Yes, it is a cheap trick to use a title that nobody else is likely to understand. I try to save it for special occasions.

"Parasceve" is a Latinized Greek word meaning "preparation." It originally referred to Friday, that being the day of preparation for the Sabbath, but the Roman Church somehow managed to narrow its meaning so that it referred only to Good Friday (notwithstanding moving the Sabbath to Sunday). I won't bore you by discussing the origins of the name "Good Friday," either, except to point out that it's more of a misnomer than usual this year in Jerusalem. I don't know what's being prepared, but I'm almost positive I don't like it. And I wish it didn't feel more like Good Friday than the second day of Passover. Of course, I kind of doubt matters will clear up first thing Sunday morning.

Like Good Friday -- like any self-respecting holiday in a thriving religious system, actually -- Passover also has half a dozen names. My favorite of the lot is z'man hiroteinu, "the season of our redemption." (Or possibly "freedom," but you get the idea.) As most of my readers probably realize, the passages of Scripture which tell the then-peculiar story of the God of Israel contain multiple injunctions to respect and help strangers and slaves "since you were strangers in the land of Egypt." They also contain multiple injunctions to wipe out other nations, avoid the company of those allowed to survive, and never, ever make covenants with them. At the Passover Seder, routinely or even temporarily observant Jews spill drops of wine from our cups to symbolize our sorrow at the plagues suffered by the Egyptians. We also run through numerous passages and songs chirpily recounting how God opened a can of whoop-ass on the Egyptians at the Red Sea and on lots of other people besides.

There are similar inconsistencies in the narratives of redemption and chosenness in both the New Testament and the Qu'ran, but the parallels are far from perfect and I bet my readers don't want the lecture.

The one thing I am absolutely clear on when I watch the news from the Middle East is that anyone who thinks there is either a simple problem or a simple solution to all of this is...insufficiently grounded in the foundational texts. Or, as someone not crippled by years of graduate education might say, "wrong."

There will be a happy-holidays post for Easter some other time. I am not feeling especially celebrational.

P.S.: If you see new entries appearing below this post, it's because I keep writing them on my laptop even when my laptop isn't network-connected -- then forget to upload them into MT until a few days later. Oops. ;)

There is a passage in the traditional Passover Haggadah which I especially like; in fact, I single-handedly snuck it back into our family Haggadah (which has most of the traditional stuff, but much of it in English, plus lots of extra songs) a few years back.* For those of you familiar with the Haggadah, it's the bit about five rabbis pulling an all-nighter in a cave in B'nai-Barak. They have a difference of opinion on whether the Biblical injunction to remember the Exodus "all the days of your life" means "not just the days, but also the nights," or "not just before the coming of the Messiah, but also afterwards." It's especially poignant if you know the context: the five rabbis are in the cave because the Romans have outlawed the study of Torah, their Temple and their entire capital city have recently been destroyed, and they're a tiny group of educated refugees trying frantically to piece together some kind of functional Judaism from the wreckage of Jerusalem. One of them is an ex-priest who has eff-all to do with himself without the Temple; one is a teenage prodigy with the nerve to hold an opinion attributed to a commoner (someone identified only as his father's son and not given his own name) against the whole group; one would later be tortured to death by the Romans for helping another Messiah candidate.**

The rabbis made a lot of things up, of course. The proper way to remember the Exodus in Temple times was to travel to Jerusalem with the family, have your lamb sacrificed, and enjoy a tasty dinner of grilled lamb and unleavened bread; it bears only a tiny resemblance to the modern Passover seder. It's at Passover, with its elaborate at-home rituals, that I'm most impressed by how much the first generation of Mishnaic rabbis -- the Tannaim, as that generation was later called -- just plain created. The thing is, they didn't create it out of nothing: they took the traditions that didn't or couldn't work any more, threw some of them out (albeit with detailed information on how to perform sacrifices just in case the Temple did get rebuilt), put a new spin on the rest, added passages to update the whole, and kept right on going. I disagree -- very politely -- with some of the things they changed and even some of the things they didn't, but I think the Mishnah is just unspeakably nifty because of the way it shows a religion adapting while remaining true to itself. Not neatly, or all at once, or even consistently, but with constant debates that show just how important every detail clearly was to those rabbis.

