Stung

Can you see the queen in this picture? Just take a moment to look for her. She's gorgeously golden, largely beautiful, and hard at work laying eggs.

This afternoon I spent a couple hours at the apiary on campus. I wore a smock with a hat-and-veil for protection, and I congratulated myself on not getting stung. Then on the drive home (not from my school, but from Mat's daycare!), a stray bee who apparently decided to hitch a ride with me/us discovered she did NOT want to be stuck in my hair anymore and stung the back of my neck.

I was thrilled! The sting was not any worse than a tattoo. I saw my first queen bee in action and learned a little something about beekeeping, a long-time fascination. I cupped a drowsy drone in my palm, ignored the agitated worker bees buzzing around my ears, and assisted in the splitting of a hive. A few years ago, I saw this film, Queen of the Sun, at the Seattle International Film Festival with a best friend. I already knew about Colony Collapse Disorder when I saw the film, but the documentary clarifies the potential for devastation, confirmed by this recent NY Times article. Do you love vegetables? Do you love almonds? Do you eat plant-based foods ever? This PSA is for you! Our crops are in danger. Crop monoculture is an enormous problem. I don't think backyard-schoolyard-churchyard apiaries are going to solve this dilemma, but they surely are a start.

I also taught Mona Caird's 1888 essay "Marriage" for the first time today, and it went very well. Oh, fin-de-siècle marriage debates. Sigh. All in all, today was a very good day-after-birthday. (And yesterday, the actual birthday, was less great, because I discovered a student had turned in this lousy paper as his own work. Somehow plagiarism is even worse when it's about one of one's most beloved novels.)

Reading and the Potential for Combustion

How fun it would be to participate in an online Wilkie Collins reading group.

Except that I'm in the middle of King Solomon's Mines, Jane Eyre, and Wives and Daughters just now, and a student just enthusiastically loaned me A Great and Terrible Beauty (which I shall squirrel away for Spring Break, when I shall deserve it most).

This term I am teaching three literature courses: ENG 250: Heroes and Monsters in Victorian Fiction (focusing on textual analysis); ENG 289: Approaches to Literary Study (the gateway to the English major course); and ENG 302: Marriage/Divorce in Victorian Literature. Such disparate topics yield interesting textual coincidences. For instance, in the first two weeks of the semester, I read Beowulf--and then The Tempest--along with Dracula and Wuthering Heights. This provoked comparisons of Grendel and Heathcliff, Grendel and Caliban, Dracula and Heathcliff, and so on. The coincidences make my head explode, and then my brains leak all over my classrooms. Today I found myself saying to my ENG 289 class, "Jane got calibanned by Aunt Reed."

Illustration by Walter Crane, c. 1893

Loyal Huggies Fan Reconsiders

I was at the gym today when this commercial caught my eye. Luvs has a whole series of these amusingly true "first kid/second kid" TV ads. Jezebel liked it last summer. AdWeek approved. Of course a whole lot of other viewers and critics were offended. We're pretty committed to Huggies Lil Movers here, but I am awfully tempted to show Luvs some love, now that I've finally caught up with the ad that made a big splash last summer. (What else did I miss last summer when I was moving across the country? The Magic Mike phenomenon. Well, I finally caught up with that last weekend, too. How I value my new colleagues.)

Incidentally, the best advice I heard as a new mom was to "raise your second child first." We're working on that. I never wasted money on a hooter-hider or bothered to drape, except in the presence of my grandfather or my Russian FIL. Breastfeeding in public should not be taboo.

I wish I knew how to hyperlink this image!

Movie Tripping

I used to get a lot of joy out of reviewing movies here on this blog.
Now I just get joy out of going to them.
Over my very long holiday break, which I supposed I would spend writing an article, I traveled much, I was very sick, along with the rest of my entire family (biological and chosen), and I used that as my excuse to go see four movies currently playing in movie theaters. This is noteworthy because I have not seen a movie in a movie theater since my child was born. Last Oscars-season sucked for me. I am the sort of person who will go see any movie playing especially if someone else is paying for it. "Romantic" relationships have been sustained for me by spending long times at the movies. Yes, the syntax in that last sentence was creative, and only I know what I meant; my point is, da films are crucial.

Movies I clocked over the break:
The Hobbit
Les Miserables
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook

Quick & totally unnecessary reviews:
Hobbit: seen with BFF 1, enjoyed, stunned that it ended mid-story. If I remember correctly, Tolkein's Hobbit was a relatively short book. I read it in Jr. High School and hated it. Must re-read. Very glad to be teaching Beowulf this term, because thanks to this movie, my students may have greater appreciation for the Anglo-Saxon epic which features many of the same elements: gold-hoarding dragon, women-excluding community of back-slapping/mead-drinking warriors.

Les Mis: seen with BFF 2, lurved, other than Russell-who-can't-Crow and high-warbler Seyfried. My love of productions of this story goes back to the Pantages Theater circa 1989. I have the entire Original London Cast Recording memorized. I have multiple worn-out garments featuring young Cosette's face. I wish I had more critique of this movie version... but that's lurve for you.

Lincoln: I am historically idiotic, but didn't Lincoln outlive two of his sons? I kept measuring this movie against Seth Grahame-Smith's inspired book Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. The movie kind of fell short.

Silver Linings Playbook: unconventional love story that ends conventionally. Sometimes (but not with regard to X-Men) I wish I was Jennifer Lawrence.

Please Don't Buy My Daughter This Toy

Every day one or more of my friends re-posts the link to this GoldieBlox video on Facebook. My friends tend to be highly intelligent and typically very highly educated folks, which is why this affinity for girly blocks with ribbons puzzles me. This toy really bugs me.

