly communities and in some degree of campus committee work, so they have plenty of other things to suck up their time. Professors at less prestigious schools have to spend more time on committee work (this is usually as thrilling as it sounds) and frequently have to deal with petty tyrants running their establishments (this is not impossible at prestigious schools, but trickier to pull off, given the higher public profile). It's probably no surprise that many such professors wind up treating teaching as an unavoidable obligation and nothing more. I'm getting ready to be a part of this establishment, and some of its practices are embarrassing and indefensible.

But it's not the class topics, people. I've enjoyed classes in differential calculus, literary-critical theory of the twentieth century, colonial Latin American history, programming in C++, and so on and so forth. I have also, goodness knows, taken some classes where obviously entertaining topics were rendered unintelligibly boring by either the chosen course material, the ways in which this material was conveyed (aka "teaching"), or both. Most decent classes aren't simply designed to force-feed you facts, anyway; they're designed to teach you how to locate and then analyze facts in certain potentially useful ways. Y'know what? I am willing to bet that I can make any topic I'm even semi-qualified to teach compelling, given time and resources to turn it into a class in my own way. (Please note that I do not make this claim for any pre-arranged syllabus: there are some syllabi which I could not render compelling if I taught the resultant classes in the nude, while rotating a hula-hoop around my hips, to an audience composed entirely of stereotypical adolescent boys.) I am also willing to bet that someone -- not me, please -- could teach the world's most boring cultural-studies course on Internet fandom communities. I could even suggest a few excruciatingly dull readings to start it off.

Clearly, I don't have many answers. But I want people to know that the problem is not organized education itself. It's not the concept, it's the execution. (For the Buffy fandom people, I beg you to remember that there is not a fanfic idea, pairing, or genre in existence that can't be screwed up royally. For the rest of you, make your own analogy.) Don't give it up. No, scratch that -- if you're in grad school and not enjoying teaching or working in the field you've chosen, please, by all means, go do something that makes you happy or at least something that won't hurt other people while you're miserable. Whether or not you get your degree first is your call. If you're in college and you hate all your classes, finish them up as best you can, then look into transferring programs or schools. In either case, find some intelligent, caring people in education to talk to about the situation both before you make a final decision and before you leave. (Note that if there are no such people at your institution, you are in a whole new dimension of problem.) Maybe register some formal complaints with your institution, if you have grounds for them -- that is, if it's not just that the topic doesn't suit you, but if you're able to specify why it's being taught poorly. But don't give up on learning, or on the belief that people can teach other people something valuable in an institutional setting.

And, hey, if you have an idea about how to fix some of this, email me, because this is what I want to do when I grow up.

Windows, Wesley, Whining

Hmph. I'd been thinking that I'd reward myself for all the thirteen-hour days this week by going out to eat tonight -- the Windows of Hope project has restaurants across the country donating their profits from October 11 to help the WTC/Pentagon victims. Unfortunately, when I looked at their listing of restaurants in this state, none of them are closer than 45 minutes away. Sadly, I cannot justify driving even 45 minutes -- much less two hours, to get to the restaurants I love -- in order to make myself feel okay about eating out when I'm in a budget crunch. (And this is a decent-sized city, which makes it even sadder.) I think I'll just stick with assembling black-bean burritos at home.

Four application-y things down, two to go. One of those simply has to be postmarked by Monday, although I could get it out today if I needed to and may very well do so; the other I'm not sure about, and I'm waiting for them to get back from lunch so they can tell me whether their "application date" means "postmarked by" or "due on." Yes, my life's a thrill a minute right now. I've noticed.

In Buffyverse news, I'm really puzzled by the ways in which people have been reacting to the character of Wesley so far this season. I'm looking forward to watching his first episodes in Buffy S3, to see whether I can figure it out. Honestly, though, he's never been Principal Snyder, and I'm baffled by the depth of the venom some people seem to feel every time he breathes -- much less assumes a leadership role -- over on Angel. In last Monday's episode alone, Wesley successfully located the object which helped solve the demon killings, was able to tell when it was removed, identified and tracked down assorted demon victims, sheltered Cordelia under him and behind a table during the Caritas shootout, dove through bullets to retrieve Fred, stood up to a group of heavily armed teenagers on a killing spree, and helped get said teenagers under control once the no-demon-violence spell was broken. Would it help if he walked on water?