Later on, in a part that we have left out of our Haggadah (my relatives sensibly prefer to sing adapted show tunes), the five rabbis debate how many plagues God visited upon the Egyptians at the Red Sea. (See, if God's finger produced the ten plagues in Egypt and God brought Israel out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm... okay, you all get it. I call this part the "multiplication tables," because they get up to a maximum of 250 plagues before calling it a night.) Just as in the previous debate, there is no right answer: each position is given equal time, properly attributed to whomever thought it up, and explained in full. This is the other thing I love about the way the Talmud works. It's multifaceted and wild and veers off onto tangents* and introduces all sorts of outside sources (you know where the name of this blog comes from, right?) and is just generally messy. Not sloppy, just pleasantly cluttered and developing.

This is how I like my religions. This is also how I like my rituals, which would explain why our Seders keep running past midnight. Fortunately, the rabbis also included tips to ascertain when someone is dozing and when s/he is definitely sleeping during a Seder.

Happy Passover, everyone!

* Basic Jewish-literacy info, for those who may not have picked it up: the Seder (meaning "order") is the meal at which we engage in lots of stories, songs, and ritual show-and-tells both before and after we stuff our faces. The Hagaddah is the book with all the stories, songs, and instructions. Most people just buy them pre-assembled by their favorite denomination or sponsored by their favorite coffee company. My family tends to have plenty of small kids, non-Hebrew readers, and non-Jews around the Seder table, so several years ago we put in some heavy labor, did lots of photocopying and downloading from Internet sites, and put together our own Haggadah. Every year, we add a few new things; it's overdue for a complete overhaul, but -- like the Haggadah says -- maybe next year.

** This year, for the first time ever, it occurred to me that someone could probably go off and write Mishnah fanfic. Then I remembered that we have an aggadic (yes, it's the same word as "Haggadah"; it means "story") tradition for a good reason, and it hits many of the same themes, although the sex is less explicit.

*** For example, the tractate Pesachim, which deals with regulations for the Passover Seder, also has a big ol' digression on Why It Is A Bad Idea To Eat Two Cucumbers And Then Have Sex. Well, okay, there's a broader principle at work -- it's also a bad idea to eat two eggs and then have sex, or to drink two cups of wine and then have sex. There are also some useful side points -- it's okay to drink two cups of beer followed by one of wine, but not two of wine and one of beer. Also, it's okay to drink ten cups of wine, but not eight. The four cups of wine we drink during the Seder are a special case, which is how the entire discussion started up in the first place. Strangely, nobody ever discussed this during my formal Jewish religious education.

As I believe I've said before, Saturdays are excellent TV days in this neck of the woods. Cooking shows on PBS in the morning, two syndicated Buffy episodes and one new one in the evening. I just came into the office to answer some email, continue half-heartedly putting together fall classes, avoid doing my laundry, and wonder what I should fix for supper. Something with lots of vegetables, I think, because I need to clear out the refrigerator before I leave town again on Tuesday. And lots of grain products, because Passover will soon be upon us (which, obviously, is why I'm leaving town on Tuesday). Maybe pasta only-technically-primavera?

I don't usually read The New York Times, mostly because (a) I don't subscribe to it, and (b) I have no desire to be The Sort Of Person Who Reads The New York Times. You know -- the sort of people who think they're sophisticated because they call it "the Times" with no available referent, even though they don't live anywhere near New York and should really know that the archetypal Times is that of London. I do not live, and have never lived, closer than three hours from NYC; if I want nationwide or international news coverage in print form, truthfully, I prefer either The Wall Street Journal (although its editorial page tends to make me foam at the mouth, so perhaps not) or The Washington Post (too many "unnamed sources," but much more congenial editorial offerings, and a good food section). The Post also has an excellent comics page, which both the NYT and the WSJ fancy themselves too good to bother with. I am quite certain that I am not hip enough to go without comics, which is why I have held a subscription to the Post (when I lived in D.C., thankyouverymuch) but only read the other two newspapers by happenstance.

