Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

★ ★ ★ My relationship with Mr. Palahniuk's work can be summed up by the word ambiguous.  I always like what I read by him, and I think his books are interesting, but I'm also never sure if I'm finding anything new in them.  I feel like sometimes there's too much craziness, the characters are too far out there, for me to really identify with what's happening.  I'll have to think about this some more.  I'll get back to you. In Lullaby , the main character is a reporter who is investigating SIDs deaths, and because he is a good little reporter, he notes everything about the scene, down to the book each person had read to their child before bed. His journalistic OCD ends up unlocking the secret to the deaths, which is that the book of children's poetry contains a culling song, a lullaby that actually ends up killing the person to whom it's directed.  The reporter, Carl Streator, can't stop thinking about the poem in that way that whatever you lea

Post to keep track of Page to Screen Reading Challenge books: Watership Down - Richard Adams The Lovely Bones  - Alice Sebold

Parents, don't dress your girls like tramps My friend posted this on her FB page and commented, " This makes me want to drink heavily. Did I miss this by having boys??" I'm having a hard time figuring out what she finds objectionable in particular, so I'll just make a list: Could it be the possible damage that could be caused by dressing / allowing your children to dress in contextually inappropriate ways?   Perhaps it is the blatant slut shaming that's happening in this article, in which he uses the words tramp and whore to talk about why these clothes are inappropriate, thereby implying that an adult woman dressed in the same way would deserve these labels.   I don't know, maybe it's the irony that we live in a culture where we will defend the rights of little boys to wear dresses and have pink toenails (justifiably so) in the face of those who would freak the fuck out about it, but that he's commenting on this little girl's appea

At a class today on cost transfers (don't worry about it), without fail research administrators (department admin staff) are referred to as she, while principal investigators (faculty) are referred to as he, both by the instructor and by my fellow students. So I guess that means I'm in the right job,  what with my lady parts and all.

Post to keep rack of Gender Identity & Expression Challenge books: Middlesex - Jeffrey Eudenides (fiction)

Post to keep track of Chunkster Challenge books: Middlesex - Jeffrey Eudenides (529 pages) Watership Down - Richard Adams (476 pages) A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness (579 pages)

★★★★★ I loved this book.  I liked how thought-provoking it was, but also just that it was a tremendous story.* A little background: our narrator is named Cal (formerly Calliope^), and we know this from the very beginning, so I'm not giving anything away (although there are some definite spoilers below).  The important thing is how Cal gets from beginning to end, a tale that puts the journey front and center.  I loved how on many levels it is such a typical coming of age story even as our character deals with something that fundamentally affects his gender, a facet of ourselves most of us never even realize we take for granted. ^ I will refer to Calliope/Cal throughout this post based on what gender s/he had at the point in the story when the events in question occur, so expect some name flipping. I think Eugenides crafts certain elements of the story to help ground Cal's experiences, to keep him from feeling too alien and unidentifiable.  It's helpful, but I wonder a

Yesterday we were walking around New Orleans' neighborhoods, Audobon Park, the French Quarter.  It's odd to be in a place that you know was visited by such devastation only six years ago.  We place such a high premium on survivorship in our society and I'm here in a city seemingly dedicated to revelry,* and everything you see that was here before 2005, people included, is a survivor.  It conjures a kind of awe that is quickly forgotten, gilded over with Mardi Gras beads and drive through daiquiri bars. But really, is this so unusual?  Aren't we all survivors of something?  Who hasn't lived through a tragedy of some kind, a loss, a misfortune, an event that threatened to tear your world apart?  It's an amazing aspect of the entire human existence that we forget, overlook in the day to day.  It's interesting that the very indicator of survival, the ability to go on with your day-to-day life, means forgetting that there are things to survive in the first plac

After suffering the agony of sitting next to a woman on a plane who popped her gum for the two and a half hours from Charlotte to New Orleans, I made it to the Big Easy.  My cab driver needed the assistance of my GPS to get us to Jessica's house, but whatevs.  This city is a maze, and I made it in one piece, so cheers to that! Yesterday Jess and I hung out at the house in the morning before getting shrimp po boys from the equivalent of the local bodega/deli.  We ate these while strolling through her neighborhood, no mean feat let me tell you.  I dropped a shrimp at one point and felt something much like self-loathing.   Her cubicle at the law library has walls that a very tall person could reach over, but made of something designed to look like very lawyerly dark cherry wood.  The door locks and the room is larger than my office.  I now have a theory about how people inhabit a space because while she has made minimal effort to personalize the room, it still feels a lot like her o