On the other hand, the "Wesley can do no wrong" brigade would make for a pretty boring character, although I may understand their motivations better. (Yes, he's "cute and smart." If I were into fictional boyfriends, he'd be a serious contender, baggage notwithstanding.) It seems to me that Wesley's speech to Gunn at the end of "That Old Gang of Mine" was (a) justified, (b) not quite ideally expressed -- the threat of unemployment should have been secondary to the fact that Gunn betrayed trusts and put his friends in danger! -- and (c) somewhat pompous-sounding, because, y'know, Wesley's not exactly brilliant at reading and responding to other people sometimes, and he's still got all those insecurities rattling around somewhere, and sounding like a pompous ass is still a bone-deep default response to certain types of problems. Despite all of this, he's currently shaping up to be a better leader than Angel (who never wanted to be a leader of anything in the first place, and we all remember those brilliant strategic plans of his...don't we?). In Buffyverse terms, that also means he's probably heading for a fall sooner rather than later, because people can't just stay content. Still...can't there be some middle ground here, folks? Shades of grey? Like on the show? Like with all the other characters? Angel, by the way, is definitely due for a Wesley-centric episode; the closest we've gotten is "Guise Will Be Guise," which was easily my favorite comic episode last season.

In my efforts to move though Buffy S3, I finally got around to watching "Dead Man's Party." Xander's still cute -- angry, but cute. Pity we didn't get much more Oz/Cordelia bonding, because that could've been hilarious. Don't especially like Willow, but I may be projecting backwards. I know I liked her back in S1; I think I liked her towards the end of S2, although her insistence on repeating the Angel-ensouling spell struck me as somewhat arrogant. And now that I think of it, isn't S6 just repeating the S3 arc of "Buffy must never let her friends know how badly their well-meaning actions screwed up her life"? Oh, wait, we never had that S3 arc; we just had "Dead Man's Party" -- bonding through zombie-whacking! -- and then Faith showed up. Wow, maybe there is something good about S6. Or maybe it'll just recapitulate the errors of S3. I'll still take "Anne" over any Buffy season-opener but the first, though.

Ahem.

Just put up a new "introduction" page -- oh, heck, look over to your right, people. I don't especially like having it pop up in a new window, but I'm not in the mood to create permanent links just so I can have this one document pop up in my Blogger window, and I'm definitely not in the mood to rewrite my layout using frames instead of tables. Yet. Well, maybe just a little bit, but that's only because I hate writing cover letters.

Unfortunately, I'm still rational enough not to immerse myself in web design when I have half a dozen things I want to mail out tomorrow. (I'm just guessing that my employers would rather not pay for me to FedEx every blessed job application at the last minute.) But because I'm Text-Based-Design Girl, I'll recommend Who Fonted? to anyone who hasn't run across it already.

Good Vibes

Good morning, sunshine! I didn't oversleep too badly today, I hit almost all the lights getting to work (I credit this to the reverse-Murphy's-Law method of trying to put on lipstick at red lights), and one of the two country stations I switch between played Martina McBride's "When God-Fearing Women Get The Blues." It's a cute song -- and a major improvement over most of the pop-country pablum out there -- but what I really want to do is to get the first two lines of the chorus playing on infinite repeat. Something about the melody, the backbeat, and the words are just perfect for me. "I've got a Mustang, it'll do 80 / You don't have to be my baby...." True love would be nice eventually, but I'll take a classic Mustang over a random carbon-based lifeform with a Y chromosome any day. And I love, love, love going fast around curves, even in my wimpy-but-reliable Escort with a speedometer that ends at 85. (Note to self: never alert parents to the existence of this journal.)