That said -- see, there's a point coming any day now -- I do occasionally find myself reading the NYT this year, because my office has a subscription. The news coverage is good, if not stupendous, and I'm becoming very fond of "Living Arts" and "Weekend." Right now I'm feeling downright chipper about reading the NYT, because the current "Weekend" section alerted me to the fact that the National Gallery (in D.C.) is having a Goya exhibition focusing on "Images of Women." (Of course, the Post would've told me that, too. I miss D.C.) For reasons I find it difficult to explain, I am a Goya groupie, in the way that some people are Monet groupies -- well, perhaps not in quite the same way, although I think the "Maja Nuda" would make a spiffy Post-It note decoration, but I digress. At any rate, since most of Goya's work lives at the Prado in Madrid and since I have yet to spend a significant amount of time there (although it's prominently featured in my long-range plans), I attend Goya exhibitions in the U.S. whenever possible. Next week, I will be within shooting distance of D.C. for the only time between now and when the exhibition closes (June 2nd), so I can go. Of course, I suspect that my mother, aunt, and one or two cousins will come along out of some misguided notion of Cultural Experience, but they can look at the Renaissance botanical paintings. (In fact, I will too -- they sound interesting, just not worth a trip to D.C. on their own.) Mmmmm. Goya. D.C. Lots of cities connected by mostly-reliable train service. Bodies of water which are neither lakes nor rivers. I feel a sudden surge of love for the East Coast.

In totally unrelated news, a nifty link from Plep: "Ghosts, Demons, and Spirits in Japanese Lore," or, as I call it "Further Proof That There Is No Possible Excuse For Not Doing A Spot Of Quick Web Research Before You Write Fanfic Instead Of Assuming That Anne Rice Is The Fount Of Mythological Knowledge."

Y'know, it's been a month since I turned in my dissertation. I think I'm finally adapting to being lazy. (It won't last long -- I have a conference paper to give in three weeks and a class to teach starting up about then.) But the weather's kind of decent today. I think I shall go back to my apartment and open some windows.

Today -- and this won't get posted until tomorrow, but I love MT's post-date-changing capabilities -- today I am "working at home." This is research-fellow code for "the wind chill's below zero, it's snowing heavily, and I didn't get home till 4 am. Therefore, I'm staying at home wearing nice comfy sweats, making soup, slogging through the Religio Medici for once in my life, and watching Buffy on F/X."

Have I mentioned lately that I love my job?

As for Religio Medici, the 1640s' answer to Chicken Soup for the Soul... okay, I'm being snarky. It's a lot less populist than that description would suggest. In fact, Sir Thomas Browne, its author and the medicus of the title, admits that his only real hatred is "that great enemy of reason, virtue, and religion, the multitude." Otherwise, he's just this pleasant English doctor who's so tolerant and easygoing that he doesn't mind praying in a Catholic church. eating locusts and grasshoppers with Jews,* eventually forcing himself to get married (although he doesn't really see the point of women, apart from procreation), or speculating idly about the physiognomy of successful panhandlers on his way to demonstrating how good he is at charity. You may have deduced that Sir Thomas Browne and I do not have a great deal in common. "I was born in the eighth climate, but seem to be framed and constellated unto all," he famously asserts. Well, I'm not sure what climate I was born in, but it must have been a contrary one, since STB strikes me as having given a whole new dimension to self-absorption.

Sir Thomas is also, as he will admit with great pride, Not Much Of A Scholar, but believes he can out-think most specialists in Philosophy and Divinity nonetheless. In fact, he doesn't think much of the multiplication of books -- this is by no means a new attitude historically, just one I dislike --, humorously deplores the invention of the printing press, notes that he thinks it's just as well the library of Alexandria was destroyed, and adds that he'd cheerfully see the whole of the Vatican Archives in ashes in exchange for a few more pages of Solomon's writings. This, gentle reader, is the point at which I realized that I would like to kick Sir Thomas Browne in the vicinity from which men have traditionally believed their authorial powers emanated.