GoldieBlox appears to be a fancy building toy with polka-dot pink ribbons and small *clothed* animal figures atop yellow pylons. More about the pylons later. Apart from the girly colors (pastels: pink and purple, yellow and blue) and girly trappings (ribbons, tiny cute animals), what makes this girl-friendly? It comes with a book, because, as the designer informs us, girls like to read! Unsurprisingly, the heroine of the book is a slender white girl with long blonde hair. Little girls are supposed to read the book(s) to learn how to play with the toy. That would seem to delimit what the kids can actually do or "build" with the toy, wouldn't it? Building toys are about stimulating the imagination: "hey kid! I challenge you to make something you haven't even dreamt up yet!" I honestly think the designer had more fun creating the prototype than any child will have playing with the toy. And that leads me to the pylons.

Photo credit: Susan Burdick Photography

They were originally spools of thread. Look at this prototype! Doesn't it look like it was super-fun to put together? The designer got to make something out of wood, paper, markers, and other mundane  things found in most homes. I used to do stuff like this when I was little--make shit out of the shit that was just lying around. I made dolls out of rocks, and houses for them out of macaroni boxes. (Because even as a child I was interested in domesticity.) I'm pretty sure Mathilde will end up making stuff like that, too. When she's not inventing potions with the chemistry sets her father will inevitably give her.

I just don't believe that girls need special building toys any more than Ellen thinks women need special pens. If the point is to get little girls interested in the STEM fields, then give them regular building toys, more often, and play with them together. Girls of my generation were frequently told that we weren't good at math because we were girls. We need to change the messages that little girls hear (at school, at home, in the media), not change the toys.

One of my biggest beefs with this toy--and with the inane video being used to spread the good news about it--is that this commendable motive to introduce girls to engineering is obliterated by the stunningly pretty femme designer's heart-felt "more than just a princess" slogan. This clever marketing ploy is precisely why all my educated feministy friends are buying the message (if not the product). People, listen up: even though the toy's designer claims it's an anti-princess project (not her exact words, OK), it's still a very gendered gender-specific building toy. Pink! Ribbons! Pretty blonde girl heroine! Tiny animals wearing tiny clothes! I will buy Mathilde REGULAR Legos, blocks, Lincoln Logs, and K'Nex instead. My girl can read the awesome books she already has, and use her *imagination* to build things with non-gender-specific toys. She may choose to build dollhouses, or treat the smallest Lincoln Logs as babies. But she doesn't need a special girl-only product to do this. (And she is, by the way, up to a 4-block tower these days!)

Hurricane Sandy Apple Pie

Here on the east coast we've been bracing for Hurricane Sandy. I think we've got all the necessary supplies for bad weather: bottled water, cans of tuna, rolls of duct tape, flashlights and extra batteries, candles and matches, extra Cheerios, red wine, and, of course, homemade apple pie.

For the past month I've been imagining a blog post entitled "Suck it, CSA!" more often after I've been unusually successful at cooking and eating everything in the weekly CSA box. It's been a lot of collard greens, kale, green beans, butter beans, cabbage (geez, it's been a lot of cabbage), asian pears, and apples. Every week there are different apples in that box. They are generally very tasty--even the Red Delicious, a variety I'd never buy in the store because they are pretty fecking boring, as apples go. As I am the only raw apple eater in the house, the apples have piled up.

 So last night I put on my brave pants and made a pie. I used this recipe for both the pate brisee and filling.

I should admit that I have not made a pie crust from scratch in many MANY years. While I am not a bad baker, pie crusts were never my thing. Back in Seattle, I had three good friends who took care of all my homemade pie crust needs. Now that they're 3,500 miles away, I have to do it myself. Sniff. 

It was labor intensive. It was time consuming. It was fecking worth it. Oh FLAKEY flakeness. Oh complex, inviting, warm filling. Oh $7.89-a-carton Haagen Dazs vanilla ice cream on top.

Hurricane Tableau: Irony wine, apple pie, and pistols, just in case

Here, by the way, is my child in her cabbage leaf hat, which she thinks is hilarious. How I wish that kid would eat some of the things I cook from my weekly CSA, instead of just wearing it all.

Pure Gold

Preliminary results from tonight's rushed research session conducted at another local university's better-stocked library (God bless them for having nineteenth-century British newspaper databases!):

HARPOCRATES.—Young and pure love is as bashful as bashful can be. Its language is sighs, furtive glances, blushes, and strange, but warm heart-flutterings. It is intuitive, and needs no interpreter. Love on; you are bathed in sunshine, if you only knew it. When the mystic time comes, your tongue will be loosened, and gallop fast enough.

J. N. solicits our advice upon a delicate subject. She says, a widower, about sixty, has paid his addresses to her for some time. He has no incumbrance, but has some cash. Therefore she asks, whether it would be an imprudent match, as she is but six-and-twenty, and considered handsome. Has our fair correspondent any other lover nearer her own age? And if she has not, does she entertain a suitable affection for the old gentleman? If she can answer these two plain questions satisfactorily to herself, and her ancient bean is of good moral character, we don’t see any very dreadful objection to the match. In these economizing days, competence with an old husband is preferable to poverty with a young one. But we must warn her that old husbands are horridly jealous of young wives, and apt to play the tyrant on every trivial occasion. In matrimony all violent disparities are avenged some way or another. Still we do not pronounce against the match. Men are scarce, women plentiful; and no woman ought to refuse an offer at all decent and prudent.

I think the clear disparity of tone is what I love most about these entries in the Notices to Correspondents section of an 1852 issue of the London Journal. To the dude, the editor is like, "keep cool and dulcet locution will follow; the girl is destined to comply" To the gal, the editor is like, "take the old guy--your choices are slim as it is."