Anyway, I've made several important phone calls and done some other administrative tasks, so I feel okay about taking a few minutes to run through last night's Angel episode in here. No major spoilers. I, er, liked it. (Will they take away my Disaffected MBTVer Card for admitting that? No, wait, it's a Tim Minear episode, so they'll take away my card for not lining up to bear the poor man's children. Yikes.) The Big Gulp demon's fate really affected me, I thought there was excellent use of Merl, the Host wasn't being shoehorned into the plot for a change (and I can definitely see his being obnoxiously brave about telling people their readings, even though bravery isn't otherwise a trait of his), Fred did something courageous (I've been waiting for this ever since "Through The Looking Glass"), Wesley displayed a whole range of typical characteristics ranging from chivalry to near-foolhardy bravery to outright pomposity, and Angel/Cordelia cutesiness wasn't central to the episode. (Mind you, much as I love Charisma Carpenter's flair for comedy, Cordelia's entire second-half subplot was totally unnecessary, unless it turns out to have relevance later on. It played like surreal comic relief, but the "Oh, God" demon was a lot funnier, in a very black-comedy way.) I haven't always been convinced by J. August Richards' portrayal of Gunn -- he sometimes seems to lack the menace attributed to his character -- but he went several steps toward reaching it in this episode, and I'm willing to ignore the hints of Angel/Gunn bonding we got in "Over The Rainbow" and look back to the tension between them in "Shroud of Rahmon" in an effort to ignore character blips. Also, the way Gunn smiled at Fred was just so damn cute. (And I say this as a dedicated foe of inter-AI romance.) I really, really hope that the writers don't just drop the tension between Wesley and Gunn, the way they dropped the tension between Wesley and Angel in "Disharmony." But...people, it was a non-Angel-centric episode about difficult moral choices. Darla didn't show up. You don't get much better than that. Yes, there were some disturbing moral implications left unresolved (I should go into the relativism question some other time), but...uh, I kind of thought that was a plus. Compare and contrast this to the last time we addressed the demon-discrimination issue. That'd be S1 "Hero," the one with the thinly disguised Nazis....

In further embarrassing news, I'm getting used to Wesley's new hair. It's...not so bad. Not wonderful, but not so bad.

Now, back to fellowship applications. "Over the next three years, I plan to learn how to function as a full-fledged academic professional, publish my dissertation as a monograph, and tie a cherry stem into a knot with my tongue." Oh, c'mon -- tell me you've never wished you could do that.

Last Chances And Cycles

Today is Hoshanah Rabbah, the seventh day of Sukkot and a half-holiday in the Jewish tradition. It's the last chance to avert heavenly judgment -- in Israel, the last chance to change God's mind about the coming year's rainfall, but more generally the last chance at all sorts of redemption for the coming year. Some traditions argue that the divine verdicts made during the Days of Awe and sealed on Yom Kippur ("who shall live and who shall die," among other things) are not delivered until Hoshanah Rabbah. In fact, that's what the holiday is named for: "rabbah" means "great," and "hoshanah" means something like "help us, we pray," although it actually refers to a genre of prayer that says just that. (The word has been anglicized to "Hosanna," and there are no doubt many intelligent Christians who believe that Jesus entered Jerusalem to the Judean equivalent of "Hooray" or "Whazzup," because nobody ever bothers to translate it in English New Testaments.) There are all manner of spiffy customs surrounding Hoshanah Rabbah: dress up, eat challah dipped in honey, eat kreplach, circumnavigate the synagogue, wave around willow branches (I'll explain that one some other time), stay up all night reading Torah and the Psalms. People can wish each other "pikta tava," which is Aramaic for a "good note," or a good verdict from The Big Hall Monitor Up In The Sky. I like minor holidays, and this is one of my favorites. One of these days, when I've stayed in the same place long enough to have a stable group of geographically proximate friends, I want to throw a party on Erev Hoshanah Rabbah, play Leonard Bernstein's "Chicester Psalms," maybe mix it up with Rossi's gorgeous Baroque "Aleinu" -- well, anyway, it's a great holiday.