I've been meaning to read the Religio Medici through for years now, both because it plays a fairly major role in my Favorite Novel In the World and because I don't really know enough about the seventeenth century. Now that I've made it through the dratted thing, I'm beginning to suspect that there's a perfectly good reason I start losing interest in English intellectual life partway through the seventeenth century and exhibit total apathy throughout the eighteenth. Metaphysical poets and random pre-Protectorate religious sects are relatively nifty, but I am spectacularly un-Augustan. (Take Oscar Wilde's famous remark about poetry and Pope as given.)

I do, however, make excellent soup.

* Does anyone know where STB might've gotten this ingenious culinary idea from? The only Jewish locust-eater I can think of is John the Baptist. I suppose it beats ritual murder accusations, but, still....

I learned about the Poem Tag Project through Caterina, but it originated from Prionix. Anyone can pick up the blank form and put their poem on it -- really, go ahead! Just think of how much more entertaining conferences would be! Or, heck, extended-family reunions! School-board meetings! Any other name-tag-bearing event!

Some people have apparently written their own one-to-three-line poems and put them on a tag. Fortunately for my readers, I'm using someone else's words -- I imagine some of you will recognize them. And, yes, of course it's meta-sneaky six ways from Sunday -- that's the fun part.

Pssst -- happy birthday, Kate!

Someone has emailed me to remind me of "Fangirls". Yes, there are clearly situations in which "fangirl" does not mean "sad and pathetic." I'd be surprised if there weren't; "girl" is a fairly neutral gender referent in many contexts. Those contexts just aren't the ones I've been seeing regularly from my myopic little corner of not-quite-fandom, and I suspect I'd be more comfortable with "fangirl" in an atmosphere devoid of the other terms I mentioned. All that said, there's still a core of Something I Don't Get at the heart of this nomenclature trend. I mean, do needlepoint aficionados run around calling themselves "floss whores"?

Anna had a post over the weekend about "fanotypes," or the different stereotypes she associates with fans in assorted fandoms. It doesn't entirely correlate with my experience, but, then, I know exactly one bona fide Sentinel fan, so I'm obviously not the best judge of that! I'd probably agree with most of the Buffy and Smallville fan stereotypes, though, as stereotypes, and those are the fandoms I've spent the most time looking over. (My closest analogue on that list is the Buffy fan, and while I'm neither over thirty nor dark-natured, I'm pretty sure I have "loquacious" and "critical" nailed down.)

I find online fandom fascinating -- and I don't mean that in some kind of weird, patronizing way; it's pretty damn nifty, even if parts of it don't necessarily agree with me (in all possible senses of the phrase). Since I don't write much fiction, since I'm trained to analyze pretty much any text that comes under my nose, and since I do enjoy participating in fannish discussion and making new online acquaitances, I tend to try and advance theories or discuss meta-issues about fandom from time to time. But I'm not sure sometimes whether or not I should bother. Most of the people who talk intelligently about fandom are speaking from years of experience in multiple fandoms, which I neither have nor plan to acquire. It's frustrating, because I think I know my limitations, but I'm sometimes wrong even about those. In theory, of course, I should be able to set my finely-honed critical-thinking skills on "stun" and point them at whatever I like. But I know perfectly well that it's not that simple. In academia, there's an obvious hierarchical structure (although it should never be taken as a perfect reflection of all possible power relations); in fandom, there's obviously hierarchy, but it's less overt, and the paths to acquiring credentials and credibility are less clearly defined. (It doesn't help that both systems do have conferences (conventions) and journals (zines), but they signify different things.) Even if I had the necessary skills and interests, I don't think I'd want to be a Big Name Fan; I do sometimes harbor minor delusions of becoming a Big Name Fandom Commentator, but I usually acknowledge that that's not all that high on my priority list either. So I really have no reason to go check out a reading list on fandom theory, and I'm not sure that would help in any case. It's just...fascinating.

Is there a fanotype for this, or just a diagnosis? ;)

Y'know what? I may be a fan -- okay, I'm definitely a fan of the TV show Angel and am still sorting out what else I'm a fan of -- but I'm not a "fangirl." I am also not a "media whore" or a "spoiler slut," although I share the interests of people who identify themselves as such. (I also like and respect many such people; I hope some of them will consider responding to this post.) At the risk of sounding as though I need an IV of prune juice, I'm going to try and explain what I mean.

In theory, I'm all in favor of reclaiming previously oppressive or chauvinistic terms whenever possible. In practice, this is difficult and rare. Since I'm Jewish, I'll use that subset of offensive language as an example: how many positive associations can anyone come up with from the nouns "yid" and "kike" and the verb "to jew"? Feel free to run through parallel derogatory language for other minority groups in your own mind. In some cases, the group has been able to reclaim the term, but only for in-group exchange. I can only think of a few examples of reclamation that have extended outside the group, and I know for a fact that the connotations of "queer" or "bitch" are still heavily dependent on context and speaker. (I've been known to refer to myself as a bitch under certain circumstances, but it's usually not a compliment.) If nothing else, I don't want to serve on the front lines of linguistic transformation, especially not when it comes to my own self-image. I also like to save truly offensive language for situations in which I am truly offended. And then there are plenty of terms that I simply don't think are worth redeeming because they come with too much cultural baggage.

I'm no expert on current slang or Gen-X/Y culture, but I'm pretty sure that neither "slut" nor "whore" has been fully reclaimed, and perhaps for good reason. Just how often is "slut" used as a compliment, especially unadorned (that is, without some phrase like "spoiler" in front), especially in reference to a woman? (The term's primary and historical meanings all refer primarily to women, and all range from slightly to extremely negative. For example, "slut's wool" is an archaic synonym for "dustbunny." I defy anyone to work that factoid into historical fiction. Now where was I -- oh, yes.) Especially given fanfic-writing fandom's primarily female base, I can do without reinforcing that particular variation on Ye Olde Sexual Double Standard. "Whore" hasn't even started to become a positive term, and given that it refers to a distressing reality (I refer not to prostitution, but to the way bodies and souls are destroyed in its current practice) and invokes another set of double standards (madonna:whore::?:??)... well, I'll spare you the lecture and just say that I don't care for it. (And, for obvious reasons, I am not anyone's "bitch." While we're at it, I seldom offer to bear anyone's children unless I mean it.)

"Girl" isn't anywhere near as offensive as the other two words I've mentioned and is a perfectly reasonable description of a female child or teenager, but I'm well into my 20s and find that there just aren't that many situations in which I feel "girlish," whatever the heck that means. (I'll confess that there's some personal bias involved here; ever since my one summer of full-time secretarial work, I have disliked being called a "girl" by someone who isn't my grandmother's age. It wasn't so much that I didn't qualify as a "girl" at the time -- I was all of 18 -- but I was working with two other women who were in their 40s and 60s, respectively, and the male doctor we worked for (older than me but younger than at least one of the other secretaries) referred to us collectively as "the girls." Of course, he also thought AIDS was an example of divine retribution for unacceptable lifestyle choices, only he used a lot of decidedly-not-reclaimed words to express this sentiment. But, hey, it paid well.) There are still fairly neutral uses of "girl" in reference to adult women -- ones in which it's just a female-specific synonym for "guy." The problem is that "fangirl" is not such a use; it tends to be prefaced by an implied or overt "pathetic," and there's often a "tee-hee! I'm so silly!" lurking around the conceptual corner.

I, Naomi, am frequently silly and occasionally pathetic about all sorts of things, but I'm damned if I'm going to use a gender-specific term to express it. For my pop-culture sidelines, I'll be using the (almost thoroughly reclaimed) term "fan," the slightly-derogatory-but-at-least-gender-neutral "junkie," or the admittedly uptight-sounding "enthusiast," unless someone can come up with a better suggestion.

I'll also be nibbling on the occasional dried plum -- now there's an example of giving up on linguistic transformation for you! -- because I like them. So, uh, there.

My parents will be showing up in a little over 24 hours, my apartment is still a disaster, I need to go shop for groceries, I need to update a few websites, I'm still answering email (professional email, mind -- all the fun stuff somehow gets answered right off), and I just realized I have to throw together course information for the class I may or may not be teaching which starts next month. Does anyone out there know of a way I can get part of an eighth-season Simpsons episode on videotape, short of waiting for it to pop up in syndication?