So, basically, we have this holiday devoted to lots and lots and lots of prayers for salvation and mercy. We are bombing Afghanistan. Odds are that bin Laden's followers will now try to bomb anything they can associate with the United States of America. Excuse me while I try to make sense out of this.

....

Oops, not working. I'll just stay in my corner, contemplating the misuse of modern technology involved in the Great and Terrible Job Search. (Memo to university career-placement services: switching your recommendation-letter dossier files to electronic storage is a good idea. Doing so in early October is a colossally bad idea.) Tomorrow -- strictly speaking, tonight -- is Shemini Atzeret; in the Reform movement, we collapse this with Simchat Torah, which is celebrated the next day in Conservative and Orthodox circles. I'm not sure that I feel up to dancing around the synagogue and gettin' jigg--er, joyful--about completing the year's cycle of Torah readings and starting them up again. But I might be able to manage some last-chance prayers for help and salvation today. And there's something to be said for trying to start back at the beginning again, even if you know it's not that easy.

Pedagogy and Premieres

Goodness gracious. I wasn't at my best the other night, was I? Sorry about that.

Well, I got everything finished, caught two hours' sleep on the train, grabbed my coffee and pastry, and taught a good class. Not, perhaps, my all-time greatest, but definitely good, especially for a first class where I don't know anyone's name and nobody else has done any reading. I overprepared and didn't get through all the material I'd planned, which is a huge improvement over the alternative. And next week I'll have time for things like assembling handouts. I'd forgotten how much pleasure I get out of teaching; the last time I taught anything was almost a year ago, and it was a topic I wasn't super-enthusiastic about, and I was working with another instructor who I wasn't at all enthusiastic about but who had more authority than I did. Bleah. What I'm teaching now pays less, but it's a really awesome topic (as well as one in which I have extensive background and training), a class I designed and am teaching all by myself, and I have smart, motivated students along with really sweet administrative support staff. ("Really sweet" = "does not utter a word of complaint about my chronic procrastination.") The commute would be evil every day, but once a week is perfect for running errands, window-shopping...oh, and there's a new place between the building where I teach and the train station with really great Chicago-style hot dogs. I'm never going to be a Midwesterner -- I think mayonnaise belongs on hamburgers and fireworks belong in public displays, not to mention my massive inability to care about hockey -- but putting a pickle spear and tomato slices on a hot dog is pure genius. Mmmmm. Next week, I'm damning the fat content and ordering the two-dogs-and-smothered-fries special.

As it turned out, my nap on the train was enough to keep me functional, if a little blurry around the edges, into Saturday night. I even watched "Bargaining." (Minor spoilers ahead.) Whoa. The first half just stunk. We're supposed to feel sorry for Willow, right, 'cause she had to kill Bambi, and not repelled because she's taken the powers of life, death, decision-making, and self-righteous bull into her own hands? We're not supposed to want Tara and Anya to just up and die because they have no character interest and are constantly caving in to their respective Significant Others? Xander came off as semi-sympathetic, apart from the fact that's he's being a massive jerk for insisting on an engagement but refusing to tell anyone. Then again, where on earth do they all get off not mentioning this Big Metaphysical Emergency which is Willow's excuse for raising the dead to Giles, who is, y'know, kind of an expert and certainly a concerned party? Poor Giles. That scene with Anya at the Magic Box was just awful. And, moving from the embarrassing to the petty, has Sunnydale passed a law that requires every woman to grow hair below shoulder-length, streak it blonde, and keep it loose, despite the obvious disadvantages during combat? (Speaking of legislation, I wish we knew who succeeded the Mayor. Sunnydale's infrastructure can't be in good shape if that tower stayed up for all those months. Earth to Joss: "adults," if that's what the Scoobies are now supposed to be, don't just worry about sex and paying the rent: they vote and pay taxes and occasionally even give a damn about the civic process. This is in no way a call for a Very Special Episode in mid-April during which the gang fights demonic accountants who refuse to recognize Willow and Tara as domestic partners while trying to get home in time to finish their 1040EZs...on second thought, maybe it is, 'cause that'd be really funny.)