The only calm spot in my life this week is my nightly -- well, more or less nightly, and occasionally morning-ly as well -- immersion in leisure reading. ("Leisure reading" means "anything without an obvious link to either my research or my teaching.") I like to read in bed, and I like to read...well, anything but prose fiction, it seems. It's not that I don't read novels, Heaven knows; I have a few favorite mystery authors whose works I gobble like popcorn, and then there's the "I'm at the airport, so it's OK to buy a trashy novel" theory which enlivens much of my travel. It's not that I don't read fanfic -- just when I think I've read everything decent in my chosen fandoms, I'll stumble on another archive somewhere with engrossing, if not strictly life-changing, stories. It's just that I don't place a priority on reading novels or fanfic. Given the opportunity to bring a handful of fun-reading books from my parents' house on my last trip home (almost all my fun-reading books are sensibly boxed up till I move again), I picked...well, what you currently see on the sidebar under "Leisure Reading," except that I skip past almost all Dorothy Parker's short stories (I love "The Little Hours," which is a short story about poetry and essays!) and focus on her poetry and reviews. I also managed to locate a questionable edition of Browne's Religio Medici and a tiny volume of T.S. Eliot's poetry with "Gerontion," "The Waste Land," and "Ash Wednesday" -- I have better versions of both in boxes somewhere, but I'm perfectly willing to go along with these for the time being. (The Eliot volume also has "Prufrock," but I don't especially like most of "Prufrock," and if I'm going to ignore chunks of the poem that don't do anything for me, I'm going with "The Waste Land," where the chunks that don't do anything for me do have a structural purpose.) So I've been alternating between prose nonfiction and poetry, and I'm enjoying myself.

Some weeks ago, informed by Eclogues, I wandered across The Emily Dickinson Random Epigram Machine and have been saving it for just such a mood as this. Do not be deterred by the fact that the quotations are more epigraphs than epigrams. Just enjoy.

Meanwhile, I'll be over here in a corner doing everything possible to avoid vacuuming.

Yes, I lost patience and switched over to Movable Type 1.4. So far I like it a great deal. No, there will not be many more design-related posts. Once I get this blog to a readable state, I'm going off to immerse myself in a nice dead language. One in which great and stirring literature has been written. One utterly and totally unlike CSS.

By the way, the W3C CSS Validtor is worth its weight in gold. And if you can't scroll down on this page when you first access it, click on one of the entries to the right and the problem will resolve itself. Honestly, I can't figure out whether that's supposed to be a feature or a bug, but if somebody knows how to make it scroll first thing, feel free to share.

Advance warning: this is mostly a rant. It is not addressed to or at any one person (not you, either). It involves a great deal of generalization, which I cheerfully acknowledge. I'd love to get feedback on this, but I don't want anyone to take it personally. 'Kay?

While I was visiting My Hometown last weekend, I went to a play with my parents, because my mother insisted on it. My father and I grumbled, but we attended, and had a good time; this same scenario happened many weekends during my childhood, and still takes place regularly between my parents when I'm not home. The thing is, my mother would be hard put to explain exactly why she went to the trouble of getting us to attend this particular play, much less the hundreds of other performances she's dragged -- er, cajoled -- us out to. It's not that Mom isn't intelligent or educated, and it's not that our family's especially dysfunctional (I think), but my mother's probably the least artistic person I know. I suspect she's been acting according to a paradigm learned from her mother, my late grandmother, who -- as we ascertained at the most recent family gathering -- took my mother, her sister, and almost all of their cousins to their first ballet performance or art museum. Both my mother and grandmother took responsibility for exposing their families to "cultural events" without being especially learned or even interested in the arts in question. The question is, why?

Part of it's an American ideal, I think -- my grandmother was the child of immigrants, which is about as American as you can get. I've seen and heard it in action elsewhere in and around My Hometown, where it's seen as a leftover from a classically trained Southern society. Mothers and maiden aunts (my grandmother was the second-youngest of her siblings and the last to marry) are the bearers, but not the producers, of High Culture. They take their sons and daughters out to plays, enroll them in piano and dancing lessons, share poetry and great literature with them. Yet the Great Artists are almost uniformly male, and women's creations, if they exist at all, are -- at best -- read only by other women. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it -- "In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes and to make them keep pace one with the other, but in two pathways that are always different." On the other hand, I don't want to make a strong argument for American exceptionalism, because similar patterns can be found in other times and places. In republican Rome, Cornelia was credited with passing on her purity of diction to her sons the Gracchi, while there are countless medieval examples (beginning, I suspect, with Augustine and Monica) of mothers who indoctrinated their children into Christian piety. Rhetoric, religion, and recitals play similar roles in very different societies: they serve as cultural capital -- that is, culturally determined skills or information, the possession or lack of which influences one's success in society just as the more traditional economic forms of capital do.* In the examples I've offered, women transmit cultural capital (even in societies in which they're not in charge of education per se) but it seems that only men can use cultural capital. I'm not unsympathetic to this paradigm, and I've certainly benefited from it, but the times they have a-changed. I'll happily drag my hypothetical children to whatever "cultural events" tickle my fancy, but my hypothetical husband had better be helping me drag, or he'll remain strictly hypothetical. I imagine that most of my readers, male and female, would agree that it's not especially one gender's place to introduce the next generation to High Culture.

That said, there's something about this paradigm that reminds me very strongly of organized fandom, and not in a good way. The fans I encounter are, by and large, still women admiring the creations of men. We -- I suppose I qualify by now -- even revere those men. (When there are women involved, we seem to hold them to a higher standard -- predominantly female Buffy fans seem to take an almost unhealthy delight in bashing Marti Noxon, and I say that as someone who has disliked almost every single episode she's written.**) We transmit the appreciation of the creators' work to anyone who will listen, and (to our credit) welcome and nurture new "converts," but we seldom use our pop-cultural capital to better our own lives or enhance our standing in non-fan society.*** Instead, we create our own societies, with everything from cliques to conferences. When we create, we do so in media (fanfic, vids, image manips) which lack legal and more broadly cultural standing. This becomes even more acute in the case of slash, which still mostly means male pairings written by women -- "clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes," indeed! Men -- pardon my crudity -- fuck. Women enable or simply vanish, forgotten in fanfic plots and edited out of images. (I've read a lot of wonderful slash, but I do tend to agree with the segment of the fandom blog community which sees a kind of intrinsic (but not, please God, primordial) misogyny at work there. The amount of Mary-Sue-bashing that goes on also strikes me as a little excessive, and all other things being equal, I'd prefer stories with active female characters.) Sometimes, the whole slash community seems like a beautifully decorated virtual ghetto with restricted egress and no mirrors.

This, of course, begs the question of what I'm doing "in" fandom at all -- you'll notice I can't decide whether or not to include myself in that category. But what saves it for me, what I like about fandom, is the one striking dissimilarity between what my mother does and what my acquaintances in fandom do: we analyze. We discuss, dissect, complain, evaluate. Without that element, which I've called "meta" but should more properly be termed "critical," I don't think I'd care for fandom nearly as much as I do. If we're able to hone our analytical skills on the semantics and semiotics of Buffy (whether or not we call them that!), there's a great deal to be said for such an enterprise, even if Buffy has no enduring aesthetic value (I think otherwise. And as someone missing some chunks of pop-cultural knowledge, I can tell you that it, too, is a form of cultural capital, and is only increasing in importance.

I still have no idea how -- if at all -- I'd explain the fandom-related aspects of this journal to my mother. Oh well.

* I've borrowed the concept of "cultural capital" from the late French theorist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu actually divides cultural capital into embodied, objectified, and institutionalized states, and what I'm thinking of falls into mostly the first but occasionally the second of these categories.
** Upon looking over the Who Wrote What? list, I will admit to liking "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," "The Wish," and "Forever," but all three with major reservations.
** See, I think the folks who've started up "Buffy Studies" kind of have the right idea, much as I joke about it. So does the very occasional fan who makes the leap to writing either scripts or "professional" fiction. It's fine to have hobbies that don't "pay off" in cash, but I think they should pay off somehow. I'm awed and not a little disturbed by the amount of effort some people in my own favorite fandoms have put into their fic, artwork, archives, blogs, message boards, etc. Perhaps the sense of community and making new acquaintances is enough -- it's certainly part of what motivates me. I'm really not sure.