The second half was definitely better, but I wonder if the Buffy writers are deliberately trying to manipulate us back into caring about Buffy-'n'-Dawn, since I for one was pretty sick of the my-fake-sister's-more-important-than-the-entire-universe vibe by the end of last season. (Yeah, yeah, so "Bargaining" kind of worked on that level. Especially since someone finally had the common sense to realize that under certain circumstances -- such as having been dead for months -- Buffy just shouldn't have good hair. And Dawn had better be heading for some massive adolescent rebellion and/or freaking out, because she's overdue.) On the plus side, I think I'm starting to grasp why Spike's supposed to be so sexy. Evil has never appealed to me, but consideration and a bit of vulnerability does it every time, and motorcycles don't hurt. Still, since when is a vampire the all-around most sympathetic, appealing, and ethical character in Sunnydale? I was never the world's most faithful Buffy fan, but I used to mostly enjoy watching it before Angel. Now I think I'll tune back in for the musical episode, because I'm curious. And, of course, I'll keep watching S1 and S3 when I get around to it. I'm not too incredibly enthused about analyzing every moment of S1, the way some people are, but it's cute and fun and I'm really looking forward to "Prophecy Girl." Remember, back when some crazy monk emailed Jenny a verse from Isaiah that helped Giles crack the mystery of the Anointed One? Remember, now that Giles is gone and nobody raised an eyebrow about Willow invoking Osiris (who is at least relevant to resurrection, but does he really know English?) and Raising. The. Dead? Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to straighten up my desk a bit, then go buy groceries so that I can get soup going before tomorrow's episode of Angel. And I'm given to understand that Gunn actually has a plot!

Not Really Presenting Myself In The Best Possible Light

I just had to craft a research agenda through 2005. I mentioned Buffy. (It has better name-rec than Angel.) It was relevant. Do I get some sort of award now?

In other news, the research-agenda thing has me sort of frustrated, because I'm trying to figure out exactly how much work I'm allowed to claim I can do over the next several years. I know what I want to do; I have a fairly accurate (if mildly ambitious) estimate of what I can do. The problem is that people only occasionally believe me, and it's not always a Good Thing when they do. Ever since I was "let go" from my first ever summer job when the hometown law firm discovered that I'd finished all the secretarial/administrative/organizational/gofering tasks they could find in three weeks (it was supposed to last all summer), I have learned to pay attention to people's expectations. It turns out that there's a fine line between overachieving and Making Things Look Too Easy, and I'm walking it. (Please note that I am not, in fact, God's gift to scholarship or administration. It's just that I read/compose/type very, very quickly and accurately when I'm actually motivated. I can't run a mile in under ten minutes, and something bizarre happens every time I try to make shortbread, but my particular set of aptitudes and skills means that I can make an awful lot of progress on several research projects simultaneously when I'm actually working. I spent awhile as a journalist, where speed is appreciated, and that probably exacerbated the problem. I also have a theory that institutional expectations haven't adjusted to the age of computers: dissertations are not being completed noticeably faster, even though people no longer have to type out each draft, because most people are told that it takes so many years to complete a dissertation, and that's what they aim for. But that's just a theory.)

Even if I wanted to, I can't entirely go by others' expectations: if I try to work full-on constantly, I'll burn out, but if I spend too little time working, I'll get bored and start testing myself against deadlines. (I knew it would be a bad idea to go straight into graduate school from college when I started waiting until 9 am to begin writing ten-page essays due at noon. Similarly, I knew I needed to quit my job and give graduate school a shot when I realized that I was only really working maybe two and a half days each week and still impressing co-workers with my productivity.) Academia is near-perfect for me, because almost everyone is a pathological overachiever; in order to get tenure at a Research One (i.e., top-flight) university, you should ideally have a second book under contract at the end of the fifth year of teaching. This is a mildly insane schedule for anyone, especially if you have some ambitions in the direction of Having A Life. But first I have to sound just overachieving enough to get such a job -- yet not so much so as to alienate potential colleagues. I hope this doesn't make me a horrible person, but right now having to do that dance is annoying me.