Today, as my astute readers have probably deduced on their own, is Play With Frames Day. I'm still not sure whether or not this is a good idea, but I need to try it to see. If you're trying to read this journal and getting something incredibly godawful and/or with broken links, wait a few hours -- I can't seem to do my layout experimentation in the middle of the night like everyone else.

*sigh* Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a parchment background that isn't strongly textured (I'd like to simulate the skin side, please, not the hair side) and actually shows up as cream-colored-towards-yellow instead of pink on my monitor? I know good and well what parchment looks like -- if it comes down to it, I was shooting more for "aged paper, slightly but not severely yellowed" but I'll happily settle for "well-prepared parchment, XIV c." or so -- and this isn't really it. I'd just go back to a solid background, but I don't want stark white and the next non-dithering color on the yellow scale is the shade my background used to be, which I know perfectly well doesn't contrast enough with the text. I can find this color and texture in stationery stores, for crying out loud. Why can't I find it on the Internet?

I think this is a symptom of a larger problem, which is that I'm just barely competent at web design. But I'll let my readers weigh in on whether they prefer this to the previous background (#FFFFCC, as I recall) or can point me to a better one. I think this may be too busy, and possibly a few shades too greyish-green. Oh, and the green text is disappearing against it, and I'm none too sure about the brown. But I'll leave it here for a day or so just to get some feedback.

Right. So that's taken care of, and now I won't have to change addresses even if I try out every possible weblogging program in succession. (Well, I'm definitely trying MT next.)

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Sunny, not too cold (I'm a big fan of temperatures in double digits), and I have nothing significant to do. I could catch up on answering my email, I suppose, or I could attend my somewhat neglected cardioboxing class, but I can't honestly say I'm in the mood for either. I'm in the mood for noodling around online a bit more, then going home and making a gigantic pot of spaghetti sauce. I'll get back to work on the Article of the Month tomorrow -- yesterday's in-house seminar presentation of the article material went extremely well, thanks, and my colleagues came up with some helpful suggestions.

My future colleagues at Wonderful University have been sending me congratulatory emails on the dissertation. I think it's safe to say I'm enjoying this. ;)

Testing to make sure the new domain is working out. (The new software, while more urgent than the new domain, is going to wait a few weeks until they bring out Movable Type 2.0. Since I've already got the domain, however, you can go ahead and change your bookmarks....)

In the interest of maintaining some sort of balance in this journal -- and in the interest of not boring my readership silly with picayune details of my daily activities -- I'd like to offer a favorite quotation from one of the few books I read as a child which I can still read without wincing at its portrayal of romantic relationships.
Do you see what I mean when I say that things were not easy for me? Or perhaps you know exactly what I should have done. I know that if we had been two people in a book by a modern American novelist I would probably have said: 'Say, I'm jest crazy about ya, bub -- let's get in a huddle in the corner of the disused fish cannery'; or if it had been a book by a modern English novelist I would probably have said: 'Angel! So inhibited! Taxi, take us to the nearest bed', and that would have been that, but I find that most of the people in modern novels are singularly unlike me, so that either (a) I am old-fashioned or (b) of the opinion that the disused fish cannery or the bed is not the ultimate answer. I am probably both (a) and (b) when I come to think about it.

The author is Jane Duncan (a pseudonym for one Elizabeth Jane Cameron), the title is My Friend Muriel, the punctuation is (obviously) English, and the date of publication is 1959, which makes the "modern" references even more entertaining -- in fact, within the story, the year is somewhere about 1947. I believe I know which American novel the narrator is talking about (I'm not especially well-learned in that area, but how many American novels about fish canneries are there?), but not which English novel.

Textual fun aside, however, I think Duncan puts that particular issue (what to do when you're attracted to someone) very nicely. I am both (a) and (b), which is a recipe for more thought than action. Perhaps this explains the blog. ;)