I can't stand Willow Sue as a character, y'know, but I have just enough of that I'm-the-smartest-kid-in-the-class snottiness left in me that I can understand (if not necessarily sympathize with) with her attitude about rules not applying to her. It'd be nice if she eventually noticed that being wildly overdeveloped in one skillset doesn't mean that you have nothing more to learn ever (the classes at UC-Sunnydale must really, really suck), and it'd be realistic if she learned how it feels to fail at something and not be able to fix it. I did both. Mutant Enemy's writing team apparently has no interest in teaching Willow either of those lessons. Pity.

Gah. Speaking of testing oneself against deadlines, it would have been a good idea to remember that I have to teach a three-hour class tomorrow morning before, er, yesterday. (In my defense, I thought they'd cancelled the class; there were apparently loads of last-minute registrants.) So now I need to finish a fellowship application, a job application, and some excuse for preparation for a course I haven't thought about since last spring. Today. While evading pep rallies, because it's a Home Game Weekend. I wonder if I can just talk about Buffy some more?

Persistence of Vision

I knew this Monday thing was a little too good to be true: I was planning to work late, but I had to leave my office before 6 because people were coming in to clean the carpets and make a great deal of noise. Oh well. I got the package with my new taupe pumps in it today, and I realize that there are many things still wrong with the world, but my shoe collection is not among them. The weather has cooperatively warmed up enough so that I can wear cute little skirts and funky tights instead of bundling up in black jeans like I do all winter. And now I have pumps that complement one of my favorite skirts, not to mention their potential usefulness when I want to wear a pastel power suit or something. (What’s frightening about this is that I own pastel power suits, several of them. Great for garden parties, hostile takeovers, summer conferences, etc. I draw the line at dyed-to-match shoes, though, hence the need for taupe.) Next on the shoe agenda: why do I crave a pair of burgundy pleather boots for which I have no possible use, much less lifestyle?

I think I’ve sorted out the best time to make journal entries: late at night, when I’m not sleepy yet but I can’t really get work done unless it’s a real emergency. (“Real emergency”: less than 48 hours until a given deadline.) There’s no point in spending valuable morning time, when I usually could work if I wanted to, trying to recreate all the things that floated through my head the night before. Of course, there’s a downside: I don’t have Internet access at home right now. Still, I’ve brought the laptop home tonight, so I’ll give it a shot. This entry will show up as posted on Tuesday morning, but right now it’s Monday night and I’m waiting for my lasagnas to cool. With a little judicious grocery-shopping, I’ve discovered, it’s possible to put together some nice one-dish meals during the commercial breaks in Angel. Last week I made an eight-quart stockpot full of spaghetti sauce; tonight I used some of the remaining spaghetti sauce to make lasagna (one 9x13 and one 9x9 pan) and froze two more cartons of sauce. I could blame this on the whole harvest-festival-food-storage aspect of this time of year, but the fact is that I have the freezer instincts of someone who comes from a much, much larger family than I actually do.

At any rate, tonight’s Angel was…interesting. Big shout-out to my dissertation, which I know better than to discuss in here. And I was right about the lack of theological conclusiveness. (Anyone waiting to see the episode should skip the rest of this paragraph right now.) So the literally (as opposed to psychologically) scarring visions Cordelia was having came from Evil Pulsating Brain Guy instead of the Powers That Be. Big whoop. Apparently, we are supposed to believe Fred’s suggestion that the PTB send visions on some sort of energy frequency which can be closely imitated (which is awfully reductionistic in any case). But we still have no clue why the PTB can’t send their visions without searing headaches, or, for that matter, why they could’t be bothered to intervene, helping Cordy and/or smiting Evil Pulsating Brain Guy. (We are also still unclear as all get-out about what the Host’s powers extend to, but that’s nothing new. Having a plot device which can reliably foretell the future means that every plot from there on out is fundamentally nonsensical, because the characters should just solve every situation by running to get their futures told. Why do you think Buffy lost the Pergamum Codex after S1?) Sarah’s got it right in her absolutely brilliant new Giles fic: the Buffyverse is profoundly unconducive to ethical monotheism (or, really, any kind of theistic ethics). It’s kind of depressing, when you think about it. But then, so is Wes’s hair. So I’m trying not to think about it -- after all, the rest of him is still pretty nice, and I really enjoyed the new cast-member interactions.

In my own universe, which is conducive to ethical monotheism most of the time, I’ve been pondering the similarities between hypertext and glosses. Someday, when I have time, and if this journal is still happening, I’m thinking of turning this page layout into something closely resembling a printed page of Talmud -- in other words, textual aids (Reblogger, various link and banner lists, etc.) surrounding a central block of text (a single entry). Before I do that, of course, I should decide what I’m doing with this space in the first place. Weebling on about my life and hobbies seems to be working reasonably well for now, though. Or maybe it’s just the calming effects of being curled up on the sofa in an apartment that smells like lasagna.

Imitation of Gandhi

This is amazing. The universe is cooperating with me one hundred percent, and on a Monday. I skip breakfast, and my officemate decides to bring in some apple pie for everyone. I feel a sudden urge to dress especially nicely today, and sure enough, someone sends me an email about a conference currently on campus with an afternoon session I'd like to attend -- and to top it off, one of my grad-school professors who I was just wondering how to get in touch with is speaking. Now if I could just get a nice big chunk of work done today before heading home for Angel, today will officially rock.

In Buffy syndication news, I finally got around to watching the episode of "Anne" I taped while out Saturday night. I was slightly gobsmacked. In order of awareness:
(1) Xander's really, really cute at the beginning of S3, in a potentially sexy way. (I mean, in S1 and S2, he was cute but dorkily so. Somehow, though, he must've put on bulk over the summer, and his hair looks good.) I finally get what Cordelia sees in him. I still don't grok the massive Oz-worship, but the way he flies across the park-or-whatever to rescue Willow from the gymnast vampire made me go "awwwww." Obviously, all the Scoobies are still in their Likeable Phase.
(2) I wish Buffy would take on more social-justice issues in demonic guise (instead of focusing on, y'know, personal issues in demonic guise, which are also good to a point but have been overdone lately). I think part of why I so strongly prefer Angel to Buffy is that the former show does just that. (This also accounts for my fondness for Angel S2 "The Thin Dead Line," even though the Chanterelle/Lily/Anne actress is way more convincing as Lily than as Anne. Now I actually want to see "Lie To Me.")
(3) A sickle? Oh, please. I was willing to give them the hammer -- I mean, there were sparks and big pools of molten something-or-other, so hammers kind of made sense in the whole infernal-mills scenario -- but a sickle? Buffy's undercover impression was more subtle than that. ("I'm bad, with the sex, and the envy, and that loud music us kids listen to nowadays." Hee hee hee. The dialogue in this episode is great.)
(4) So that's where that shot in the credits came from. And, my, they've left that in there for a long time, haven't they? Someone must feel strongly about it.
(5) Isn't anyone the least bit bothered about all the other slaves they left down there? Some of them must've still been able to remember their own identities. Also, did Buffy stop the whole demonic slave trade, or just temporarily shut down a single portal? And do I need help suspending my disbelief or what?
(6) This is what the Pylea arc on Angel failed to be: serious, scary, funny, and character-developing at the same time.
(7) I like this episode better than "Becoming." It also makes me feel more for Buffy and for Buffy/Angel.
(8) It's distinctly possible that S3 is my favorite season of Buffy, but I should give it more than one episode, shouldn't I? (Also, "Dead Man's Party" is exuding cheese from the previews. Oh well.)

Tonight on Angel, several key theological issues will be danced around. And I say this before checking out the wildfeed summaries. Tonight in Naomi's life, it's time to start on fellowship applications that probably demand my freakin' dental records.